Deuteronomy 8:8

"Palestine has been celebrated in all ages for three products: corn, wine, and oil, which still continue to be its most valuable crops". The principal corn crops were wheat and barley. The vine was largely and carefully cultivated; the olive required little cultivation, being almost a spontaneous growth, and forming one of the most valuable productions of the country; the fig was also indigenous in Palestine, and still grows there, both wild and cultivated, in abundance; that the pomegranate ( firemen ) also was very abundant may be inferred from the number of places named from this (cf. Joshua 15:32 ; Joshua 19:7 , Joshua 19:13 ; 20:45 , 20:47 ; 21:13 ; 1 Chronicles 4:32 , etc.). Honey . The word so rendered ( d'bash ) is used both of the honey of bees (Le Deuteronomy 2:11 ; Deuteronomy 32:11 ; 1 Samuel 14:26 , etc.; Ps 81:17; Proverbs 16:24 , etc.), and of the honey of grapes, a syrup obtained by boiling down the newly expressed juice of the grape to a half or third part of its bulk, and still known among the Arabs by the name of dibs . In the wilderness, the people had murmured that they had been brought into an evil place, no place of figs, or of vines, or of pomegranates; and where there was no water to drink ( Numbers 20:5 ). Moses here tells them that the land they were about to occupy was not such a place, but one abounding in all those things of which they had found the wilderness so destitute.