Melchizedek: The Most Mysterious Man in the Bible

Genesis 14 contains one of the most mysterious passages in the entire Bible after Victorious battle Abraham returns from rescuing his nephew lot who had been captured and he encounters a man who appears seemingly out of nowhere and king melkisedek of Salem brought out Bread and Wine he was Priest of God most high this priest king melkisedek blesses Abraham and Praises God for delivering his enemies into his hands Abraham responds by giving melkisedek a tenth of everything he owns this Brief Encounter has mystified readers for thousands of years for several reasons melkisedek appears suddenly with no

prior introduction or lineage and then he's never mentioned again in the narrative also he's described as both a king and a priest a rare combo and on top of that he's a priest of God before the establishment of the official Israelite priesthood in Jerusalem a much later arrival in Israel's history as the Bible tells it moreover melkisedek is a priest king of God most high the Hebrew reads L Elon L was a widely applied epithet in the ancient near East not only for the god of Abraham but also for a high God in the Canaanite

Pantheon L Elon in particular appears in several ancient inscriptions and seems to have been a Canaanite and Phoenician deity worshiped as the creator of Heaven and Earth though Scholars still debate whether the name llon refers to a single being or combines two different gods so for which God is melkisedek a priest even back then no one could agree what that meant so in this video we're going to get to the bottom of the mystery of melkisedek who was he what did different Traditions say about him and what do we learn from his curious appearance in

the Book of Genesis melkisedek appears in just three places in the whole Bible this mysterious passage in Genesis 14 then again in a brief mention in Psalm 110 and again in Hebrews chapter 7 in each chapter it's clear that there's a bunch of contexts that we're missing Psalm 110 briefly mentions a lineage of priests in the order of melkisedek Christians later situated Jesus in this lineage inspired by Psalm 110 Hebrews chapter 7 in the New Testament presents melkisedek as a priest who prophetically foreshadows the coming of Jesus after all melkisedek is a priest king who

brings out bread and wine kind of sounds jesusyouth arises resembling m one who has become a priest not through a legal requirement concerning physical descent but through the power of an indestructible life in other words Jesus could be a priest as well in a lineage stretching back to melkisedek so how do we get from the melkisedek in Genesis to the melkisedek in Hebrews a figure that foreshadows the Messiah well both then and now people love writing spin-offs taking minor characters in their favorite content and elevating them to main character status giving them new backstories fleshing

out their their character and putting them into new scenarios ancient Jewish and Christian writers did this with Enoch they took a minor character mentioned briefly in the Book of Genesis and made a whole enoic Cinematic Universe with Enoch as the main character in many ways melchisedec got the same treatment a minor character in The Book of Genesis who's later massively elevated there were two major ways that people interpreted him we might call these the Prototype interpretation and the exalted being interpretation we can think of these as two answers to the same question what does it

mean that melkisedek appears as a priest before there were priests among the people of Israel let's start with the Prototype interpretation this is clearest in Jewish rabbi literature like in a collection of rabic teachings on Jewish law called the mishna and extended commentaries on earlier rabbinic teachings called the talmud in these texts melkisedek is most often portrayed as a Proto Rabbi a rabbi before there were rabbis who reflected rinic ideals so for example circumcision is super important for Jewish identity well according to these texts melkisedek was born circumcised knowledge of Torah is fundamental well melkisedek

taught Torah to Abraham before Moses even existed put another way melkisedek proves that the rabbis stand in a tradition of piety that ran all the way back to Creation in fact one tradition even says that Adam himself the first man passed on his Priestly robes to melkisedek who then passed them on to Abraham it was also common in ancient Jewish interpretation to translate the proper name melkisedek as a title the righteous King so if melkisedek was a title and not a name what was his real name a lot of rinic literature identified him as Shem

one of the sons of Noah if melkisedek was in fact Shem of course it was no problem for Abraham to show him so much respect however not all rinic texts were so positive given that he's often viewed as a protor rabbi an Exemplar of piety rabbis needed to address a potentially awkward question why didn't melchisedec's descendants get to be priests after all Israelite priesthood was her AR and his priesthood clearly predated the Jerusalem Temple why weren't the Israelite priests in a lineage stretching back to melchisedec instead of the brother of Moses well according to one

