Beware of Milk and Honey

When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, ²you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. ³You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, “Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.” ⁴When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, ⁵you shall make this response before the Lord your God: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. ⁶When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, ⁷we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. ⁸The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; ⁹and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. ¹⁰So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.” You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. ¹¹Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Because of the theological and political tensions therein, reading chapter 26 of Deuteronomy can be overwhelming for the senses. Think about it. On the one hand, there is in the foreground “a land flowing with milk and honey.” This literary foregrounding of comfort in the near future is understandable given that the original text was written from a position of exile. Here were a group of people at the margins of power, exiled by the Babylonian Empire, and dreaming of a better future for themselves. This desire for a better future unsurprisingly makes its way into the text and is presented as imminent after the long journey in the desert. On the other hand, as one reads the text with modern eyes and ears, the problematic language of inheritance, possession, and settlement the chapter begins with rightly alarms readers concerned about occupation of stolen lands using theologically justifying language. Despite the anachronism, the tensions in the literary presentation are non-harmonizable. Then and now, there are inconsistencies in life that simply cannot be harmonized.

In this cacophony of non-harmonizable tensions, the people are exhorted to remember their etiology and constantly retell their story. Here too, we encounter another tension. We might phrase this tension via a question. Are the people exhorted to remember their success (“all the bounty” in Deuteronomy 26:11), or are they asked to remember their history of marginality and oppression (“a wandering Aramean was my ancestor” in Deuteronomy in 26:5)? It seems it is the latter and not the former. This is a most intriguing exhortation. Why hold on to negative memories?

We see the payoff of this intriguing exhortation in the verses that follow. Lest the people get distracted and enamored with “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Deuteronomy 26:9), they are commanded to keep their focus on celebrating all the good things in their lives with the “aliens who reside among you” (Deuteronomy 26:11). According to the text, financial contributions and material goods are to be distributed, in addition to ecclesial institutions (the Levites), also to “the aliens, the orphans, and the widows, so that they may eat their fill within your towns” (Deuteronomy 26:12). Reorienting one’s ethics towards care of the vulnerable is the payoff.  

While the positive work (ethical action towards the vulnerable) of negative memories (of one’s own history of oppression) is established in this way, the text from Deuteronomy raises some concerns that can speak to societal realities in our own time. Let me raise two concerns: 1. The problematic yet seemingly ubiquitous “I-worked-hard-therefore-I-succeeded” narrative, and 2. The truth of the famous quote by Frederick Douglass, “power concedes nothing without a demand.”

Concern 1: The problematic yet seemingly ubiquitous “I-worked-hard-therefore-I-succeeded” narrative: Deuteronomy 26 allows us to eschew the dominant albeit mistaken “I-worked-hard-and-therefore-I-succeeded” cultural narrative that shames those made poor by structural injustice. Such a cultural narrative makes abstract capitalistic mechanisms of success. It places blame on those it perceives as lacking in hard work while evading the question of how people are made poor by the greed of the rich. Hint, hint: The text asks the people to remember it was Pharaoh and his henchmen that “treated [them] harshly and afflicted [them], by imposing hard labor on [them]” (Deuteronomy 26:6). These were people who slaved under the scorching sun making bricks for Pharoah’s superpower infrastructure. They were some of the hardest working people of their time but were made and kept poor by societal structures.

Privileging of individual efforts to overcome poverty and other forms of precarity can easily become misplaced when the constrictive forces of structural injustice are not seen for what they are. This is especially true in lands where governments that wave the carrot of capitalism and increasingly undo social safety nets deploy narratives of “opportunity-that-awaits-all-who-are-willing-to-grasp-it.” The mistaken idea in such a situation goes something like: “If there is so much milk and honey, it’s your fault for not getting some.” Deuteronomy 26, by privileging negative memories, rejects such capitalistic postures. Beware of the capitalistic “milk and honey” language, the text warns us. What the text seems to convey, instead, is an implicit judgment of the rich. In the final analysis, the presence of the poor is not a judgment of the failure of the poor but rather a judgment of the rich’s greed. 

Concern 2: The truth of Frederick Douglass’s statement that “power concedes nothing without a demand”: Arvind P. Nirmal, one of the pioneers of Dalit theology, referring to the text’s observation that “the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders” (Deuteronomy 26:8), argues that “liberation does not come only through ‘signs’ and ‘wonders.’ A certain measure of ‘terror’ is necessary to achieve it.” Nirmal’s argument is not unlike Douglass’ reminder. Unfought-for-progress is a misconception. As Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of [people] willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.” Power does not concede without a demand. Deuteronomy 26 reminds us that Pharoah’s cruelty would not have come to an end without the “terrifying display of power.”

This second concern thus enables us to resist the myth of meliorism and privilege the agency of the divine and other persons. Deuteronomy 26:7 is of key importance: “We cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.” On the one hand, “we cried to the Lord” shows how the impulse for resisting oppression is to be first located in the agency of those that are oppressed. On the other hand, the movements in divine agency—“the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction”—invite all modern readers to similarly undertake acts of hearing and seeing the cries of the oppressed in our own time. Such an invitation, as we have considered, is present to the original hearers in the text. 

The future is open-ended but necessarily requires responsible human agency. The text, then, helps one to foreground the importance of outstretched arms in service of positive change. In other words, the text calls readers to resist a sense of fatalism that leads to both forced and chosen indifference. Who among us has not felt that almost paralyzing feeling in the face of structural forces—be it, racial capitalism, casteism, or patriarchy—that seem to be of such magnitude that they feel virtually unstoppable? And yet, outstretched arms exercising agency—even when they don’t feel particularly “mighty”—are necessary in the pursuit for social change.

Positive social change is unsurprisingly difficult. Those in positions of power often blame or shame those who are historically disadvantaged. The widespread prevalence of the “I-worked-hard-therefore-I-succeeded” narrative is evidence of such blaming and shaming of those oppressed by structural injustice. If people in positions of power were to eschew such blaming and shaming, it would mean they have to make structural changes that necessitate deep and fundamental changes to how they do things. For instance, the increasing undoing of social safety nets cannot be rectified by temporary stimulus checks that address a symptom but not the underlying problem. Eschewing blaming and shaming of the poor would require privileging the needs of the vulnerable. It is in this connection that the text offers a hidden gem of a reminder that readers can, to use the metaphor of lapidary, excavate, polish, and lift up for consideration, that is, that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” For those at the margins of power, the text offers encouragement to keep on keeping on in their struggle. For those at the center of power, the text nudges, judges, and calls them to undertake fresh imaginative acts that place vulnerability and precarity as problems in need of urgent and fundamental redress. We could get to a better place in our collective life if the tensions and inconsistencies we find among us are redressed with the needs of the vulnerable instead of rationalizing or harmonizing the status quo.