Genesis 14:18-20; Hebrews 7:1-3

Who was Melchizedek, and why does Hebrews build so much on three verses about him?

Four verses in the Old Testament, a thousand years apart, and a chapter of the New Testament built on what they do not say.

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The question as it came to us

He arrives with no introduction and leaves with no exit. Abram is coming home from rescuing Lot, and a king nobody has heard of walks out of a city nobody has heard of with bread and wine: And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. (He was priest of God Most High.) (Genesis 14:18). He blesses Abram, Abram gives him a tenth of everything, and he is never mentioned in Genesis again. Three verses.

A thousand years later David writes one line about him, and it is an oath: The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek (Psalm 110:4). That is the whole of the Old Testament on the subject. The name occurs twice in it, and four verses in all.

Then a thousand years after that, the letter to the Hebrews spends its central chapter on him, and says things about him that stop a reader cold: He is without father or mother or genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God he continues a priest forever (Hebrews 7:3). Read that sentence at face value and you have a man with no parents who never died. So the question arrives with company. Was he an angel? Was he Jesus before Bethlehem? Was he Shem, Noah’s son, still alive and hiding in Canaan? Somebody at church said he was, and somebody else said the order of Melchizedek is a priesthood men can hold today.

Underneath all of it is a plainer question, and it is the one Hebrews is actually answering: why does it matter who my priest is?

Short answer

He was a man. A real king of a real city, and a priest of the true God centuries before there was an Israelite priesthood to belong to. Hebrews reasons about him as a man throughout: See how great this man was to whom Abraham the patriarch gave a tenth of the spoils (Hebrews 7:4), and again, this man who does not have his descent from them received tithes from Abraham (7:6). He is not the pre-incarnate Christ, not an angel, and almost certainly not Shem. What he is, is a man in Canaan who knew the true God, and whom Abram treated accordingly.

The silence about him is deliberate, and it is a silence in the record, not a fact about his body. Hebrews 7:3 is a statement about what Genesis supplies. Genesis is a book organised by genealogies, these are the generations of, over and over, and every significant person in it is placed in a family. This one is not. No father, no mother, no birth, no death, no successor. That absence would later be a disqualification: when the exiles came home, men who could not produce their priestly registration were excluded from the priesthood as unclean (Ezra 2:62). Papers were the whole basis of the office. So Scripture hands us one priest with no papers at all, and as Scripture presents him he simply has no beginning and no end, which is exactly the portrait needed for a priesthood that is not inherited and does not run out.

He is not Christ. He is like Christ, and the likeness is the entire use of him. The same verse that sounds most divine settles it: resembling the Son of God he continues a priest forever (7:3). A copy resembles the original; the original does not resemble itself. Hebrews says the new priest arises in the likeness of Melchizedek (7:15), and calls Christ a priest after the order of Melchizedek (6:20), which would be a strange thing to say of a man being told he belongs to an order named after himself. A type cannot be its own fulfillment.

And here is why any of it matters. Under the Law your priest had to be a son of Aaron, and your king had to be a son of Judah, and no one could be both: Uzziah tried it and left the temple a leper (2 Chronicles 26:16-21). Jesus is from the wrong tribe for the job, and Hebrews says so without flinching: it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses said nothing about priests (7:14). So either he is no priest at all, or there is an older order than Aaron’s, sworn by God himself in a psalm sung in the temple that order was going to replace. That is what Melchizedek is for. He is God’s advance notice, laid down in Genesis before there was a Law, a Levi or a tabernacle, that the arrangement at Sinai was never the last word.

Close to the center Who the man was is curiosity, and the page treats it as curiosity: nobody’s standing before God depends on identifying a Canaanite king. Why the New Testament raises him is not curiosity at all. Melchizedek is how Hebrews explains why the priesthood Israel had was never the last word, and how a man from the tribe of Judah can be your priest at all. Hold the first half loosely. The second half is the ground you are standing on when you pray.

