Fr. Stephen De Young: Okay, we’ll go ahead and get started, we’re going to get started. We’ll pick up at the beginning of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 7. And really as we’ve seen before—the places we stop—even though we try to stop it at chapter breaks, we’ve seen that those, the chapter breaks of course, were added much later and are in some cases fairly arbitrary. And that’s definitely the case a lot here in Hebrews; we’ve already seen a little bit of that. Part of that is because as we’ve said now, repeatedly, this isn’t really a letter in the same way that St. Paul’s other epistles are letters. And so with St. Paul’s other epistles—since it’s a letter, he’ll move from one topic to another, and that’s a good place to put a chapter break if you’re coming along later and putting them in. Whereas St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, as we said, is more homiletic or sermon type material; it has a more rhetorical style. And if you think about that: if someone gives a sermon or a speech or an oration, and then you have the text of it, and you are trying to break it into chapters, there might be some places where there’s a shift or change, and it’s kind of obvious, but there might be other places where you just have to pick a spot based on length if you want the chapters to be of similar length. And so that happens here in Hebrews.

So all that is to say we’re going to pick up in media res when we start chapter seven. So we need to do a little bit of catch up. So when we left off—St. Paul is finishing a digression that we went through last time, where he had moved from—we talked about how this is sort of a sermon on Psalm 110, or 109 in the Greek—and he had moved from—he started with the first verse, “The Lord said to my Lord sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.” And then he had gotten to the point where he had moved into and introduced the next major part of that Psalm, which is where the Lord says to the Lord—where Yahweh says to the Lord, the Messiah, “I made you a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.”

And so he had brought up the idea of Christ as the high priest, he had dropped the name Melchizedek, he even quoted the verse, but then he went on a digression for a little bit. And that digression had to do with, as we talked about last time, apparently as the oration was being given some people were maybe not paying attention. [Laughter] And so there was a digression and an excursus on, “You guys really should be paying attention. Here’s why. You may not be ready for this kind of stuff yet. You still want milk and not solid food. You’re like baby Christians. But you really need to start chewing on some solid food. We’re going to get you into some.” And so after that digression, then, he dropped us back in with—there’s sort of a segue at the very end of chapter 6, where he got back to Christ’s high priesthood and got back to Melchizedek. So it’s like, “Okay, now back to the topic.”

And so now as we start chapter 7, we’re going to launch straight into this relationship between Christ and Melchizedek. So I have to do a little excursus here before we start because there’s some background we need to have going into this. And that’s that Saint Paul, when he’s connecting the Messiah to Melchizedek, when he’s connecting Christ to Melchizedek—this isn’t a new thing that St. Paul just came up with. You might think that, just reading through St. Paul’s epistles, because we haven’t seen it so far in the New Testament. But we know that the texts that ended up being in the New Testament were not the only texts that existed in the world at the time. And St. Paul—we’ve seen several times in St. Paul’s epistles where he’s referred to other traditional Jewish interpretations, other Jewish texts, as he’s speaking and talked about them in a matter-of-fact way.

So for example, we saw most recently in Second Timothy, he mentioned Jannes and Jambres, the magicians who contested with Moses. Well, you won’t find the names Jannes and Jambres anywhere in the Old Testament, let alone in Exodus. That’s part of this traditional Jewish interpretation, but St. Paul just refers to it offhand because everybody he was writing to knew what he was talking about. Timothy certainly did, and other people who would be concerned with it. We saw back in 1 Corinthians where he says, “The Israelites had a rock that followed them in the wilderness and that rock was Christ.” And everyone as a Christian focuses in on that, “oh the rock in the wilderness that gave water, that’s Christ!” and goes off on excursus. They kind of missed that “a rock that followed them in the wilderness” part. Because you could again go all through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy: you won’t see anything about the rock following them. There’s a rock at the beginning that gives water; there’s a rock at the end that gives water. And previous generations of readers of the Torah had noticed that and said “well, where did they get their water the rest of the time?” And so this tradition had developed and become more and more elaborate by the time of the first century A.D. that the rock had miraculously appeared wherever they made camp. And it sort of followed them through the desert so they would always have water.

