03 July 2022
The matter of (7) no consuming blood is not so obvious to us. It's directly stated in Genesis 9:4. On the one hand, it's obvious that if you drain the blood from an animal, it's no longer alive. Eating the flesh of a live animal should be repulsive to human instinct. Let the creature die first. But there's more.
On the other hand, blood is sacred. Shedding it must be justified. The basic principle is that all blood must be an offering to the Lord, or it defiles the land and everyone who stands on it. This is why it impinges on the fifth command. Regardless what moving creature you kill, it must meet God's purpose, and the blood is reserved as an offering to Him. It is His minimum portion of all things that we kill.
Noah was permitted to kill anything necessary for his own survival, but the blood was always God's. So it is with killing humans; the blood must be accounted for to avoid defilement. Otherwise you bear "blood-guilt" on your soul. If the killing is according to the code, then the blood is an offering to God that He accepts. The whole point is reverence for Him as the Creator, and recognizing that this fallen existence is brutal. The cost is very high.
Thus, we are obliged to take a moment for the blood ritual. Naturally, when your convictions move you to acts of war, the ritual of blood comes before and after the battle. The same goes when killing for food. When you are killing for defense without warning, there would be a moment of blood ritual afterward. The main point is that you are aware of the duty to do these things in righteousness.
Yes, it's obvious to us that the blood of your food kills carry all the health threats, but that's really not the point here. The whole point is that only in pagan idolatry would anyone in ancient times consume meat with blood in it. There were a few pagan rituals that called for ritual strangling of the animal and then it was to be eaten with its blood intact as part of the ritual. In some cases, it was sucked from the strangled animal. From at least the Flood of Noah, this has been forbidden for all humanity.
By the way, most meat you buy in the stores has no blood. What runs red and congeals in the pan from meat is not blood, but a liquid protein that was trapped in the meat fibers. It's extremely rare in the US that slaughter workers and butchers don't bleed the animal properly.
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