What is settled, and what is not

The left column is what the two Testaments state between them, and the last three items are the reason the question is in this section rather than in the trivia. The right column is where the record stops, and it is where every legend about this man has grown.

Settled, Scripture states it

He was a man, and Scripture reasons about him as one. See how great this man was to whom Abraham the patriarch gave a tenth of the spoils (Hebrews 7:4), and this man who does not have his descent from them received tithes from Abraham (7:6). The argument of the chapter runs on a comparison between him and Christ, and a comparison needs two.
He worshipped the true God, and Abram said so out loud. Melchizedek blesses Abram by God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth (Genesis 14:19). Minutes later Abram swears his own oath and borrows the title whole, with one word added at the front: I have lifted my hand to the LORD, God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth (14:22). The covenant name is Abram’s addition. The rest is Melchizedek’s, and Abram had no hesitation about using it.
He was greater than Abraham, and the text proves it twice. Once by the blessing, since it is beyond dispute that the inferior is blessed by the superior (Hebrews 7:7), and once by the tithe, which Abram gave rather than received. Hebrews then presses the tithe one generation further: Levi himself, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, for he was still in the loins of his ancestor when Melchizedek met him (7:9-10).
God swore an oath about his order, and did it a thousand years later. The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek (Psalm 110:4). Note who is being addressed. The psalm opens The LORD says to my Lord (110:1), and Jesus made the whole weight of his argument rest on that pronoun (Matthew 22:41-45). The oath is sworn to David’s Lord, not to David.
A change of priest requires a change of law, and God planned both. Now if perfection had been attainable through the Levitical priesthood, what further need would there have been for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek? (Hebrews 7:11). And then the conclusion the first readers were resisting: For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well (7:12). Psalm 110 was in their own hymnbook, announcing the end of their own system.
The order has exactly one occupant, and he does not vacate it. The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office, but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever (Hebrews 7:23-24). The older English is blunter and worth keeping in mind: an unchangeable priesthood, one that is not handed on.

Not given in this age

His parents, his birth, and his death. Not because he had none, but because Genesis withholds them, which is precisely what Hebrews is working with. Take 7:3 as biology and you have made him a creature of some other order, which the same verse forbids by saying he resembles the Son of God.
Whether Salem is Jerusalem, beyond reasonable doubt. Almost certainly it is. His abode has been established in Salem, his dwelling place in Zion (Psalm 76:2) puts the two names in parallel, and Josephus says flatly that Salem was later called Jerusalem. A minority have argued for a Salem near Shechem. The identification is strong, and it is still an inference rather than a statement of the text.
Whether Melchizedek is a name or a throne title. Six hundred years later the king of the same city is Adoni-zedek (Joshua 10:1), lord of righteousness beside king of righteousness, which looks less like coincidence than like a dynastic style, the way every Egyptian king is Pharaoh and several Philistine kings are Abimelech. Nobody can prove it, and Hebrews argues from the name as translated, which is what the text gives.
How he came to know God. Scripture records no revelation to him, no covenant with him, and no teacher over him. He is simply there, worshipping rightly, in a land the Bible otherwise describes as ripe for judgment. Everything anyone has ever said about how he got there is invention.
What became of him, and of his priesthood. No successor is named, no shrine, no institution, nothing. The next time Scripture looks at that ridge it belongs to the Jebusites, and it takes David to get it back. Whatever Melchizedek had, it did not visibly continue, and Hebrews treats that as fitting rather than as a loose end.

Four verses, and what has been built on them

The first diagram is the entire record, laid out in order. Band widths follow the sequence of events and are not to scale, since two of these bands are single verses and two are millennia.

Everything Scripture says, in order

Read left to right this is the whole of it. The two long bands are the silences, and the argument in Hebrews depends on them as much as on the verses.