And why is it important to know that? Aside from just a fun fact, “hey look, here’s St. Paul referring to something outside the Old Testament. Take that, sola scriptura”? That’s not the main reason. The main reason is: that influences what he’s saying about Christ. Because then he’s not just saying Christ provided for them at the beginning and at the end. He’s saying the whole time that Christ was accompanying them, which is slightly different, and so those details are important. So in the same way as those couple—and there are more examples that we’ve seen, but that’s just a couple—this connection between Melchizedek and the Messiah goes back at least a few centuries before St. Paul—goes back at least into the third century B.C. And arguably it’s there in Psalm 110.

Because we talked about how everybody by the first century A.D. had connected the Lord in verse one to the Messiah. And there’s evidence for this in the gospels because Christ—after the Pharisees—we read this during Holy Week—have been badgering him with all these questions trying to trap him—the Pharisees are the teachers of the law and everybody are all trying to trap him—he turns it around and says, “Let me ask you a question.” And he quotes that verse, “[The] Lord said to my Lord sit at [my] right hand” and he says, “If the Messiah is the son of David, why does David call him his lord?” Well, what does that assume? That assumes that everybody Christ was talking to accepted that the lord of that verse was the Messiah. Because we don’t read that anybody said, “Well wait a second, where are you getting that interpretation?” They all agreed to that, and so the problem they were facing was, “Well wait a minute, the son of David would by nature not be greater than David, but then David’s calling him his lord.” So that’s the thing that the Christ is pointing to. And the answer of course is that that could only be true if the lord there, the Messiah, is divine—is god. That would make him greater than David. If he’s just a human, then he wouldn’t be greater than his forefather.

So they had already accepted that. And so when you get to verse—I believe it’s verse four—and it says, “I’ve made you a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.” And that’s Yahweh talking to now the Lord Messiah. Then, oh well there’s a connection between Melchizedek and the Messiah. So you see that arguably already there in 110, at least in the way they were interpreting it. But this gets greatly elaborated. I won’t read the whole text here, but one of the texts from the dead sea scrolls 11Q13—and the reason they’re named that way—this is kind of a fun fact, I’ll admit it; this is a fun fact digression. But the Dead Sea Scrolls all have names like that, with a Q in the middle. And the number before the Q is what cave they were found in, because there’s a whole network of caves. So 11Q13 was found in cave 11. Q is for Qumran, which is the place where they were found. And then the number after the Q, so in this case 13, is just the number of the scroll. So as they identified them, they said, “Okay this is 11Q1, this is 11Q2, this is 11Q3.” Unless it’s a Biblical book; then it’s the name of the book. So there’s a 4QDeut which is 4QDeuteronomy. It’s the scroll of the book of Deuteronomy that was found in the fourth cave at Qumran.

So this is 11Q13, this is the 13th scroll that they found in the 11th cave at Qumran. It’s sometimes just called the Melchizedek scroll because what it literally says is that at the the end of days—at the final battle between good and evil—and it says that Melchizedek will show up, who it identifies as the Messiah. Melchizedek will come from heaven as the Messiah, leading all of the righteous gods—because that’s the language they used—we’ve talked about that before. For them, god or gods and holy one or holy ones that we translate as saints [were] interchangeable. So the idea of theosis that we have in the Orthodox Church is not even a new Christian thing. It goes back. And to take revenge, vengeance on Belial and all the forces of Belial. And that’s from the, I believe the late third century B.C., that scroll.

So they had this firm idea of the Messiah and Melchizedek. And one important piece of that, as we’re going to see as we go through, is that Melchizedek as he appears in Genesis is both a priest and a king. Or the priesthood gets split off under Moses. Priesthood gets taken away from Moses and given to Aaron. So you have Moses who’s this leader, and then Moses is followed by Joshua, then by the Judges. The last of the judges is Samuel, and then Saul is the first king. But the priesthood stays separate in the line of Aaron. But Melchizedek’s before all that. Melchizedek is back in Abram’s time in Genesis, and so he was the king of a city and a priest, both. They’re reunited in him. So this is part of what they saw the Messiah was going to do—was that in him not only was the Davidic monarchy going to be restored, the kingdom was going to be restored to Israel, but the priesthood was going to be restored.

