NOTES for Gen 14:1-24
In the story of the war of the kings, the reader's main attention is naturally drawn to the figure of Melchizedek. Meanwhile, the story is interesting also because it lets us better understand the situation that was taking shape in Palestine in Abraham's time. There was no unified authority in this territory then, and wars between small city-states located mainly in Galilee and in the Jordan Valley were commonplace. Tribes living on the adjacent lands were often drawn into such wars. That is what happened to Lot: after settling near Sodom (Gen 13:12), he was taken captive together with the inhabitants of the city 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 days, blessed the returning victor (vv. 17-20).
Who, then, was Melchizedek? In the story's text 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. Besides, 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") occurs only in this story, and Abraham himself never called his God by this name. Melchizedek plainly did not serve the God of Abraham. And yet his god was not an ordinary Baal, of the sort found in great numbers in antiquity both in Palestine and in other Near Eastern lands. Judging by the fact that he was called "possessor of heaven and earth," he was not a simple 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 gleams of an ancient monotheism that had already almost completely disappeared.
And now this prophet of the heavenly god blesses Abraham, and his blessing is filled with a meaning that perhaps Melchizedek himself never thought of, a meaning that will be fully revealed much later, when in Christ the possibility of communion with the God of Abraham is opened to everyone and the vague premonitions of paganism are replaced by the clarity of true communion with God.