Genesis 14:18-20: he arrives with bread and wine, blesses Abram, receives a tenth, and goes A thousand years in which the name is not written once Psalm 110:4: an oath Another thousand years, and the temple is standing again Hebrews 5 to 7: the name returns, and the central chapter of the letter is built on it

What Hebrews does with each detail

The detail in Genesis 14	What Hebrews makes of it
His name	Malki-tsedeq, rendered king of righteousness (Hebrews 7:2). Hebrews takes the meaning of the name as part of the portrait.
His city, Salem	And then he is also king of Salem, that is, king of peace (7:2). The order is not decoration: righteousness first, then peace, which is the order of the gospel itself (Romans 5:1).
Priest of God Most High	A priesthood older than Sinai and outside Levi, which is the one thing Hebrews needs and the one thing the Law could not supply (7:11-14).
He blessed Abram	It is beyond dispute that the inferior is blessed by the superior (7:7). The greater man in the room was not the patriarch.
Abram gave him a tenth	Pressed a generation deeper: Levi, unborn, paid tithes through Abraham (7:9-10), so the Levitical priesthood acknowledged this one before it existed.
Genesis gives him no genealogy	Without father or mother or genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life (7:3). The silence in the record is read as the picture, and the picture is a priest who neither inherits nor bequeaths.
He brought out bread and wine	Nothing at all. Hebrews mines every other clause of the paragraph and walks past this one without a word, which is the fact to keep in hand whenever someone builds on it.

Who people have said he was

Five answers, with what each rests on and what each costs. The first is ours, and the reason we hold it is that it is the only one that leaves the argument of Hebrews 7 standing.

1. A Canaanite king of Salem, and nothing stranger than that He worshipped the true God in a land that had largely forgotten him, and Genesis reports the meeting without explanation because the point is what Abram did, not who the stranger’s parents were. Calvin’s reason for holding this is worth having: the admirable grace of God shines more clearly in a person unknown. This is our reading, and it costs the reader nothing except a mystery he would rather keep.
2. Shem, the son of Noah Ancient, and not silly. The lifespans in Genesis 11 leave Shem alive in Abram’s day, and Jewish tradition made the identification directly: Targum Pseudo-Jonathan renders the name as Shem son of Noah, and the Talmud does the same. Luther followed it. What it costs is the argument of Hebrews: Shem’s genealogy is given twice in the very book that withholds Melchizedek’s (Genesis 10:21-31; 11:10-26), and a man with a recorded father, a recorded death and a famous family is the exact opposite of the figure Hebrews 7:3 describes.
3. The pre-incarnate Christ Popular, and the most reverent of the wrong answers. It founders on the words Hebrews actually uses: he is resembling the Son of God (7:3), the new priest arises in the likeness of Melchizedek (7:15), and Christ is a priest after the order of Melchizedek (6:20). Each phrase requires two persons. On this reading Christ is a member of an order named for himself, modelled on himself, and the whole argument from the lesser to the greater collapses into a tautology.
4. A heavenly being Older than Christianity. A Qumran scroll (11QMelchizedek) casts him as a heavenly deliverer who proclaims the last jubilee and executes God’s judgment; a later sect, the Melchizedekians, ranked him above Christ; and the treatise Jerome was asked to answer in 398 identified him with the Holy Spirit. Hebrews knows a heavenly Melchizedek would wreck its case, and calls him a man who met Abraham on a road.
5. A figure of speech Philo allegorised him into the divine Reason, and some modern readers treat the Genesis paragraph as a later insertion written to give Jerusalem’s priesthood a pedigree. Both dissolve the man into an idea. Hebrews argues from an event: he met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings (7:1), and an idea cannot receive a tenth of the spoils.

