Genesis 9:4

Summary

The verse prohibits eating flesh that still contains its "life"/"soul", identified here with its blood. The Hebrew places two nouns — nefesh ("life") and dam ("blood") — each with a third-person suffix, in a construction that links flesh, life, and blood together as the object of the prohibition.

Key words

• 'akh ("nevertheless", H0389) — a restrictive adverb that narrows or limits what has just been permitted (in the surrounding context, the eating of animals); it signals an exception clause.
• basar ("flesh", H1320) — masculine singular noun, the direct object of the final verb; refers to animal meat as food.
• nafsho ("its life", H5315+H9023) — construct form of nefesh ("life/soul") plus 3ms pronominal suffix "its"; grammatically bound to what follows.
• damo ("its blood", H1818+H9023) — construct form of dam ("blood") plus 3ms suffix "its"; stands in apposition to nafsho.
• tokhelu ("you shall eat", H0398) — qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural; combined with the negation lo, it forms a prohibition addressed to a plural group.

What the text says

The sentence opens with the restrictive particle 'akh ("nevertheless", H0389), marking a limitation on a prior permission. The object of the prohibition is basar ("flesh", H1320), qualified by the phrase be-nafsho damo — literally "in its life, its blood." Both nafsho ("its life", H5315) and damo ("its blood", H1818) are construct-form nouns carrying the same third-person masculine singular suffix, referring back to the same antecedent (the animal). The preposition be- ("with", H9003) attaches only to nafsho, and damo follows without its own preposition, placing it in apposition to "its life" — the two terms describe the same substance from two angles rather than naming two separate things.

The finite verb tokhelu ("you must eat", H0398) is a qal imperfect, second person masculine plural, negated by lo ("not", H3808), producing a durative prohibition rather than a single-instance command — it addresses an ongoing practice for the plural addressees rather than one occasion.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the phrase as ἐν αἵματι ψυχῆς ("in blood of soul"), inverting the Hebrew order so that nefesh becomes a genitive modifying dam ("blood of life"), rather than dam standing in apposition to nefesh as in the Hebrew. The Vulgate simplifies further, rendering only cum sanguine ("with blood") and omitting any equivalent for nefesh altogether. The Spanish SBLIBRE explicitly separates the clause as an explanatory statement — "porque la sangre es la vida" ("because the blood is the life") — which supplies a causal connector not present as such in the Hebrew apposition.