You shall not eat any blood, whether it is of bird or of animal, in any of your dwellings.
Not to eat blood of any animal or bird
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְכָל־דָּם לֹא תֹאכְלוּ בְּכֹל מוֹשְׁבֹתֵיכֶם לָעוֹף וְלַבְּהֵמָה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מאכול דם, והוא אמרו כל דם לא תאכלו. וכבר נכפלה בו האזהרה פעמים. ובא באור הכתוב בו שהוא בכרת ואמר כל אוכליו יכרת אם היה מזיד ובשוגג חייב חטאת קבועה. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בפרק ה' מכריתות. (צו את אהרן, שם):
He prohibited us from eating blood. And that is His saying, "And you shall not eat any blood" (Leviticus 6:26). And the prohibition about it has already been repeated [several] times. And the explanation that it is [punished] with excision which is in Scripture is His saying, "whoever eats it shall be excised" (Leviticus 17:14) - if it was volitional. But if inadvertent, he is liable for a fixed sin-offering. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Chapter 5 of Keritot. (See Parashat Tzav; Mishneh Torah, Forbidden Foods 6.)
Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.
Literary form: a prohibition
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Recorded as practiced today
Classical halakhic consequences
The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.
Imposed by a court
- Lashes (malkot)
At the hands of Heaven
- Karet — being 'cut off'
Ritual remedy
- A sin-offering (ḥatat)
How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment
The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.
- Orthodox Binding
- Conservative Binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite Binding
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
How later traditions received this commandment
How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- CD 12:13-14 read it more strictly
Rabbinic aggadah
- Leviticus Rabbah 13:3 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.118-123 rationalized it
Josephus
- Antiquities 3.260 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Acts 15:20, 29 The catalog describes this reception as: retained Apostolic Decree retains blood-abstention for gentile believers as a minimal continuing obligation on the majority dietary-blood reading, though some scholars argue the clause concerns bloodshed/murder rather than consumption
- Acts 21:25 The catalog describes this reception as: retained reiteration of the decree
The Church Fathers
- Tertullian, Apologeticus 9.13 affirmed it
- Augustine, Contra Faustum 32.13 reinterpreted it
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 5:3 carried a parallel
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- ugaritic texts Ugaritic sacrificial ritual treats animal blood as sacred matter directed to the deity in the cultic act; the West Semitic shared presupposition that blood belongs to the divine sphere provides the cultural substratum on which the Israelite absolute blood prohibition and its nefesh theology are constructed, though no analogous categorical dietary ban on blood consumption is preserved in the Ugaritic ritual corpus Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Ugaritic sacrificial ritual texts (KTU 1.40 national expiation; KTU 1.46 sacrificial list) Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (SBL, 2002)
- gilgamesh epic The post-flood divine permission to use animals granted to Utnapishtim in the Gilgamesh flood narrative contains no restriction on consuming blood or living flesh; Genesis 9:3-4 grants the same post-flood meat-eating permission but adds the blood-life-force prohibition, marking a deliberate Israelite divergence from the Mesopotamian flood tradition's silence on blood consumption Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast Tablet XI (flood denouement, lines 155-196) George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (Oxford, 2003)
Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks
One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.
This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
The commandment prescribes flogging (and divine karet) for consuming blood from any animal or bird; the court-imposed lash penalty for a dietary choice is incompatible with post-Enlightenment norms of bodily autonomy, even where the underlying theological rationale regarding life-force is internally coherent.
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Article 7
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
ICCPR Article 7 prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment; thirty-nine lashes for consuming blood — whether through direct drinking or insufficient meat preparation — constitutes a degrading physical sanction under international human-rights law.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
Modern proportionality doctrine requires sanctions commensurate with harm; corporal punishment for a blood-consumption dietary act — one that causes no demonstrable harm to third parties — is disproportionate under any secular penal framework.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
The malkot sanction requires an ordained beit din of three judges (Mishnah Sanhedrin 1:2; Rambam, Hilkhot Sanhedrin 5:4); since semikhah-bearing courts no longer exist, the court-imposed lash penalty is de jure operative but de facto unenforceable, leaving only the divine karet sanction operative within the tradition's own framework.