Blanks?   Well, the idiom means what just about everyone knows it means.

By the time I was 20 years old  I had many instances of "blood is thicker than water" translated into French and most of them had either "la famille passe avant tout" or "la voix du sang est la plus forte" (there were also some literal translations: "le sang est plus épais que l'eau" (which I imagine were done by people wh'd never learnt not to translate idioms word for word, because I've never heard that used in French). And I had also seen those French phrases translated as "family comes first" or "blood is thicker than water".   So the meaning commonly assumed today was clearly the actual meaning then.  On the other hand, the phrase "the covenant of blood is thicker than the water of the womb" seems to have originated in 1994, when I was 50 years old, so it doen't seem to be the original version, but of course some people have jumped on it and all sorts of justification for it have been invented (such s "the blood of the covenant" means the blood spillt or risked in battle, so that   comrades in battle come before family).  The earliest uses I know of "blood is thicker than water" in modern English all have Scottish origin; they are by Scott (in 1815), Ray/Belfour (in 1813), and Ramsay (1737).  And of course "blood is thicker than water" iis generally translated as "Is luaithe a leanabh fhéin a bhaisteas an sagart" is commonly translated to/from "family comes first" or "blood is thicker than water" so it seems obvious from that that the English phrases must have the traditional pro-kinship meaning..  According to wikipedia (not neccessarily a reliable source unless the rubbish edit-wars of the past haven't continued into the present) variants of it occurred in Early Middle English (which got it from German sources) and in those days it meant "Kin comes first".