 MacDonald wrote that the term for milk (, "chalav") could easily be the word for "fat" (, "chelev"), and the word for honey (, "devash") could indicate not bees' honey but a sweet syrup made from fruit.The expression evoked a general sense of the bounty of the land and suggested an ecological richness exhibited in a number of ways, not just with milk and honey.MacDonald noted that the expression was always used to describe a land that the people of Israel had not yet experienced, and thus characterized it as always a future expectation.