4 But meat with its life, its blood, you must not eat.
אַךְ־בָּשָׂ֕ר בְּנַפְשׁ֥וֹ דָמ֖וֹ לֹ֥א תֹאכֵֽלוּ׃
A couple of weeks ago, on June 8th, I casually mentioned the assertion of Itzhak Amar of Bar-Ilan University that this paragraph “exhibits only a tenuous connection to the flood narrative.” Whether we accept that or not, we’re now going to let him and Joachim Schaper of the University of Aberdeen show us that there’s a very strong connection between this passage and two other biblical chapters: Leviticus 17 and Deuteronomy 12. The flashing lights that draw our attention to this connection are the words דם dahm ‘blood’ and נפשׁ néfesh ‘life’.
We first saw and discussed the word nefesh way back on Day Five, when the first living creatures came into being. We first saw the word dam (twice) back in Genesis 4, when Cain killed Abel, where I pointed out that we would be seeing it again in Genesis 9. This is the first time it has appeared since then; stay tuned for a meaningful repetition of that word in v. 6.
Where do the two words appear together in the Bible?
here in our verse and the next
in Lev 7:27
in Lev 17:10, 11, 12, and 14
in Deut 12:23
in verses scattered through the rest of the Bible
The crucial phrases that explain our verse are these:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Bible Guy to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.