Topical List of Scriptures Using the Term "Blood"

Before bringing Steiner's insights to bear on the subject, it is well to note that there appears to be an evolutionary development of the meaning of blood within the Bible itself—a transition all the way from punishments related to the spilling of blood to the blood's saving agency. The following categories are noted (all scriptural uses are found under one of these categories, as shown in the Chapter End Note):

1. The shedding of another human's blood where it is:

(a) Culpable
(b) Innocent or inadvertent

2. The express indication that a creature's life is in its blood (whether or not the eating of its blood is prohibited)

3. The prohibition of the eating of blood, while not stating that a creature's life is in its blood

4. The turning of an object into blood

5. The effecting of salvation and/or life preservation through animal blood

6. The ritual of animal sacrifice as an atonement for sin, peace offering, ordination of priests, etc.

7. The genital discharge of blood through childbirth (parturition), normal menstruation or longer emission⁴

8. The sanctity of human blood

9. The transition away from sacrificing (spilling the blood) of animals

10. Blood as the basis for covenant

11. Becoming drunk on human blood, or the wantonness of having shed it

12. The blood of Christ (ignoring the prophetic aspect of the Old Testament sacrifice of lambs)
(a) As a sacrament of remembrance
(b) As the agency of human salvation

13. Blood as a factor in health, sickness or healing

14. Blood as a factor in ancestral inheritance or the birth process

15. The eating, other than sacramentally, of Christ's blood as a necessity of salvation

16. Human blood unable physically, i.e., while still in the flesh, to inherit the Kingdom of God

17. Other significant usage

18. Miscellaneous usages of lesser significance

For detail on these categories, see the Chapter End Note.

Various Steiner Insights and Biblical Reflections

There is general agreement that the teachings of Christ were not new, that their substance had been proclaimed by others before him, excepting perhaps only his teachings about his own sacrifice (and even that was seen by [Second] Isaiah; probably also by Moses [Gen 22,13]). It was his deed rather than his words that was new, unique and a "once for all" event (Heb 7,27; 9,12,28; 10,10,12-14; Rom 6,10; 1 Pet 3,18). It is that alone, his shed blood, which works the salvation of humanity and eventually of all creation.

But while there is literal similarity between many of Christ's teachings and those of his predecessors, he brought new and different meaning into the words of the old teachings. The six "you have heard, but I say unto you" passages of Mt 5,21-47 spring immediately to mind. But it is particularly Christ's interpretation of Lev 19,18 ("you shall love your neighbor as yourself") in Lk 10,27b and its ensuing "good Samaritan" parable (Lk 10,29-37) that focuses most clearly on this point.

Steiner says that such universal love really commenced in the teachings of the Buddha half a millennium before. It is significant that the source of these teachings, the purified astral body (Nirmanakaya) of the Buddha, became the astral body of the Nathan Jesus Child of Luke's Gospel (see "The Nativity" in The Burning Bush as well as The Incredible Births of Jesus). Those teachings were the seed of the human conscience, for conscience had not evolved in the human soul before that time.⁵

For our purposes, what is really at stake in the "good Samaritan" teaching of Jesus is that the time of blood-based love, upon which humanity had thus far been nurtured from primeval time, and upon which Lev 19,18 was historically based in theory and practice (see 28A AB 879 and 880-881, on Luke's Gospel), had ended (or that it would end with the falling of his blood into the Earth). This was one of the teachings also of Mt 5,43-47 (loving one's enemy) and of Jn 2,1-11 (the wedding at Cana, see pp. 137-142 of The Burning Bush ). That it pointedly involved a historically disdained Samaritan, meaning one of mixed blood, as in the case of the woman at the well (Jn 4,7-42), is indicative of this also. Cana, in Galilee north of Samaria, was also an area of mixed blood, a necessity for the scriptural setting of the wedding (The Gospel of John and its Relation to the Other Gospels [Jn-Rel], Lect 9, p. 161; see the meaning of "Galilee" in "The Whirlwind" section of the "Fire" essay). It was because of this that Christ admonished his followers that those who do not "hate" their fathers and mothers and follow him (otherwise an odious spiritual concept) are not worthy of him (Lk 14,26; Mt 10,37; The Gospel of Saint John [GSJ], Lect. 4, pp. 69-70). What was here indicated is the earthly establishment of the clear demarcation line between the spiritual validity of the historical group soul (i.e., blood-based love) and the newly christened "I AM" of the individual Christ-inspired Ego whose love billows out henceforth to those of mixed blood, even to the entirety of humanity and creation.

It is particularly critical that we become aware of the current regency of the Archangel Michael over the divine intelligence on Earth,⁶ the first since the time of Christ (his last having been when the enlightening Greek influence was spread by Aristotle's pupil Alexander across the world in preparation for the coming of Christ; see I-19). The barriers of group thinking and loving that have historically existed in clan, race, creed (including religion or political or other group affiliation) and nationality, must be broken down during this Michaelic regency. The individual Ego (I Am), through Christ-enabled love and concern, must reach beyond any such selective grouping. These various divisions and separations of humanity are, for our time, what the blood-related division between Pharisee and Samaritan was in the time of Jesus.

The central thread running as underlying substance through all of the blood scriptures from beginning to end is expressed in category #2 above, "The life is in the blood!"

Somewhere fairly early in my Bible-teaching career it came to me, and I thus expounded, that this scripture was based simply upon the observation from time immemorial that when enough blood had drained out of one's body there was no life left. My experience is that one can search the Bible commentaries for any other explanation and find nothing much more profound than this. An animal that died other than through the spilling of its blood was, according to the scriptures, still deemed to have its life within it until the blood was spilled out. Until then, it could not, for that reason, be eaten by God's people.

It is urgent that in this Michaelic era the new intuited light of anthroposophical insight (whether or not so called) illumine human understanding, for the old concepts are inadequate to lead humanity to the point of recognizing the Christ in his second coming. In that event, so different from the days when he walked on the Earth, he will never be observed in a tangible physical body (Mt 24,23-28; Lk 17,22-24; Acts 1,11). Rather this second coming commenced early in the twentieth century in the etheric world where the Christ could be perceived by those who had developed the necessary spiritual organs (Mt 25,1-13; Lk 12,35-40). Those who are to tread the upward path to the Kingdom must increasingly perceive his presence there in the centuries ahead. See "Second Coming" in The Burning Bush.