Why did the priesthood have to be restored? Well, even when there was one—and presumably this comes from St. Paul, this was before the destruction of the temple so there still technically was one—that priesthood was controlled by the Sadducees. So what happened was after the temple was reconstructed, they reinstituted the priesthood. This is around 511, 510, 511, B.C.: the beginning of what’s called the Second Temple period. They came back from Persia—exiles were allowed to return to Judah, became the Persian province of Judea, later Greek and Roman province of Judea—they rebuilt the temple; they reinstituted the priesthood with descendants of the original high priesthood the way they were supposed to.

Then of course the Greeks came along. Antiochus IV Epiphanes committed the abomination of desolation, desecrated the temple, sacrificed pigs to Zeus on the altar of the Jerusalem temple. The temple therefore couldn’t be used by the Jewish people. It fell into disrepair and that, along with other indignities and martyrdoms, triggered the Maccabean revolt in the second century B.C., with Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers. And Judas Maccabeus—that name means Judah the hammer, which is one of the coolest names. I want somebody to name their kid Judah the hammer. Next one up, Judah the hammer. But he and his brothers, that rose and overthrew the Greeks and established an independent Judea for a short period of time, made one cardinal mistake. That was, “Hey we need to make alliances to keep the Greeks from coming back and taking us back over.” First alliance was with the Spartans. That went okay. Second alliance was with Rome. That didn’t go so well: they got annexed by Pompey. So that period that’s established is called the Hasmonean dynasty or the Hasmonean period in ancient Judea.

And so you may wonder, “Well, they rededicated the temple right after they gained their independence. They reconsecrated the temple.”—That’s where the feast of Hanukkah comes from. The feast of lights is from the rededication of the temple.—“Who did

they make priests?” Well prophetically, if you read Ezekiel, priests were supposed to be the descendants of Zadok. Judas Maccabaeus made his brother Simon the high priest. Not a Levite, let alone a Zadokite. And later on, once you get to John Hyrcanus in the middle of the second century B.C., he made himself both the king and the high priest at the same time.

Interlocutor 1: Like Melchizedek.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yeah. [Laughter] Well, he very much wanted to present himself as the Messiah; that’s part of why he did it. He’s also the one who destroyed the Samaritan’s temple on Mt. Gerizim.

But so when we get to the Gospels and we have the Sadducees there running the temple, the name Sadducee literally means “sadeq” [צדק], it’s Zadokite. So they called themselves the Zadokites to try to claim legitimacy. “As you know, we’re—this is the real legit temple and we’re the real legit priests.” But everyone knew they weren’t. Everyone knew they weren’t and had no rights to it. And beyond just them claiming it without having a rightful claim, the Sadducees were unbelievably corrupt. So most of the land in Judea was owned by Rome, obviously, but what wasn’t owned by Rome, 70 percent of it was owned by the high priest’s family in the first century A.D. And he didn’t come to own it by going and making good fair offers to all of the peasant farmers in Judea. He came to own it through the temple tax. They were allowed by the Romans, the Sadducees, because they controlled the priesthood and controlled the temple—they were allowed to levy an additional tax over and above the Roman taxes for the upkeep of the temple. They could set it wherever they wanted to, and so they would set it high—massively in debt, these peasant farmers with back taxes to the temple—and then seize their land as payment. And then basically make the people who used to own the land now work the land for them as hired hands and pay them a pittance.

So they had vastly enriched themselves at the expense of the people who they were supposed to be shepherding if they were going to be priests. So there’s a firm impression that had they actually done a good job as priests, the whole “who you’re genetically descended from” thing could have been waived. [Laughter] But they were not. They were preying upon the people and enriching themselves, seizing their own power, and this is going on in the background in a lot of what’s going on in the Gospels, especially when we get to Christ in Holy Week. Because the Sadducees may have been rich, but they weren’t Romans, and so they had found this space for themselves under Roman oppression where they had been able to enrich themselves and live this good life, but that was always threatened by their ability to keep control, keep a lid on things.

