Leviticus 3:17
By a perpetual law for your generations, and in all your habitations: neither blood nor fat shall you eat at all.
The verse in its languages
- Vulgate (Clementine)
- jure perpetuo in generationibus, et cunctis habitaculis vestris : nec sanguinem nec adipem omnino comedetis.
- Septuagint (Swete)
- νόμιμον εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα εἰς τὰς γενεὰς ὑμῶν ἐν πάσῃ κατοικίᾳ ὑμῶν· πᾶν στέαρ καὶ πᾶν αἷμα οὐκ ἔδεσθε.
- Hebrew (WLC)
- חֻקַּ֤ת עוֹלָם֙ לְדֹרֹ֣תֵיכֶ֔ם בְּכֹ֖ל מֽוֹשְׁבֹתֵיכֶ֑ם כָּל חֵ֥לֶב וְכָל דָּ֖ם לֹ֥א תֹאכֵֽלוּ
Haydock's commentary
Fat. It is meant of the fat, which by the prescription of the law was to be offered on God's altar: not of the fat of meat, such as we commonly eat. (Challoner)
This distinction is sufficiently insinuated; (chap. vii. 25,) whence it also appears that the fat, here forbidden, is only that, which, in all sacrifices, appertains to the Lord, ver. 9, 10. The fat which was intermingled with the flesh might be eaten, and even the rest if the animal was not sacrificed. God repeatedly forbids the use of blood, chap. xvii. 13. Yet the Jews abstain from the fat also of all oxen, sheep, and goats; (Josephus, [Antiquities?] iii. 10,) and some, adhering to the words of this text, forbid the use of fat indiscriminately. (Calmet)
Cornelius a Lapide condemns it, if the animal might be offered in sacrifice, though it were slain at home.
From Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary, 1859, in the transcription made by Todd Easton and kept online by John Paul Wohlschied at johnblood.gitlab.io/haydock.
The Fathers on this verse
Tertullian On Fasting, Chapter VI
Now, if there has been temerity in our retracing to primordial experiences the reasons for God’s having laid, and our duty (for the sake of God) to lay, restrictions upon food, let us consult common conscience. Nature herself will plainly tell with what qualities she is ever wont to find us endowed when she sets us, before taking food and drink, with our saliva still in a virgin state, to the transaction of matters, by the sense especially whereby things divine are handled; whether (it be not) with a mind much more vigorous, with a heart much more alive, than when that whole habitation of our interior man, stuffed with meats, inundated with wines, fermenting for the purpose of excremental secretion, is already being turned into a premeditatory of privies, (a premeditatory) where, plainly, nothing is so proximately supersequent as the savouring of lasciviousness. …