Sometimes, when reading the Law, you can tell as much about the nations around Israel as you do about Israel itself.
Take the double prohibition in Leviticus 7:26-27 for example. Twice in those two verses, God warns about people who “eat blood.” In verse 26, He says not to do it, and then in verse 27, He says that those who do eat the blood will be cut off from the people.
Why does He say this? Was there a huge temptation on the part of the Israelites to eat blood?
As it turns out, eating blood was more common than we might think. Several Canaanite cultures, such as the Akkadians and Sumerians, had blood as a component of medicinal practices, while parts of Ireland in the not-so-distant past drank blood during certain ceremonies.
This paganistic practice is part of what the early Christians had in mind in Acts 15. In dealing with the integration of gentiles into a community that also included Jews, the people there decided to circulate a letter with four prohibitions. One of them included not drinking blood, so as to not harm the consciences of their newly Christian, but still somewhat-culturally Jewish, brethren.
Avoiding blood is talked about to a greater degree elsewhere in Leviticus, but the idea dates back to the post-flood era. Immediately after Noah gets off the Ark, God tells him to “not eat the flesh with its life, that is, its blood” (Genesis 9:4).
The reason for avoiding blood, as we’ll find out in Leviticus 17, is that the “life is in the blood.”
Thousands upon thousands of sermons have been done on this topic, most often linking the “life” that is found in blood to the spiritual life that is found in the blood of Christ. I won’t belabor that point by talking about the concept more here.
What I will say is that God clearly had in mind a two-fold understanding of blood. The first is that drinking blood—especially the blood of an animal that had been killed and left for dead—could be dangerous. It’s one thing for someone to kill and then consume blood as part of a ritual, it’s another to drink it from a rotting animal corpse.
The second reason is distinctly spiritual. God demands holiness from His people, and since blood was used in so many different ways in other cultures, a command to not drink the blood necessarily separates His people from others. Their uniqueness in abstaining from blood would’ve set them apart.
It also preserves the integrity of the sacrificial system. If there is “no forgiveness without shedding of blood” (Hebrews 9:22), then how can Israelites consume the very thing that is spilled out onto the earth to forgive them of their sins? Doing so risks denigrating the very foundation of their spiritual relationship with God.
