What's For Dinner? - Leviticus 17

Chapter 17 gives an interesting and, at least to me, unexpected commandment and that is that all animals that will be used for food must be first sacrificed at the tabernacle. This means that if a family is going to eat meat for dinner, they have to take the animal to the tabernacle first to be properly sacrificed. This is really interesting to me because I could only imagine the volume increase this one commandment made as far as the work load for the temple workers. As far as why God made this commandment, I could see it as being made so that all animal life could be respected, so if you wanted to eat meat then you had to offer that meat first to God. The IM also notes that this might be because the Hebrews at this point had 400 years of being immersed in Egyptian religious traditions and apparently there were a lot of rituals that involved blood. So if God could control when and where that blood was shed, then it set the conditions for what the blood could be used for and deny the blood rituals of other cultures.

The punishment for eating meat that was killed anywhere besides the tabernacle was banishment, or being cut off from the people. TB suggests that this punishment indicated that this sin was just as bad as murder, being they were both sins of “the blood”. Interestingly, if an animal died of natural causes or was killed by another animal then that meat shouldn’t be eaten, but the punishment was simply being unclean until you washed yourself and your clothes and then waited until sunset, so a “wash and wait”. It’s interesting to consider the differences in punishments between the two actions, one gets you kicked out of the community and one is just a wash and wait.

The IM does note though that people thought that they could get around this rule by killing the animals outside of the camp of Israel, but God made it clear that that was not the case. Additionally, this rule mostly only worked while Israel was mobile because once the people settled and built the temple and spread out over all the land it was too difficult and far to only get your meat from the temple. Therefore, at that point, “they were permitted to pour out the blood in a sacrificial way until God at their respective dwellings, and to cover it with the dust.” With all this talk of blood, it seems that this rule was mostly about getting the blood rituals our of Israel, and also controlling the sacrificial process, making the people sacrifice the animals at the tabernacle with the prescribed priests, instead of just doing it themselves outside of camp.