Genesis 9:3
Genesis 9:33Everything that lives and moves will be food for you; just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you all things.
is the preamble to the Watchtower's blood-abstinence doctrine. Verse 3 grants every moving animal as food; verse 4 adds the restriction "only flesh with its soul — its blood — you must not eat." JWs read the pair as the Noahic foundation for a universal and permanent blood prohibition that is then reaffirmed at and extended from eating to medical transfusion.
itself is uncontroversial — the gift of animal flesh as food. The doctrinal weight lives at verse 4, and the critical clarification is the domain of the command. is a food preparation instruction: flesh is to be properly bled before consumption, because the blood represents the life given by the Creator and is reserved for atonement use (). A medical transfusion does not enter the digestive tract and is not the ingestion of flesh. The 2026 Governing Body concessions — that "the Bible does not comment on the use of a person's own blood in medical and surgical care" (March), and that the four main components of donor blood are a matter of conscience (September) — apply by their own logic to whole-blood transfusion too, because the Bible does not comment on transfusions at all; they did not exist until the twentieth century. The rule is extrapolated from a first-century council's dietary accommodation, not commanded by Jehovah.