Leviticus 17 Summary and Study Guide

Before Sinai a man could build an altar wherever he pitched his tent. Leviticus 17 ends that, and the reason God gives for ending it is the sentence the New Testament reaches for whenever it explains why the cross was necessary. This Leviticus 17 summary and study guide takes the chapter’s two laws in order and stops on that reason.

Setting the Stage

God moved into the middle of Israel’s camp. He had them build Him a tent, and when it was finished the cloud settled on it and the glory of the LORD filled it, so that Moses could not go inside (Exodus 40:34-35). Everything God has said since answers one question: how do people who are not holy live next door and survive?

Chapters 1 to 7 gave the offerings, 8 to 10 the priests, 11 to 15 what makes a person unfit to come near. Then once a year the high priest carried blood into the holy place for the whole nation (Leviticus 16:16). Chapter 17 says why it was blood God asked for. For where the book is going, see our Book of Leviticus summary by chapter.

Comprehensive Leviticus 17 Summary

The LORD speaks to Moses, and the message is for Aaron, for Aaron’s sons, and for every Israelite. Two laws about blood follow.

Any ox, lamb or goat killed and not brought to the door of the tabernacle counts as bloodshed, and the man who did it is cut off from his people. God states the purpose at once.

Israel had been sacrificing out in the open fields, and those offerings are to come instead to the priest at the tabernacle and be offered as peace offerings, which was the one offering the worshipper ate part of, with the blood sprinkled on the altar and the fat burned.

Then God names the danger the rule was guarding against. Israel is to stop sacrificing to devils, which is something they had already been doing. The same law is then repeated for foreigners living among Israel, carrying the same penalty.

From the place of sacrifice God turns to the blood itself. Nobody may eat blood, Israelite or foreigner, and here God says He will set His own face against the offender and cut him off Himself. The reason follows, and it is the centre of the chapter. Life is in the blood, and God gave the blood on the altar to make atonement.

Two hard cases close the chapter. A hunter who kills a bird or animal must pour its blood out and cover it with dust. A person who eats an animal that died on its own or was killed by a wild beast washes his clothes, bathes, and is clean at sunset, and he carries guilt only if he refuses to wash.

One Word Summary

• Blood: the chapter’s own word, carried in seven of its sixteen verses.
• Place: one door, named four times, and no other address allowed.
• Reason: the chapter stops the law long enough to say why blood atones.

In One Sentence

The LORD tells Moses to command Aaron, his sons, all Israel and every foreigner among them to bring their sacrifices to the tabernacle door rather than the open fields where they had sacrificed to devils, and to eat no blood, because God had claimed the blood of every creature for His altar.

Theme of Leviticus 17

Leviticus 17 is about blood and about who owns it. God says life is in the blood, and that He gave it one place, the altar, and one purpose, atonement (Leviticus 17:11). Three things follow. Worship happens where God appoints, so a man’s own altar counts here as bloodshed. Every law falls on the foreigner in the words it falls on Israel. And the severity is reverence, because what is guarded is what God gave to cover sin.

Leviticus 17 Outline

• Leviticus 17:1-2: The LORD tells Moses to speak to Aaron, to Aaron’s sons, and to all the children of Israel.
• Leviticus 17:3-4: Anyone who kills an ox, lamb or goat without bringing it to the tabernacle door is charged with bloodshed and cut off from his people.
• Leviticus 17:5-6: Sacrifices offered in the open field are to be brought to the priest as peace offerings, and he sprinkles the blood on the altar and burns the fat.
• Leviticus 17:7: Israel is to stop sacrificing to devils, and the rule is given as a statute for ever.
• Leviticus 17:8-9: The same requirement binds foreigners living among Israel, with the same penalty.
• Leviticus 17:10: God sets His face against anyone who eats blood and says He will cut him off.
• Leviticus 17:11: God gives the reason, that life is in the blood and He gave it on the altar for atonement.
• Leviticus 17:12: The ban on eating blood is restated for Israel and for the foreigner alike.
• Leviticus 17:13-14: A hunter must pour out the blood of what he catches and cover it with dust, because the life of all flesh is its blood.
• Leviticus 17:15-16: Anyone who eats an animal found dead or torn by beasts washes and bathes, and bears his iniquity if he refuses.

