Why couldn't Israelites eat fat or blood?
Because neither one was theirs to eat — the fat was the richest part of the animal, reserved for God, and the blood carried the animal's life, reserved for the altar.
Leviticus 3 ends the peace-offering law with a rule stated as bluntly as any rule in the Torah:
"All fat is the LORD's. It shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations, in all your dwelling places, that you eat neither fat nor blood." — Leviticus 3:16–17
Two different substances, two different reasons. The "fat" here isn't dietary fat in general — it's chelev (חֵלֶב, H2459), the hard suet and visceral fat around the entrails, kidneys, and liver lobe of an ox, sheep, or goat. That's the richest, choicest part of the animal, and Leviticus 3 says three separate times (once per animal grade) that it belongs on the altar, not on anyone's plate.
Blood is withheld for a different reason, and the Torah tells us exactly what it is:
"The life of the flesh is in the blood, and it is the blood that makes atonement by the life." — Leviticus 17:11
Blood isn't just another body part — it is life, in Hebrew thought, and life belongs to God alone. Eating it would mean claiming for yourself what only the altar could rightly receive.
This isn't a rule that starts and ends in Leviticus. It's older than Israel: God tells Noah, long before Sinai, "its blood you shall not eat" (Genesis 9:4) — the first statement in Scripture that blood carries life, given to all humanity. At Sinai the rule gets teeth: anyone who eats fat or blood from an offering "shall be cut off from his people" (Leviticus 7:22–27). The rule gets broken in the narrative too — Eli's sons at Shiloh seize sacrificial meat "before the fat was burned" (1 Samuel 2:13–17), and the text calls it a sin "very great before the LORD." Centuries later Ezekiel indicts corrupt priests by naming the very thing they'd defiled: "my food, the fat and the blood" (Ezekiel 44:7).
And the thread doesn't stop at the Old Testament. When the Jerusalem council in Acts 15 frees Gentile believers from the requirements of the Law, it still asks them to abstain "from what has been strangled, and from blood" (Acts 15:20, 29). Worth noting precisely: of the old fat-and-blood pair, it's the blood that carries forward into Acts — the decree names no fat. So the blood prohibition specifically is the one still asked of the early church, kept as literal practice rather than as a picture fulfilled and set aside.
From Noah to the apostles, the rule never really changes: the fat and the blood were never the eater's to claim.
For the full trail through eight stages of the canon — with the actual Hebrew and Greek at each stop — read the full study on the peace offering.
Does 'peace offering' mean peace with God?
Only loosely — the connection runs through a shared Hebrew root, not through the Greek words the New Testament actually uses for peace, so the honest answer is more careful than the English name suggests.
What does 'the table of the LORD' mean in the Bible?
It's the altar itself, pictured as a shared table where God receives his portion of the sacrifice — and Paul reaches for the exact same Greek phrase to warn the Corinthians against eating at pagan altars.
What is the peace offering in the Bible?
The peace offering (zevach shelamim) was a voluntary Israelite sacrifice that, unlike the burnt offering or the grain offering, ended with the worshiper himself sitting down to eat a meal in God's presence.
Why was the peace offering eaten as a meal?
Because Leviticus 3 splits it into three portions — one burned for God, one given to the priests, and one eaten by the worshiper himself — making it the only offering in Leviticus 1-3 that seats a human being at the table.