can scarcely be anything better than cream and honey; and it is certainly not spoken in accordance with Israelitish taste, if _Hofmann_ (_Weiss_, i. S. 227) thus paraphrases the sense: "It is not because he does not know what tastes well and better (cream and honey thus the evil!), that he will live upon the food which an uncultivated land can afford, but because there is none other." In Deut. xxxii. 13, 14, cream and honey appear among the noblest products of the Holy Land. Abraham places cream before his heavenly guests, Gen. xviii. 8. The plenty in honey and cream appears in Job xx. 7, as a characteristic sign of the divine blessing of which the wicked are deprived. It is solely and exclusively vers. 21 and 22 that are referred to for establishing the erroneous interpretation. It is asserted that, according to these verses, the eating of milk and honey must be considered as an evil, as the sad consequence of a general devastation of the hind. But there are grave objections to any attempt at explaining a preceding from a subsequent passage; the opposite mode of proceeding is the right one. It is altogether wrong, however, to suppose that vers. 21, 22, contain a threatening. In those verses the Prophet, on the contrary, allows, as is usual with him, a _ray of light_ to fall upon the dark picture of the [Pg 57] calamity which threatens from Asshur; and it could, indeed, _a priori_, be scarcely imagined that the threatening should not be interrupted, at least by such a gentle allusion to the salvation to be bestowed upon them after the misery (comp. in reference to a similar sudden breaking through of the proclamation of salvation in Hosea, Vol. I., p. 175, and the remarks on Micah ii. 12, 13); but then he returns to the threatening, because it was, in the meantime, his principal vocation to utter it, and thereby to destroy the foolish illusions of the God-forgetting king. It is in the subsequent prophecy only, chap viii. 1; ix. 6 (7) that that which is alluded to in vers. 21, 22 is carried out. The little which has been left--this is the sense--the Lord will bless so abundantly, that those who are spared in the divine judgment will enjoy a rich abundance of divine blessings. Parallel is the utterance of Isaiah in 2 Kings xix. 30: "And the escaped of the house of Judah, that which has been left, taketh root downward, and beareth fruit upward."--If thus the eating of cream and honey be rightly understood, there is no farther necessity for explaining, in opposition to the rules of grammar, לדעתו by "(only) until he knows" (comp. against this interpretation _Drechsler's Comment._). לדעתו can only mean: "belonging to his knowledge, _i.e._, when he knows." _Good_ and _evil_ are, as early as Deut. i. 39: "Your sons who to-day do not know good and evil," used more in a physical than in a moral sense. Michaelis: "_rerum omnium ignari_." The parallel expression, "not to be able to discern between the right hand and the left hand," in Jonah iv.