Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you as the green herb I give you everything.
After the flood God blesses Noah and sets the terms for a new world. One of those terms is a wider table, which raises three questions: why God widened it, what it now costs, and what He kept back.
Before the flood, man and beast lived on plants. Commentators read this as a real enlargement, given with no restrictions attached:
Besides this, mankind was no longer limited to a vegetarian diet (v.2). God allowed him animals, birds and fish as food, just as fully as herbs and fruits. There were no restrictions like the ones God later gave Israel under law (Lev. 11), and then set aside after the death of the Lord Jesus (Acts 10:11-16; 1 Tim. 4:4-5). Of course, if someone finds that a food gives him physical trouble, it is only wise to avoid it. But God does not forbid the use of any.
Did animals eat one another before this? Commentators differ. One writer holds that every beast, bird and creeping thing first fed on green plants, "and they may not have become carnivorous until after the flood, when flesh was given to man to eat." He allows the other view too: that sin had already changed them, and God held them in check in the ark. (Morrish Bible Dictionary)
This gift works through death. Man's food now comes from creatures that die for him, and one writer finds deep meaning in that:
All things are his, and now even death itself supplies him with food. This fact carries the deepest significance. It is death serving life, and God would keep that principle constantly before us. Almost every meal testifies to us of the very basis of all real gospel, which the Lord's supper declares in full and formal terms.
The very next verse forbids eating flesh with its blood. One writer shows why that single limit matters so much:
God now gave every moving thing that lives to be food for man (Gen. 9:3), as freely as He had first given green plants to beast and bird and reptile (Gen. 1:30). But He placed a clear restriction on the blood. Man was not to eat it (Gen. 9:4). The blood was the life, and God reserved it for Himself. Giving man the freedom to eat animals made God's claim stand out all the more. Life belonged to God, and it will go badly for those who despise or defy His rights... This is no longer the dominion given by the Creator. Now He gives permission, and He forbids.
One writer adds that Christians are given more than Noah was:
Only after we know deliverance, and in the new place with God, can this be rightly understood. We now go farther than the type and past the restriction imposed here: we drink the blood also. What is God's alone as atonement is ours to sustain and cheer us, as atonement now made.
Later God told Israel which animals they could and could not eat. One writer asks why, and finds the answer in standing, not diet:
After the flood, God gave man a grant of every moving living creature for food (Gen. 9:3). Here, under the law, He brings in restrictions... But why these restrictions? Because the law puts man at a distance from God and makes him feel it. It is also meant to teach him the great difference between standing on the ground of keeping the law and standing on the ground of grace... How free was the grant to Noah and his sons! How strict the restrictions placed on Israel!
Some would make holiness a matter of avoiding certain foods. One writer names where that idea comes from, and answers it from this grant:
Demons play on man's sense of defilement. As the cure they suggest staying away from certain foods and from marriage — the very things God has provided for His creature's good. So they make God out to be the author of man's lack of piety... Nothing that God has provided for His creature defiles. Every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be refused if it is received with thanksgiving, because the word of God and prayer sanctify it — that is, God's grant to Noah (Gen. 9:3-4) and the thanksgiving of the one who receives it.
That leaves our part. God has spoken; the thanks are ours:
In Genesis 9:3, we find how the word of God put an ample supply of food at man's disposal. It is sad if Christian households do not complete this sanctification by prayer as they use the food He has so mercifully provided.
- Granted — after the flood man is no longer limited to plants. Animals, birds and fish are food now, as fully as herbs and fruit, with no forbidden list.
- Purchased — food now comes by death. Nearly every meal says the same thing: life kept alive by another's death.
- Reserved — God kept back the blood, because the blood is the life. The wider the freedom, the clearer His claim.
- Contrasted — Israel's food laws taught distance under law. Noah's free grant shows what grace looks like.
- Received — nothing God provides defiles. Rules that ban His food attack the Giver, and thanksgiving at our table completes the grant.
Only, the flesh with its life, its blood, ye shall not eat.
God had just given Noah and his sons a new freedom. Every moving creature could now be food. But God kept one thing back. Man must not eat the blood, because the blood is the life.
The gift and the limit come in the same breath. Man gains a wide new freedom at the table, and God marks off one thing as His.
God now gave man every moving thing that lives for food (Gen. 9:3), as freely as He had first given green plants to beast and bird and reptile (Gen. 1:30). But He put a clear limit on the blood. Man was not to eat it (Gen. 9:4). The blood was the life, and God kept it for Himself. Letting man use animals for food made God's claim stand out all the more. Life belonged to God, and woe to those who despise or defy His rights.
The words "flesh with its life, that is, its blood" are packed tight. One writer works through the Hebrew behind them. The verse does not name two separate things, flesh and life. It means flesh while the life is still in it.
From Genesis 9:4 it is clear, I think, that the expression means flesh in its living state; that is what must not be eaten. And that state — of ruined flesh — lies in its blood… The verse comes in to show that the term means flesh with the life in it — flesh in its living state — which is the blood.
Behind the rule lies a question of ownership. Man may kill an animal for food, but the life in it is not his to take.
To eat blood denied the rights of God the Creator. Even though man forfeited his own right by sin, the LORD kept His title over life untouched. God set up human government in the first place to deal with death by deliberate violence. Shed blood is the sign of that death, and it belongs to God alone. Man has no right to take it for himself.
