Melchizedek: the King-Priest of Salem

Hebrews cites the phrase “in the order of Melchizedek” from Psalm 110:4 at 5:6, 5:10, 6:20, 7:11 and 7:17, so the letter argues from the psalm as well as from Genesis.

The name stands in fourteen verses of the Berean text: Genesis 14:18 and 14:20, Psalm 110:4, and eleven in Hebrews 5 to 7.

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown hold the phrases of Hebrews 7:3 to his priesthood alone, in their Commentary of 1871.

Three Jewish readings survive from the centuries before the letter: a heavenly judge at Qumran, a moral allegory in Alexandria and a Bronze Age king in a history written under Rome.

Hebrews takes a fourth road: the man of Genesis 14, read through the oath of Psalm 110 and applied to Jesus.

Writing for a Roman readership, the Jewish historian treats Melchizedek as a plain fact of the past. He translates the name as “the righteous king” and says the king was made priest of God because he was righteous.

He then retells Genesis 14 in ordinary terms. The king supplied Abram’s exhausted army with provisions in abundance, praised him at the meal, blessed God for the victory, and accepted the tenth.

In the Jewish War he goes further and makes the same figure the city’s founding priest. He was the first to officiate there and the first to build a sanctuary on the site, and he renamed Salem as Jerusalem.

A generation before the letter to the Hebrews, Philo, a Greek-speaking Jew of Alexandria, read the three verses as moral allegory. In his hands the name and the city become a programme for the soul, the righteous king set against the tyrant and ruling a mind at peace. He identifies the priesthood with logos, reason itself, which pours out wine rather than water because what it gives the soul is stronger than drink. Elsewhere he calls him the great priest of God Most High.

Philo’s use of logos for Melchizedek shows the term was current among Jewish writers before Hebrews. Philo writes moral allegory, while Hebrews argues from a sworn oath about a priesthood.

Held by a rabbinic tradition, which Jerome records among the Hebrew interpreters of his day in his Hebrew Questions on Genesis. By the chronology of Genesis 11, Shem’s life overlapped Abram’s, so a priest of God Most High near Salem in that era could be the patriarch through whom worship before the Flood had passed.

Rashi, the eleventh-century French commentator, notes on Genesis 14:18 a midrashic explanation that he is identical with Shem, son of Noah, and cites the Talmud at Nedarim 32b. Epiphanius, a bishop of the fourth century, reports that the Samaritans held the same reading.

Held by churchmen of the fourth century whom Epiphanius reports in his Panarion, who said Melchizedek was the Son of God appearing to Abraham in the form of a man. They read the missing genealogy and death of Hebrews 7:3 as literal, so that the simplest account is that Melchizedek is the Son himself.

Commentators of the historical reading answer that 7:3 says he was made to resemble the Son of God and that 7:15 speaks of another priest arising in his likeness, so the letter compares two figures.

Malki-Tsedeq: “my king is righteousness,” the name; Hebrews adds that Salem means peace (7:2).

Shalem: “peaceful, complete,” the early name of Jerusalem.

kohen: priest, one who officiates (Genesis 14:18; Psalm 110:4).

El Elyon: God Most High, the God Melchizedek serves.

le’olam: forever, perpetually, the term of the oath in Psalm 110:4.

al-divrati: “after the order of,” the Hebrew idiom the Septuagint renders kata tēn taxin.

taxis: order, rank, the Septuagint’s term, quoted into Hebrews 5–7.

aphōmoiōmenos: “made to resemble” (7:3), a passive participle.

kreittōn: better, greater (7:7).

akatalytos: indestructible (7:16).

diathēkē: covenant; Jesus is made the guarantee of a better one (7:22).

aparabatos: permanent (7:24).