NextHere, we come to one of the supposedly clearest universal laws there is. When the Almighty gave his protective covenant to Noah and all of creation, he gave some laws that concern Noah and his descendants, i.e., all of humanity. Here is one of them.
Everything that moves that is alive, it shall be food for you. But flesh with its vitality, its blood, you shall not eat. (Genesis 9:3a,4)
Now in the past, when I was freshly out of christianity, I used to think to myself that this verse clearly states that a person should not eat the blood of an animal. It seemed clear to me. Doesn't the verse overtly mention the blood of the animal? Aren't there other parts of the Jewish Bible that says Israelites shouldn't eat blood? To me it was obvious that the plain reading of this verse meant, do not eat blood.
But later on, espcially after reading the context of the verse over and over again, and listening to what noahides and their rabbis have been telling, I began to notice that I wasn't reading the full verse, just the parts that I thought could be equated to Jewish law. Let me quote the verse as well as the following verses and let's see if you can see what I've been missing.
(3) Every moving thing that lives shall be for food for you; as the green vegetation have I given you all. (4) Only flesh with its life, its blood, you shall not eat. (5) But your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it; and at the hand of man, even at the hand of every man's brother, will I require the life of man. (6) The one who sheds the blood of a man, by man shall his blood be shed; because He made man in God's image. (Genesis 9:3-6)
It's important to note the way that "blood" is used in the rest of this section and the way it culminates in verse 6. Verse 6 is not simply saying that if someone cuts someone else, and blood pours out, i.e., literally shedding blood, then someone else can shed the same amount of blood out of the blood-letter. This passage is generally understood as killing, murder. Whenever the passage mentions blood in the passage following the one that we are interested in, it is talking about life-blood, vitality, something that has to do with the quality of being alive. It's not simply the literal red stuff that flows in your body while you're alive and stops when you're dead.
The interpretation of this verse is also impacted by the wording of the verse itself. I'll highlight it while highlighting my mistake of ignorance. Verse 4 says "... flesh with its life [or vitality or soul], its blood, you shall not eat!" It's important to note what it doesn't say. It doesn't say "don't eat blood!" It doesn't even say "don't eat flesh/meat with blood." But that was how I used to read/understand it. Here's what it actually says: "you shall not eat flesh with its life, its blood." Now read this in a context, the following verses, where blood is not used literally to simply refer to what moves in the vein when alive and stops when dead, but rather the living principle with a person, and you'll see that the rabbis actually have a strong point when they interpret the command as "don't eat meat with its life principle/aspect in it" or "don't eat meat from a living animal". This is important because it says that we are not talking about whatever is in an animal once it is fully dead because then it has no living principle. It's dead.
So basically, what I'm saying is that this law is incumbent on all mankind since Noah (at least). No one is allowed to eat meat that came from an animal while it was alive. We have to make sure the animal is totally dead before we eat it. There's no real prohibition in this verse that forbids a person from eating whatever blood remains in the meat of a dead animal.
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