The Four Cases in Leviticus 17

The chapter governs four situations, and it binds the foreigner in every one of them.

Read down the last column and the weight drops. The first three cases end in a man losing his place among his people, and the fourth ends in a bath and a sunset. The animal in that fourth case had already died on its own, so its life was gone before anyone touched it, and the penalty falls accordingly.

Observations from Leviticus 17

The Word “Blood” Runs Through the Chapter and the Word “Holy” Never Appears (Leviticus 17:1-16)

Leviticus is the book of holiness, and it says so repeatedly: “ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). God tells Israel to be holy because He Himself is holy. In chapter 17 that word is missing altogether. What fills the space is blood, named in seven of the sixteen verses.

Holiness is still the subject here. God is telling Israel what it cost, and He measures the cost in blood on an altar rather than in a word repeated.

The Priest Appears in Only Two Verses (Leviticus 17:5-6)

In the chapters just before this one the priest carries almost everything. He inspects the skin, shuts the person up for seven days, looks again, and pronounces them clean or unclean (Leviticus 13:4-6). Here he is named twice, and in both places he is receiving what somebody else has brought and putting the blood on the altar.

Everything that decides a man’s standing in this chapter happens before he reaches the priest, out where he chose to kill the animal. The obedience is his.

Every Law Here Is Given Twice, Once for Israel and Once for the Foreigner (Leviticus 17:8, 10, 12, 13, 15)

The stranger living among Israel is named in five of the sixteen verses. He is bound by the rule about the place of sacrifice, by the ban on eating blood, by the requirement to cover the blood of hunted game, and by the washing after eating an animal found dead.

Nothing is relaxed for him and nothing extra is laid on him. A foreigner in Israel came to the same door with the same offering under the same penalty, so an outsider could approach the God camped in the middle of Israel on the same terms as a son of Abraham.

God Names Himself as the One Who Will Punish the Offence Nobody Could Catch (Leviticus 17:4, 9, 10)

Verses 4 and 9 both say the offender “shall be cut off from among his people” without saying who does the cutting off. A man who sacrificed at the wrong altar could be seen doing it, and the community could act.

Verse 10 changes the voice: “I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.” God says He will turn against that person Himself and remove him. Eating blood happened at a private table where no elder was watching, and that is the offence God takes into His own hands.

Difficult Verses Explained

Does Leviticus 17 Forbid All Butchering of Animals for Food?

Bible teachers have long divided on this, and Scripture leaves the question open. On one side, verse 3 says “that killeth an ox, or lamb, or goat”, using a general word for killing rather than the word for offering a sacrifice, and Deuteronomy 12:20-21 later permits Israel to slaughter at home once the sanctuary lies far away, which reads like an earlier restriction being lifted.

On the other, verse 5 states the purpose in sacrificial terms, the tabernacle court could scarcely have handled the meat animals of a whole nation, and verse 7 calls this “a statute for ever”, wording that suits a permanent rule rather than one due to expire at the Jordan.

Both sides agree on the part the chapter is actually pressing. From here on, no sacrifice could be offered anywhere but at the tabernacle door. And in the land, Deuteronomy 12 allows home slaughter while repeating the ban on blood without any change at all.

What Are the “Devils” in Leviticus 17:7?

The Hebrew word behind “devils” means a hairy one, or a he-goat, and the King James translators rendered the same word “satyrs” where it appears in Isaiah 13:21 and Isaiah 34:14. It turns up again in 2 Chronicles 11:15, where Jeroboam appointed priests “for the devils, and for the calves which he had made”, meaning he set up his own clergy for goat idols and calf idols together.

So verse 7 is describing something Israel had actually been doing. They had been offering sacrifices to goat gods out in the open country, and many Bible teachers point to the goat worship reported in ancient Egypt as where they picked the habit up.

Gods of that kind were thought to haunt deserts and open ground, which is exactly where Israel was camped when God gave this law. Moses later says the nation kept at it, “They sacrificed unto devils, not to God” (Deuteronomy 32:17), meaning their offerings were going to demons rather than to the LORD.

A psalm looking back over Israel’s history reaches the end of that road: “Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils” (Psalm 106:37). What began with a goat in a field ended with children. Paul says the same thing about idol sacrifice in his own century: “the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God” (1 Corinthians 10:20). What pagans offered to their idols was in fact being offered to demons.

