ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 explores the sublime space of milk and honey in the Bible and the way it has been mythologized in Israeli discourse. I first discuss the original site of God’s linguistic spectacle of milk and honey. It explains, I argue, the urgency in which Moses’ spies and Zionism build on its abundance of meaning. I provide a long list of poems and narratives to see the enactment of milk and honey in Hebrew literature from early Zionism to the present, and by canonical authors such as Shai Agnon and Avraham Shlonsky as well as Mizrahi minorities Shohsana Shabababo and Sam Chetrit. I interrogate the history of Tnuva, Israel’s largest food company, the mobilizer of the discourse of milk as national elixir, promoting a global neoliberal economy. Moving away from binaries, I was able to demonstrate how myths like the “the land of milk and honey”, had produced an abyss of hunger and satiation in their own turn. I conclude with Sami Chetrit’s poem that laments the Sephardic accent and the loss of the self.