What the text says

He appears at the hinge of a war story, opposite the worst king in the chapter Abram comes back from the rescue and two kings come out to meet him. The king of Sodom offers a deal: Give me the persons, and take the goods for yourself (Genesis 14:21). The king of Salem offers bread, wine and a blessing, and asks for nothing. Abram refuses Sodom a thread or a sandal strap (14:23) and hands Salem a tenth of everything. The chapter is arranged so that you watch a man decide who he will be made rich by.
Abram treats Melchizedek’s God as his own God, without correcting him This is the hinge for anyone wondering whether Salem’s priest was a pagan with a lucky title. He blesses Abram by God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth (14:19), and Abram promptly swears by the LORD under that same title (14:22). Abram adds the covenant name; he changes nothing else. Two men in a Canaanite valley knew the true God, and one of them was not in the covenant family.
This is the first priest in the Bible, and he is not an Israelite The Hebrew word for priest occurs here for the first time, centuries before Aaron is born, and it is worn by a Gentile king. Two other firsts are in the same three verses: the first mention of Salem, and the first tithe. The institutions Israel would think of as most its own all appear first in the hands of an outsider.
David sings one line about him, and it should not have been possible You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek (Psalm 110:4), addressed to the one David calls my Lord (110:1). Israel’s king could not be a priest and Israel’s priest could not be king, and here is a psalm in the national worship promising a man who is both, on oath, forever, in an order nobody had heard of since Genesis.
Under the Law, a king who reached for the censer was struck down Uzziah grew proud, to his destruction, went into the temple to burn incense, was confronted by eighty priests, and leprosy broke out on his forehead while he stood there with the censer in his hand (2 Chronicles 26:16-21). Saul lost his dynasty for offering a sacrifice he had no business offering (1 Samuel 13:8-14). Psalm 110 is therefore not describing an office Israel had. It is describing one Israel did not have.
Hebrews argues from what is absent, and the absence was already loaded Without father or mother or genealogy (7:3) is not a claim that he was never born. It is a claim about a book that names everybody’s father. And in Israel the missing paperwork was fatal to a priest: the returning exiles who could not find their names in the registers were excluded from the priesthood as unclean (Ezra 2:62; Nehemiah 7:64). Genesis therefore preserves a priest who would have failed Israel’s own test, which is Hebrews’ point rather than an embarrassment to it.
The greater blesses the lesser, and the tithe says it a second time See how great this man was (7:4), and it is beyond dispute that the inferior is blessed by the superior (7:7). Then the move that decides the argument: since Levi was in Abraham’s body at the time, the tribe that would collect Israel’s tithes had already paid one (7:9-10). Aaron’s priesthood is outranked in its own ancestor before it exists.
So the change of priesthood carries the law with it For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well (7:12), and a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness, for the law made nothing perfect; but on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God (7:18-19). The first readers were being pulled back to a temple that was still standing. Hebrews answers with a psalm they sang inside it.
Our Lord is from the wrong tribe, and Hebrews says so out loud For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses said nothing about priests (7:14). Sit with the irony. The man whose genealogy opens the New Testament, traced through forty-two generations (Matthew 1:1-17), holds his priesthood in an order defined by having no genealogy at all, not on the basis of a legal requirement concerning bodily descent, but by the power of an indestructible life (7:16).
He never dies, so he never hands over, so the help never lapses The old priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office (7:23), each one an interruption. This one holds his priesthood permanently (7:24), and the conclusion Hebrews draws is the sentence the whole chapter exists for: Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them (7:25).

How others have answered

Named only where the words were written about this passage. Quoted phrases are theirs; the summary around them is ours.

