What Does Exodus 3:17 Mean?

"And I promise that I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey." The elders are to be told not only of the divine appearance and observation but of the specific divine promise: "I will bring you up." This is the vertical vocabulary of the Exodus: God brings up, God takes out, God delivers; the elect people are those moved by divine initiative from one place to another.

The people do not escape; they are brought out. The agency is consistently attributed to God even when Moses is the visible instrument.

The list of peoples inhabiting the promised land serves a specific rhetorical function in the commissioning context: it tells the elders that the land to which God is bringing them is currently inhabited, and God is aware of this, and the promise stands nonetheless. The nations list is not an impediment to the promise but a specification of the territorial scope. God knows who lives there; the promise is not made in ignorance of the current situation. The Canaanites and the five other nations will need to be displaced, and this is incorporated into the promise as part of what God will accomplish.

The phrase "land flowing with milk and honey" is given its second occurrence in the Exodus narrative (the first being verse 8). The repetition of the description in Moses' message to the elders signals that this image is the covenant community's encoded hope. From Moses to Joshua to the judges and the kings, "milk and honey" is the shorthand for the fullness of what God promised: the place of divine provision in contrast to the place of forced labor, where the land produces for those who dwell in it rather than extracting from those who work it.