Melchizedek - a Literary Phantom to an Eternal Priest and Savior
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Note: This article is based on updated research and is intended to replace my old article on Melchizedek, written several years ago. It has also been produced as a documentary at the MythVision YouTube channel.
Melchizedek. You’ve probably heard that name before, but many Christians would be hard-pressed to tell you who he was or why he was significant to Judaism and Christianity. Since his name only appears twice in the Old Testament, how important could he be? Nevertheless, this marginal figure and the Hellenistic legends that developed about him ended up influencing Second Temple Judaism and early Christian theology in profound ways.
The purpose and origins of the Melchizedek story in Genesis are also far from obvious. He appears out of nowhere as a Canaanite priest-king devoted to the God of Israel at a time when the Canaanites were supposedly wicked idol worshippers, bestowing blessings on Abraham after a military campaign that portrays the peaceful patriarch as a powerful military commander.
Thanks to recent biblical scholarship, we might finally have a solution to most of these puzzles. Stay tuned as we explore how the legend of Melchizedek grew from his surprising Old Testament origins into a major savior figure for the Dead Sea Scrolls cult and early Christians.
Part I. Melchizedek in the Old Testament
The Battle Campaign of Genesis 14
The only narrative passage in the Bible that mentions Melchizedek is Genesis chapter 14, and we need to take a closer look at the surrounding events concerning Abraham in order to understand what Melchizedek is doing here.
In the preceding chapter, we read about how Abraham — or rather, "Abram" as he is called here — and Lot the kinsman of Abram have migrated together from Egypt into southern Palestine with their livestock herds. Because of disputes between the herders employed by Abram and Lot, the two men decide to split up and go their separate ways. Lot chooses the fertile plain of the Jordan River near the city of Sodom, and Abram settles in the hill country of Canaan. It is at this time that Yahweh makes the famous promise to Abraham that all the lands he can see will belong to his offspring, who will be like the dust of the earth in number. Abram then builds an altar to Yahweh at Hebron.
The theme of Yahweh’s promise to Abram continues in chapter 15, as Yahweh comes to Abram in a vision, promising him a son and declaring that his descendants will be like the stars in the sky in number.
Sandwiched between these two chapters, however, is a story that is unlike anything else in Genesis. It tells of an invasion by four nations led by the king of distant Elam, named Chedorlaomer. First, these invaders subdue the towns of southern Canaan. Then they defeat the kings of the Dead Sea pentapolis, including Sodom. They pillage Sodom, kidnap Lot, and then depart.
When Abram hears of this, he forms an army of trained warriors from his household. Abram and his army chase the four kings to the distant north — first to the city of Dan, and then to a place called Hobah north of Damascus — and defeat them. Abram recaptures the loot along with Lot and the other abductees and returns home.
A few things happen when Abram returns. First, the king of Sodom comes out to meet him at a place called the King’s Valley. In the next verse, verse 18, we are told that "King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was a priest of El Elyon." In verses 19 and 20, Melchizedek says to Abram:
"Blessed be Abram by El Elyon, maker of heaven and earth,and blessed be El Elyon, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!"
Lastly, the text says "and he gave him one-tenth of everything." Grammatically, the subject he should refer to the speaker Melchizedek, who gives a tenth of his wealth to Abram, even though all English Bibles translate it the opposite way. This becomes an important issue later on.
Melchizedek’s sudden appearance in these three verses is jarring, because no earlier verse has mentioned him, and the city of Salem, presumed to be Jerusalem, has no obvious connection to the story. This is another problem we’ll come back to.
The narrative then returns to the king of Sodom, who offers to let Abram keep the plunder he recovered, but Abram declines the offer.
The Historicity of Genesis 14
For a long time, Bible scholars assumed that some memory of a genuine historical event lay behind this story. However a century of archaeological research failed to produce any evidence for these four kings and their campaign in Palestine. There was simply no time in the second millennium BCE when an international alliance led by Elam could have been a historical reality. In fact, every aspect of this story creates problems when viewed through the lens of historicity.
For one thing, while Elam and Shinar are well-known places, the lands of Goiim and Ellasar, where the other two kings came from, are difficult to identify. Similarly, the names of the four kings themselves are unknown in the historical record.
