Noah May Eat Meat but Not the Blood of Life

Noah put the knife to the throat of a clean animal on ground that had been under water a season earlier, and his hand was not steady.

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Before the flood nobody had eaten meat. Green things had been the whole diet since the garden. Now every moving thing that lived was food (Genesis 9:3), the permission sat over the new grass like heat, and his sons were standing too close and watching his hands.

He cut. Then he set a bowl under the wound.

The Bowl Under the Throat

"Flesh with the life of it, which is the blood of it, you shall not eat" (Genesis 9:4). The meat was theirs. The dark stream running into the bowl was not.

A living thing is not one soul. It is three, stacked. There is the part that feeds and grows, which a vine has as well. There is the part that sees and hears and smells and wants, which every animal in the herd has. And above those, in a man only, sits the part that reasons, and that part came into Adam the day God breathed into his face, and it has nothing to do with blood at all.

Blood carries the middle one. That is why flesh is crowded with appetite and empty of thought. Spirit and blood are two different substances and anyone can hold them apart in speech, and nobody has ever found them apart in a body. They run mixed. Open a man and the veins come up heavier with blood and lighter with air, and the channels that carry breath come up the other way round, every vessel keeping its own proportion of the two out to the ends of the fingers.

Noah tipped the bowl into the dirt. "That part was never ours," he said.

Warm and Fiery

There is a second thing the phrase carries, and it has nothing to do with butchery.

Ask what the blood of a soul would be, if a soul had blood, and the answer is the warm fiery quality in a person, the thing that stands up when something comes at it. Courage. A man with that in him does not spend his life negotiating with his own stomach. He can sit at a loaded table and hardly notice, because the heat in him is going somewhere else.

Noah wiped the blade on the grass. He had spent a year in a dark hull rationing fodder to animals that would have eaten him if the door had opened, and he had some notion of what the heat was for.

From the Hand of Every Beast

Then the rest of the speech came, and it left the subject of food entirely. The blood of your lives will I require, God said. From every beast will I require it, and from the hand of man, from the hand of every man's brother, will I require the life of man (Genesis 9:5).

Beasts come first in the sentence and they are the lesser half of it. A wolf that takes a child took a stranger. It never sat at the same fire. It never had the child in its power and picked the hour. Whatever it destroys it destroys from outside, and it kills what it was never given any authority over.

Noah had watched wolves for a year through a gap in the boards. They frightened him less than what he remembered of the towns.

From the Hand of a Man's Brother

Brother is the word that does the damage, and it is doing three jobs at once.

Every man alive is kin to every other. Not by treaty. By birth, out of one mother, and the mother is rational nature, and that makes the whole race a household whether it cares for the arrangement or not.

And the ugliest fighting in any household happens between the ones who share a wall. Over a field to be divided, over which of them sits higher at the table. A stranger has to guess where a man is soft. A brother has known since childhood, and when he moves he goes straight at it, because he carries all your inner circumstances by heart.

Last, the word is a warning read out in advance. Whoever kills gets handed back exactly what he gave, and nobody will pity him while it happens, because the man on the ground was not a stranger to him. He was blood.

The Greater Court

Noah's grandsons shoved each other by the fire that night over nothing at all. He stepped between them with the morning's stain still on his sleeve and said one thing. "He watches for the ones who cannot speak."

A man can kill and walk out of a town and never meet a single avenger, and the people who saw it will shrug and say the world does not care. It does not follow. The killer who got clear has already been arrested. He is standing, at this minute, in front of a court that convenes above every human court and sits specifically to answer for people who were handled shamefully and had nobody.

The boys sat down. Noah went and washed the knife, and the blade came up clean, and behind him in the grass the dark patch had already sunk into the ground where the rest of it had gone.