The covenant with Noah was marked by another fairly important innovation: from then on, human beings were allowed to eat meat. People may, of course, have eaten it before, but now it was blessed by God...
The covenant with Noah was marked by another fairly important innovation: from then on, human beings were allowed to eat meat. People may, of course, have eaten it before, but now it was blessed by God. True, there was one reservation: meat could be eaten, but without blood, because the soul is in the blood. What is meant here?
In the Bible, the soul is not a structure, not something static; it is rather a process, a dynamic, a flow of life, what a modern philosopher would most likely call existence. According to the biblical witness, animals have the same kind of soul, and for them it is in the blood.
This is understandable: blood is the substance of life, its symbol, at least when we are speaking about natural life. Life belongs to God; no human being can appropriate it. It is not meat, which is now given to humanity for food just as grain and fruit were given for food at creation. Meat is for the human being; life, of which that meat had been the vessel, is for God. The matter is even more interesting, and sadder, with human beings: their soul, the flow of their life, is now also bound to blood.
Before the fall, it was bound to that "breath of life" which God gave the human being at creation, and this was the uniqueness of the human being: human life, the very process of human existence, was determined by God directly through the "breath of life." Now everything has changed: human life has moved into the blood, as in any animal. In a certain sense, the human being has himself become an animal; his existence is now determined not by God, not by the "breath of life," but by nature, by the natural processes that take place in his body.
Accordingly, direct guidance of human life by God is now only something to dream of: at the fall, human bodily existence changed so that a human being could live in a semi-autonomous mode, like all the animals whom he has now come to resemble. Now, in order to come even a little closer to the former state before the fall, a person has to make an effort so that God may once again begin to determine his life through the "breath of life," which after the fall a person at times barely notices within himself and almost forgets.
The human being remained a spiritual-natural creature, but if before the fall his natural state was spiritual life, so that the spirit within him determined the life and activity of his nature, now his natural state has become a natural one, so that nature now determines the limits of the existence and manifestation of his spirit. These are the fruits of the fall, with which even a righteous person such as Noah has to make peace.
9 In this chapter is,
In this covenant,