The short answer
Blood makes atonement because of the life in it. Leviticus 17:11 says that “the life of the flesh is in the blood,” and that God gave the blood to Israel on the altar to make atonement. In Leviticus that blood cleansed God’s altar and sanctuary, and the people were forgiven and made clean. Chris White proposes that life cleanses because the defilement it answers comes from sin and death. Christ’s blood carried a life that death could not hold.
What Leviticus 17:11 Says
Leviticus says many times that blood makes atonement. The priest puts blood on the horns of the altar, sprinkles it before the veil, or carries it into the holy of holies, and the text gives the result: “the priest shall make an atonement for him, and it shall be forgiven him” (Leviticus 4:31). One verse gives the reason blood was the means:
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 verse sits in a chapter about where blood may go. Leviticus 17 requires Israelites to bring the animals they slaughter to the tabernacle, where the priest puts the blood on the altar. It forbids eating blood. It tells a hunter to pour out the blood of game and cover it with dust. Verse 11 gives the reason for all three rules.
The verse also says who gives the blood. The worshiper brought the animal and the priest handled the blood, so it would be natural to call it Israel’s gift to God. God describes it the other way around: “I have given it to you upon the altar.” The blood was his provision for his people, assigned by him to atonement, so that a sinful and unclean people could live near him.
The Life Is in the Blood
The link between blood and life is older than Leviticus. After the flood God gave Noah the animals for food, with one restriction:
But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.
Genesis 9:4
Moses repeated it when Israel was allowed to slaughter animals at home: “Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh” (Deuteronomy 12:23). Eating blood carried one of the law’s heaviest penalties. God said he would set his face against the one who did it and cut him off from his people (Leviticus 17:10). After the cross and the resurrection, the apostles still told Gentile believers to abstain “from blood, and from things strangled” (Acts 15:29), and Christians kept that rule for centuries.
The Hebrew word translated “life” in these verses is nefesh. The King James Version translates the same word “soul” later in Leviticus 17:11. It is the Bible’s word for a creature as a living thing. When God breathed into the man he had formed, “man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7), a living nefesh, and Genesis uses the same word for the animals.
When a creature’s blood runs out, its life goes with it. That life was given by God, and when it is taken it goes back to him. This is why Israel could not eat the blood, why a hunter poured it out and covered it, and why the blood of a sacrifice was brought to the altar. Scripture treats the blood as the life itself.
“By Reason of the Life”: The Last Clause
The King James Version ends the verse “for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” The Revised Version of 1885 and the American Standard Version of 1901 changed the clause to “for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.” The RSV and NASB also read “by reason of the life,” the ESV reads “by the life,” and the NRSV and the Jewish Publication Society’s translation read “as life.” In the King James reading, the clause says who benefits from the blood. In the others, it says why the blood works.
The difference comes from one small Hebrew preposition, be, joined to nefesh. It can mean “in,” “by means of,” “as,” or “in exchange for.” Earlier in the same verse, “to make an atonement for your souls” uses a different preposition, al, the ordinary way the priestly laws name the people for whom atonement is made. When those laws name what atonement is made with, they use be: “the priest shall make an atonement for him with the ram of the trespass offering” (Leviticus 5:16). The book argues that the change of preposition marks the last clause as a statement of means. The blood atones by the life it carries, and the end of the verse explains its opening words, “the life of the flesh is in the blood.”
The older reading has a long history too. The Greek Septuagint, made by Jewish translators before Christ, has the blood atoning in place of the life, a life given instead of the worshiper’s. Scholars of Leviticus still debate the verse. Some read its atonement as a ransom, others as a cleansing, and one major commentator limited it to the peace offering. On each of these readings, what the blood brings to the altar is life, and God accepts it because it is life.
The Common View: Blood Stands for Death
Many Christians have been taught that blood in the Bible stands for death, and that the animal’s death was the penalty for sin, suffered in the sinner’s place. That reading has a long history, and some of its reasons are good ones. The animal really died. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Hebrews says that “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). Scholars who read Leviticus 17:11 as a ransom give the death more weight for reasons like these.
Everyone agrees that the animal had to die and the blood had to be shed. The question is whether the blood that atones counts as the death or as the life, and the one verse that explains why blood atones speaks of it as life. The law also fixes its attention on what happens after the animal is killed. In the burnt offering the worshiper killed the animal, and then the priests brought the blood and sprinkled it round about upon the altar (Leviticus 1:5). The words of atonement and forgiveness come after the blood has been applied. The book reads the blood on the altar as the animal’s life given back to the God who gave it, with the death as the necessary way of obtaining it.
What the Blood Did: It Cleansed God’s House
When Aaron and his sons were ordained as priests, Moses killed a bull for a sin offering and did this with its blood:
Moses took the blood, and put it upon the horns of the altar round about with his finger, and purified the altar, and poured the blood at the bottom of the altar, and sanctified it, to make reconciliation upon it.
Leviticus 8:15
The altar was new. No Israelite had yet brought an offering to it for any wrong he had done. Moses still put blood on it to purify it, and he did so on each of the seven days of the ordination (Exodus 29:36–37). On the Day of Atonement the high priest sprinkled blood on the altar to “cleanse it, and hallow it from the uncleanness of the children of Israel” (Leviticus 16:19). Hebrews sums up the whole law in the same terms: “almost all things are by the law purged with blood” (Hebrews 9:22).
