Genesis14chapter 14

Genesis 14:1-2

The first war in the Bible begins here, and this is also the first verse in which a man is called a king, since chapter 10 had spoken only of a kingdom. It starts out of Shinar, the plain where Babel was built and where Nimrod began to reign. Four kings come west against five, and the writer gives their names and their cities like a record rather than a story, which is why the identification of these men has been argued over for more than a century.

Genesis 14:3-4

The narrator names the valley by what it became rather than by what it was, because one chapter earlier the same plain was well watered everywhere, like the garden of the LORD. Lot chose it on that description. The whole political cause of the war is two lines, twelve years of tribute and a rebellion in the thirteenth, and the fourteenth year brings the army back.

Genesis 14:5-7

Chedorlaomer comes down the east side and strikes the Rephaim, the Zuzim, the Emim and the Horites before he ever turns toward Sodom. Deuteronomy 2 says the Emim were counted among the Rephaim and were a people great and many and tall as the Anakim, so Israel will meet these same nations on this same ground on the way in. The Amalekites are named here before Amalek is born in chapter 36, which the older commentators take as the writer using the name the country carried in his own day.

Genesis 14:8-10

Five kings march out to fight and the ground defeats them, because the vale was full of slimepits and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fell there. That slime is the bitumen the builders used for morter at Babel in chapter 11, so the material that raised the tower swallows the army. Those who are left run for the mountain, which is where Lot will be told to run in chapter 19.

Genesis 14:11-12

The raiders strip the cities, and then the text adds the line that turns a border war into Abram's business, that they took Lot. Genesis identifies him by his choice, as the man who dwelt in Sodom, after he had pitched his tent toward it in chapter 13. The plain he picked for its water carries him off here and burns over him in chapter 19, where he is spared because God remembered Abraham.

Genesis 14:13

This is the first time the word Hebrew appears in Scripture, and it lands on Abram at the moment he is about to act for somebody else. The older commentators read the name either from Eber in the line of Shem or from the verb to cross over, which would make it the title of the man who came from the other side of the river. The same verse shows him in a working alliance with three Amorite brothers, Mamre, Eshcol and Aner, whose names the chapter will need again in its last line.

Genesis 14:14-15

Genesis calls Lot his brother here and again at verse 16, though verse 12 had said brother's son, and this is the book that opened with a man who killed his brother and then asked whether he was his brother's keeper. Abram takes three hundred and eighteen men born in his own house against an army that had just beaten five kings, divides his force, and attacks in the dark. He chases them past Damascus, the city that supplies the name of his steward Eliezer in the very next chapter.

Genesis 14:16-17

Nothing is left behind, and the writer stops to say that the women were brought back as well, which is the detail a raided household would care about most. Then two kings come out to meet the same man in the same valley, and the chapter sets them side by side on purpose. One comes from Sodom to bargain over the spoil, and the other comes from Salem, the place Psalm 76 sets in parallel with Zion. The king's dale is named once more in 2 Samuel 18, where Absalom raises a pillar to keep his own name alive.

Genesis 14:18

Melchizedek walks in with no father, no mother, no genealogy and no departure, which is loud in a book organised by genealogies. This one verse carries the first priest named in Scripture, the first bread and wine set together, and the first use of the title most high God. Psalm 110 swears a priesthood after his order and Hebrews 7 builds its argument on him, resting it on what Genesis declines to say about his parentage. Matthew Henry is among those who read him as an appearance of Christ himself, while Adam Clarke reads him as a real Canaanite king whose ancestry is missing in exactly the way Bera's and Birsha's are.

Genesis 14:19-20

The blessing runs in two directions, over Abram first and then back to God, and the priest calls God the possessor of heaven and earth. Abram answers by handing over a tenth of everything, the first tithe in Scripture, given long before any law required it and given by the man who held the promise to a priest who held no covenant. Jacob will vow the same tenth at Bethel in chapter 28. Hebrews 7 presses the order of the transaction, that the lesser is blessed by the greater and that Levi paid tithes while still in the loins of Abraham.

Genesis 14:21-22

Sodom's king offers a trade that sounds generous, the people back and the property kept, and Abram will not touch it. He answers with an oath sworn by lifting his hand, the oldest form of it in the book, and he swears using the exact title he had just heard from Melchizedek, the possessor of heaven and earth. To that title he adds the covenant name, so the words he took from a Canaanite priest he binds to the LORD who called him out of Ur.

Genesis 14:23-24

Abram had come up out of Egypt rich, paid in sheep and oxen and servants by a Pharaoh who thought he was buying a sister, and here he refuses to be made rich by a king of Canaan who is offering honestly. The only ground he ever owns in the land of promise he buys with his own silver, four hundred shekels for a burying place in chapter 23. He does not lay his own vow on Aner, Eshcol and Mamre, who never made it, and he tells them to take their portion. Chapter 15 opens straight out of this refusal, with God telling him to fear nothing because God is his shield and his exceeding great reward.