Leviticus 17: Even the Hunter Has to Cover the Blood

Verse 13 is the one in Leviticus 17 that gets skipped, and it's the only one where nobody is watching. A man goes out hunting and catches a beast or a fowl "that may be eaten", and the instruction is that "he shall even pour out the blood thereof, and cover it with dust." There's no tabernacle in the verse and no priest or altar either, only a man with a dead animal and two things to do with the blood, which I picture happening somewhere out of sight. The chapter explains the blood rule but never says why the second job is the dust.

Two Saturdays ago a boy on the other team slid into second at one of Caleb's games and opened up his forearm on the base path. It wasn't much as these things go. It bled anyway, onto the dirt in front of the bag. His mother had him by the elbow before I'd crossed the infield. The league handbook has a whole page on bleeding, with uniforms and gloves and when a player can come back in, and nothing on the ground. Between innings I walked out and dragged my cleat across the spot until it was just dirt again. Nobody asked me to. It was verse 13 that brought the whole thing back, a few days later.

Why does it matter where the animal is killed?

The rule has to cover every place a man could do it, so verse 3 takes a man who kills "an ox, or lamb, or goat, in the camp, or that killeth it out of the camp" and doesn't bring the animal to the door of the tabernacle, and verse 4 says "blood shall be imputed unto that man", and says he "hath shed blood", and then he is cut off from his people. That's heavy language for what looks to us like butchering a lamb behind your tent. It stops sounding strange if you take it, as I do, that an ox or lamb or goat killed anywhere but the door is being treated in this chapter as an offering that went somewhere else.

The purpose in verse 5 tells you this was already going on. The rule is "to the end that the children of Israel may bring their sacrifices, which they offer in the open field, even that they may bring them unto the Lord". So they were sacrificing in the open field. Nobody is being told to start something. The practice is being collected and moved to the door, where the priest sprinkles the blood on the altar and burns the fat (v. 6). Then verse 7 says "they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have gone a whoring."

No more.

Those two words tell me some of what was being offered in the open field wasn't going to the Lord at all, though that's my reading and the verse doesn't spell out the whole picture.

Deuteronomy 12 complicates all of this, because Moses tells the people there that they "mayest kill and eat flesh in all thy gates, whatsoever thy soul lusteth after" (Deuteronomy 12:15), and that if the chosen place "be too far from thee" they can kill at home (12:21). The blood rule comes through untouched, since the people are still to "pour it upon the earth as water" (12:16). A few verses on, Deuteronomy gives the reason again in nearly the same words, "for the blood is the life" and "thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh" (12:23). So Leviticus 17's everything-at-the-door can't be the last form of the law, and I'd guess the difference is the camp itself. A tent set up in the middle of a people who can all walk to it is a different thing from a country. Leviticus doesn't say that, so it's only a guess.

What does verse 11 say the blood is for?

Verse 11 is the one that gets quoted.

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.

Look at who's talking, because verse 10 has "I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people." Right behind it comes "I have given it to you", and then "Therefore I said unto the children of Israel". First person the whole way through. Moses isn't explaining the Lord's reasons from the outside, and the Lord isn't handing down a rule and walking off. The reason arrives with the rule, and the reason is a gift. The blood has been given. It was set aside for the altar. A man who eats blood has taken something that was spoken for and used it at his own table, which is a different offense from breaking a diet.

Set this beside Adam, who gets the same sort of instruction with no reason attached. In Moses 5:6 an angel appears to him "after many days" and asks why he offers sacrifices, and Adam says "I know not, save the Lord commanded me." Only then does the angel say "This thing is a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten of the Father, which is full of grace and truth" (Moses 5:7). Adam obeyed for a good while with no explanation at all. Israel in Leviticus 17 gets the explanation in the same verse as the command. Latter-day Saints read the altar the way Moses 5:7 reads it, and I read verse 11 in that light, though Leviticus 17 never says which sin any particular offering covers. It names the altar and the blood.

The reasoning gets wider than the altar at verse 14. Verses 10 through 12 are about blood that could go to the altar. Then the hunter turns up in verse 13 with game nobody was bringing to a priest, and verse 14 says "Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof." Same reason, bigger circle.

"Cut off" shows up four times in the chapter, in verses 4, 9, 10 and 14. Twice it follows a man who didn't bring his animal to the door and twice a man who ate blood. It isn't used anywhere else in the chapter. Those are the two things the chapter treats as the end of a man's place among his people.

Why is eating blood worse than eating a dead animal?

Verses 15 and 16 end the chapter and can read like an afterthought. Verse 15 takes "every soul that eateth that which died of itself, or that which was torn with beasts" and gives him a short list: wash his clothes, bathe himself in water, be unclean until the even. "Then shall he be clean." Verse 10 uses the same verb, "eateth", and there it costs a man his place, while here it costs him an evening. Washing the clothes and being clean again is a pattern the book has used already, for the scab that turns out to be nothing in Leviticus 13.

I can't make the two verses answer each other, and I'd be careful about anyone who says they can. A torn carcass found in a field was never brought to any altar, which may be part of it, and the blood in it may be the other part, but verse 15 doesn't mention blood, so that's me filling a gap. What the text does show is that verse 15 hands the man a way back, and verses 10 and 14 don't. There's no washing for the one who ate blood and no waiting until even.

Verse 16 adds that the man who won't wash "shall bear his iniquity", the only place the chapter uses the phrase.

The hunter in verse 13 sits between the two, a man who kills a clean animal without a priest and is told to pour out the blood and cover it. The verse mentions no washing and no uncleanness until even, and says nothing about anyone checking his work. Whatever the dust is doing, it's the whole procedure he's given.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "cut off from among his people" mean in Leviticus 17?

The chapter uses it four times and never says what it looked like. I've read it as being put out of the camp and I've heard it read as something worse, and the text doesn't settle that. The one thing I'd point to is verse 10, where the Lord says "I will even set my face against that soul" and "will cut him off". The community isn't the only one acting in that verse.

Did the blood rule apply to people who weren't Israelites?

Yes, and the chapter makes a point of it. The first rule, in verse 3, is for "the house of Israel" alone. The stranger who sojourns is added in verse 8 and named again in verses 10, 12, 13 and 15. Verse 15 names him in the one place where the cost is a bath and an evening, so he doesn't get off the cheap rules either.

Who were the "devils" in verse 7?

The word itself is about as far as I can take it. As I understand it the Hebrew behind it is related to the word for a male goat, and scholars connect it to spirits worshipped in open country, but I'd want a better source before leaning on that. What the verse says is plain enough: they had sacrificed to something other than the Lord, and they had done it often enough that it needed a statute.

Is Leviticus 17:11 about Christ?

The verse says only that the Lord gave the blood for the altar to make atonement. Moses 5:7 is where our scripture says outright that the offering is "a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten of the Father", and that's the light I read verse 11 in.

Was the blood rule only about the tabernacle?

Genesis 9:4 has it before Moses: "But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat." Acts 15:20 has the apostles asking Gentile converts to abstain "from things strangled, and from blood", long after anyone was bringing an ox to the tabernacle door. A rule that turns up before the law of Moses and again at the council in Jerusalem is carrying more than tent-door logistics.

— D.