Josephus (Antiquities 1.180-181; Jewish War 6.438) The earliest surviving comment outside Scripture, and it is prosaic. Josephus explains that the name means righteous king, says that he was so in fact, and that he was therefore made priest of God. In the War he is blunter still: Salem’s founder was a Canaanite chief, the first to officiate as priest of God, who built the first sanctuary there and gave the city the name Jerusalem. A first-century Jew with no Christian argument to make took Melchizedek for a man and Salem for Jerusalem.
The rabbis: Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and the Talmud (Nedarim 32b) The Targum simply translates the verse with the identification built in, the righteous king, that is Shem son of Noah. The Talmud goes further and turns the scene into an explanation of why the priesthood ended up with Abraham’s line at all: Melchizedek blessed Abram before he blessed God, and the office was taken from him for it. Two things worth noticing. The Shem identification is very old, and the tradition itself remembers his priesthood as something that stopped.
Philo of Alexandria (Allegorical Interpretation III) Philo reads the man as an idea: Melchizedek is the priestly Reason, and the bread and wine are food for a soul rather than a meal for tired soldiers. It is elegant, and it is nothing like the method of Hebrews, which is the useful comparison. Hebrews does not dissolve him into a principle; it argues from a road, a battle, a blessing and a tenth of the spoils, and reads the record of the man rather than the man as metaphor.
11QMelchizedek, from Qumran (first century BC) A scroll found in Cave 11 makes Melchizedek a heavenly figure who proclaims liberty in the final jubilee, executes God’s judgments and stands over the assembly of God. It matters for one reason: the exalted, superhuman Melchizedek is not a Christian invention and not a misreading of Hebrews, it was in the air before Hebrews was written, and Hebrews declined it. Given every chance to say that Melchizedek was more than a man, the letter says instead that he was a man who resembled the Son of God.
Jerome (Letter 73, to Evangelus, AD 398) Someone sent Jerome a tract arguing that Melchizedek was the Holy Spirit, and asked what he thought. Jerome’s reply is a survey of the opinions and a firm refusal of that one: Melchizedek was a man. Having settled that, he inclines to the Jewish view that the man was Shem. We follow him on the first half and not on the second, and the letter is a useful reminder that the strange readings of this passage were circulating early enough to need answering in the fourth century.
Cyprian (Epistle 63) and the Council of Trent (Session 22, 1562) The bread and wine are read as a figure of the eucharistic sacrifice, offered by a priest after the same order, and Trent made the connection part of its case that the Mass is a propitiatory sacrifice. This is the historic Roman reading of Genesis 14:18, and it is the reason the three verses have been argued over so hotly. It should be stated in its own terms before it is answered.
John Calvin (Commentary on Genesis; Institutes IV.xviii) Calvin answers it on the text. The bread and wine were brought out to refresh Abram and his men, exhausted with the late battle and fatigues of the journey; not in the way of sacrifice, and Genesis never says anything was offered to God. Then the observation that settles it, and it is his rather than ours: the apostle collects every point of similarity between Christ and Melchizedek with great care, and says not a word concerning the bread and wine. Calvin also declines the Shem identification, to whose opinion I am, for many reasons, hindered from subscribing, and gives the better reason for the silence: the admirable grace of God shines more clearly in a person unknown; because, amid the corruptions of the world, he alone, in that land, was an upright and sincere cultivator and guardian of religion.
Martin Luther (Lectures on Genesis) Luther takes the other road, and it is right to say so plainly. He weighs the chronology of Genesis 11, notes that the Hebrews generally assumed it, and lands there himself: I am pleased with the general opinion that Melchizedek is Shem, because there was no greater patriarch at that time, especially in spiritual matters. Two men we learn from, reading one paragraph and reaching opposite conclusions, neither of them touching the gospel by doing it. We follow Calvin here, for the reason given in the list above, and we do not pretend Luther was not Luther.
Charles Spurgeon (Salvation to the Uttermost, New Park Street Pulpit no. 84, 8 June 1856) We have not found a sermon of Spurgeon’s on the identity question, and we will not invent one. What he preached, at Exeter Hall to a crowded hall as a young man, was the sentence the argument ends at: he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25). That is the right instinct about this chapter. The mystery is a staircase; the intercession is the room.
The Latter-day Saints, on the order rather than the man In Latter-day Saint teaching the higher priesthood is called the Melchizedek Priesthood, held today by men in the church, and named for him out of reverence (Doctrine and Covenants 107:1-4). Answering it does not require a word about anybody’s sincerity, only the text: Hebrews contrasts the old priests, who were many because they were prevented by death from continuing in office, with one who holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever (7:23-24). The older translations call it an unchangeable priesthood, one that does not pass to a successor. The order of Melchizedek, as Hebrews argues it, has room for exactly one priest, and the reason it saves to the uttermost is that it never changes hands.

