The First Menu Had No Meat
In the beginning God gave man the seed-bearing plants and the fruit of the trees for food, and He gave the green plants to the animals (Genesis 1:29-30). No animal appears on that list. Luther pictures Adam and the beasts eating at “one and the same table,” and he says that Adam “would have been averse to killing even a small bird for food.” Before the flood men kept animals for work and for sacrifice, as Abel did with his flock (Genesis 4:4). They did not keep them for the kitchen. When Noah stocked the ark, the food that he gathered was food that grows (Genesis 6:21).
What Changed When Noah Left the Ark
Noah built an altar, and God blessed him with the words that He first spoke to Adam: be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 9:1). Two new things follow. The fear of man falls on every living creature (9:2), and every moving thing that lives is given to man for food, just as the green plants were (9:3). The second explains the first. Until that day, Luther says, man had been “a kind ruler of the beasts, not a killer and eater.” The words of the grant are general. Luther judged that Noah in practice ate only the clean animals, the kinds that he offered on the altar. Moses later spelled out the clean and the unclean (Leviticus 11), and Christ made all food clean (Mark 7:19).
Why Did God Give It?
Genesis records the gift and attaches no reason to it. The Church’s teachers have drawn four reasons from the text and its setting.
| The Reason | The Source | What It Says |
|---|---|---|
| The wrath is over | Luther on Genesis 9 | The grant is “a token of God’s favor” and proof “that God no longer hates man, but favors him.” After a year in the ark, God feeds Noah “with lavish hand.” |
| Food for a full earth | Luther; The Lutheran Study Bible | Noah’s household had “no need of it,” since a few people held the produce of the whole earth. Their descendants would need it. The Study Bible suggests that the decreasing fruitfulness of the earth (Genesis 3:17-19) made it necessary, and it notes that in very cold or dry lands people cannot live without animals for food. |
| A clear conscience | Luther on Genesis 9 | Luther writes that “beasts could not have been killed without sin if God had not expressly permitted it by his Word.” God has spoken, and therefore “there can be no sin in their use.” |
| The altar | John Chrysostom, Homily 27 on Genesis | Noah’s family was about to offer animals in thanksgiving. God gives the animals as food so that no one would hold back from eating meat on the ground that it was consecrated. |
The One Thing Held Back
The gift came with a limit: man is not to eat flesh with its lifeblood still in it (9:4). Chrysostom noticed the pattern. In Eden God gave every tree and held back one; here He gives every animal and holds back the blood. Luther reads the verse as a rule against cruelty. It forbids the eating of “raw flesh and members still palpitating,” and it requires slaughter as it was done at the altar, with the blood drained. Leviticus supplies the reason: “the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I myself have assigned it to you to make atonement for your lives upon the altar” (Leviticus 17:11, in John Kleinig’s translation). The blood belonged to God, the giver of life. Christians are not bound by this rule. The apostles asked Gentile believers to abstain from blood (Acts 15:20), and the Augsburg Confession explains that “they forbade it for a time, to avoid offense” (XXVIII 65).
Why This Matters
Every plate of meat rests on a word from God, and Paul teaches us to receive it that way: “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:4). The table prayer is that thanksgiving. The blood tells the larger story. From Noah’s day God kept it from the table, and in Israel He assigned it to the altar, where the blood of the sacrifices pointed ahead to the blood of Jesus Christ. Drinking blood was forbidden even before the Law of Moses. Then, on Maundy Thursday, the Lord gave His disciples the cup and called it “the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). The one thing that God withheld at Noah’s table He now gives at His own: the lifeblood of His Son, shed on the cross for the forgiveness of sins and given to us to drink.
Genesis 9:3–4 · Received with Thanksgiving