tradition in the talmud the key phrase in Genesis 14 is he was a priest was past tense this particular interpretation suggests that melkisedek might have done something questionable in Genesis 14 mlisc blesses Abraham Before He blesses the highest God in other words he prioritized Abraham over God this misstep according to some rabbis resulted in the loss of the priesthood for his Descendants the text from the talmud says Abraham said to him and does one place the blessing of the servant before the blessing of his master immediately the Holy One Blessed Be he gave the priesthood

to Abraham interestingly similar prototype interpretations are found in Samaritan Traditions as a reminder from my earlier video The Samaritan Israelites are an ethn religious group who Trace their identity in scripture like the Jews back to Antiquity the Samaritan Israelites recognize the pent as scripture and so they also venerate Abraham and there's some partial evidence suggesting that ancient Samaritans also associated melkisedek with Shem one of the sons of Noah as we'll see in the second part of this video there's an argument that the melkisedek passage in Genesis CH 14 looks the way it looks because of

anti-s Samaritan edits turning now to the exalted being interpretation according to this reading melkisedek has some kind of cosmic or even Supernatural significance remember this is a different type of answer to the same question what does it mean that melkisedek was a priest before there were priests among the people of Israel this sometimes features in rabic literature as well but it's much more common Elsewhere One of the most significant examples of a Supernatural mesc is found in a short tractate discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls a text with the super memorable name 11 Q13 these

materials were discovered in the late 1940s and revolutionized how we understood ancient Judaism in particular the Dead Sea Scrolls alerted us to the sheer variety of opinions within Judaism at the time from 11 Q13 we know that at least some an ient Jews represented melkisedek as a figure who would be instrumental in bringing about the Messianic age perhaps even instrumental to the Forgiveness of sins on a final day of atonement at the end of time for example 11 Q13 interprets a section from the book of Isaiah which Begins the spirit of my sovereign God is

upon me because God has anointed me I have been sent as a Herald of Joy To The Humble to bind up the wounded of heart to Proclaim release to the captives Liberation to the imprisoned sounds Messiah likee and if it sounds familiar to some of you it's because the Gospel of Luke in the Christian New Testament represents Jesus claiming that he has fulfilled the section of Isaiah but 11 Q13 Associates this joyful time to come with melkisedek it will be melkisedek who will Proclaim to them Liberty to forgive them all their iniquities this mzc in

the final days will bring the sons of Light to the path of Torah and he's described as Waging War against the satanic figure bile but melkisedek will carry out the Vengeance of God's judgment and on that day he will free them from the hand of bile and from the hand of all the spirits of his lot some interpreters understand the melkisedek and 11 Q13 as an Angelic being others interpret him as Messianic but what's clear is that this melkisedek has Cosmic significance and this isn't the only place where we find an exalted melkisedek let's consider

a tretis found among the nagadi codes these texts were found in Egypt and likely originated in an early Christian monastic context they contain a lot of material that focuses on Cosmic speculation and philosophy and famously and problematically they've been called Gnostic texts though from a scholarly perspective they're particularly interesting because they show us just how diverse Christian practice and thought was at the time the nonomi melchisedec Treatise is highly fragmentary less than 50% of the text can be reconstructed I mean this is what my copy looks like today it's really hard to read but from

what we can tell it was an apocalypse of melkisedek Apocalypse in the sense that melkisedek receives Divine Revelations ultimately realizing that he himself is an expression of Jesus Christ and that they will play a fundamental role in The Cosmic struggle against Satan at the End of Time the text prophesies that melkisedek will prevail over malevolent lower order Divine beings called the archons be strong oh melkisedek great high priest of God most high for the archons who are your enemies made War you have prevailed over them and you destroyed your enemies this text also connects mesc

