In the Book of Exodus, Moses leads the Hebrews out of Egypt to escape from the tyrannical pharaoh and find the Promised Land. They follow him eagerly enough at first, but it soon becomes clear that the journey will be far from straightforward.
As geography students will remember, between Egypt and Israel lies the barren wasteland of the Sinai Desert. It isn’t long before Moses’ flock start complaining: ‘Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt,’ they moan, ‘when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full.’ ‘Flesh pots,’ in this passage, means exactly what it sounds like: pots in which you cook flesh.
But the fleshpots of Egypt became a popular metaphor for any luxurious scene imagined with regret or disapproval. Gradually, the Egyptian reference dropped away—in 1710, Jonathan Swift writes of the ‘fleshpots of Cavan Street’— until fleshpot became an all-purpose word for anywhere that was particularly alluring.
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