The names of Canaanite kings, meanwhile, seem to have been intended as puns or "message-names". The king of Sodom, for example, is named Bera, which means "in evil", and the king of Gomorroah, Birsha, has a name that means "in sin." Although these kings are the good guys in Genesis 14, their names remind the reader of that other Sodom and Gomorrah tale.
The geography of Genesis 14 also poses difficulties. In particular, the reference to Dan is anachronistic, because according to the book of Judges, that city was named by the Danites after their ancestor Dan, a great-grandson of Abraham who has not even been born yet in this story. It’s also a problem that no city named Hobah existed anywhere in the region of Damascus.
Additionally, there is the matter of Melchizedek himself. At one time, scholars speculated that Melchizedek might have belonged to a "Zadokite" line of priest-kings who ruled Jerusalem before the Israelites conquered it, but our modern knowledge of Bronze Age Jerusalem, particularly in light of the Amarna tablets, rules this out.
Lastly, the very idea that texts like Genesis would contain cultural memory about minor historical events that took place centuries or millennia earlier is problematic. Old Testament scholar Ronald Hendel points out that looking for historicity in passages like Genesis 14 is pointless. He writes:
These historical questions relate to the time of individual events, the smallest scale of history. Cultural memory is liable to forget particular events within a few generations. […] When one looks beyond a few generations, cultural memory tends to forget or blur these small time scales and relates instead to larger scales of historical time, particularly to the scale of "social time." This timescale does not pertain to small, punctuated events, but to the longer rhythms of society, religion, ethnicity, and economy. (Hendel 2012:65)
It has become clear to modern historians, Bible scholars, and archaeologists that the story of Genesis 14 does not refer to historical events. So where did this story and its characters come from, and what does that mean for the historicity of Melchizedek?
The Offerings of Melchizedek by James Tissot
Genesis 14 as a Late Addition to the Abraham Legend
It is now a widespread view among scholars that chapter 14 was a late insertion into the book of Genesis. We have already seen how it disrupts the story in chapters 13 and 15, which are concerned with God’s promises to Abraham and flow more smoothly without chapter 14. John Van Seters, in his famous book on the themes of Genesis, titled Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis, notes that Genesis 14 is too late to have any relevance to the main text of Genesis.
A recent, meticulously researched book on Melchizedek by a Norwegian scholar named Gard Granerød (Granerød 2010) provides an insightful theory as to why Genesis 14 was written and inserted into the Abraham narrative – a theory that, if correct, fortifies the case that Genesis 14 was later than the surrounding chapters. Granerød argues that the earlier story of Abraham contained critical literary gaps that a later editor of Genesis wanted to resolve.
For example, in Genesis 13, God instructs Abram to walk "through the length and the breadth" of the Promised Land. But what does Abram actually do in response to this command? He simply pitches his tent at Hebron and builds an altar.
Genesis 14 fills in this omission. Interestingly, it is the invaders who take the first steps, as they traverse key locations throughout southern Canaan. Then Abram pursues them all the way to the far north, completing the journey through the land. In this way, Abram vanquishes and ousts the foreign nations to become the master of all the Promised Land. There seems to be a deliberate allusion here to Deuteronomy 34 and the vision God gives to Moses of a promised land stretching from Zoar in the south to Dan in the north — the two cities that in later times defined the furthest reaches of Israel.
The use of the name El Elyon, often translated as "God most high," is also interesting. The phrase is rare in the Bible and occurs mainly in later texts. It is also frequently used in Sirach, a Hellenistic book, and it was part of the title used by the Hasmonean priests.
We’re getting to the Melchizedek stuff, I promise! But establishing the late dating of Genesis 14 is a crucial first step for understanding how the Melchizedek legend developed. Just how late is Genesis 14? Granerød proposes that King Chedorlaomer is not simply a fictional person but a stand-in for a real nation in the author’s own day—namely, Persia, the empire that ruled Israel after the exile. Persia’s core territory included Elam, and Susa, the old Elamite capital, had become one of the capitals of Persia. Interestingly, Ezra 4 tells us that Elamites had been deported and settled in Samaria during the exile. Therefore, it is only during and after the exile that Jews would have been familiar with the Elamites and Elamite-sounding names. Chedorlaomer is indeed a plausible Elamite name, even though no actual king by that name is known to history.
