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These laws require that every domesticated animal—namely cattle, sheep, and goats (cf. 1:2)—be offered on the altar before the Tent of Meeting. If a person does not follow this procedure, that person will be guilty of shedding blood and be subject to the penalty of being cut off from the people of God. The fact that these penalties are so severe indicates the heavy value the OT places on all life. The purpose of this law was to put an end to the practice of making sacrifices in the open field. This practice was dangerous, for the people not only made sacrifices to God, they also directed their sacrifices to satyrs, i.e., goat demons, which they believed inhabited these open lands. By placating these field demons with their slaughtering, which they considered to be a sacrifice, the popular belief was that they could avoid those forces such as blight, mildew, and locust, that diminished greatly the yield of a field or even wiped out the entire harvest. Yahweh does not permit worship or acknowledgment of any other deities. That is why the transgression of this standard carried the heavy “cut off” penalty.
A major problem with interpreting this law is that it conflicts with the law in Dt 12:20-27, which permits the slaughter of domesticated animals at one’s home. Conservatives reconcile these laws by understanding this law in Leviticus to apply only to the wilderness period, being set aside by the new law in Deuteronomy for the time of occupying the land. The major problem with this interpretation is that v.7b says that this law is an eternal statute. Other scholars, for the most part, find the setting for this law to be the small community of Jews gathered about Jerusalem in the early days after the return from Babylonian captivity. In their opinion the priestly leaders of this community put away the law found in Deuteronomy. This position does not seem realistic, for it does not seem likely that the priests of this small community would formulate laws that would place a great hardship on Jews scattered throughout the land of Israel and the diaspora, and undermine support from the very people who would form the nucleus of a Jewish community in Israel. In light of the great obstacles to these two positions, a third alternative is proposed. This position follows the understanding of the term for “slaughter” by Jewish scholars like Akiba, Siphra, and Levine. They take this word to refer to ritual slaughter, not slaughter in general. This prohibition, then, forbids the making of peace offerings in an open field away from an official altar where no official priest would be present to manipulate the blood properly. In this light there is no tension between the laws in this chapter in Leviticus and those in Dt 12.