Genesis 9:4
New International Version
“But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.

New Living Translation
But you must never eat any meat that still has the lifeblood in it.

English Standard Version
But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.

Berean Standard Bible
But you must not eat meat with its lifeblood still in it.

King James Bible
But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

New King James Version
But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.

New American Standard Bible
But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.

NASB 1995
“Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.

NASB 1977
“Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.

Legacy Standard Bible
However, flesh with its life, that is, its blood, you shall not eat.

Amplified Bible
But you shall not eat meat along with its life, that is, its blood.

Christian Standard Bible
However, you must not eat meat with its lifeblood in it.

Holman Christian Standard Bible
However, you must not eat meat with its lifeblood in it.

American Standard Version
But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

Aramaic Bible in Plain English
Only the flesh whose blood is in itself you shall not eat.

Brenton Septuagint Translation
But flesh with blood of life ye shall not eat.

Contemporary English Version
But life is in the blood, and you must not eat any meat that still has blood in it.

Douay-Rheims Bible
Saving that flesh with blood you shall not eat.

English Revised Version
But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

GOD'S WORD® Translation
"But you are not to eat meat with blood in it. (Blood is life.)

Good News Translation
The one thing you must not eat is meat with blood still in it; I forbid this because the life is in the blood.

International Standard Version
However, you are not to eat meat with its life—that is, its blood—in it!

JPS Tanakh 1917
Only flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

Literal Standard Version
only flesh in its life—its blood—you do not eat.

Majority Standard Bible
But you must not eat meat with its lifeblood still in it.

New American Bible
Only meat with its lifeblood still in it you shall not eat.

NET Bible
But you must not eat meat with its life (that is, its blood) in it.

New Revised Standard Version
Only, you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.

New Heart English Bible
But flesh with its life, its blood, you shall not eat.

Webster's Bible Translation
But flesh with the life of it, which is its blood, shall ye not eat.

World English Bible
But flesh with its life, that is, its blood, you shall not eat.

Young's Literal Translation
only flesh in its life -- its blood -- ye do not eat.

Additional Translations ...
Audio Bible



Context
The Covenant of the Rainbow
3Everything that lives and moves will be food for you; just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you all things. 4But you must not eat meat with its lifeblood still in it. 5And surely I will require the life of any man or beast by whose hand your lifeblood is shed. I will demand an accounting from anyone who takes the life of his fellow man:…

Cross References
Acts 15:20
Instead, we should write and tell them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood.

Acts 15:29
You must abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. Farewell.

Leviticus 7:26
You must not eat the blood of any bird or animal in any of your dwellings.

Leviticus 17:10
If anyone from the house of Israel or a foreigner living among them eats any blood, I will set My face against that person and cut him off from among his people.

Leviticus 17:11
For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for your souls upon the altar; for it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.

Leviticus 17:14
For the life of all flesh is its blood. Therefore I have told the Israelites, 'You must not eat the blood of any living thing, because the life of all flesh is its blood; whoever eats it must be cut off.'

Leviticus 19:26
You must not eat anything with blood still in it. You must not practice divination or sorcery.


Treasury of Scripture

But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall you not eat.

the life.

Leviticus 3:17
It shall be a perpetual statute for your generations throughout all your dwellings, that ye eat neither fat nor blood.

Leviticus 7:26
Moreover ye shall eat no manner of blood, whether it be of fowl or of beast, in any of your dwellings.

Leviticus 17:10-14
And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people…

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Genesis 9
1. God blesses Noah and his sons, and grants them flesh for food.
4. Blood and murder are forbidden.
8. God's covenant, of which the rainbow was constituted a pledge.
18. Noah's family replenishes the world.
20. Noah plants a vineyard,
21. Is drunken, and mocked by his son;
25. Curses Canaan;
26. Blesses Shem;
27. Prays for Japheth, and dies.














(4) But flesh. . . . --The words are remarkable. "Only flesh in its soul, its blood, ye shall not eat." The Authorised Version is probably right in taking blood as in apposition to soul, which word means here the principle of animation, or that which causes an animal to live. This is God's especial gift; for He alone can bestow upon that aggregation of solids and fluids which we call a body the secret principle of life. Of this hidden life the blood is the representative, and while man is permitted to have the body for his food, as being the mere vessel which contains this life, the gift itself must go back to God, and the blood as its symbol be treated with reverence.