So when Christ comes and starts doing things in the temple in Holy Week, and they are losing control, this is why they’re afraid that the Romans are going to come down on them and remove them and replace them with somebody else who they think could do a better job, because that’s how the Romans operated. That’s what they did with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. You had one job: keep the peace, keep the Pax Romana going in your territory. If you can’t do it, we’ll recall you to Rome, behead you, and send somebody else who could do the job right.

And so the Sadducees knew, “Hey, this is us.”—and that ends up happening. That’s how the temple gets destroyed, is that there’s a Jewish revolt, and the Romans say, “Hey, you Sadducee families are supposed to keep a lid on this.” They all get killed. Temple gets destroyed. That’s why there’s no Sadducees after that. Just poof. That whole faction goes away because their whole power base was just around the temple and using that to enrich themselves. So this is why they saw one of the purposes of the Messiah as being to renew the priesthood, to restore the real priesthood. That’s already underlying a little bit of what we’ve read in Hebrews about Christ’s high priesthood. That this is part of what Christ does, is restore the correct means for us to relate with God, to be able to approach God, because that’s what the priesthood was all about, as we’ve talked about. It was part of—in the Torah, the system for managing sin that allowed God to continue to dwell among his people and allowed them to come and approach him in worship. He could stay there with them, and they could come close to him because of the purification of sin, the maintaining of purity, the removal of impurity when it arose.

And so if you have a priesthood that is itself impure, they’re not doing that. They’re not doing that. And so this is part—the culmination of that, that we find in Second Temple Jewish literature, is a tradition of the Messiah as high priest initiating an eschatological, meaning a final, great Day of Atonement. Because the Day of Atonement was this one day out of the year. They’re doing sin offerings all the time, so the Day of Atonement was in addition to that. And remember there were the two parts with the two goats. There was one goat—there was the goat for Azazel, sort of this demonic spirit out in the wilderness. They put all the sins of the people on the goat, drive the goat out into the wilderness. That goat doesn’t get sacrificed because now it’s unclean. It’s got sins on it. It’s sent out into the wilderness, sent back to Azazel where the sin came from in the first place. And then the other goat, the goat for Yahweh, is the one that is sacrificed. And its blood was used to purify the temple, the physical objects in the temple, because the view was: even though those sins have been dealt with in the people who committed them, there’s this taint or this residue or this stain left even on the physical world by sin, and so that needs to be purified by this Day of Atonement every year. So this eschatological Day of Atonement was going to be this final dealing with, where Azazel wasn’t just going to have sins sent back to him, but he’s going to be done away with, and we aren’t going to have to keep purifying things because everything is going to be purified once and for all. And so this was attached to this restoration of the priesthood idea, this Day of Atonement idea. It’s the high priest who does these acts on the Day of Atonement, so we have to have this layered in if we’re going to understand what it is that St. Paul is going to be talking about.

Just as a last note on that. We still have this understanding of the material world in the Orthodox Church. This is why we bless things. We don’t throw wood, smear animal blood on things, thankfully. That would be a mess. But this is why we bless houses. We use holy water now. It’s why we bless new cars. This is why we bless objects of all kinds. I’ve got the Book of Needs. I’ve got—it’s in alphabetical order. I can bless an apiary, I can bless an aviary, I can bless— You can just flip through it. Blessings for all of these things. We bless water, we bless— and that’s not turning it into magic, but it’s purifying it, and it’s taking it out of the world where it may have been used for all kinds of sinful things that may have represented all kinds of sinful things to people bringing it into the church and into our lives to use to serve God. To use it in the way it was created to be used. And that’s what blessing is, so we still have that concept. That’s why we do it.

I had somebody once say, “You know, you just blessed my house last year. Do you really need to come do it again?” And I said, “Have you sinned there in the last year?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “That’s why. That’s why I have to come back. So just go a year without sinning, and I won’t have to come visit you.”