to a priesthood for all time I am melkisedek the priest of God most high I know that it is I who truly the image of the true high priest in other words melkisedek is the archetypal priest this is the mirror opposite of Rabbi Traditions remember that rabbinic Tex put a hard stop to mkc's priesthood he lost it it was taken away from him when he accidentally blessed Abraham before God but this nagadi mlisc aligns with interpretations that we find in the book of Hebrews where the followers of Jesus are said to be priests according to

the order of melkisedek rabbis wanted no such thing but Christians found that the answer posed by melchisedec's mysterious priesthood pointed to a superior priesthood that ultimately superseded the Jerusalem priesthood so what do we do with these two sets of interpretations the main thing to notice is that melkisedek posed a problem a problem of interpretation Genesis 14 raises so many questions what does it mean that he was a priest who is this God L Elon what city is Salem is it Jerusalem and so a Jew who might have composed 11 Q13 a Christian who wrote up

nagadi melkisedek or the talmudic rabbis of the 6th Century all read the same text but they offer different interpretations and it's no wonder because Genesis 14 itself seems to have undergone multiple phases of editing the text that we have now is likely the result of repeated revisions by editors who were not entirely happy with the tradition as it was handed down to them let's return to the central passage of Genesis 14 as a reminder it's an earlier part of Abraham's story before he had his son Isaac and even before he had the name Abraham he's

still called Abram here and he's already a leader with Divine favor getting caught up in the Affairs of local Kings we need to look at the whole passage to really see how it may have been edited over the years in verse 17 after defeating a coalition of Canaanite Kings the king of Sodom came out to meet Abram and then verses 18- 20 king melkisedek of Salem brought out bread and wine and blesses Abram invoking L Elon then in verses 21 to 24 the king of Sodom offers Abram All The Spoils of War but Abram declines

and then in verse 22 Abram invokes L Elon so what's so strange about any of this well a few things first of all these melkisedek verses completely break the narrative structure the king of Sodom came out to meet him and king melkisedek of Sal brought out Bread and Wine wait what we were just talking about the king of Sodom and now we're talking about the king of Salem who then just disappears again second MDC blesses Abraham by invoking L Elon which as we've seen was a Canaanite deity not necessarily the god of Israel and then

suddenly in verse 22 Abram invokes Yahweh lelon Abram uses the epithet of melchisedec's God to refer to his own God adding the four-letter Divine name known as the tetragrammaton a name that Scholars think developed significantly later in Biblical history the simplest explanation that most Scholars endorse is that the melkisedek verses have been inserted into the story the story makes total sense without verses 18 to 20 see what happens when we delete them the king of Sodom came out to meet him then the king of Sodom said to Abraham give me the persons and take the

possessions for yourself the conversation flows between Abram and the king of Sodom the same is true for the mention of the god of Israel us the tetragrammaton scholars think the tetragrammaton was added by later scribes who wanted to make it very clear that Abram was not swearing by a Canaanite god and only worship the god of Israel this verse makes it explicit that the god of Israel and llon are one and the same this also gives the impression that melkisedek himself was a priest of God and not some other Canaanite deity so why do Scholars

think this well check out the Greek version of Genesis I will stretch out my hand to the most high God the Greek translators seem to be directly translating the Hebrew words llon but not the tetragramaton which is usually translated with the Greek word cuos in other words the Greek translators must have been sitting in front of a Hebrew manuscript without the tetragramaton now Genesis was originally written in Hebrew and then was later translated into Greek sometime during the helenistic period but many scholars think that the Greek version called the Septuagint sometimes preserves an older version

than what we find in the mastic text the standardized version of the Hebrew Bible compiled by Jewish Scholars sometime in Antiquity and the early medieval period The Scholar Robert Cargill who's one of the leading experts on melkisedek argues that in the case of Genesis 14 the tetragrammaton was added to the Hebrew Bible after the septu translation of the pentat which took place about 250 BCE however while a lot of Scholars think that verses 18 to 20 were added entirely he thinks that they're original but melkisedek was originally the king of Sodom before being changed to