In terms of genre, Genesis 14 is vastly different from the rest of the Abraham narrative but quite similar to the novelistic, quasi-historical narratives that were common in Jewish literature of the Persian and Hellenistic periods. These stories, such as Daniel, Esther, and Judith, freely mixed factual elements with fictional characters and events.
Granerød has convincingly shown that Genesis 14 is the same type of story, and it interweaves other Old Testament passages in its construction. The four invading nations are all found in the table of nations in Genesis 10, assuming Ellasar to be a variant of Elishah. The cities conquered by the invaders are the same cities mentioned in the wilderness wandering of Deuteronomy 1 to 3, with the order reversed. Abram’s pursuit of the invaders to Damascus and Hobah follows exactly the extent of David’s conquests in 2 Samuel 8, which includes Damascus and Zobah. Hobah, then, is probably just a misspelling of Zobah, and Abraham’s conquest of the four kings is an allegorical story expressing the hope and yearning of Jews – living under Persian or Seleucid rule and surrounded by deportees from other nations – to re-establish the Davidic kingdom of Israel.
As a result, Granerød and many other leading Old Testament scholars, including Thomas Römer and Israel Finkelstein, believe that Genesis 14 was composed in the Persian or Hellenistic period.
The Melchizedek Episode
Just as Genesis 14 interrupts the surrounding narrative of God’s promises to Abram, the three verses that concern Melchizedek — verses 18 through 20 — disrupt the dialogue between Abram and the king of Sodom. In verse 17, the king of Sodom goes out to meet Abram in the King’s Valley, but Melchizedek the priest-king of Salem appears without any earlier announcement in verse 18 to provide bread and wine, pronounce a blessing on Abram, and give a tithe. Then, just as suddenly as Melchizedek appeared, he disappears again, and the king of Sodom resumes his conversation with Abram. Melchizedek is not mentioned any further in Genesis.
As French scholar M. Delcor once put it,
"[Melchizedek] crosses the sky like a meteor, nobody knowing where he comes from or where he is going to." (Delcor 1971, p. 115)
If the suspicions of most scholars are correct, then chapter 14 originally lacked the Melchizedek verses when it was first inserted into Genesis. In other words, Genesis 14 is one of the latest passages of the Old Testament, and the Melchizedek verses are later still. This makes it quite unlikely that Melchizedek reflects any genuine memory of an ancient historical figure or the political situation in Bronze Age Jerusalem.
It also raises the possibility that rather than being based on Genesis, the Melchizedek mention in Psalm 110 actually came first.
The Problem of Psalm 110
Psalm 110 is, simply put, a puzzle. It appears to be a royal psalm, but its origins are debated, and the dates assigned to it range from the pre-exilic period of the monarchy to the Hasmonean period. The precise meaning of key verses also continues to elude scholars to this day. Let’s take a closer look at what it’s about.
The psalm is addressed to the king in Jerusalem, with Yahweh as the speaker. In the first three verses, it promises the king victory over his enemies and the loyalty of his people.
YHWH says to my lord: Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.YHWH sends out from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your foes.Your people will offer themselves willingly on the day you lead your forces in holy splendor. From the womb of the morning, the dew of your youth will come to you.
In verse four, Yahweh swears an oath and makes a statement to the king that is the crux of the problem. The typical translation, such as that given by the NRSV is this:
You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.
However, the NRSV offers an alternative translation in the footnotes:
You are forever a rightful king by my edict.
How can this sentence be translated in such different ways, and why has Melchizedek’s name disappeared from the second version?
According to Granarød, this sentence has two ambiguous components. One is Malki-tsedek, which in Hebrew looks more like two words connected with a maqaf – the Hebrew hyphen – than a person’s name. The malk part means king—which makes sense, since this psalm is addressed to the king—and the tsedek part has a wide semantic range that includes accuracy, loyalty, and righteousness. Some scholars believe that Tsedek was also the name of a Bronze Age Canaanite god, but there is no direct evidence for such a deity. Based on Aramaic inscriptions that use the same word to describe a vassal king’s loyalty to the Assyrian king or to his god, Granarød suggests that loyalty might be the best interpretation of tsedek here.
