When Moses was allowed to see from the mountaintop the land that Jehovah was going to give the people he had led out of Egypt and through the wilderness for over forty years it must have been an awe inspiring and promising view.
Laid out before him was a widely varied countryside with arid plains in the south and snow covered mountains in the north and also the many hills, valleys, coastal plains, and plateaus which resulted in a wide variety of climate zones and soil types.
Just how fertile this land could be was seen from the grapes that some of the spies had brought back to him forty years earlier as they were preparing to enter this" good land" promised by Jehovah God.
For centuries after this the Israelites enjoyed the agricultural bounty of these productive soils. These vegetables and fruits included the seven species mentioned in Deuteronomy 8:7, 8. as well as other fruits and vegetables, such meat such as lamb, and fish from the sea.
Wheat and Barley
Two of the big crops were wheat and barley. Barley ripened in time for the Festival of Unleavened Bread in March or April and wheat in May in time for the Festival of Weeks or Pentecost in May as described in Leviticus 23: 10, 11, 15-17. Bread made from these two grains were a staple food for people in this regions from Bible times to the present day.
Grapes, Figs, and Pomegranates
These three fruits were what the ten spies brought back from the excursion into the Promised land described in Numbers 13: 20, 23and were soon a common sight on Israelite tables.
Vineyards needed proper care, however. This included carefully designed terraces on a hillside with a protective stone wall and hedges, as well as proper irrigation, pruning, and harvesting in order to keep the vines productive. As Isaiah describes (Isaiah 5:1-7) Negligent farmers were soon faced with a vineyard of wild grapes, thorns, and weeds and dried up because of a lack of water.
Properly cared for vineyards provided an abundance of grapes at harvest time. These were used in three ways after the grapes were trampled in a vat or squeezed in a wine press: (1) to produce a delicious wine by allowing the juice to ferment (2) to produce a natural sugar by boiling the juice and extracting the sugar or (3) to produce raisins, used in baking raisin cakes, by allowing the grapes to dry in the sun as described at 2 Samuel 6:19.
The fifth food Moses mentioned, the fig when picked fresh was a mouth watering delicacy although most of us in Western lands are familiar with the fig only in its dried and pressed form.
In Israel and other Mediterranean lands it grew (and still grows) on the tree as a sweet and delicious reddish fruit surrounded by green leaves. but the Jews quickly learned that it had to be quickly sun-dried and turned into "cakes of pressed figs mentioned in 1 Samuel 25:18 in order to preserve it. And that is the way most of us know the fig today.
The pomegranate, which we often see on the shelves of our Western markets as a raw fruit, hid nutritious "minifruits" under the leathery skin. These could be eaten raw or turned into a refreshing, healthful and nutritious juice.
Likely because of this the pomegranate became very popular in ancient Israel. So much so that clothing designers even included representations of it on the garments of the high priests. According to the Bible account in Exodus 39: 24 The pomegranates were woven from blue thread, wool dyed reddish purple, and coccus scarlet material. These were interspersed with real gold bells along the hem of the high priests' sleeveless coats.
And in addition to this Jewish architects featured it in the decorations on the top plate of 50 cubic high pillars supporting Solomon's temple according to 1 Kings 7:20.
Olives and Honey
To see an entire family out beating the branches of olive trees to make the ripened olives fall to the ground where they could be harvested was a common sight in the Promised Land during October of each year. They would pick up the olives and store some away used in winter meals or taken to a communal press to be crushed and the oil used in the food, cosmetics, or as fuel for lamps. As it was crushed the pale green fluid was poured into containers for family use or selling at the market.
The honey Moses mentioned as the seventh species of food they could look forward to in the Promised came in two forms. Some of it came from the syrups extracted from dates and grapes ( a sweetener still used today) and the wild honey from the honey comb mentioned at Judges 14: 8,9 which describes how Samson scooped wild honey out of the corpse or a lion and 1 Samuel 14:27, a narration of how King Saul's son, Jonathan, ate wild honey from the trip of a rod after dipping it into a honeycomb in a field.
Exactly which type of honey Moses meant is not stated but archaeologists have discovered more than 30 beehives in northern Israel showing that beekeeping was practiced as early as Solomon's time.
These "seven species" are still found in the market of modern Israel -- along with a wide variety of other foods native to the land or introduced to Israeli farmers and grown successfully by them. All of this shows that Moses was not wrong in describing this narrow strip of land along the eastern end of the Mediterranean as the "good land."
