Who is melchizedek in genesis

Logos Bible Software makes this super easy , by the way. When I was working on a guide to the Book of Hebrews , I noticed that letter gives some attention to Melchizedek. So I took a break from that project to make a laundry list of biblical Melchizedek facts. The books Melchizedek is mentioned in are Genesis , Psalms , and Hebrews.

Melchizedek is introduced as a king during the time of Abraham. The Old Testament is silent about him until the book of Psalms, which alludes to him when describing a royal priesthood. Melchizedek is first mentioned in the Old Testament, and so you might expect the OT to have more to say about him than the NT.

His role in the Bible takes place in a span of just a few verses in Genesis, but the author of Hebrews unpacks his significance in great detail.

Or to put it another way, the writers of Genesis and Psalm give us four verses about Melchizedek. The author of Hebrews spends all of chapter 7 discussing his priesthood. We first meet Melchizedek right after one of the less-famous stories of Abraham in the Bible.

After God called Abram from Ur of the Chaldeans but before his name was changed to Abraham , the patriarch finds himself in an interesting situation: his wealthy nephew Lot has been kidnapped. Chedorlaomer, the king who had been controlling the city-states of the region was off conquering the nearby world.

So Ched makes Lot his prisoner and moves on. So he takes trained warriors, beats Ched in battle, and takes Lot and the spoils back to Canaan with him. Yet Melchizedek has none. No mention of a mother. No mention of a son.

Not really anything. The author of Hebrews makes a pretty big deal out of this. He contrasts the lineage-based priesthood of Aaron with Melchizedek, who has no recorded birth or death or anything He , 8.

This is where the discussion on Melchizedek gets really interesting, and goes in many different directions. Was he just a righteous man? An angel sent to govern the city of Salem? A priest is someone who performs religious rituals for divine beings on behalf of people. They also frequently offer sacrifices and do other things on behalf of humans. In a way, priests are human go-betweens. They serve gods on behalf of humans, and humans on behalf of gods. This usually means priests are held to a different standard than other humans—so that they can be ritualistically pure enough to interface with divine beings.

The books of Exodus and Leviticus give us a good look at some of the requirements God and Moses had for the Hebrew priests. Abram has just returned from defeating four kings in battle, and Melchizedek brings out bread and wine for the hero. Then Melchizedek blesses Abram:.

Melchizedek recognizes that Abram has aligned himself with the God above all other gods—and blesses both Abram and their mutual Creator.

Salem was a city-state in the land of Canaan. Dutch Nederlands. Finnish Suomi. German Deutsch. Hungarian Magyar. Indonesian Bahasa Indonesia. Italian Italiano. Norwegian Norsk. Polish Polski.

Swahili Kiswahili. Swedish Svenska. Back to Blog. Table of Contents. Who Is Melchizedek in the Bible? Not confusing at all, right? Abraham and Melchizedek. So what happens in the encounter between Abraham and Melchizedek in Genesis 14?

Melchizedek and the Messiah. Melchizedek and Jesus. Jesus, Our Royal Priest. Keep Exploring. You can ask me questions like: How can I donate? How do I update my payment method? How do I cancel my recurring donation? Why did I stop receiving your emails? How do I find a specific resource in your library? Genesis 14 starts off as a chronicle of war.

After 12 years of servitude, there was an uprising, which Kedorlaomer quashed with a vengeance, seizing captives and booty from the rebelling cities. Among those captured, Genesis 14 tells us, was Lot, the nephew of "Abram the Hebrew.

But Abram was a wealthy and powerful landowner, so he decided to go save his nephew. Abram took well-trained servants and attacked Kedorlaomer at night, chasing the enemy to Damascus and retrieving the stolen goods and people, including Lot. Here's where things get interesting. Lot and his family lived in Sodom. When Abram makes his triumphant return, he's first greeted by the king of Sodom identified earlier in the chapter as Bera. But before the king of Sodom has a chance to talk, Genesis introduces a new character not previously mentioned in the long lists of warring kings.

In verses , it says:. As we'll see, a lot has been made of those short verses. Here was a priest of "God Most High," — understood as the one true God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam — blessing Abram, who would soon become the patriarch of God's chosen people.

And here was Abram paying a tithe to this high priest, whose elevated position and authority predates all of the ancient prophets. Yet right after this momentous occasion in the history of monotheism, Melchizedek disappears. In the very next verse, we're back to the king of Sodom, who offers Abram a share of the spoils, which Abram, being a righteous man, refuses.

So how do we explain this rather awkward insertion of Melchizedek, priest-king of Salem, into the war narrative of Genesis 14? Robert Cargill , a professor of classics and religious studies at the University of Iowa, has some interesting theories.

According to Cargill, early editors of the Hebrew Bible chose to distance Abram from any positive encounters with a king of Sodom, since Sodom and Gomorrah came to be equated with vile wickedness and sin. That would explain why Melchizedek is so abruptly inserted into the narrative after the king of Sodom greets Abram.

In the original version, they were the same person. Cargill asserts that the scribes switched out Sodom for Shalem, a known city in Samaria. But how, then, did we get from Shalem to Salem translated as "peace" , a city believed to be a precursor to Jerusalem?

That's the result of yet another, later textual "tampering," writes Cargill. Starting around B. The Samaritans worshipped the same God as the Jews but had their own priests and their own temple on Mount Gerizim in Samaria.

Cargill believes that the Levite priests were the ones who changed Shalem to Salem as part of a centuries-long campaign to centralize all priesthood authority in Jerusalem and write Samaria out of the picture.

And by depicting Abram as making tithes to the priest-king of Salem, it strengthened the authority of the Jerusalem priests to also demand tithes from the faithful.