The second ambiguous component in verse 4 is the phrase al-dibrati, which appears nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. This is what scholars call a hapax legomenon. It means that Hebrew scholars and translators have no other examples of this word in ancient literature to help them understand its meaning. Traditionally, it has been translated "according to the order of." Granarød argues that, based on more well-understood phrases that are similar in structure and etymology, it means "for my sake" or "because of me." It does not appear to describe a priestly order or lineage.
Putting it all together, Granarød believes Psalm 110:4b is best translated as "You are a priest forever. For my sake my king is loyal." As a second possibility, he suggests "You are a priest forever, for my sake, O king of righteousness." The exact translation is not important. What is important is that without Genesis 14, Bible translators would have no reason to translate Malki-tsedek in Psalm 110 as a person’s name. This psalm is not about a Canaanite king named Melchizedek. It is a declaration by Yahweh that the king of Jerusalem is his loyal and righteous priest.
Is this interpretation 100 percent assured? Perhaps not, but it is easier to justify on linguistic grounds than the traditional interpretation, which is heavily reliant on the Septuagint and on the assumed existence of Melchizedek in Genesis 14. Furthermore, this new interpretation fits very well with the likelihood that Melchizedek was not introduced into the Abraham story until a very late date, and with the otherwise improbable fact that no other passage in the Old Testament ever mentions this so-called Melchizedek. The author of Psalm 110 was not writing about Melchizedek, because he had never heard of him.
Historicizing Psalm 110
When the various Hebrew psalms were compiled in the Hellenistic period, it became common practice to associate them with other biblical characters and stories. We see, for example, how many of them, including the 110th Psalm, are attributed to David even though they originally had nothing to do with him. Sometimes, details from the Psalms and other poetic texts could also be imported back into biblical narratives as a form of intertextuality.
An interesting example of this, given by Yair Zakovitch in a 2000 paper, is the story of King Amaziah and his defeat of the Edomites. In the original version of this story in 2 Kings 14:7, Amaziah kills 10,000 Edomites in battle and captures their rocky fortress of Sela.
The later version in 2 Chronicles 25:11–12, however, adds the detail that 10,000 Edomites were captured alive at Sela and thrown down onto the rocks, dashing them to pieces. This gruesome addition seems to be influenced by Psalm 137, which condemns the Edomites and Babylonians, saying "Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!"
Another example comes from a fascinating study by Marc Z. Brettler of Psalm 105 and its recounting of the Egyptian plagues. Through careful analysis of the Psalm’s structure and vocabulary, Brettler shows that the Psalmist was working not from Exodus itself, but from separate J and P sources of the plagues, and he added the Darkness episode to precede them. Some time later, the editor of the book of Exodus reused and embellished the Darkness plague but changed its placement in the plague sequence.
The same kind of intertextual influence may have been responsible for the Melchizedek verses in Genesis. Granarød argues that Psalm 110 was reinterpreted in the Hellenistic era as a historical poem about Abraham and his battle with the foreign kings. Because the ascription "of David" had been added, interpreters assumed that the speaking voice of the psalm was David, and who else could the great King David describe as his "lord" but Abraham, the father of all Israel? We see similar logic at work in Mark 12:37, where Jesus argues on the basis of Psalm 110 that the Christ cannot be a son of David, because David would not call his own son "lord."
Although our lack of Jewish scriptural commentaries from the Hellenistic period makes Granarød’s theory impossible to prove, the association of Psalm 110 with Abraham is evident in Rabbinic literature, and there is reason to think that Psalm 110 was read together with Genesis 14 in synagogues.
Melchizedek the Gap-Filler
Jews who interpreted Psalm 110 as a historical poem about Abraham would have discovered that it contained four surplus details about Abraham that were not originally explained in Genesis 14. Granarød believes that the Melchizedek character was invented on the basis of Psalm 110:4 and added to Genesis 14 to fill in those gaps.
The first surplus detail was the insistence that Yahweh was actively involved in Abraham’s battles. The battle campaign described in Genesis 14 takes place without any divine intervention. The Melchizedek verses fill that gap by declaring it was El Elyon who delivered Abram’s enemies into his hand. Remember that in Hellenistic times, El Elyon was a widely used title for the God of Israel.
The second detail is that in Psalm 110, Yahweh comes from Zion to provide aid for Abraham. Genesis 14 did not mention Zion; however, the Bible’s only other mention of ‘Salem’ — Psalm 76:2 — uses it as a synonym for Zion, and so Melchizedek bringing aid to Abraham from Salem fills this gap.