What Does “Cut Off From Among His People” Mean?

Scripture uses the phrase without defining it, and Bible teachers read it three ways: barred from the tabernacle, expelled from the community of Israel, or brought to an early death by God so that the man’s line ended. The text does not choose between them, and an honest answer says so.

What the chapter does settle is the direction. Whatever the mechanism, the man is put outside the fellowship the whole book has been building, both with Israel and with the God living in the middle of it. Matthew Henry suggested that where the offence was public the courts acted, and where it was private God acted, which fits the shift in voice at verse 10.

Common Misunderstandings

• “Leviticus 17:11 proves the Bible knew modern medicine.” The verse is making an argument about atonement. Nothing in the chapter mentions health, disease, or nutrition, and it grounds its care for blood in the altar.
• “Blood atones automatically, because there is power in the blood itself.” The verse blocks this in its own middle clause: “I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls”. God assigned the blood that role and put it on that altar. The power is granted, not inherent.
• “Pouring the blood on the ground and covering it was throwing it away.” Verse 13 has the hunter bury the blood rather than discard it, which treats it as a sacred thing that must not be trodden on or eaten.
• “Leviticus 17 is where the ban on eating blood begins.” It is the third time Leviticus states it (Leviticus 3:17; 7:26-27), and God had already given the command to Noah for all mankind: “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat” (Genesis 9:4). Meat still carrying its blood was not to be eaten.

Christ Connection

The writer of Hebrews reasons directly from this chapter. “Without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22) is Leviticus 17:11 turned into a principle: no sin is forgiven without a life being given up. He then presses the same logic further, saying of Christ that “by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Hebrews 9:12).

Christ went in once, carrying His own blood, and secured a release that lasts. His blood cleanses the conscience where animal blood only ever reached the body (Hebrews 9:13-14). Then he says the thing Leviticus never says about itself: “it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). Animal blood could never remove sin.

That is why Jesus reached for this chapter’s own vocabulary at the table. “This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:28). His blood is being poured out so that many can be forgiven, and the sentence rests on Leviticus 17 from beginning to end.

It also explains why one saying of His was unbearable. Leviticus 17 carries the sternest ban on consuming blood anywhere in the law, and Jesus told a crowd, “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you” (John 6:53).

Unless a person takes Him in, He said, there is no life in them. He was speaking of trusting Him rather than of a meal, and He points that way a few verses later when He says that His words are spirit and life (John 6:63). The crowd had this chapter in their bones, and that is very likely why the saying stopped them.

One more line runs from this chapter to the cross. Leviticus 17 fixes the place of sacrifice at the door and forbids it in the camp or outside it. Hebrews observes that the bodies of the sin offerings were burned outside the camp, “wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate” (Hebrews 13:12).

Jesus died outside the city so that His blood could make His people holy. Hebrews 13:13 then calls believers out to Him, and three verses earlier the same writer says plainly, “We have an altar” (Hebrews 13:10). The chapter that gave Israel one door has become a chapter about one Person.

When, Where, and Why

• When: Israel’s year at Mount Sinai, after the tabernacle had been raised and while the nation was still camped around it. Traditional dating places this around 1490 to 1446 BC, though the date is carried by tradition rather than fixed by the text.
• Where: The camp of Israel, with the tabernacle at its centre and open country beyond it. The geography is the argument of the chapter, because everything it decides comes down to the difference between the door of the tabernacle and a field.
• Why: Moses records these laws to end sacrifice in the open field, where it had been drifting into sacrifice to goat idols (Leviticus 17:7), and to guard the blood God had assigned to the altar (Leviticus 17:11). Many Bible teachers add that one altar also held the tribes together, since a nation meeting in one place to worship had a single centre. Placed here, straight after the Day of Atonement, the chapter explains the day before it: chapter 16 shows blood carried into the holy place, and chapter 17 says why blood was the thing carried.

Key Verses

“And bringeth it not unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to offer an offering unto the LORD before the tabernacle of the LORD; blood shall be imputed unto that man; he hath shed blood; and that man shall be cut off from among his people.”