the king of Salem this would solve that awkward jump in the narrative rather than jumping back and forth between the king of Sodom and then the king of Salem and then back to the king of Sodom Abram simply has a conversation with one king the king of Sodom melkisedek but why make this change well changing melkisedek from being the king of Sodom to the king of Salem makes a lot of sense Sodom is a famously evil city in Genesis and is destroyed by God just a little bit later in the narrative scribes would have been

motivated to distance Abram and melkisedek for that matter from having anything to do with Sodom as for Salem later interpreters argued that Salem refers to Jerusalem however ancient evidence doesn't really support this in ancient inscriptions Jerusalem is never referred to as Salem it's always a multi- syllable name aushim we see this in the amarna letters these were correspondences between the Egyptian pharaoh and the Canaanite Kings and a few of these tablets mentioned the city aushim or Jerusalem Salem was probably a different city and Dr cargle thinks it was a city located well north of Jerusalem

close to sheum sheum was deeply important to Abraham's story it was there that God first appeared to him promising to give the land to his descendants and where Abraham built an altar to the Lord marking the site as sacred Salem being a northern city fits with the general story of the Patriarchs in Genesis who spend a lot of their time up north around sheam and the City of Shilo but that change also had an unintended consequence Salem as a northern city was also close to mount gazim the holiest site for the Samaritan Israelites they believe

that the true rightful place for worshiping the god of Israel is gazim not Jerusalem Dr cargo argues that Salem's proximity to gazim made it geographically problematic for the later priesthood in Jerusalem who wanted to disassociate The Narrative from the northern region and Samaritan worship he argues that scribes needed to find ways to clarify that Salem meant Jerusalem not some other city so many scholars believe that the melkisedek verses were composed and added to the original narrative perhaps as late as the helenistic period which as it turns out is when melkisedek rapidly became more popular as

a Messianic figure which helps explain why get such a varied reception of melkisedek the story is already complicated a mysterious priest king a potentially problematic foreign God lelon and the unclear City of Salem but even more so the story apparently was circulating in multiple versions and no matter whose version you read it contained a layer of edits that aimed to clarify the meaning and significance of melkisedek that perhaps wasn't so clear in the earlier story overall there's no one definitive answer to who was melkisedek not because we've lost the explanation but because even in Antiquity

the material was already being interpreted in multiple ways was he king of Sodom or Salem priest of Lon or the god of Israel was Salem up north or was it Jerusalem ambiguity was baked into the story from the start compelling later editors to reinterpret what they were reading recognizing that biblical texts are composite documents with layers of authorship and interpretation is a crucial part of being biblically literate knowing that stories like mkis aex have been reinterpreted and reshaped over time helps us avoid simplistic or Surface level readings but unfortunately what's often presented as biblical literacy

is sometimes used to push partisan agendas take for example recent news about the state superintendent of Oklahoma mandating all public schools to teach the Bible under the guise of promoting a deeper understanding of the Bible these efforts can introduce narrow doctrinal interpretations this is why I turned to today's sponsor ground news to give me a clear view of new stories like this ground news is a website and app on a mission to give readers an easy data driven and objective way to read the news they aggregate stories from a bunch of different media outlets and

pair those stories with a quick visual breakdown of the political bias factuality and ownership of the sources reporting so let's return to that story from Oklahoma Herr news has aggregated 179 new sources covering this story 33% of the sources are left leaning 47% are in the center and 20% on the right using the headline comparison tool we can see how these stories Are Being Framed the right-wing website the Western Journal frames it as Oklahoma putting the Bible back in schools while the leftwing website the national zero focuses on the enforcement angle Oklahoma education secretary threatens

to revoke teaching licenses if instructors don't include Bible lessons every story also comes with a factuality rating of the reporting sources and a breakdown of who owns them whether they're publicly funded corporately owned or independent one of my favorite features is their blind spot feed which highlights stories that are being underreported or completely overlooked by news sources with a specific political leaning this helps us break out of our news Bubbles and see which stories are receiving disproportionate coverage on the right or left this not only helps us break out of our news bubbles but it

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