The third detail is that Psalm 110 confers on Abraham an eternal priesthood—an idea that dovetails nicely with Moses’s declaration in Exodus 19 that Israel is to be a kingdom of priests. Melchizedek giving tithes to Abraham confirms him as a priest, since only a priest could receive tithes. And if it seems strange to regard Abraham as a priest, remember that he builds altars to Yahweh on several occasions and performs sacrifices, nearly including that of his own son.
The fourth detail is that Psalm 110 describes Abraham having his head raised up because he drinks from a stream. Melchizedek bringing wine to Abraham might fulfill this element, although Granarød acknowledges that the case here is a bit weaker than the other three.
In summary, a strong case can be made that Genesis did not contain a character named Melchizedek until a fairly late date. The word malki-tsedek, if properly understood, is actually a description of the loyalty or righteousness of the king toward Yahweh. However, in Hellenistic times, this psalm was regarded as a poetic version of the story about Abraham in Genesis 14, and malki-tsedek was reinterpreted as the name of a priest-king associated with Abraham and his battle campaign.
Once the existence of this enigmatic priest-king became firmly established in Genesis 14 and in Psalm 110 — particularly the Greek translation of Psalm 110, which explicitly treats Melchizedek as a name — there was an explosion of interest in Jewish religious circles about this mysterious character’s identity and importance.
Part II. Melchizedek After the Old Testament
Embellishment of the Melchizedek Legend by Hellenistic Writers
Melchizedek is mentioned frequently by Jewish writers during the late Second Temple period, starting in the second century BC. The Genesis Apocryphon, an Aramaic retelling of Genesis, embellishes the story of Genesis 14 to smooth over the abruptness of Melchizedek’s appearance, and it specifies that Melchizedek rather than Abram was the recipient of the tithes.
Josephus and Pseudo-Eupolemus also recount and expand the story of Abram and Melchizedek. In book six of his Jewish Wars, Josephus goes so far as to state that Melchizedek was the first priest of God and the original founder of the Jewish temple, rather than Solomon. Like the Genesis Apocryphon, Josephus also clarifies that it was Abraham who paid the tithe. Pseudo-Eupolemus, on the other hand, says it was Melchizedek who paid the tithe to Abraham.
The Jewish historian and philosopher Philo of Alexandria describes Melchizedek in a truly remarkable way. In his book Allegory of the Laws, Philo says that Melchizedek was created directly by God as a king with his own priesthood, a symbol of lawfulness and righteousness in opposition to tyrants. He describes Melchizedek as the prince of peace, and then has this to say:
For [Melchizedek] is a priest, even the Logos, having as his portion Him that is, and all his thoughts of God are high and vast and sublime: for he is the priest of the Most High…
Scholars still debate exactly what Philo means here, but Philo seems to be describing Melchizedek as a priest-king specially created by God to serve as the Logos – an angel-like entity or substance that is able to bridge the chasm between the transcendent God, who necessarily exists outside the material cosmos, and the earthly realm. The Logos concept originated in Greek philosophy, and here, Philo is combining Greek concepts with an esoteric interpretation of Genesis in order to convey philosophical truth. However, Philo’s application of the Logos to Jewish theology was highly influential among early Christians, who believed the Logos was a divine redeemer sent by God to save humankind.
Second Enoch and the Need for a Priestly Deliverer
Another stage in the development of the Melchizedek legend is found in the book of 2 Enoch, which is generally now dated to the early first century. (Orlov 2012) Building on the pre-flood mythology of 1 Enoch, 2 Enoch describes the miraculous conception and birth of Melchizedek to Sothonim, the sister-in-law of Noah, even though Sothonim is barren and has not slept with her husband. This miraculous birth has important parallels with the birth of Noah in the earlier texts of 1 Enoch and the Genesis Apocryphon. Furthermore, Melchizedek emerges from his mother’s body as a fully grown adult with the "badge of priesthood" on his chest. This mark is probably the divine name YHWH, which Israelite priests wore on their turbans, but in this case, it signifies Melchizedek’s innate priestly nature. To keep Melchizedek safe from the lawlessness of the pre-flood world, God commands the archangel Michael to take Melchizedek to the Garden of Eden in heaven so that he can become God’s high priest after the flood. God also appears in a dream at night to Melchizedek’s father and gives him this promise:
"Melchizedek will be the priest to all holy priests, and I will establish him so that he will be the head of the priests of the future." (2 Enoch 71:29, Recension J).
