 The expression evoked a general sense of the bounty of the land and suggested an ecological richness exhibited in a number of ways, not just with milk and honey.MacDonald noted that the expression was always used to describe a land that the people of Israel had not yet experienced, and thus characterized it as always a future expectation.Professor Donald Englert, who taught at the Lancaster Theological Seminary in the second half of the 20th century, suggested that “water with your foot” in may have been a euphemism for “to urinate.”

Professor Walter Brueggemann, formerly of Columbia Theological Seminary, argued that the "if-then" structure of a trademark rhetorical feature of the Deuteronomic tradition, makes clear that the gift of the land was not an automatic given but a consequence of obedience.