Where it lands

Everything Hebrews wants from those three verses is a portrait of a priest who does not begin, does not end, does not inherit and does not hand on. Then it lays the portrait against Jesus and says: this one.

Think about what the old arrangement was actually like for a worshipper. Your priest was appointed by birth, and might be a scoundrel; Eli’s sons were. He had to sacrifice for his own sins before he could touch yours (Hebrews 5:3). He worked in shifts, and he died, and someone else took the room, and the sacrifices began again the next morning, and every morning, for as long as the tabernacle and the temple stood. The system was not a failure. It was a lesson, and the lesson was that this is not how a man is finally brought near.

So God put a picture at the front of the story, before Sinai, before Levi, before there was a tabernacle to serve in, and then swore an oath about it in the middle of Israel’s own hymnbook. The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind (Psalm 110:4). When Hebrews finally names the man the oath was sworn to, the writer has already told us where he is: Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek (6:20). Inside the curtain. Ahead of us. Not returning to be replaced.

Take the two halves of the name in the order Hebrews takes them. King of righteousness, and then king of peace (7:2). Not peace first. A peace arranged before righteousness is a truce with sin, and it is what every soft gospel offers. Righteousness first, at the cross, and peace as the consequence: since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1). The order was sitting in a Canaanite king’s two titles two thousand years early.

And look what Abram does in the valley, because it is what you do at the Table. The man who has just been handed every promise God ever made to the nations comes home from a victory and is blessed by someone greater than himself, is handed bread and wine he did not provide, and gives away a tenth of what he won. He receives before he gives, and what he gives is a response, never a payment. Whatever the bread and wine did or did not prefigure, and Hebrews declines to say, the posture is unmistakable.

Then the conclusion, which is the only line on this page a Christian has to have: he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25). To the uttermost, at the far end, in the worst of it, for the worst of them. Not because your grip is strong. Because your priest cannot die, and is praying for you at this moment, and will never be succeeded by someone who does not know your name.

What the passage does not settle

This page cannot tell you who Melchizedek’s parents were, when he was born, or where he is buried, and neither can anyone else. Hebrews 7:3 is not a report on his body. It is a reading of a record that leaves those things out, and it says so by adding that he resembles the Son of God, which is a word for a likeness and not for an identity. Any answer that turns him into something other than a man has to get past that word, and none of them do.

The location of Salem is very likely Jerusalem and not certainly so. Whether Melchizedek is a personal name or a throne title cannot be settled. How a man in Canaan came to be a priest of the true God is not told us, and that silence should be left alone: it is a fact about God’s mercy reaching a place we would not have looked, not a hint that there is some road to God running around Christ. Scripture closes that door in the same letter, and does not reopen it here.

One more limit, and it is the one that matters most on a page like this. The whole temptation of Melchizedek is to spend your afternoon on the puzzle and never arrive at the priest. Hebrews saw it coming. Right at the point where the argument turns to this man, the writer stops and says, About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing (5:11). The obscurity was never the destination. The access is.

Questions to sit with

For reading this with someone else, a family, a study, or a friend who asked in the first place.

Abram turned down everything the king of Sodom offered and gave a tenth to the king of Salem, inside the same hour. What was he saying about where he expected to be made rich?
Hebrews reads a silence and treats it as revelation. Where else does Scripture teach by leaving something out, and what keeps that kind of reading from becoming a licence to invent?
Read Psalm 110:4 aloud, then 2 Chronicles 26:16-21. Why could no son of David serve as his own priest, and what does that make of the claim in the psalm?
Melchizedek worshipped the true God in Canaan, outside the covenant family, and we are told nothing about how. What is the difference between saying that God had a worshipper there and saying that a man may come to God some way other than through Christ?
If your priest cannot die and is interceding for you now, name one thing about this week that it changes.