2. Speak to Aaron and to his sons and to all the Israelites. In contrast to the preceding chapters, God here enjoins Moses to address not merely Aaron and the priestly caste but the whole Israelite people. This pitching of the divine message to the entire populace is one of many signals that have led scholars since the nineteenth century to conclude that chapters 17–26 constitute a distinctive unit—conventionally designated the Holiness Code because of its concern with the idea that the entire people shall make itself holy—possessing certain distinctive theological features and certain distinctive elements of vocabulary.

3. Every man of the house of Israel. This phrase, ʾish ʾish mibeyt yisraʾel, is reiterated in this chapter and does not appear at all in chapters 1–16. It is a stylistic device for insisting on the comprehensiveness of the obligation for all Israelites with which the Holiness Code is concerned.

who slaughters. There has been debate since Late Antiquity about whether the verb refers to general slaughter for the purpose of eating or slaughter for the purpose of sacrifice. There are grounds to conclude that in the early biblical period there was no such thing as “secular” slaughter (sḥehitat ḥulin), for slaughter was regularly associated with offering some part of the animal as a sacrifice. That appears to be the assumption of this law. Slaughtering “outside the camp” entails the danger of sacrifice to the feral or vegetal deities of the open field, and so the animal must be brought to the sanctuary. This ban on secular slaughter, pointedly permitted by Deuteronomy, logically implies, as Milgrom argues at length, that local sanctuaries are envisaged by the law, where people living in the immediate region could bring the animals as offerings before consuming a large part of them.

4. it shall be counted as blood . . . he has spilled blood. The starkness of this formulation is quite startling, and very much in keeping with the emphasis throughout the chapter on the sacrosanct character of blood as the principal bearer and symbol of life. The person who slaughters an animal without having the priest cast some of its blood on the legitimate altar of YHWH is considered to have committed murder. The blood on the altar, then, offered up to the deity together with the burnt suet, is an expiation for the blood of the animal spilled in the slaughtering process, a ritual recognition that the taking of life, even for consumption as food, is a grave act that must be balanced by an act of expiation.

7. And they shall no longer sacrifice their sacrifices to the goat-demons. This clause provides persuasive evidence that the “slaughter” mentioned in verse 3 is not solely for eating but involves a cultic act. The “goat-demons” (seʿirim) are surely to be associated with Azazel in chapter 16. While our knowledge of their precise nature is limited, they are clearly archaic nature gods of the wild realm “beyond the camp,” outside the pale of monotheistic civilization that the sundry Priestly writers are laboring to create. Monogamy, of course, is a reiterated biblical metaphor for monotheism, and so worship of the goat-demons and other deities is an act of promiscuity, “whoring.”

10. the living person. In similar contexts elsewhere, the polyvalent Hebrew nefesh is rendered in this translation simply as “person,” but here it is important to add the notion it implies of life because the use of the term puns on nefesh in the sense of “life” as it appears in the next verse.

11. I have given it to you on the altar to ransom your lives. The conception of sacrifice as expiating substitution is made perfectly explicit here: the bloodshed, equivalent to murder, involved in slaughtering the animal is “made good” through divine provision by the sacrificial blood cast on the altar “to ransom [or, atone for] your lives.”

12. no living person. As in verse 10, the fraught term nefesh is pointedly used rather than ʾish, “man.”

13. he shall spill out its blood and cover it with earth. In the case of game, perhaps typically downed with an arrow, the beast or bird is not fit to be brought as an offering to the altar, so a different mechanism is employed to respect the sacrosanct nature of the lifeblood—spilling it out on the ground and covering it with earth.

14. For the life of all flesh, its blood is in its life. The syntax here, literally reproduced in the translation, is a little crabbed, leaving the relation of terms slightly uncertain. One suspects that the writer was impelled by the desire to insist repetitively on the equation of dam, “blood,” and nefesh, “life.”

15. any living person who eats . . . shall launder his garments and bathe. The clear implication of this verse, in contrast to other biblical legislation on this topic, is that it is not forbidden to eat an animal that has died of natural causes or has been killed by a beast of prey. The animal carcass does convey ritual impurity, so laundering of the garments and bathing are required of the person who eats its flesh. The permissiveness concerning this category of meat may be dictated by the consideration that an animal found dead would not be fit for sacrifice and so, unlike animals slaughtered in open country, would not lead a person into the danger of sacrificing to the feral deities.