We live in a world where the sight of blood rarely brings comfort. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. News broadcasts spill it across our screens in stories of war and terrorism. Video games glorify it. Movies drench it across battlefields, back alleys, and broken bodies. Blood, in modern consciousness, is almost exclusively the currency of violence. It signals danger, trauma, or death. It is something to be wiped away, disinfected, hidden behind sterile gloves and hospital curtains.
But the Bible whispers a different story.
Blood in a World of Violence — Reclaiming a Sacred Symbol
In Scripture, blood is not a horror but a hope. Not a sign of destruction, but of redemption. In ancient Israel, blood was not treated as a grotesque byproduct of suffering, but as a sacred element in the architecture of spiritual life. Blood was not a mark of violence but a medium of healing. It sanctified, purified, cleansed, and restored. More than anything, blood meant life.
That may sound foreign to modern ears, trained by centuries of secular thought to see religion through a forensic, even cynical, lens. But to step into the world of the Bible is to walk into a place where every drop of blood pulses with divine meaning. Leviticus 17:11 declares with bold, ancient clarity:
For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.
Leviticus 17:11
Here, blood is not a symbol of judgment—it is a vessel of grace. It is not the sign of God’s anger, but the conduit of His mercy. The blood is not the object of wrath, but the bridge between a holy God and a fragile people who dwell in the shadows of sin and mortality.
We must learn to see blood as the ancient Hebrews saw it: not with fear or disgust, but with awe. It was never meant to stir up images of gore and punishment. It was always meant to stir the soul toward wonder.
Blood, in biblical thought, is the tangible expression of life’s most sacred energy—the divine breath made visible. It is life distilled into red. It is the story of a God who meets us in our mortality and offers a path not just through death, but beyond it.
To reclaim the meaning of blood is to recover a truth our modern world has forgotten: life is sacred, and life comes from God. And wherever God gives life, He also provides a way for that life to be restored, even after it has been fractured by sin, shame, or death. The blood of sacrifice was never a payment to appease divine rage—it was a gift, a grace, a reminder that death is not the end.
In a world obsessed with death, the Bible’s use of blood is a quiet rebellion. It does not glorify bloodshed; it glorifies the life behind the blood. The life God breathed into Adam. The life poured out for Israel at the altar. The life offered to the world through the Messiah.
Before we can understand the cross, before we can grasp atonement, we must first purify our vision. We must allow Scripture to reframe our symbols. Only then can we understand what it truly means that the life is in the blood (Leviticus 17:11).
The Life Is in the Blood — Leviticus 17:11 and the Heart of Atonement
The beating heart of the Hebrew Scriptures is not found in laws or rituals, but in a single, sacred truth whispered into the fabric of Israel’s worship: life belongs to God—and that life, that pulse, that holy vitality, is found in the blood.
Leviticus 17:11 is not merely a law; it is a theological key. A portal. A holy lens through which the entire system of sacrifice, and later the meaning of Messiah’s death, can be rightly seen: “it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.” (Leviticus 17:11b)
Notice the careful wording: it is not death that makes atonement. It is the blood. And what is in the blood? Life.
This verse does not speak of vengeance. It speaks of gift. “I have given it to you,” God says—language not of retribution but of provision. God does not demand blood in anger. He provides it in compassion.
In the ancient world, many nations believed that their gods needed appeasement—pain, fear, death, even torture were sometimes required to bend the divine will. But Israel’s God was different. He was not a tyrant demanding satisfaction. He was a Father longing for restoration. His provision of blood was not to satisfy His own wrath but to heal the rupture between life and death, heaven and earth.
This is why blood is the agent of atonement. The Hebrew word for “atonement,” kippur, carries the sense of covering, cleansing, reconciliation.
And what covers us? What reconciles us to God? Not the suffering or death of an animal, but its life—its blood, its vitality, its sacred energy poured out for the sake of another.
In this way, the altar becomes the meeting place between two worlds: death and life. Sin, which leads to death, is answered not by more death, but by a deeper life—life willing to be poured out in love. Atonement, then, is not about punishment; it’s about reunion. A torn relationship is being stitched back together, not through force, but through the offering of life itself.
To the modern mind, this may sound mystical, even irrational. But to the ancient Hebrew imagination, it made perfect sense. Just as blood flows to every part of the body, bringing oxygen and vitality, so too did the sacrificial blood symbolically carry life into the center of Israel’s spiritual body—into the very heart of the Tabernacle, into the Holy of Holies, into the soul of the nation.
This is why Leviticus 17:11 is the axis upon which the whole system of sacrifice turns. Without it, the rituals become strange and archaic. With it, they pulse with divine logic. The blood is not magic. It is not brutality. It is the most tangible form of life the ancients had. And God, in His mercy, allowed that sacred symbol of life to stand in the gap between heaven and humanity.
From this foundation, everything else begins to make sense—not only the sacrifices of bulls and goats, but ultimately the offering of Jesus, the Messiah, whose blood—whose life—was poured out not to appease wrath, but to defeat death.
Before we speak of crosses and thorns, we must sit before the altar in Leviticus and hear God say it clearly: “I have given you the blood… for atonement… because the life is in the blood.”
This was a complimentary excerpt from my new book “Mighty to Save: A Jewish Perspective on Jesus’ Atonement and Redemption.”
