"You Shall Not Eat with the Blood"

There are three biblical references to “eating with the blood,”¹ as a prohibition (Lev. 19:26), as a historical incident (I Sam. 14:32–35), and in a prophetic rebuke (Ezek. 33:25). Rashbam was the first to link the prohibition of eating meat “with the blood” to the second half of the verse, “you shall not practice divination or soothsaying,” and explains it as a ban on some magical practice. Ibn Ezra accepted this interpretation, but he expanded the prohibition to other forms of divination such as “soothsayers and augurs” (Deut. 18:14). In addition, he pointed to Leviticus 17:1-7, which states that all sacrifices be offered at one legitimate altar located near the entrance of the Tent of Meeting “so that they may offer their sacrifices no more to the goat-demons after whom they stray” (v. 7). The worship of goat demons (seirim) was associated with illness and death. Sforno says that all of these were methods employed to gain knowledge of the future, a deviation from the pure spirit of prophecy to impurity. According to Ramban, this seems to have been a kind of witchcraft or divination, deduced from the context of the verse: the people would spill the blood of the cattle and gather it in a hollow attended, in their belief, by the satyrs, and they would eat at their tables to learn future events; in the incident in I Samuel, the people were inquiring of the satyrs or of witchcraft to know their way and what to do, and they were eating with the blood in order to perform that craft.²

The explanation reached its full form in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed: although blood was very unclean in the eyes of the Sabeans, they nevertheless partook of it, because they thought it was the food of the spirits; by eating it man has something in common with the spirits, which join him and tell him future events. There were, however, people who objected to eating blood as a thing naturally disliked by man; they killed a beast, received the blood in a vessel or a pot, and ate of the flesh of that beast while sitting around the blood. They imagined that in this manner the spirits would come to partake of the blood which was their food, whilst the idolaters were eating the flesh; that love, brotherhood, and friendship with the spirits were established, because they dined with the latter at one place and at the same time; that the spirits would appear to them in dreams, inform them of coming events, and be favorable to them.³

The syntax of “do not eat with (al) the blood” is difficult, because the verb akel takes a prepositional object only if it also has a direct object.⁴ There are two common explanations. The first is that here al means “with” (as rendered above): do not eat anything along with blood; that is, it is forbidden to eat blood, or meat with blood. The other is that al means “alongside,” “next to,” “near”; that is, it is forbidden to eat meat in proximity to the blood of the slaughtered animal.

The historical incident occurred during Saul’s war with the Philistines: “The troops pounced on the spoils; they took the sheep and cows and calves and slaughtered them on the ground, and the troops ate with blood” (I Sam. 14:32). Following the battle against Amalek there is a similar description of the troops’ desire to plunder the spoils; Samuel accused Saul, “Why did you disobey the Lord and swoop down on the spoil” (15:19). Both instances have a negative connotation. While Saul was trying to put the blame on the people, Samuel accuses Saul; it was Saul’s responsibility to rein in his people. In the Talmud we find a dispute between Rav and Shmuel over whether the animals were slaughtered at night or not.⁵ Rabbi Elazar pointed to the contradiction between verse 33, where it says to bring the stone “this day” (hayom), and verse 34, which mentions night. However we should point out that the word hayom can also refer to the night, as in “And there was evening and there was morning, a first day (yom)” (Gen. 1:5). Since worship and sacrifice to chthonic forces usually took place at night, it is more than likely that the rush upon the spoils happened in the evening.⁶

Rashi, commenting on I Samuel 14:32 and focusing on “cows and calves,” explains that they violated the ban on slaughtering an animal and its young on the same day (Lev. 22:28). He also cites the midrash that the animals were offered as sacrifices and the people sinned by starting to eat the meat before the blood had been offered on the altar. According to Radak, the transgression was that they ate the meat with the blood still in it: “They prepared the meat hastily, because they were hungry; they slaughtered it on the ground, so the blood did not flow out well and was absorbed into the meat.” But when Saul slaughtered over a stone the blood did drain from the meat. A similar explanation is offered by R. Isaiah of Trani. Gersonides and Abravanel, however, explained that the prohibition is to eat near the blood, because the pagan custom was to use the blood for divination and magic; this is why Saul tried to keep the troops from eating the meat in the same place where the blood had been spilled.

