Leviticus 17:10

Verse 11 is the heart of the passage, and everything around it rests on it: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” It is a plain statement about living creatures, and it is also God’s own teaching about how sin is dealt with.

The word for life is nephesh. It comes from a verb meaning to breathe, and it means a breathing creature, life, soul, self or person. The same word stands behind “souls” and “soul” later in this verse, and behind “soul” in verses 10 and 12. So the life of the animal on the altar is set beside the soul of the person it covers.

The word for blood, dâm, is the ordinary word for the blood of man or beast, the blood whose shedding brings death, and Scripture even uses it of wine, “the blood of grapes”, because of its red colour. Its weight here comes from what God says about it. The creature’s life is in its blood, so when its blood is shed, its life is given.

God speaks in the first person: “I have given it to you.” The sacrifices are his provision, and atonement starts with him. He gives the blood, he appoints the altar as the place where it is offered, and he names the purpose, which is atonement for souls. Israel brought the animals, and the way of being made right with God was his gift.

Verse 12 opens with “Therefore”, and the word ties the ban straight to verse 11. Blood carries the life, life belongs to God, and God has given the blood for the altar. To eat it would be to take as common food what God has kept for himself and for atonement, as though the eater had a claim on the life.

The ban also set Israel apart. The nations around them, the Canaanites among them, used blood in the worship of their idols, and some drank it hoping to take in an animal’s strength or to commune with their gods. The LORD drew a clear line between his people and those customs, so that they would stay a holy nation, set apart to him.

The ban is complete. “Any manner of blood” in verse 10 and “no manner of flesh” in verse 14 take in every kind, whatever animal it came from and however it was prepared, whether raw, cooked or mixed with food.

Each time the ban is given, it names two groups. In verse 10 the first is “the house of Israel”, bayith (house) and Yisrâʼêl, the name God gave Jacob, formed from words meaning to prevail or have power and God. Beside them stand “the strangers that sojourn among you”. The stranger, gêr, was a resident alien, someone living in a land other than his own, whether for good or for a long stay. He was counted among the weaker members of the community, often with certain legal protections and duties. The verb gûwr, “sojourn”, first meant to turn aside from the road for a lodging, and so to live somewhere as a guest.

Verses 12 and 13 name the stranger again. Whoever lived among God’s people lived under this law, so that one standard of holiness held for everyone in the land and the practices of other nations were kept out of the community. Verse 12 adds “No soul of you”, in Hebrew kol-nephesh, so the command reached every single person.

“I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood” is a strong way of saying that God will oppose the offender himself. The verb nâthan means to give, and it is used very widely for to put, set or make. The word for face, pânîym, is plural in form but always used as a singular, and it also means presence. When God sets his face against a person, his attention is fixed on that person in judgment. The judgment falls on “that soul”, the one who did it, so each person answers to God for himself.

Verse 13 carries the law out from the altar into the field. The verses before the passage (Leviticus 17:1–9) require every animal killed for sacrifice or for food to be brought to the door of the tabernacle, which kept Israel from offering sacrifices in other places and to other gods. Wild game is killed far from the tabernacle, so God gave the hunter a command of his own. Whoever, Israelite or stranger, “hunteth and catcheth any beast or fowl that may be eaten” must “pour out the blood thereof, and cover it with dust”.

To pour out, shâphak, means to pour out, spill or shed. To cover, kâçâh, is the plain word for covering. Draining the blood onto the ground kept it from being eaten, and covering it kept it from being used for anything profane. It also handed the life back, as it were, to the God who gave it, laying it in the dust of the ground from which God formed man (Genesis 2:7). Covering the blood had a practical side as well, for cleanliness and to keep scavengers away. Its first meaning is reverence. Even when an animal was killed for an ordinary meal, the hunter acknowledged that its life was the LORD’s, and so holiness reached past the tabernacle into the everyday work of hunting and eating.

Verse 14 gathers up the passage. It states the reason twice: “For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof”, and again, “for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof.” “All flesh” takes in every creature. Between the two statements stands the command, “Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh”, and the verse ends with the penalty of verse 10. The repetition makes the reason impossible to miss. God’s command rests on what is true about life, and on his right to it.

God forbade eating blood long before Israel came to Sinai. After the flood he told Noah, “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat” (Genesis 9:4), a command for all mankind. In Leviticus the same principle is set out in full for the covenant people and tied to the altar, and Deuteronomy repeats it: “for the blood is the life” (Deuteronomy 12:23).

Both earlier and later settings belong to God’s covenants. The command to Noah is part of the covenant God made after the flood (Genesis 9), and the repetition in Deuteronomy 12 belongs to the laws of worship that kept Israel apart from the idols of the nations.

The apostles spoke to this directly. When the church met in Jerusalem to settle what Gentile believers must keep (Acts 15), they wrote asking them to abstain from meats offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled and from fornication (Acts 15:29). This was a pastoral word that laid only a few things on the Gentiles, for the sake of fellowship between Jewish and Gentile believers and to avoid needless offence. Elsewhere the New Testament teaches that Jesus declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19) and that believers are free of the Old Testament food laws (Colossians 2:16–17).

Believers differ on whether the abstention from blood still binds. Some hold that the decree met a need of its own day, the fellowship of Jewish and Gentile believers, and that with the ceremonial law fulfilled in Christ, what remains is reverence for life and care for the conscience of others. Others hold that the ban stands for every believer, since it was first given to Noah for all mankind and the apostles kept it for the Gentiles. On either view, the reverence for life that this law teaches remains, and so does the meaning God gave to blood, which is fulfilled in the blood of Christ.

All the blood poured out under the law points forward to Jesus, “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Animal blood covered sin for a time, and Hebrews says that the blood of bulls and goats could never take sins away (Hebrews 10:4). Christ entered the holy place once for all by his own blood, obtained eternal redemption for us, and purges the conscience (Hebrews 9:12–14). Hebrews also puts the principle of verse 11 in a few words: “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22).

In Leviticus the life of an animal was given for the soul. On the cross the life given was the sinless life of the Son of God himself, offered once for all. God set him forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood (Romans 3:25). We are justified by his blood (Romans 5:9), and in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins (Ephesians 1:7). He made peace through the blood of his cross (Colossians 1:20), his blood cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7), and we were redeemed with his precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot (1 Peter 1:18–19).

Jesus spoke of the cup as the new testament in his blood (Luke 22:20), the new covenant the LORD promised through Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:31). By that blood we may now enter God’s presence with boldness (Hebrews 10:19–20), and God, rich in mercy, has made us alive together with Christ (Ephesians 2:4–5). The blood Israel was forbidden to eat, because God had given it for atonement, finds its full meaning in the blood Christ shed for us.

These verses show us who God is. He is Lord of every life, from the bird caught in the field to the person who eats it. He is holy, and he takes sin seriously enough that it costs a life. He is merciful, for he gave the blood himself, on his own altar, for the souls of his people. If he guarded the blood of a hunted animal this carefully, he guards human life, made in his own image, more closely still.

The passage also gives us a reason for thankfulness in ordinary things. The hunter’s meal was God’s provision, and pouring out the blood acknowledged the Giver. Our salvation was bought with a life as well, and that life was Christ’s, given freely so that we might belong to God.