Sweeter than honey

Of all the images Scripture gives of itself, this is the one that sounds least like doctrine and turns out to be the most demanding.

Sweetness is not a metaphor for approval. It is a metaphor for appetite. A man does not force himself to eat honey. He does not schedule it, or discipline himself into it, or feel virtuous afterward. He wants it, and he wants more of it, and the wanting is the whole point of the picture.

Which is why the image is uncomfortable. Most of us can say the Word is true. Fewer can say it is sweet. And the psalmist is not describing a mood he happened to be in; he says it 176 verses long, in an acrostic that took real labor to build.

Then there is a prophet who was told to eat it, literally.

Ezekiel is handed a scroll and told to open his mouth. He does. The scroll is written on both sides — front and back, no margin left — and its contents are lamentation, mourning, and woe.

And it tasted like honey.

Sit with that, because it does not resolve neatly. The content is grief. The taste is sweet. The two are not in tension for Ezekiel, and the reason is that the sweetness is not in the subject matter. It is in the source. A hard word from God is sweeter than a pleasant word from anyone else, because of whose it is.

Jeremiah says the same thing in a sentence that sounds like a man remembering a meal:

A book you have read is information. A book you have eaten has become you — it is in the blood, it is doing its work in places you cannot supervise, and you cannot give it back. The Bible reaches for the most ordinary and most total image available: this is not a thing to be consulted. It is a thing to be swallowed.

There is a warning folded into the image as well. Proverbs says that a man who has had his fill loathes honey, but to the hungry even what is bitter tastes sweet. Sweetness is not only a property of the thing eaten; it is a relationship between the food and the appetite. Which means a man who finds Scripture flat is not making a statement about Scripture.

And appetite is trainable. That is the practical end of it. Nobody is born wanting honey more than bread, and nobody is born finding Scripture sweeter than the phone. The psalmist did not have this taste at 176 verses’ worth of intensity on the first day. Taste follows eating, and not the other way around.

Psalm 119 sets its sweetness line inside an acrostic of twenty-two stanzas, one per Hebrew letter, eight verses each, every verse in a stanza beginning with that letter. The form is a discipline, and it is a claim: the Word is worth the whole alphabet, from one end to the other, with nothing left out.

The Ezekiel scene has a hard edge worth naming. Sweet in the mouth is not the whole account — when John eats a scroll in Revelation 10:9–10, he is told in advance that it will be sweet in his mouth and bitter in his stomach, and it is. The sweetness of receiving a word from God and the cost of carrying it are not the same experience, and Scripture does not pretend otherwise.

Note also what surrounds the honey image in Psalm 19:10 — the Word is compared to gold in the same breath. Value and delight, side by side. One image for what it is worth, one for what it does to the appetite.

There is a fourth man worth adding to the three. Job says he has treasured the words of God’s mouth more than his necessary food — and he says it in the middle of the worst season any man in Scripture endures. The appetite image is not confined to comfortable circumstances; it shows up in the mouth of a man scraping himself with a potsherd.

And a practical note the sweetness image implies but does not state. Honey was not farmed in ancient Israel the way it is now; it was found — in a rock, in a carcass, in a wood. Jonathan finds it in a forest and his eyes brighten. The word behind the image assumes something come upon, tasted quickly, and immediately wanted again.

It is worth asking why food is the image at all. Scripture could have said the Word is like a lecture, or a lamp, or a law — and it does say lamp elsewhere. But food is the one thing a body must take in repeatedly or die, and nobody outgrows the need. A man who ate well last year is not fed.

Look it upH1706 דְּבַשׁ devash, honey · H4452 מָלץ malats, to be smooth or sweet · H2441 חֵךְ chek, palate or taste · G1099 γλυκύς glukus, sweet

Where this touchesPsalm 119:103 · Psalm 19:10 · Ezekiel 2:8–3:3 · Jeremiah 15:16 · Revelation 10:9–10 · 1 Peter 2:2–3. Milk, bread, and solid food are self-portraits of their own in later weeks.