So all of that is background. I know that’s a ton, it’s almost like an introduction to a book, but in order to make sense of what St. Paul is going to say and why he’s bringing up Melchizedek and what Melchizedek has to do with the Day of Atonement—he’s in Genesis and the Day of Atonement is in Leviticus—you have to know a little bit about what was going on there. And so what St. Paul is doing is not completely from scratch drawing some connection between Christ and this figure in six or—no it’s more than that, it’s like 12 or 13 verses in Genesis. It’s, St. Paul is connecting Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah as Christ to these Melchizedek traditions here and what we’re about to read.

So all of that said, let’s actually start reading St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews. Chapter seven, verse one. “For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the Most High God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him, to whom also Abraham gave a tenth part of all, first being translated ‘king of righteousness’ and then also king of Salem, meaning ‘king of peace,’ without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God, remains a priest continually.”

So first of all, this is a summary of what we have of him in Genesis. They basically—this is your short summary. So there’s this guy, this Melchizedek, king of Salem—he’s identified there as the priest of the Most High God—met Abraham. Abraham’s returning from the original war of the five kings and blessed him. Abraham gave him a tithe. So that’s the summary of what happens when Melchizedek shows up, and then the rest of it is interpretation.

But so we’ll go through this in more detail. So the name Melchizedek as he translated it there—well, we’ll get to the interpretation “king of righteousness” in a minute. Originally Melchi-zedek, means “My king is Zedek.” Zedek was a pagan god. He was a version of the pagan sun god Shemesh, who’s the sun god who was worshiped in Jerusalem before David took it, and unfortunately starting with his son Solomon, for most of Israel’s history. This is—it’s kind of buried in there, but if you read First and Second Kings or Third and Fourth Kingdoms of the Orthodox Study Bible closely, you’ll see that, for example, when King Josiah takes the throne, he goes and destroys the chariot of the sun god that Solomon had put in the temple in Jerusalem. So it was there that whole time until King Josiah destroyed it.

As a side note, you will frequently, all too frequently, get when you watch—as I’m compelled to do by some dark compulsion—watch documentaries on the National Geographic channel and the History channel about the bible, or just read articles, one of the most common things you see, even from scholars—it boggles my mind—is, “Well, the Bible says that the Jews were monotheists, but look. We found all these pagan shrines in Israel and Judah.” And I’m going, “Have you read the Bible, which says like every half a page that the Israelites were off worshiping at pagan shrines, and all these kings are wicked and built pagan shrines?” [Laughter] Over and over again, that’s exactly what the Bible says. The Bible says they were supposed to only be worshiping the one god; doesn’t say they actually did it. It says the exact opposite. It says they never did that, and that’s why they ended up in exile. Or destroyed, if we’re talking about the northern kingdom.

But so he’s named after that pagan sun god, and one of the things that confirms that—besides just linguistically, it means “my king is Zedek”—is when you get to the book of Joshua and they fight the king of Jerusalem during the conquest in Joshua, the king of Jerusalem at that time—so this is between five and seven hundred years later—the king of Jerusalem at that time is named Adonizedek, meaning “my lord is Zedek.” So this is the naming convention for their kings to be named after Shemesh Tzedekah, which is this version of the sun god. If you translate Shemesh Tzedekah literally, as most English Bible translations do when it shows up later, it means “sun of righteousness”. And so if you read closely in the prophets, when they’re talking about the Messiah, they’ll say the true sun of righteousness who will arise in Jerusalem, as opposed to this pagan one who’s not the real one. And that language gets picked up in our Nativity hymns, as we’ll hear here in a few weeks, referring to Christ as the true sun of righteousness who arises, as opposed to this one.

So this is why if you go back and read in Genesis about Melchizedek—and as St. Paul repeats here—it says repeatedly in a couple verses, it says three or four times, that he’s the priest of the Most High God. He’s the priest of the Most High God. Just to make clear this is not Abraham going with a pagan priest to worship the sun god, even though he’s named that. He didn’t name himself. His parents named him. He’s actually a priest of the of God Most High. He’s actually a priest of the the true god. And St. Paul mentions that again.