The offering the King James Version calls the sin offering was also required where no sin had been committed: for a mother at the end of her days of purifying after childbirth, for a man healed of skin disease, and for the new altar. For this reason Jacob Milgrom called it the purification offering, and many scholars follow him. Its blood went where the defilement had reached. For the sin of a ruler or an ordinary Israelite, it was put on the horns of the great altar in the courtyard. For the sin of the anointed priest or the whole congregation, it was carried into the tent. On the Day of Atonement it went all the way to the lid of the Ark, and then to the tent and the altar (Leviticus 16:14–19).
The people were cleansed as well:
For on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the LORD.
Leviticus 16:30
God had Israel build him a sanctuary so that he could dwell among them (Exodus 25:8). Their uncleanness and sins defiled it, and the blood cleansed it so that he could stay. Scholars debate how the cleansing of the sanctuary and the cleansing of the people relate, and they agree on the result: the house was cleansed, and the people were clean before the LORD.
Why Would Life Cleanse? The Book’s Proposal
Leviticus says that blood atones by reason of the life, and that this blood cleanses. Why life should make an altar clean is a further question. In chapter 5 of How Atonement Works, Chris White proposes an answer, building on Milgrom’s study of the purity laws: the defilement the blood answered was bound up with death, and life is the remedy for death. Leviticus states the cleansing; this explanation of it is the book’s synthesis of several lines of Scripture.
The first is that sin leads to death. God warned Adam, “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Paul writes, “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23).
The second is that Scripture treats death as defiling. The main sources of ritual uncleanness in the law were a dead body, skin disease, and discharges of blood or seed. The corpse was the strongest of them: anyone who touched a dead body, a bone, or a grave was unclean for seven days (Numbers 19:11–16). When Miriam was struck with skin disease, Aaron pleaded, “Let her not be as one dead” (Numbers 12:12). Milgrom concluded that death is what these impurities have in common. Ritual uncleanness and sin are different things. Scripture still speaks of sin as defiling in a similar way. Murder polluted the land, and the land could be cleansed only “by the blood of him that shed it” (Numbers 35:33).
God is “the living God” (Deuteronomy 5:26). If what defiled his house was death and the sin that brings it, then the fitting remedy is life, and life is what Leviticus 17:11 says the blood carries. The rites for the worst impurities fit this pattern. To cleanse a man healed of skin disease, the priest killed one bird over running water and dipped a living bird in its blood (Leviticus 14:4–7). A person defiled by a corpse was cleansed with the ashes of a red heifer mixed with running water (Numbers 19:17). In both rites the Hebrew for “running water” is “living water.”
An animal’s life had limits. It answered death’s marks on the sanctuary for a year, and the next year the house needed cleansing again. Hebrews says, “For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4).
The blood is where the book begins. How Atonement Works follows the life in the blood from Noah to the altar, into the holy of holies on the Day of Atonement, and on to the risen Christ, the scapegoat that carried sins away, and the defeat of the devil.
Get the Paperback on AmazonWhy Christ’s Blood Cleanses as No Other Blood Can
The New Testament speaks of Christ’s blood in the language of Leviticus. Believers are justified by his blood (Romans 5:9), and “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). Isaiah said of the servant of the LORD that “he hath poured out his soul unto death” (Isaiah 53:12), and the Hebrew word for “soul” there is nefesh, the word of Leviticus 17:11. Christ’s death was real. What he poured out at the cross was the life in his blood.
The life in Christ was the life of God. John calls it “that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us” (1 John 1:2). Peter told the crowd in Jerusalem that God had raised Jesus up, “because it was not possible that he should be holden of it” (Acts 2:24). Hebrews makes the comparison with the old rites:
For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
Hebrews 9:13–14
The writer names the blood of the Day of Atonement and the ashes of the red heifer, the remedy for contact with the dead. He describes Christ’s blood as cleansing from “dead works” so that believers may serve “the living God.” The book reads this as the fulfillment of the whole pattern. The animals gave a creature’s life, which was itself subject to death. Christ gave the life of one whom death could not hold. After his resurrection he entered heaven “by his own blood” (Hebrews 9:12) as a priest “after the power of an endless life” (Hebrews 7:16). The page on the resurrection and forgiveness follows that part of the story.
Christ’s blood is also given in the same direction as Leviticus 17:11. There God says, “I have given it to you.” At the last supper Jesus took the cup and said, “Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:27–28). The blood Israel was forbidden to take for itself is given by God, and to receive it is to receive life: “Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life” (John 6:54).
Where This Understanding Comes From
The reading of Leviticus 17:11 as atonement by means of life has strong support among scholars of Leviticus. Jay Sklar defended the instrumental translation and showed that the verse grounds the blood’s atoning power in the life it contains. David M. Moffitt, in Rethinking the Atonement (2022) and his earlier work on Hebrews, follows that reading and connects it with Christ’s entrance into heaven. Jacob Milgrom’s work on Leviticus showed that the purification offering cleansed the sanctuary, and he tied impurity to death and the cleansing blood to life. Roy Gane, Baruch Schwartz, and Matthew Thiessen have added to the study of these rites and of Jesus’ cleansing miracles. Early Christians, Tertullian among them, kept the apostles’ rule against eating blood. How Atonement Works builds on this scholarship and credits it. Chris White’s contribution is to carry the connection between life and cleansing through the New Testament, to the blood of Christ and the whole Day of Atonement.