Honey is potent stuff in the Jewish world. Since ancient times, it has been a powerful trope for love, hope and promise, and it is the key ingredient of the iconic honey cake, which retains its High Holiday status to this day.
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Honey serves as a metaphor throughout the Torah, in passages such as Song of Songs 4:11, which says, “The sweetness of Torah drips from your lips, like honey and milk it lies under your tongue.” Indeed, consuming honey was often used to symbolize consuming Torah knowledge, says Jordan D. Rosenblum, professor of classical Judaism at the University of Wisconsin and author of Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism. That’s true in Ezekiel 3:2–4, which says, “Feed your stomach and fill your body with this scroll which I am giving you. Then I ate it, and it was sweet as honey in my mouth.”
Use of bee’s honey by humans dates to at least the Mesolithic period. In Valencia, Spain, cave paintings of men climbing ladders to beehives were created between 9000 and 4000 BCE. In ancient Egypt, the earliest known evidence of beekeeping dates to approximately 2600 BCE. But bee’s honey wasn’t common in ancient Israel—in fact, “the land of milk and honey” of the Torah is a bit of a misnomer. The reason for the lack of honey is simple: The bees of the region were a particularly aggressive strain. Their ferocity made raiding hives for honey a risky task, so bee’s honey was a delicious, if rare, happenstance. (King Saul’s son Jonathan found honey on the ground during the battle of Mikhmash and “his eyes brightened.”)
Honey was frequently made from sources other than bees, such as dates, figs and even pomegranates. The “land of milk and honey” refers to molasses from dates, sources say. Archaeological findings at Beit She’an in Israel indicate that around the 9th century BCE, people started keeping tame, non-native Anatolian bees. By Talmudic times, according to the late food historian Gil Marks’s Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, the Hebrew word devash, which once referred to all kinds of syrup, generally meant bee’s honey.
Scholars granted honey a unique status as the only kosher product of a non-kosher creature. The bee, it was ruled, was a carrier, not a creator. Rosenblum believes that the rationale was a type of reverse engineering, necessary since honey was “a common, readily available sweetener that is very shelf-stable. It lasts a long time and does not require refrigeration. Also, I would argue, the fact that it is discussed so positively in biblical texts and many others surely influenced the rabbis to look for wiggle room to declare it permissible.” Furthermore, honey was sometimes viewed as having medicinal value. Maimonides, the 12th-century philosopher and physician, suggested that honey was a curative elixir for some, particularly for the elderly, to whom he suggested mixing honey with warm water to ease digestive woes. Still, he was concerned that possible overuse might lead to gluttony and health repercussions. He writes, “Honey and wine are bad for children and good for the elderly, certainly in the rainy season.”
Honey’s symbolism has given it a significant place in Jewish customs. Among Ashkenazi Jews, the sticky nectar has been tied to learning. The deliciousness of knowledge was emphasized the day boys entered cheder and were handed a slate with Hebrew letters smeared with honey, which they were instructed to lick off, a palpable and tasty lesson in the delectability of consuming wisdom.
Holidays were also historically marked with honey. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews have long served luscious desserts topped with a honey syrup: Baklava was and is popular at Sukkot and other holidays, and tishpishti, a cake of Turkish origin made with nuts, was a popular Passover confection because it could be made unleavened. Honey was often associated with Shavuot, to represent accepting the Torah. Eating dairy, also traditional on Shavuot, harkened back to “the land of milk and honey.” Serving sweets—including honey—to welcome and celebrate the New Year or for special occasions has been common since antiquity. Today, on Rosh Hashanah, when bee’s honey is de rigueur, the hope is for a good and sweet new year.
Honey cake on Rosh Hashanah is now sealed into the Jewish culinary canon. “Honey cakes were made in antiquity,” says Darra Goldstein, professor at Williams College and editor of The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. They are “so ubiquitous that they can’t be traced to a single source.” Gil Marks notes that the honey cake traditions were spread by Arabs into Sicily and Moorish Spain. Although Arab cultures soon developed a taste for sugar, honey continued to be popular in Europe, Marks says, making its use in cakes an inevitability. In Europe, honey cake was known as lekach, from the German word for “to lick,” and it was remarkably similar to the honey cake still eaten today.
“Both Eastern European and German Jews brought their own versions of honey cake when they immigrated to the U.S.,” says Goldstein, “and you’ll find variations ranging from dense and chewy to the extraordinarily light and multi-layered cake [pastry chef] Michelle Polzine makes at 20th Century Cafe in San Francisco.” Even today, when it’s sometimes hard to find a honey cake recipe in a contemporary cookbook, the old standard remains beloved. “All Jewish families I know still make honey cake at Rosh Hashanah, and for me, it remains symbolically important,” says Goldstein. “I don’t see it as a relic, because people either make their family’s own recipe to carry on a meaningful tradition or else they play around with more modernized recipes to adapt to changing tastes.” —Tami Ganeles-Weiser
3 thoughts on “Honey: How Sweet (and Holy) It Is”
The author misquotes Song of Songs 4:11, which does not have the word Torah in it.
I learned a great deal from this piece and thoroughly enjoyed reading it!
My grandmother’s honey cake was dense, moist and chewy, and had dried fruit, including apricots.