GEN677 Although human beings were now permitted to eat meat, they were still forbidden to consume blood, either by itself or with animal meat. [Few, if any, biblical laws are repeated as often as this one.  First enunciated in [this verse], the prohibition is reiterated in Leviticus 3:17, 7:26-27; 17:10-12, 14, 19:26; Deuteronomy 12:16, 23; 15:23.  Professor Jacob Milgrom [“The Biblical Diet Laws as an Ethical System,” Interpretation, July 1963] has noted that “none of Israel’s neighbors possessed this absolute and universally binding blood prohibition.  Perhaps at the very moment the Bible was granting man the right to kill animals for food, it wished to ensure that this permission would not lead to widespread bloodletting and savagery.  Indeed, based on this commandment, the laws regarding kosher slaughter ordain that after an animal is slaughtered, its blood must be fully drained.  What eventually became a Jewish obsession with not eating any blood (for example, salting the meat so that every drop of blood is removed) helped to produce, I believe, a general Jewish abhorrence of blood-shed. Thus, Jews have committed fewer violent crimes than their non-Jewish neighbors in every society with which we are familiar.  TELVOL 2:331-332