What Is the Bible’s View?
Is It Right to Eat Blood?
LIFE is closely associated with blood. It is the blood that transports needed nourishment and oxygen to all parts of the body, and carries away the waste products. Blood being so intimately involved in the life processes, the “soul” or life of a creature is referred to in the Bible as being “in the blood.”—Lev. 17:11.
Since life is sacred, blood is also sacred. Respect for the sanctity of blood is therefore respect for life. The Giver of life, Jehovah God, has laid command upon mankind to respect life, including that of animals. When he permitted Noah and his family to add flesh to their diet, he stated: “Every moving animal that is alive may serve as food for you. As in the case of green vegetation, I do give it all to you. Only flesh with its soul—its blood—you must not eat.” (Gen. 9:3, 4) Having descended from Noah through his three sons, all of us are under that command.
In the first century C.E. this prohibition respecting blood was repeated by formal letter to Christians. The occasion was the settling of a controversy as to whether non-Jews who embraced Christianity were to be circumcised and placed under the commands of the Mosaic law. The evidence presented as well as the guidance of God’s holy spirit made it plain that circumcision was not to be imposed upon non-Jews. The decision, composed in written form by the apostles and other elders of the Christian congregation at Jerusalem, read, in part: “The holy spirit and we ourselves have favored adding no further burden to you, except these necessary things, to keep abstaining from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication.”—Acts 15:28, 29.
This was no temporary direction to appease Jewish believers but it involved things necessary for gaining salvation. Those who persist in idolatry and fornication are debarred from entrance into the Kingdom. (1 Cor. 6:9, 10) Disrespect for the sanctity of blood is just as serious. Why? Because men really do not have the right to deprive any creature of life, for they are unable to restore that life. Accordingly, for them to take life without acting in harmony with God’s command respecting blood means taking God’s property, that is, the life represented by the blood. It means making themselves responsible for taking the life of the creature in defiance of God.
Even many who do not know God’s law about blood are not wholly without guilt when they show disrespect for its sanctity. Is it not true that most people have a feeling of revulsion when it comes to drinking blood? They have an awareness that it is not fitting to drink blood. That internal sense or conscience is reason enough to abstain from blood. As the apostle Paul pointed out at Romans 2:14, 15: “Whenever people of the nations that do not have law do by nature the things of the law, these people, although not having law, are a law to themselves. They are the very ones who demonstrate the matter of the law to be written in their hearts, while their conscience is bearing witness with them and, between their own thoughts, they are being accused or even excused.”
It is also noteworthy that from the time of Adam’s creation until the statement on blood made at the spirit’s direction in the first century C.E. no faithful servant of Jehovah God had ever eaten blood. From the time of Adam until the flood of Noah’s day there was no divine authority for eating meat and so there was no need for a specific prohibition respecting the eating of blood. With divine permission being granted to eat meat, the prohibition on blood was announced and continued in force without any indication that this was but a temporary measure. In view of that, no faithful servant of Jehovah God would take it upon himself to say that the prohibition about blood had been lifted.
Historical evidence proves that those professing Christianity in the first few centuries abstained from blood. They did not use it in any shape or form. Minucius Felix, thought to be the oldest of the Christian apologists, writes: “So much do we shrink from human blood, that we do not use the blood even of eatable animals in our food.” Tertullian, of the second and third centuries C.E., states: “Blush for your vile ways before the Christians, who have not even the blood of animals at their meals of simple and natural food; who abstain from things strangled and that die a natural death . . . . To clench the matter with a single example, you tempt Christians with sausages of blood, just because you are perfectly aware that the thing by which you thus try to get them to transgress they hold unlawful.” In his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius quotes a woman who professed Christianity and died a martyr’s death: “‘How,’ said she [contradicting the blasphemers of Christians], ‘could such as these devour children, who considered it unlawful even to taste the blood of irrational animals?’”
In later centuries, however, the situation changed among professed Christians. In the eighth century C.E. the pope of Rome took action to repeal the apostolic decree prohibiting the eating of blood. From that time onward churches recognizing his authority did not treat the Biblical injunction about blood seriously.
Today many people have no regard for the sanctity of blood. Millions do not find it objectionable to eat blood sausages and blood pudding or to use whole blood in cooking. In some lands it is difficult, if not impossible, to get sausages that are free from blood. Businesses mix blood into ground meats and other food items.
Slaughtering processes in various parts of the world show no regard for the sanctity of blood. In some lands pigs are killed by sticking them through the belly and then stopping up the hole. The animal thus bleeds to death internally but the blood can be drawn off and used for other purposes. Often chickens are slaughtered by snapping the neck in such a way as to break the jugular vein. This causes the neck of the chicken to swell up with blood, but it does not result in proper bleeding.
Many hunters fail to bleed animals properly. Maintaining that when deer are shot blood collects in the thorax, some hunters take no immediate steps to drain the blood from the animals.
While disregard for the sanctity of blood may be prevalent in your locality, how do you feel about it? Do you make reasonable personal investigation so that you do not violate God’s law on blood? Do you make sure that the meat you use comes from animals that have been bled properly? For the person seeking to be a faithful servant of Jehovah God, abstaining from blood is a matter of no little importance. So if we desire divine approval, we must demonstrate ourselves to be persons who uphold the sanctity of life and blood.2