Verse 4. - But - אַך, an adverb of limitation or exception, as in Leviticus 11:4, introducing a restriction on the foregoing precept - flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof. Literally, with its soul, its blood; the blood being regarded as the seat of the soul, or life principle (Leviticus 17:11), and even as the soul itself (Leviticus 17:14). The idea of the unity of the soul and the blood, on which the prohibition of blood is based, comes to light everywhere in Scripture. In the blood of one mortally wounded his soul flows forth (Lamentations 2:12), and he who voluntarily sacrifices himself pours out his soul unto death (Isaiah 53:12). The murderer of the innocent slays the soul of the blood of the innocent (ψυχὴν αἵματος ἀθώου, Deuteronomy 27:25), which also cleaves to his (the murderer's) skirts (Jeremiah 2:34; cf. Proverbs 28:17, blood of a soul; cf. Genesis 4:10 with Hebrews 12:24; Job 24:12 with Revelation 6:9; vide also Psalm 94:21; Matthew 23:35). Nor can it be said to be exclusively peculiar to Holy Scripture. In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics the hawk, which feeds on bloods, represents the soul. Virgil says of a dying person, "purpuream vomit ille animam" ('AEneid,' 9:349). The Greek philosophers taught that the blood was either the soul (Critias), or the soul s food (Pythagoras), or the soul's seat (Empedocles), or the soul's producing cause (the Stoics); but only Scripture reveals the true relation between them both when it declares the blood to be not the soul absolutely, but the means of its self-attestation (vide Delitzsch s ' Bib. Psychology,' div. 4. sec. 11.). Shall ye not eat. Not referring to, although certainly forbidding, the eating of flesh taken from a living animal (Raschi, Cajetan, Delitzsch, Luther, Peele, Jamieson) - a fiendish custom which may have been practiced among the antediluvians, as, according to travelers, it is, or was, among modern Abyssinians; rather interdicting the flesh of slaughtered animals from which the blood has not been properly drained (Calvin, Keil, Kalisch, Murphy, Wordsworth). The same prohibition (commonly regarded by the Hebrew doctors as the seventh of the Noachic precepts which were enjoined upon all nations; vide infra, ver. 6) was afterwards incorporated in the Mosaic legislation (cf. Leviticus 3:17; Leviticus 7:26, 27; Leviticus 17:10-14; Leviticus 19:26; Deuteronomy 12:16, 23, 24; Deuteronomy 15:23), and subsequently imposed upon the Gentile converts in the Christian Church by the authority of the Holy Ghost and the apostles (Acts 15:28, 29). Among other reasons, doubtless, for the original promulgation of this law were these: -

1. A desire to guard against the practice of cruelty to animals (Chrysostom, Calvin, 'Speaker's Commentary').

2. A design to hedge about human life by showing the inviolability which in God s eye attached to even the lives of the lower creatures (Calvin, Willet, Peele, Kalisch, Murphy).

3. The intimate connection which even in the animal creation subsisted between the blood and the life (Kurtz, 'Sacr. Worship,' I. A.V.). . . .

Parallel Commentaries ...


Hebrew
But
אַךְ־ (’aḵ-)
Adverb
Strong's 389: A particle of affirmation, surely

you must not
לֹ֥א (lō)
Adverb - Negative particle
Strong's 3808: Not, no

eat
תֹאכֵֽלוּ׃ (ṯō·ḵê·lū)
Verb - Qal - Imperfect - second person masculine plural
Strong's 398: To eat

meat
בָּשָׂ֕ר (bā·śār)
Noun - masculine singular
Strong's 1320: Flesh, body, person, the pudenda of a, man

with its lifeblood
בְּנַפְשׁ֥וֹ (bə·nap̄·šōw)
Preposition-b | Noun - feminine singular construct | third person masculine singular
Strong's 5315: A soul, living being, life, self, person, desire, passion, appetite, emotion

[still] in it.
דָמ֖וֹ (ḏā·mōw)
Noun - masculine singular construct | third person masculine singular
Strong's 1818: Blood, of man, an animal, the juice of the grape, bloodshed


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OT Law: Genesis 9:4 But flesh with its life its blood (Gen. Ge Gn)
Genesis 9:3
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