One writer sets the ban against Eden, where God closed the way back to the tree of life. To eat life would be to seize by force what sin had already lost.
To eat the blood would have been a bold taking back of what he had lost through sin — an attempt to win life again by forcing the way that the cherubim's sword guarded. This rule told the sinner that he had lost his right to the tree of life and can never return to it in his own strength. The life has gone back to God. The blood is His. And the gospel comes to tell us how He has used it, even providing with it and through it new, eternal life that cannot fail for the sinner who is dead.
God kept the blood back from man's table because He had His own use for it. One rule teaches man three things about himself, and ends in a gift.
Life belongs to God, so no one of the human race was to eat blood. The sinner has also forfeited his life. He can only live before God on the basis of the death of a sacrifice in his place… So the ban on eating blood reminds us of three important truths. We are creatures, and must remember it. We were sinners by nature, and are to acknowledge it. We owe atonement by blood entirely to God, and are always to own it. The One to whom life belongs has given it to be poured out for our everlasting blessing.
God spoke this word to Noah centuries before Moses, and through him to the whole human family. That timing shapes how the apostles later handled it.
This law pressed on Israel what God had already laid down for Noah after the flood, in Genesis 9:4. So when the apostles and elders gave the same command to Gentile believers in Acts 15:20 and 29, they were not loading them with a mere item of the law of Moses. They were repeating a ban that applies to everyone. We do well to keep it, though we need not copy the extreme carefulness of the Jews, as the instruction of 1 Corinthians 10:25 shows.
- Gift — God handed over every moving creature for food, as freely as He once gave green plants. The limit sits inside a gift.
- Reserve — He keeps back one thing: the blood. The wider the freedom to eat, the clearer His claim.
- Reason — The blood is the life, and life belongs to God. Leaving it alone is how man admits he is a creature, not the owner of life.
- Meaning — Man forfeited his life by sin. To eat life would be to seize back what he lost. The blood goes to God, and God uses it for atonement.
- Reach — God gave this word to Noah for the whole race, long before the law. He pressed it on Israel, and the apostles gave it again to Gentile believers in Acts 15.
And indeed your blood, [the blood] of your lives, will I require at the hand of every animal will I require it, and at the hand of Man, at the hand of each [the blood] of his brother, will I require the life of Man.
After the flood, God sets up a new order for Noah's family. They may eat animals, but not the blood. And God warns that He will call every killer of a human being to account. Two questions follow. Why does God claim the blood? And does a word spoken to one family still hold for everyone?
Permission to eat meat came with one limit: not the blood. That limit sets up the demand here. Giving man more freedom made God's own claim stand out.
Man was not to eat the blood. It was the life, and God kept it for Himself. Letting man use animals for food made God's claim stand out all the more. Life belonged to God, and it will go badly for those who despise or defy His rights. This is the state of a fallen world. God is a Preserver, or a Saviour, of all people, as the apostle says — especially of those who believe.
God's claim reaches past human killers. He says He will require the life at the hand of every beast.
The life of a man killed by a beast — "from every beast I will require it." So we see that God keeps His right over life, even a beast's life. They must come and offer the blood to God. Man had no meat to eat until God gave it to him. Many are seeking to do away with capital punishment; but what do they care about God? The whole order of God is broken up now. Even a beast that kills should die.
The wording reaches down to the closest human relationships. Cain's question — was he his brother's keeper — is answered here.
Above all, man's life is sacred. What Cain did is to go unpunished no longer. Man is plainly declared to be his "brother's keeper": he is to require blood for blood, and to do it as the instrument and deputy of God on earth.
That raises a question from the earlier chapters. Why did the first murderer go free?
No government had yet been set up on the earth, so God would allow no one to punish Cain. Once government began in its simplest form, men were to act, as we see in verses 5 and 6 of Genesis 9.
God foresaw that this authority would be abused. Writers read His demand here as a guard set against that abuse.
Man would soon misuse and twist the very governing authority God placed in his hand, following his own will without the fear of God. Rivers of blood would flow — not only through lawless corruption and violence, as before the flood, but through ambitious kings and rulers after it. So God, in His foreseeing wisdom and thoughtful goodness, declares at the very start of the new order, "And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it."
Commentators see this word as the starting point of all lawful government.
The words of Genesis 9:5-6 — "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in His own image" — first laid the primary basis of human government as it is. Life belonged to God, and He passed that principle on to Noah. From then on man was responsible as God's servant to carry out wrath, even to the shedding of blood if blood had been shed; for he must not carry the sword for nothing.
This demand also set a law in place. Writers note how long that law has stood.
Life is what lets a created being enjoy the place the Creator has set it in. Sin has come in, so that life is forfeited, and God claims it in the words of Genesis 9:5. That established capital punishment for murder, and the law has never been cancelled or changed.
- Claim — Life is God's. He reserved the blood for Himself and treats every human death as a debt owed to Him.
- Reach — The claim runs to the beast, to man, and to a man's own brother; no killer is outside God's reckoning.
- Contrast — Cain went free because no government existed yet. Here God puts the sword in man's hand for the first time.
- Restraint — The same word that arms rulers also warns them. God knew authority would be twisted, and rivers of blood would follow.
- Permanence — This word established capital punishment for murder, and writers say that law has never been cancelled or changed.