Blood

Pig’s blood, crushed bird heads, animal fats, and fine oils were all used to mark the doorposts and thresholds in the ancient Near East, to protect against a host of dangerous supernatural powers. The Torah repurposes this ritual as a practical sign allowing YHWH to distinguish between Israelite and Egyptian households. An anthropological lens points to yet another layer of meaning in this ritual, carried out on the very night before Israel leaves Egypt.

In Ezekiel’s graphic metaphor of a girl abandoned in the blood of her afterbirth, God sees baby Jerusalem and urges her to live (Ezekiel 16:6–7) but leaves her there until she is older. The verse’s inclusion in the Haggadah (ca. 16^th century) hinges on Mekhilta’s radical reinterpretation and regendering of the blood as representing Israel’s first mitzvot in Egypt: circumcision and the paschal offering. In response to Christian supersessionism, women’s menstrual blood was added as a third example of Israel’s blood-based mitzvot.

Why did Laban accept that Rachel could not rise before him when she said, “For the way of women was upon me”? Why does the Torah forbid sexual relations during menstruation? Nahmanides’ answers place him at the crossroads of medieval science and mysticism.

Biblical dietary laws forbid consuming animals that shed the blood of other animals, reflecting an ideal world without violence among humans or animals. But what counts as blood?

In Priestly law, impurity is stripped of its mythic origins in the demonic realm but still retains its dangerous, physical presence, and must be mitigated by specific acts of ritual cleansing and banishing, depending on the type of impurity. Purification from the skin disease tzaraʿat (Leviticus 13–14) offers the starkest example of such a ritual.

I don’t defend the Torah’s ostensibly immoral laws, but I do try to understand what motivated them.

Blood has a significant role in many biblical stories and rituals, most prominently in the atonement sacrifices of Leviticus. With the destruction of the Temple and the loss of sacrifices, Judaism and Christianity took very different paths to achieving atonement.

Three curious details in the plagues of blood and frogs show the hand of a post-priestly editor and his concern about purity laws.

In the Torah, Nimrod and Esau are hunters, Isaac enjoys game, and the legal collections take it for granted that hunting for food is common and permissible. Once Judaism decided that even wild animals must be ritually slaughtered, the Jewish attitude towards hunting took a sharp negative turn.

Is the Bible’s portrayal of the magicians (Ḥarṭummīm) in accord with Egyptian literature and ritual practice? How did the Israelite writers obtain this knowledge?

The Torah first describes a world that is created to be vegetarian. It is only after the Flood that humans were allowed to eat meat. Leviticus restricts meat consumption to the sacrificial offerings only, whereas Deuteronomy permits even non-consecrated meat. How do we understand the tension between these approaches?

Is the book of Leviticus primitive? I believe so, though an analysis of the meaning of the word kipper suggests that these sacrificial laws may be more relevant than we often realize.

If a corpse is found in a field, and the killer is unknown, the enders of the closest city to break a heifer’s neck by a stream and declare that they did not spill “this blood” (Deuteronomy 21). How does this ritual of eglah arufah, “broken-necked heifer,” atone for Israel’s bloodguilt?

Leviticus requires covering the blood of undomesticated animals; Deuteronomy requires pouring out the blood of slaughtered domesticated animals onto the ground. How do these laws jibe with each other? The Essenes have one answer, the rabbis another, the academics a third.