Chapter 17 is in many ways a connecting and transitional chapter. Stemming back from the golden calf incident in Exodus 32, the remainder of Exodus through Leviticus 16 has primarily focused on the work of the priests (interacting with the people) in their protection against idolatry and understanding of God’s holiness, especially how to live and act among His presence among them. Aaron kicked this off as the person/priest primarily responsible for leading the people to the ill-fated golden calf. With that priest-channel of idolatry mostly straightened out, the next section transitions to defining the holiness (and paths to idolatry) of the average individual.
The first warning against improper action is against trying to avoid the sacrificial system altogether by killing animals outside of the sanctuary. This brings with it a number of problems. For starters, there has been a lot of effort made to sanctify (make holy) the various implements involved in the sacrifices (the altar, the priest, the clothes of the priest, etc.) Obviously, if you’re trying to administer sacrifices by yourself out in the wilderness, you are not the right person, are not clean, do not have access to any of the sanctified items, and are not in the proper area. Further, this prohibition makes it pretty easy to spot someone who is actually trying to sacrifice to another god (in this case some sort of goat-demon) vs. someone who is making an offering to Yahweh. “Whoring” after these other gods (think offering one’s body and service to them) seems to be something the Israelites are prone to. Having such clear and specific instruction on what an offering to Yahweh looks like prohibits someone from trying to claim they were offering sacrifices in the wilderness to Yahweh when they were actually offering to another god.
The penalty for violating this is that the violator shall be “…cut off from among his people”. Basically, this offense is akin to murder and will be punished by God directly. The lack of immediate punishment by the community that surrounds the violator may make it seem like they are getting off easy. However, the threat of being cut off by the hand of God would hover over a guy like an incurable and imminent disease whose effects may come upon him at any time without warning. The sense of paranoia that would exist in such a circumstance (and the fact that on the other side of that is the specific attention of a holy God on you) would make this consequence very difficult to bear.
Of course, there is a solution here. If you kill an animal in the wilderness, bring it in. The priest will make sure the blood is out, burn the fat, and give the meat back to you. No worries. Note that this law is not restricted to followers of Yahweh, even those who are just travelling through or are guests in the land must bring their meet to the tabernacle to be offered as a peace offering to Yahweh. There are certain things God will just not permit within His presence and fealty to other gods is one of them.
In v.10 we get a sense of how this whole sacrificial system works and why there is such a focus on blood. God declares that the blood of an animal is its life and it has been given to the people as a means of atonement. When sin entered the world, death came with it. The sacrificing of the animal allowed for that punishment to be covered, “atoned” for, with the animal acting as a substitute for the guilty person/people. The overall respect for blood (draining of it, not eating it, etc.) is centered around a respect for life itself (this is not foreign so far in the Torah, we saw a similar description in Genesis 9).
Two more distinctions are made as the chapter ends. If you’re hunting and you kill a beast, you must drain all of its blood and cover the blood with the dirt. It’s possible there’s a distinction here between wild game and those that are available for sacrifice. The strictest interpretation would be that if it’s an animal that is able to be sacrificed (ox, sheep, bull, etc.) then it must always be brought to the tabernacle to be dealt with, even if they are just going to drain the blood, burn the fat, and return the meat. However, if it’s not one of those and it is hunted and killed in the wild, then it doesn’t have to be taken to the priest, you just have to make sure to drain all of the blood before you eat it. The less strict interpretation is that anything hunted in the wild can be dealt with in the wild. I lean towards the more strict interpretation because the primary concern here is protecting against idol sacrifice in the wild so it would make the most sense that any animal killed that was allowed to be sacrificed to Yahweh would have to be taken to the tabernacle to be dealt with as an affirmation it wasn’t being whored-out to a goat-demon.
Finally, it’s unclean to eat an animal that dies on its own or is killed by another animal. If you do so, you have to bathe yourself and clean your clothes and wait the day and then you’ll be clean. If you refuse to do that, you remain unclean and bear the risk of walking around in an unclean state when a holy God lives among you. As attested in prior chapters, this is not a sensible risk to take.