Grintz favors the view of Gersonides and Abravanel and conjectures that Saul was attempting to prevent his soldiers from participating in a ritual of chthonic worship.⁷ He says that Leviticus 17 distinguishes between sacrifices to the Lord, offered on an altar by day, and sacrifices to the satyrs, offered in the field (v. 5), paralleling the Greek distinction between sacrifices to the Olympian gods and to the chthonian deities under the earth.

Description of worshiping the underworld gods and making sacrifices to them appears in ancient Near East sources.⁸ In Mesopotamia, Etana entreats Shamash: “Thou hast consumed, O Shamash, my fattest sheep, the earth drinking up the blood of my lambs. I have honored the gods and revered the spirits.”⁹ In Ugarit, “throat of a calf . . . let me place in the hole of the underworld gods.”¹⁰ In Egypt, “deities, whose bloodthirsty character is emphasized, are summoned to drink the blood of sacrificial animals.”¹¹

The incident recounted in the book of Samuel takes place at night, the time for sacrifices to demons and the black powers. According to the text, “they slaughtered on the ground”; the locative artzah can also mean that they sacrificed toward the earth, that is, that they slaughtered the animal with its neck facing down. In ancient Greek literature we read that when an animal was sacrificed to the underworld deities its neck faced downward. When Circe instructs Odysseus in the rites required to raise the spirits of the dead so that he can ask Tiresias about the future, she tells him, among other things, “Then sacrifice a ram and a black ewe, turning their heads toward Erebos.”¹² In Greece, animals were offered to the Olympians on an altar, whereas sacrifices to the underworld deities were slaughtered on the ground or on a circle of dirt and grass close to the ground, with a crack in the center into which the blood was poured and through which the dead rose to tell the future.¹³

Why did Saul’s soldiers eat “with” the blood? Was it to placate the spirits of the dead? In Greece, sacrifices were offered to the underworld gods to appease them and to ward off evil, because those deities avenged spilled blood. Xenophon recounts that on his return march from Persia he was told that Zeus Meilichios was waiting to intercept him, but he sacrificed swine according to the ancestral custom, and the god relented.¹⁴ Offering blood to the underworld dwellers served as a bribe to avert punishment, since it was believed that they were pursuing blood to replenish their life fluid. Indeed, in a Hittite text we read of a ritual in which the officiating priest appeals to the earth to prevent the passage of malicious deities from the underworld, after which statues were smeared with blood and deposited in the foundation of a new structure, the aim being to appease the chthonic deities from intruding upon the dwelling.¹⁵

We have two possibilities, then: Saul’s troops ate “with” the blood to appease the spirits, or, as suggested by Nahmanides and Maimonides, in order to foretell the future. As mentioned above, “eating with the blood” is a practice associated with divination and fortune-telling. The fast that Saul imposed on the people in the previous episode (I Sam. 14:24–28) can be understood in a similar fashion. Another fast associated with an attempt to learn the events of the morrow is found in the incident at Endor, where Saul had not eaten anything during the preceding day or night.¹⁶ In Greece and Rome, those who inquired of the dead or of a god fasted for three days. The fast decreed by Saul was not initially intended to divine the future, but some of the army used it for this purpose.¹⁷ Note that Saul inquired of the Lord after the sacrifice (v. 37), but the Lord did not answer him. Previously, in v. 18, he had inquired of the Ark of God whether to attack the Philistines. Because the battle began while Saul was still asking his question, some of the people turned to divining by blood — though the question whether to go to the battlefield was carried by Saul, the king of Israel, and not by an individual soldier. This leads us to the conclusion that eating “with” blood in Saul’s camp was meant to placate the spirit of the dead and ward off evil, because those deities avenged spilled blood.