Leviticus 17:11
Leviticus 17:1111For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for your souls upon the altar; for it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.
This verse is one of the foundational proof-texts for the Watchtower's blood prohibition. Witnesses are taught that blood represents life and belongs exclusively to Jehovah, and on this basis a transfusion of whole blood is forbidden. For decades the ban also covered the four main components of another person's blood; since September 2026 accepting those has been a matter of personal conscience. Under the earlier policy many Witnesses, including children with treatable cancers, refused treatments that are now a personal choice.
The verse is about altar atonement under the Mosaic covenant — "the blood that makes atonement by means of the life in it." Read it with : that atoning purpose has been fulfilled once for all in the blood of Christ, who "obtained an everlasting deliverance" by entering the holy place with his own blood. The ceremonial-blood law was about altar use, not about emergency medicine. A transfusion is not an offering on an altar; it does not enter the stomach; it does not consume blood as food. Even Orthodox Jews, who take the dietary blood laws of Genesis 9 and Leviticus 17 with the utmost seriousness, have no problem with transfusions. The Watchtower's reading misapplies a ceremonial law to a medical procedure that did not exist in the first century. And by the Watchtower's own 2026 admissions — "the Bible does not comment on the use of a person's own blood in medical and surgical care", and the Scriptures "do not comment on the various products that may be derived from blood" — the same logic applies to whole-blood transfusion: the Bible does not comment on transfusions of any kind.
The NWT renders the Hebrew nephesh as "life" both times in this verse — "the life of the flesh is in the blood ... atonement by means of the life in it." The KJV, NASB, and other literal English versions retain "soul" for nephesh in this passage, preserving the verse's depth ("the soul of the flesh is in the blood"). The "life-in-blood" reduction is not strictly mistranslation — nephesh can mean life — but the consistent flattening across the chapter strips the verse of its theological texture and slots it neatly into the JW blood-prohibition framework. Cross-check the NWT's use of "soul" elsewhere in Genesis-Leviticus: it is used hundreds of times. The choice to drop it here is targeted.