David Biale observes in Blood and Belief that “the ancient Israelites were the only Near Easterners to make blood a central element in their religious rituals” (10).
He fills out the picture: “There were, to be sure, magical and medical rituals mentioned in Akkadian, Sumerian, and Hittite texts that used blood to feed bloodthirsty demons, and one Hittite text mentions the use of blood as a ritual detergent (similar to its use in the Bible), but blood played no other significant role in the sacrificial offerings of the ancient Near East. Those offerings were intended to feed the gods, and blood was not usually the main course on the divine menu: although the Canaanite goddess Anat is said to have drunk the blood of her brother, Baal, this was probably not her everyday diet.6 With two possible exceptions, no biblical text states explicitly that the Israelite God drinks or eats blood (‘eating’ blood in the biblical context evidently meant eating meat with its blood still in it), but the prohibition on his people’s doing so undoubtedly stems from the centrality of blood in the Israelite cult.”
In Scripture, though, blood is a basic material of religious ritual: “Blood is a ritual detergent when used by the priests in the temple in order to purify the sancta after they have been contaminated. Such contamination can even come in the form of a ‘miasma’ from outside the temple precincts. The blood from different expiatory sacrifi ces is also used as part of a process of atonement for inadvertent sins. For Milgrom, since blood is equated with life, the killing of an animal for nourishment, which he identifi es with the shelamim (well-being) sacrifi ces, involves a capital crime that can be expiated only by the blood of the animal itself (Lev. 17:11). Therefore, any animal killed for the purpose of consumption must have its blood poured out on the altar or, if it is a wild game animal, covered with earth. Ingestion of the blood is strictly prohibited (Lev. 3:17, 17:10–16, 19:26). Deuteronomy accepts this prohibition on eating blood (Deut. 12:23) but allows for secular slaughter of domesticated animals that previously could be killed only as sacrifices.”
Along the same lines, Scripture is unrelenting about murder: “biblical law would not allow any remission of capital punishment, a unique stringency in ancient Near Eastern law” (15). Whoever sheds blood has to pay with his own blood; otherwise, the land is defiled.
The main analogy to Israel in this regard is, somewhat surprisingly, ancient Greek sacrifice: “Especially around issues of blood, Greek religion was significantly closer to that of the Israelites than were the rituals of more proximate Near Eastern cultures. In some cases there may have been indirect cultural interchange between Israel and Greece” (14). Greece also, Biale argues (not altogether convincingly) that Greece shows an almost-biblical severity toward bloodshed - at least in Aeschylus’ tragic reconstruction of the past (16).
It’s not clear what we make of this. That Hebrew religion is bloodier than its neighbors is clear, and it’s the kind of fact of which we must make something.