blood: the red fluid of a body, which the Bible treats as the place where life is held, so that the one word reaches from a literal stain to a killing and the debt it leaves behind
Israel did not treat blood as one substance among many. Blood is where life (נֶפֶשׁ) is held, so it is never a neutral fluid: to pour it out is to let a life go, and once a life has been let go, someone has to answer for it. Every use of the word runs back to that one conviction, which is why a single Hebrew word can name the stain on Joseph's coat, the blood a priest throws against an altar, and the murder that leaves a city guilty.
Israel's worship puts blood to work in several distinct ways, and they are worth keeping apart:
- Blood is applied at the altar and inside the sanctuary to cleanse and to cover, in a carefully graded set of rites.
- Blood seals an agreement, as when Moses throws half of it against the altar and half over the people and calls it "the blood of the covenant".
- Blood smeared on a doorway marks a household so that death passes it by, which is neither a cleansing nor an agreement.
- Blood may never be eaten, because the life in it belongs to God and has to be given back to him, at the altar or poured out on the ground.
The word's hardest edge is violence. Especially in the plural, blood stops meaning the fluid and starts meaning the deed and the debt: spilled blood cries out from the ground, stains the land, and clings to whoever is answerable until it is settled. Hebrew keeps saying "blood" where English has to pick between "bloodshed", "bloodguilt", and plain "murder". A whole set of fixed phrases works this way, calling a killer "a man of blood", Jerusalem "a city of blood", and a man's own liability "his blood on his head".
At the poetic edges the word stretches further still. Dark grape juice is "the blood of the grape", a moon gone red is a moon "turned to blood", and redness itself is measured against blood as the standard for it.
Nuances
What Leviticus 17:11 claims about how blood covers, and how widely the verse applies.
- majorityBoth are at work: the life in the blood buys back a life that is in danger, and it also cleanses what wrongdoing has polluted, so the verse should not be forced to choose.; Sklar, Sin, Impurity, Sacrifice, Atonement (Hebrew Bible Monographs 2, 2005); Kiuchi, The Purification Offering in the Priestly Literature (JSOTSup 56, 1987); Wenham, The Book of Leviticus (NICOT, 1979)
- contestedThe blood covers as a ransom: the animal's life is surrendered to God at the altar in place of a payment, and the verse is not about an animal dying in the worshipper's place.; Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16 (Anchor Bible, 1991), 704-13; Levine, In the Presence of the LORD (SJLA 5, 1974); Janowski, Sühne als Heilsgeschehen (WMANT 55, 1982)
- minorityThe blood covers because a life was given up in death; across the Hebrew Bible the word overwhelmingly points to life violently taken, not to life released for some further use.; Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (1955), ch. 3; Stibbs, The Meaning of the Word "Blood" in Scripture (1948)
- minorityThe verse is a limited rule requiring animal blood to be brought to the altar, not a general theory of sacrificial blood, and blood rites work by marking status and sacred space rather than by carrying a message that can be restated as doctrine.; Schwartz, "The Prohibitions Concerning the \"Eating\" of Blood in Leviticus 17," in Anderson and Olyan (eds.), Priesthood and Cult in Ancient Israel (JSOTSup 125, 1991), 34-66; Gilders, Blood Ritual in the Hebrew Bible: Meaning and Power (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)