Bloody Bible

David Biale observes in Blood and Belief that “the ancient Israelites were the only Near Easterners to make
blood a central element in their religious rituals” (10).

He fills out the picture: “There were, to be
sure, magical and medical rituals mentioned in Akkadian, Sumerian,
and Hittite texts that used blood to feed bloodthirsty demons, and
one Hittite text mentions the use of blood as a ritual detergent (similar
to its use in the Bible), but blood played no other significant role in
the sacrificial offerings of the ancient Near East. Those offerings were
intended to feed the gods, and blood was not usually the main course
on the divine menu: although the Canaanite goddess Anat is said to
have drunk the blood of her brother, Baal, this was probably not her
everyday diet.6 With two possible exceptions, no biblical text states
explicitly that the Israelite God drinks or eats blood (‘eating’ blood in
the biblical context evidently meant eating meat with its blood still in
it), but the prohibition on his people’s doing so undoubtedly stems from
the centrality of blood in the Israelite cult.”

In Scripture, though, blood is a basic material of religious ritual: “Blood
is a ritual detergent when used by the priests in the temple in order to
purify the sancta after they have been contaminated. Such contamination
can even come in the form of a ‘miasma’ from outside the temple
precincts. The blood from different expiatory sacrifi ces is also used as
part of a process of atonement for inadvertent sins. For Milgrom, since
blood is equated with life, the killing of an animal for nourishment,
which he identifi es with the shelamim (well-being) sacrifi ces, involves a
capital crime that can be expiated only by the blood of the animal itself
(Lev. 17:11). Therefore, any animal killed for the purpose of consumption
must have its blood poured out on the altar or, if it is a wild game
animal, covered with earth. Ingestion of the blood is strictly prohibited
(Lev. 3:17, 17:10–16, 19:26). Deuteronomy accepts this prohibition on
eating blood (Deut. 12:23) but allows for secular slaughter of domesticated
animals that previously could be killed only as sacrifices.”

Along the same lines, Scripture is unrelenting about murder: “biblical law would not allow any remission of capital
punishment, a unique stringency in ancient Near Eastern law” (15). Whoever sheds blood has to pay with his own blood; otherwise, the land is defiled.

The main analogy to Israel in this regard is, somewhat surprisingly, ancient Greek sacrifice: “Especially around issues of blood, Greek religion was
significantly closer to that of the Israelites than were the rituals of more
proximate Near Eastern cultures. In some cases there may have been
indirect cultural interchange between Israel and Greece” (14). Greece also, Biale argues (not altogether convincingly) that Greece shows an almost-biblical severity toward bloodshed – at least in Aeschylus’ tragic reconstruction of the past (16).

It’s not clear what we make of this. That Hebrew religion is bloodier than its neighbors is clear, and it’s the kind of fact of which we must make something.