Butter

Butter in the UPDV names a dairy food set down on Israelite tables alongside milk, honey, and the choicest cuts of meat. The word covers the range a modern reader would split between curds, cream, and butter proper, and the texts that mention it cluster around three settings: hospitality, the bounty of the land, and a single proverb on how it is made.

Hospitality and the Patriarchal Table

The first appearance of butter is at Mamre. Abraham slaughters a calf and sets it before his three visitors with butter and milk, standing by them under the tree as they eat (Gen 18:8). The same pairing reappears in the Davidic court when Shobi, Machir, and Barzillai meet the king's exhausted column east of the Jordan and bring him "honey, and butter, and sheep, and cheese of the herd, for David, and for the people who were with him, to eat" (2 Sam 17:29). In both scenes butter is the food a host offers when the guests are weary and need to be honored.

Jael's act in Judges trades on the same convention but turns it inside out. Sisera asks for water; she answers, "[and] she gave him milk; She brought him butter in a majestic dish" (Judg 5:25). The hospitality vocabulary is intact down to the dish; what follows in the song is not.

Token of the Land's Abundance

Moses' song in Deuteronomy lists butter at the head of a catalogue of what Yahweh fed Israel on: "Butter of the herd, and milk of the flock, With fat of lambs, And rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, With the finest of the wheat; And of the blood of the grape you drank wine" (Deut 32:14). The same imagery turns up in Job's description of what the wicked will be cut off from: "He will not look at the rivers, The flowing streams of honey and butter" (Job 20:17). Butter belongs in the same register as flowing honey, fat lambs, and the finest wheat — the food of a land that is yielding.

Isaiah picks up that register and presses it. The Immanuel sign promises a child who "will eat butter and honey . . . when he knows to refuse the evil, and choose the good" (Isa 7:15), and a few verses later the prophet returns to the same diet: "because of the abundance of milk which they will give he will eat butter: for butter and honey will every one eat who is left in the midst of the land" (Isa 7:22). The remnant's diet is dairy and honey because the cultivated agriculture has collapsed; what is left is what the cow gives.

The Proverb on Churning

Only one passage looks at how butter is made. The proverb works by analogy: "For the churning of milk brings forth butter, And the wringing of the nose brings forth blood; So the forcing of wrath brings forth strife" (Prov 30:33). The sequence is the point — apply pressure to milk and you get butter; apply pressure to a face and you get a bloody nose; apply pressure to a temper and you get a fight. Butter here is not the food but the worked product, the thing that comes out when something soft is squeezed long enough.