An important theme of 2 Enoch is the idea that a "supra-human mediator figure" – to quote Lutheran theologian Charles A. Gieschen – rather than the Jewish law is needed in order to provide true deliverance from sin. Although the origins of 2 Enoch are obscure, Gieschen thinks it was written by a group that believed the Levitical priesthood in Jerusalem to be impure. This community, whoever they were, yearned for a divine mediator who could provide deliverance from the sin that had corrupted Israel and the world. As the original priest of God, miraculously ordained at the very beginning of history and then preserved in heaven for a time of destruction and judgment, Melchizedek seems to be an archetype for that deliverer.
Gieschen summarizes the Melchizedek-related portion of 2 Enoch as follows:
…the generative idea of 2 Enoch 69–73 is the need for a priestly mediator to provide deliverance from the grip of evil and offer atonement for sins. These chapters catalogue the divine origin and birth of a supra-human priest who will deal with evil and make atonement for sin. A very degenerative view of the Levitical priesthood is presented here. This indicates that it was probably still functioning at the time when this document was written. (Gieschen 2012:384)
The Gospel of Melchizedek
The most important Dead Sea Scroll concerning Melchizedek is a remarkable text called 11Q Melchizedek, which probably dates to the first century BC, although some scholars push it back to the second century. (Mason 2008:170)
The Judaean community that produced this scroll apparently believed Melchizedek himself to be the one who, in Psalm 110, sits at God’s right hand, has dominion over his enemies, and brings judgement. Accordingly, they looked for other Jewish texts that described such a figure.
One in particular they discovered was Psalm 82. According to 11Q Melchizedek, Melchizedek is the Elohim or "god" who sits in judgment and exercises God’s authority in Psalm 82. 11Q Melchizedek combines this psalm with pesher-style interpretation of Torah passages about the Day of Atonement and the Year of Jubilee (Mason 2008:182) to reinvent Melchizedek as a savior who, in the last days, will fight and destroy the armies of the devil Belial, judge humanity, set the captives free, provide atonement for the people of Zion, and usher in a new age of peace – christological roles that should be familiar to any Christian. 11Q Melchizedek also connects Melchizedek to the gospel or "good news" that is proclaimed in Isaiah 52:7. Thus, Melchizedek is Isaiah’s messenger who announces peace and salvation, and the phrase malak elohayik – "your God is king" – is understood as a pun or allusion to Melchizedek’s name. Furthermore, 11Q Melchizedek identifies Melchizedek as the anointed priest in the end times prophecy of Daniel 9:25:
This is the day of peace which he spoke of through Isaiah the prophet who said, "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, the messenger of good who announces salvation, saying to Zion, ‘your God is king’." … And the messenger is the anointed of the spirit, the one about whom Daniel said, "Until an anointed one, a prince, it shall be seven weeks." (11Q Melchizedek lines 15–16, 18, translated by Eric Mason, edited slightly and reformatted for clarity)
There are a handful of other fragmentary Dead Sea Scrolls that Melchizedek appears in, if scholars’ reconstructions of those scrolls are correct. In one called The Visions of Amram, he is equated with Michael, the Prince of Light and angelic counterpart to Belial, the prince of Darkness; in Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, he is again portrayed as an angelic priest who serves in the heavenly sanctuary.
Melchizedek in the Epistle to the Hebrews
The Epistle to the Hebrews is an oddity among the books of the New Testament. While Pauline theology and the Gospels interpret the death of Christ through the metaphor of the Passover lamb, Hebrews approaches it as a Yom Kippur or Day of Atonement sacrifice, which serves a very different purpose in Judaism. Hebrews also seems to have no room for a physical resurrection of Christ in its theology; instead, Christ’s ascension to heaven where he presents his own blood as an atonement sacrifice is the direct and immediate consequence of his crucifixion.
