As I write, Jenni, a friend of mine, is sitting in a veterinary office, covered in the blood of her faithful springer spaniel, Mojo. About two hours ago, while jogging, a pit bull raced out from behind a house and attacked Mojo. Jenni carries mace, but the dispenser failed. Mojo’s lifeblood was spreading across the street, yet Jenni and a number of Good Samaritan neighbors were helpless to stop the attack. Eventually, an individual driving by the scene stopped, shot, and killed the pit bull. Jenni recounted the events with words like horror, nightmare, and bloody.
Our culture has a love/hate relationship with blood. Blood is the stuff of violence, horror films, and nightmares. It’s creepy. As an RN, I worked on I.V. teams and in the O.R., but I began my nursing career in psychiatric nursing because I could not tolerate the sight of blood. During nursing school, I held the inglorious distinction of fainting more than anyone in my class—and in the history of the program. The dean of the nursing program and most of my instructors encouraged me to pursue another career path, but I stumbled and fainted my way through to graduation. I’m not alone. According to psychologists, 15 percent of the population suffers from hemophobia or blood-injury phobia, a fear of the sight of blood.
According to Tyler C. Ralston, PsyD, a clinical psychologist who treats people with blood-injury phobias: “The idea is that back in time, when someone was coming at someone else with a sharp stick or rock, a kind of genetic variation allowed certain people to faint in response. Warriors who fainted looked dead and were passed over during battle. The blood pressure drop also might have helped those who were wounded avoid bleeding to death. Survivors then passed on the ‘fainting’ gene.”
Hemophobic or not, many people consider blood creepy … and fascinating. The phrase, If it bleeds, it leads, attributed to several individuals, purports to describe the way news programmers prioritize violence. Why? Ratings indicate that blood, from crashes, fights, or riots, is interesting. In the entertainment industry, vampires and violence continue to fascinate.
Heck, the Bible isn’t just a bloody book; it’s a bloody library. In the Bible, the word blood occurs more often than the word love.
Full disclosure, I’m a pastor now, and though I’m generally opposed to violence (especially against me), this isn’t a religious rant against media violence. A “bloody rant” from a pastor might seem hypocritical in light of the fact that the Bible is a bloody book.
More than bloody book
Heck, the Bible isn’t just a bloody book; it’s a bloody library. In the Bible, the word blood occurs more often than the word love, almost exactly as often as the word sin, and it occurs in two-thirds of the 66 books of the Bible. One of the bloodiest days in the Bible is now called “Good Friday.” Good? Really? And no time is wasted in getting bloody. The first mention of blood is in the first book and refers to the first murder among humankind—brother killing brother:
Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground (Gen. 4:9-10).
One could call it the scarlet thread of Scripture. Even the red letters in your Bible are inspired by blood. While common-place today, the first red-letter Bible wasn’t published until 1899. Louis Klopsch, an editor for The Christian Herald, was inspired to print a Bible with the words of Jesus in red, after reading Luke 22:20, “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which I shed for you.” Well over 400 occurrences of the word blood can be found in the Bible. Compare that to 121 occurrences in Bram Stoker’s famous vampire novel, Dracula.
Why is the Bible so bloody? One possibility might be that blood permeates our lives, figuratively and literally.
Bloody bodies
- The average adult body contains about five quarts of blood, which travel through …
- 60,000 miles of blood vessels—enough to circle the earth two and a half times.
- With the exception of the cornea, every part of the human body depends upon blood for survival. The cornea breathes in oxygen from the air in the atmosphere.
- Every two seconds, someone in the United States requires a blood transfusion.
- The blood Horseshoe crabs is baby-blue, very expensive, and unwittingly, you’ve probably tasted it.
- Every drug certified by the FDA is tested for bacterial contaminates using a substance found only in the blue blood of horseshoe crabs.
- If it seemed like the last person to draw your blood was digging for gold, they were. Your blood contains approximately 0.2 milligrams of gold.
Bloody idioms
The English language runs red with bloody idioms:
- In cold blood
- Flesh and blood
- That makes my blood boil
- Blood is thicker than water
- Blue blood
- Young blood
- Out for blood
- Blood brother
- Blood and guts
- It’s in my blood
- Bad blood
- Can’t squeeze blood from a turnip/stone
- Too rich for my blood
Bloody quotes
- I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. – Winston Churchill
- The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. – Thomas Jefferson
- The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. – B. B. King
- The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets. – John D. Rockefeller
- No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody. – Andrew Jackson
- If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
- I am innocent of the blood of this just person; see ye to it. – Pontius Pilate
- The more you mow us down, the more numerous we grow; the blood of Christians is seed. – Tertullian
- Writing is easy. Just put a sheet of paper in the typewriter, open a vein and bleed. – Red Smith, Sports Writer
- The life of every creature is in the blood. – God, Leviticus, 17:11
Bloody life
The Bible is bloody, because real life is bloody. The Bible speaks to the uncensored realities of life: anger, violence, pain and suffering. Wars continue (some in the name of God) and every day, headlines bleed with stories of shootings, violence and rage.
Most of us take solace in the knowledge that we’ve never actually killed or drawn blood, but God makes no such distinction. Why? The Father’s love is the passionate, zealous love of a parent. To treat another life with unkindness, objectification, hatred, envy, bigotry or anger is injustice against the life of one of his children—the life of every person is in the blood—and to turn a blind eye to injustice would be unjust.
Bloody spots
In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, are sorely burdened with guilt after murdering Duncan, the king. While sleep-walking, Lady Macbeth famously states, “Out! Out, damned spot!” lamenting her inability to wash away the blood from her hands or her conscience. Similarly, Macbeth says, “Will all the water in the ocean wash this blood from my hands? No, instead my hands will stain the seas scarlet, turning the green waters red.” Macbeth, understanding intuitively that he must pay a price for murdering the King, goes on to say, “Blood will have blood.” (We too know this as evidenced by our language of debt: “I owe you an apology.”)
Macbeth is bloody well right. God would be completely just in demanding of us blood for blood—offender for victim—but God loves both the victim and the offender. It’s a conundrum, and Good Friday is good because it’s the solution to justice for both victim and offender. Our Book is bloody because it tells the story of bloody sin and the bloody day when God demonstrated both his great justice and his great mercy for us in this, that even while we were unkind, uncaring, angry, impatient, unfair and even murderous, he, in the person of his Son, went to the cross to pay the bloody price that we owed, that we might have life. Jesus’ blood for our blood.
Ours is a bloody good Book.
David Slagle is pastor of Veritas Church in Decatur, Georgia.
