10 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. 

11 For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul. 

12 Therefore I said unto the children of Israel, No soul of you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger that sojourneth among you eat blood.

Today’s verses reiterate God’s prohibition against the eating of blood. It is worth noting that this prohibition is different from the other laws regarding what meat was clean or unclean to eat. Those laws were about defining what sorts of animals were good, based on their possessing positive symbolic traits. Thus, clean animals were able to be eaten because they represented what was good, and unclean animals were not because they represented what was bad. But as we see in today’s verses, the blood wasn’t prohibited because it was bad, but because it represented something too sacred: life itself. And it wasn’t just the blood of unclean animals that was prohibited, but even of otherwise clean ones.

The prohibition of blood is therefore a lesson to us that not only should man eschew evil, but he also must not claim that which is too holy for him. It is exactly this sort of thinking that led to the abolition of slavery, as it entailed the possessing of another’s life, which was something too sacred for any man to own. And this is a principle that extends even to God. For even though He may claim our very lives, yet our obedience and our free will He still leaves as our own.

Thus, there is the outer sanctity that all of us are commanded to walk in the paths of, but there is also the inner sanctity, the sovreign soul that lives inside each of us, that no one else may lay claim to.