What’s the deal with Melchizedek?

Ask a church receptionist #2

Welcome another installment of Ask a church receptionist, a monthly column where I answer your questions about the Bible, Christianity, and how to look cool without, y’know, looking like you’re trying to look cool.

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Dear church receptionist,

What’s the deal with Melchizedek? I understand that he is a type of Christ, but Jonah is also a type of Christ, and Jonah’s narrative makes sense regardless. I can understand that Jonah got swallowed by a fish; but what happened with Melchizedek? Am I supposed to believe that he really had no father or mother, that he is immortal (as per Hebrews 7)? Why is Abra(ha)m tithing to him? If Abraham has come from the East bearing secret knowledge of the Lord, why is Melchizedek already there? Why does God’s mantle pass through Abraham and not through Melchizedek?

I don’t need biblical narratives to be literally true—I mean, I don’t think giant fishes swallow people for three days—but I do need them to make narrative sense, and that’s where the story of Melchizedek is tripping me up.

—Hal Johnson

Dear Hal,

First of all, let me say again that I really enjoyed your book Impossible Histories, and highly recommend that my readers check it and/or your Substack out! (I await my kickback!)

Now, as for Melchizedek…

Sigh. I’m going to have to explain who Melchizedek is for readers who aren’t Hal, aren’t I?

Okay, briefly (after the break):

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In Genesis chapter 14, a war breaks out between a handful of Ancient Near Eastern city-states, resulting (among other things) in Abram’s nephew Lot getting abducted. Abram (soon to be known as Abraham), being a badass Jewish Patriarch, leads a posse out to rescue him, and on his way back from the successful mission, he’s met by the “king of Salem” (a city-state mentioned nowhere else, in the Bible or otherwise¹) Melchizedek, who the author of Genesis adds is also “priest of God Most High.” Abram gives him a tenth of their spoils, and Melchizedek blesses Abram and gives him some bread and wine.

He appears as an active character for all of three verses, and then disappears into the ether—but that hasn’t stopped people from reading a whole lot into the incident over the last few millennia.

Melchizedek’s second mention in Scripture is in Psalm 110, a psalm attributed to King David and commonly regarded as a prophecy about the coming Messiah. In verse 4, God tells said Messiah, “You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.”²

That’s it for Melchizedek until the New Testament, where the unknown author³ of the Epistle to the Hebrews uses these two passages to expound on Melchizedek for three chapters straight. Hebrews, as the name suggests, was written as a letter to early Jewish Christians (that is, Jews who had “converted” to Christianity—with the caveat that Christianity was mostly just a weirdo Jewish sect at the time), with the primary goal of arguing that Jesus had supplanted the need for the traditional Jewish priesthood. That’s where the author of Hebrews begins, arguing that Jesus is the Psalmist’s “priest forever in the order of Melchizedek,” but (as you’ve noted), said author goes on to draw even more parallels between Melchizedek and Jesus, describing him as “without father or mother or genealogy, having neither the beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God, he continues a priest forever” (Heb. 7:3).

Which…what?

Okay, so, to be clear, I think it would be a mistake to take this to mean that the author of Hebrews thought that Melchizedek was literally immortal. The most straightforward understanding—and, from what I can tell, the one favored by most modern commentators—is that the author of Genesis, despite writing pages and pages of genealogies elsewhere, has made the editorial decision to omit the genealogy for Melchizedek. In other words, by choosing not to disclose Melchizedek’s origins or end of life, the author of Genesis was (1) emphasizing that it was possible to be a priest without having priestly ancestry (which Jesus also lacked), and (2) predicting an ageless and immortal Messiah.

So Melchizedek was just some guy who happened to be king of a no-name city-state, and also a priest, whom the author of Hebrews decided to use as an extended metaphor. Maybe. If that explanation is a little too boring for you, countless other people have tried to explain who, or what, Melchizedek was, in various other ways:

• Was Melchizedek actually Shem? The Babylonian Talmud (a collection of ancient rabbinic commentaries and debates on Scripture) posits that Melchizedek was just another name for Noah’s son Shem. If that’s the case, it makes Melchizedek hundreds of years old when the scene takes place, which isn’t a huge problem, since, according to Genesis 11:10–11, Shem lived to the ripe old age of 600. If true, this explains why Abram is paying tribute to him, since (1) Shem is presumably carrying on the priesthood of his father Noah, and (2) Abram is Shem’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson (per Genesis 11:26). So, to sum up: Noah establishes a new priesthood after the flood ➡️ he passes that priesthood on to Shem ➡️ Shem passes it on to Abram with his blessing. It makes a kind of sense.

• Was Melchizedek some sort of quasi-messianic demigod? There are several fragments of texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls (scrolls associated with the ancient Essene sect of Judaism) that identify Melchizedek with “Elohim” (a Hebrew word for “God” or “gods”) and/or the archangel Michael, and describe him as an immortal messianic figure who will atone for the world’s sins and judge the nations on the last day. Was the author of Hebrews aware of and/or influenced by these ideas? Maybe! Possibly! By that same token, though…

• Was Melchizedek just Jesus making an Old Testament cameo? This one is a minority view among Christians, but it’s been argued by a handful of respected theologians, including the famous St. John Chrysostom (who served as bishop of Constantinople around the turn of the fifth century). This is part of a Christian tradition of reading “proto-incarnations” of Christ into the Old Testament (a tradition that, I’m sure you can imagine, Jews aren’t crazy about), suggesting that, before becoming name-brand Jesus, God the Son sometimes appeared under aliases like “the Angel of the Lord,” “Michael” (there’s that guy again), and, at least according to His Grace St. John, “Melchizedek.” Casting doubt on this is that neither Michael nor Melchizedek ever say “This isn’t even my final form”—but it does explain why Melchizedek shows up and leaves so quickly: Jesus had important Jesus stuff to do.

So there you have it. Melchizedek was Jesus and/or Michael and/or Shem and/or just some minor monarch who showed up with snacks and thereby became history’s most confounding theological metaphor.

Yours forever (in the order of Melchizedek),

—the church receptionist 🕹🌙🧸

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1. There are some sources that identify Salem with Jerusalem, but they’re all quite a bit more recent than Genesis. Personally, I’m imagining a town full of witch-hunt-crazed Puritans.

2. It might be worth pointing out that this understanding of the verse, while clearly preferred by the author of Hebrews, isn’t universal; some English translations render it as “You are a priest forever, O Melchizedek,” while others cut Melchizedek out entirely, rendering it as something along the lines of “You are a priest forever; a rightful king by my decree.”

3. Hebrews is weird for being the one book of the New Testament where there’s no strong tradition of who wrote it. Even with books whose traditional authorship is questioned by modern scholars (the Gospel of St. John, for example), early Christian writers are close to unanimous when it comes to the question of who wrote it; with Hebrews, even the earliest Church Fathers mostly shrug and say, “Who knows who wrote this thing?” Suggestions include St. Paul (but it’s very different from his other letters), Paul’s traveling buddy St. Barnabas, St. Luke the Evangelist, or early missionary St. Priscilla.