NOTES for Gen 14:1-24
In the story of the war of the kings, the reader's attention is drawn above all, of course, to the figure of Melchizedek. Meanwhile, he is also interesting because he helps us better understand the situation that existed in Palestine in Abraham's time. There was no single authority over this territory then, and wars between small city-states, located mainly in Galilee and in the Jordan Valley, were common. Tribes living on nearby lands were often drawn into such wars. This is what happened to Lot: after settling near Sodom (Gen. 13:12), he was taken captive together with the inhabitants of the city that had been defeated in the war (vv. 11-12). Abraham had to rescue his relative who had fallen into trouble, and he did so by attacking the victors' camp at night (vv. 14-16). And Melchizedek, as was customary in those times, blessed the returning victor (vv. 17-20). Who, then, was Melchizedek? In the text of the account he is called a "priest," but the corresponding Hebrew word came to mean priest only much later, after the Exodus; in the time of the Patriarchs it meant not a priest but a prophet. Moreover, the god in question here has no relation to the God of Abraham. Although in the Russian text he is called "God Most High," his Hebrew name ("El Elyon") appears only in this account, and Abraham himself never called His God by that name. Melchizedek evidently did not serve the God of Abraham. And yet his god was not an ordinary baal, one of the many found in antiquity both in Palestine and in other Near Eastern lands. Judging by the fact that he was called "maker of heaven and earth," he was not a mere patron of a city or region, as the baals were. He was probably a heavenly god, like the Greek Zeus or the Roman Jupiter, and his worship reflected faint glimmers of ancient monotheism, already almost completely vanished. And now this prophet of a heavenly god blesses Abraham, and his blessing is filled with a meaning of which perhaps Melchizedek himself did not even think, a meaning that would be fully revealed much later, when in Christ the possibility of communion with the God of Abraham would be opened to everyone, and the unclear premonitions of paganism would give way to the clarity of true communion with God.