To explain how Christ could be the heavenly high priest despite being from the seed of Judah and not a Levite, Hebrews invokes the high priest mythology of Melchizedek. Christ may not be a Levite, but to the author of Hebrews, Christ is a divinely created son of God, and his eligibility for priesthood is affirmed by comparing him to Melchizedek, who, according to Hebrews 7:3, is also
…without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God, he remains a priest forever. (Hebrews 7:3)
The idea that Melchizedek is immortal probably originates with the statement in Psalm 110:4 (especially in the Septuagint) that Melchizedek is a priest "forever". A connection with the Jewish tradition of 11Q Melchizedek is also implied, because both 11Q Melchizedek and Hebrews link the messianic high priest and salvation of God’s people to the Yom Kippur ritual – a point of similarity that cannot be derived from either of the two Melchizedek passages found in the Old Testament. (Aschim 1999:139) More generally speaking, the author of Hebrews assumes that his audience is already fully acquainted with a well-developed tradition in which Melchizedek is not a dead historical character but an eternal priest in the heavenly temple.
In the verses that follow, the author of Hebrews defends the superiority of Melchizedek’s priesthood by arguing that because Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek, and the Levites were descended from Abraham, the Levites, who were still "in the loin" of Abraham, also paid tithes to Melchizedek in a sense. He then goes on to argue that tithes received by one who is immortal are superior to tithes received by mortal men – confirming that, for the author, Melchizedek is still alive and serving in the heavenly temple. Incidentally, this is why it is so important for English Bibles to translate Genesis 14 as having Abraham pay tithes to Melchizedek instead of the other way around. If we instead allow that it was Melchizedek who gave tithes to Abraham, the logic of Hebrews and its doctrine of soteriology collapses.
(As an aside, Christians who believe in the literal inerrancy of the Bible must contend with the fact the author of Hebrews has such a lofty view of Melchizedek as an immortal angelic priest – a view that goes well beyond what can be gleaned from the canonical Old Testament.)
The conclusion of this argument in Hebrews chapter 7 is that Christ must be the one spoken of in Psalm 110, and the oath sworn by God that Christ would live on as a priest forever makes his position superior to the earthly Levites, who must continue to offer sacrifices day after day.
Over the years, scholars have often noted the affinity between Hebrews and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a few have speculated that Hebrews might have been written for an audience of Essenes who had converted to Christianity. One New Testament scholar, the late John O’Neill of Edinburgh University, even goes so far as to suggest that Hebrews was originally written about the Teacher of Righteousness – the martyred leader of the Jewish sect at Qumran – and only later revised as a Christian epistle. (O’Neill 1999) His proposal is based not only on the theology of Hebrews but also on the fact that every appearance of the name "Jesus", aside from the epistolary appendix at the end, is either missing from certain manuscripts or can be challenged on grammatical grounds as a secondary gloss. O’Neill’s view has not been widely accepted and is probably not even known to most scholars today, but the fact that such a position is possible shows how well Hebrews fits into a pre-Christian Jewish framework.
The potential connection between Hebrews on the one hand and the Melchizedek traditions of Qumran on the other has long been controversial among scholars. Harold Attridge of Yale Divinity School, in a recent paper, describes the author of Hebrews as "a sophisticated rhetorician and exegete" who seems to be aware of various esoteric interpretations of the Melchizedek character without committing to any of them. (Attridge 2012:393) Norwegian scholar Anders Aschim, on the other hand, argues in a 1999 paper that the tradition found in Hebrews is "very much the same" as the one found in 11Q Melchizedek, wherever the author may have learned it. (Aschim 1999:146) Benjamin Ribbens, in a recent book on Hebrews, also points out the sharp criticism in Hebrews toward the Levitical priesthood and the inefficacy of levitical sacrifices – a viewpoint that is shared by 11Q Melchizedek in particular. (Ribbens 2016, esp. 2–11, 87)
No matter how the puzzle of the Book of Hebrews and its origins gets resolved, our exploration of the Melchizedek legend through the ages demonstrates that belief in a heavenly high priest who was once a human on earth, who was elevated to God’s right hand in heaven, and who will bring judgment, atonement, and salvation at the eschaton, was present in Jewish communities well before the earliest Christian writers began applying these beliefs to Jesus.
Works Cited
- Aschim, Anders (1999). "Melchizedek and Jesus: 11QMelchizedek and the Epistle to the Hebrews". In The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism (SJSJ 63).
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