honey: a thick, sweet, golden substance, either the honey bees make or a syrup boiled down from fruit
This one Hebrew word covers two different sweet substances, and that is not a flaw in the word but the whole point of it. To an Israelite, honey was honey: thick, sweet, sticky, and prized, whether it came from a wild bees' nest in a rock cleft or from dates and grapes boiled down into a dark syrup. The same word names both because both were the same kind of treasured sweetness on the table.
For a long time scholars thought the word almost always meant fruit syrup, on the argument that there was no beekeeping in ancient Israel. That argument collapsed when an Iron Age beekeeping operation, with rows of clay hives, was dug up at Tel Rehov in 2007. Bees' honey is now known to have been real and available, so the question is no longer which one substance the word always meant, but which kind of sweetness a given passage has in view.
The context usually tells you. When the word stands beside comb words or pictures honey dripping from a rock or a Samson finds it in a carcass, it is bees' honey. When it sits in a list of farmed produce, or as a tribute gift, or as a first-fruits offering, it leans toward fruit syrup. And in the famous promise of a land flowing with milk and honey, the word is deliberately left open, evoking sweetness of every kind at once.
Nuances
Disputed
In the recurring promise of "a land flowing with milk and honey," does honey mean fruit syrup, bees' honey, or is the word deliberately left open?
- contestedFruit syrup. Honey in the Bible is predominantly the thick syrup made from dates, the Bible never describes beekeeping, and the formula pictures the fertility of cultivated land.; N. M. Sarna, Exodus (JPS Torah Commentary; Jewish Publication Society, 1991); J. H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS Torah Commentary; Jewish Publication Society, 1996); M. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1-11 (Anchor Bible; Doubleday, 1991)
- contestedBees' honey is at least available everywhere in the formula now that an Iron Age apiary has been found, and one proposal even rereads "milk" as "fat" to match the ancient pairing of honey with an oily substance.; A. Mazar and N. Panitz-Cohen, "It Is the Land of Honey: Beekeeping at Tel Rehov," Near Eastern Archaeology 70 (2007): 202-219; I. Dershowitz, "A Land Flowing with Fat and Honey," Vetus Testamentum 60 (2010): 172-176
- contestedThe formula is a literary picture of plenty whose exact substance is rhetorically unimportant; ancient hearers would have heard every kind of sweetness at once, with bees' honey now guaranteed to be among them.; A. Mazar and N. Panitz-Cohen, "It Is the Land of Honey: Beekeeping at Tel Rehov," Near Eastern Archaeology 70 (2007): 202-219; T. Forti, "Bee's Honey: From Realia to Metaphor in Biblical Wisdom Literature," Vetus Testamentum 56 (2006): 327-341