Leviticus 17:4

A man who kills the animal but does not bring it to the tabernacle is held guilty of shedding blood, and he is put outside his people. The offering does not count as a poor offering. It stops counting as an offering at all, and what is left is a killing.

“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.”

Leviticus 17:11

The life of a creature is carried in its blood, God has put that blood on the altar to cover His people, and it is the blood that does the covering. This one verse is the reason the whole sacrificial system works, and it is the only place in the chapter the word atonement appears at all.

One Hebrew word stands behind “the life of the flesh”, “your souls” and “the soul” here, so the verse is saying one thing three times: a life was given in place of a life.

“For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof: therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off.”

Leviticus 17:14

Every creature’s life is in its blood, so Israel is to eat no blood of any kind, and anyone who does is cut off. God states His reason twice inside a single verse and then attaches the penalty to it, which is how much weight He puts on a rule people would have been tempted to treat as a detail.

“But if he wash them not, nor bathe his flesh; then he shall bear his iniquity.”

Leviticus 17:16

If the man will not wash his clothes and bathe, he carries the guilt himself. The guilt in this verse does not attach to what he ate. It attaches to refusing the washing God had already provided for it.

Key Lessons from Leviticus 17

• God fixes both the place and the way of approach, and a sacrifice offered anywhere else is counted here as a killing rather than as worship (Leviticus 17:4).
• The law names the thing it is protecting Israel from and admits they had already been doing it, which reads as mercy rather than as accusation (Leviticus 17:7).
• The blood makes atonement because God assigned it to, not because of anything the blood holds in itself (Leviticus 17:11).
• The same law binds the Israelite and the foreigner living among him, with nothing relaxed and nothing added (Leviticus 17:8, 10, 12, 13, 15).
• A person who refuses the washing God provided keeps a guilt he could have laid down (Leviticus 17:16).

To go deeper into the lessons from this chapter, read our full study: Lessons from Leviticus 17.

Bible Study Questions

1. Read Leviticus 17:11. What three things does the verse say about blood, and which of them explains why eating it was forbidden?
2. Compare the penalties in verses 4, 9, 10 and 15. Why does the last case end so much more lightly than the first three?
3. Verse 7 says Israel had been sacrificing to devils. What does it tell you about God that He states the problem plainly instead of leaving it unnamed?
4. Trace the foreigner through verses 8, 10, 12, 13 and 15. What is required of him, and what does that show about who could approach God under this law?
5. Read Hebrews 9:22 beside Leviticus 17:11. What does the writer of Hebrews take from this chapter, and what does he add to it?
6. Read John 6:53 with Leviticus 17:10 in front of you. Why would that saying of Jesus have shaken people who knew this chapter well?
7. Verse 16 puts the guilt on refusing to wash rather than on the eating. Where might that pattern show up in the way a believer responds to God today?

Frequently Asked Questions

Leviticus 17, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference.

1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

2 Speak unto Aaron, and unto his sons, and unto all the children of Israel, and say unto them; This is the thing which the LORD hath commanded, saying,

3 What man soever there be of the house of Israel, that killeth an ox, or lamb, or goat, in the camp, or that killeth it out of the camp,

4 And bringeth it not unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to offer an offering unto the LORD before the tabernacle of the LORD; blood shall be imputed unto that man; he hath shed blood; and that man shall be cut off from among his people:

5 To the end that the children of Israel may bring their sacrifices, which they offer in the open field, even that they may bring them unto the LORD, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, unto the priest, and offer them for peace offerings unto the LORD.

6 And the priest shall sprinkle the blood upon the altar of the LORD at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and burn the fat for a sweet savour unto the LORD.

7 And they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have gone a whoring. This shall be a statute for ever unto them throughout their generations.

8 And thou shalt say unto them, Whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers which sojourn among you, that offereth a burnt offering of sacrifice,

9 And bringeth it not unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to offer it unto the LORD; even that man shall be cut off from among his people.

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.

13 And whatsoever man there be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, which hunteth and catcheth any beast or fowl that may be eaten; he shall even pour out the blood thereof, and cover it with dust.

14 For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof: therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off.

15 And every soul that eateth that which died of itself, or that which was torn with beasts, whether it be one of your own country, or a stranger, he shall both wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even: then shall he be clean.

16 But if he wash them not, nor bathe his flesh; then he shall bear his iniquity.