"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.