Blood and life

In his recent Concordia commentary on Leviticus, John Kleinig gives a good summary of what I think is the best explanation of the blood prohibtiion of Lev 17:

“many animists regard blood as the most potent of all ritual substances. The blood of an animal was either drunk or, more commonly, eaten with its meat to gain its life-power, its vitality and health, its virility and fertility, its energy and strength.” For the nations surrounding Israel, blood was food for deities (cf. Book 8 of the Odyssey), and was used to ward off evil spirits.

For Israel, however, God is the God of life and death: “God reserved all blood for himself as the life-giver. It had to be given back to him. People could not use blood to gain supernatural life-power for themselves, nor could they manipulate it to grant life-power to those who lacked it. It could not be handed over to other gods and demons, since they had no right to use it, nor were they allowed to acquire life-power from it. Above all, no Israelite was allowed to consume the blood from any animal. God ordained that it was to be used ritually only in the rite of atonement and the practices associated with it. Yet the power of blood in that rite did not come from the life in it, but from God’s word which had instituted its use. That Word determined its function in the rite of atonement.”

This also implies that everything Israel ate was “dead,” since it was drained of life-blood. Israel was forbidden to eat living animals, or animals that still had blood-soul in them. Instead, they were required to eat dead things, and recognize that Yahweh alone gave life to and through the dead food.

For Christians, one perenniel question is how this prohibition of blood relates to the Eucharistic consumption of blood. Kleinig suggests that “Christ’s institution does not really violate the taboo, because it is the ultimate reason for it.” He appears to mean that Israel was forbidden to eat animal blood because there is only one life-giving blood, the blood of Jesus.

To that, I would add this additional note: While Israel was required to eat only dead things, Christians are invited to eat “flesh” with the blood, and that means we are invited to feed on a living Christ. But this is not really blood of “flesh,” since Jesus has been raised out of flesh into the life of the Spirit. (We have the complication that Jesus offered His blood before His resurrection, but let’s ignore that for now!) Perhaps we should put it this way: Fleshly life is sustained through consumption of dead food, meat without life-blood; but the life of the Spirit is sustained through consumption of living food, body with life-blood. Fleshly life is sustained by the flow of the life of the flesh, which is in the blood; the life of the Spirit is sustained by the flow of the Spirit.