So, and Abraham meets him after Lot had been kidnapped. So a group of kings including the king of Sodom, where Lot was living at the time, tried to have an uprising. As you were saying, not technically a revolution, but to throw off the yoke of Kedorlaomer and several other kings, who had sort of dominated the region. They decided they wanted their independence. They lost. And so when they lost, Kedorlaomer and the other kings sacked the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and a few others in that area, the cities of the plain, and took a bunch of slaves and took a bunch of treasure. They sacked them, and Lot was one of the people taken as a slave.

So Abram at the time didn’t take that lying down. He got 318 men of fighting age and went up and attacked the rear flank of their armies as they’re going back and liberated Lot and a bunch of the other slaves and a lot of the loot that they were taking. And so after that victory, as he’s coming back, he was met by Melchizedek, who brings out bread and wine as a sacrificial meal for the Most High God. And Abraham—now it’s important Abraham doesn’t tithe from the loot. He gives all the loot back to the king of Sodom and tells the king of Sodom, “I don’t want any of your stuff.” Alright, why? Because it’s tainted. He’s like, “I don’t want anything to do with you or your stuff, king of Sodom.” because the king of Sodom offered him this big reward for bringing everything back. Abraham said no.

This is—he’s tithing from his own possessions. Back to giving a tenth back to God, who gave him all of it. So that’s what happened. So now the second part of this here in Hebrews is then interpretive— Yessir?

Interlocutor 2: How did Melchizedek become a priest of Yahweh if Abraham has this relationship with Yahweh, and we get the impression that nobody else does?

Fr. Stephen de Young: Well, he’s another person who does. So the story of Abraham begins right after the Tower of Babel. There’s literally nothing intervening. There’s—you get a genealogy at the end of Genesis 11 that leads from Shem, Noah’s son, to Terah, but that genealogy doesn’t even tell you where in there the Tower of Babel happened. So we’re meant to be feeding straight out of that story—in fact there are later rabbinic Jewish legends that say that Abram was at the Tower of Babel, that the reason for that is that no time passed, that he was there. But it’s clear that time passed because Abraham goes to Egypt, and they have a pharaoh and a developed civilization, which takes a while after the dividing of the nations.

But so what happens at the Tower of Babel, remember, is that at the Flood, man had become so wicked that basically God’s presence with man wiped him out. And after the Flood, God sets his bow— remember the rainbow isn’t a bow like on a package; it’s a bow like a bow and arrow. God sets his bow down. He declares peace unilaterally with humanity. It says, “I won’t destroy the earth again.” Well then, we see immediately after the Flood in those genealogies: things get really bad again, really fast. You have Nimrod showing up. So you’ve got some giant types showing up again, Nephilim types. You’ve got the Tower of Babel obviously being built. And so God isn’t going to destroy humanity again. So what happens when you take Genesis 11 in connection with Deuteronomy 32, which is the other place the Tower of Babel is talked about, is: okay, God doesn’t want everyone to be destroyed, so he has to leave. You can’t be present with sinful humanity without destroying them, so he withdraws.

And that means that between him and humanity, now there are angelic beings who he assigns to the various nations. That’s what Deuteronomy 32 says, “When god divided the nations, he numbered them according to the sons of God.” [He] puts these these angels in charge of them. They end up worshiping some of those angels. They become the powers and principalities and demons and gods of the nations, who god later judges.

So what we see with with Abram interestingly—when Abram gets called in Genesis 12, Yahweh doesn’t introduce himself the first time he talks. He does to Moses, but he doesn’t to Abram. He just talks to him. So his relationship with Abram pre-exists the story that we’re reading. He just says this to him. What is—so they already had—so we have that, and then it’s only two chapters later in chapter 14 that Melchizedek shows up. And he’s still a priest of the Most High God. So the picture we get is that even in this time period, there’s this remnant out there. There are these scattered people who will still remember and are still worshiping God Most High, even though he’s become this distant figure. And this is something that’s observed anthropologically in civilizations literally all over the world: that there there’s—over the course of—in the Near East, it’s the fourth and third [millennia] B.C.—the Most High God figure drifts off into the distance. And instead, everybody’s interacting with these other gods.

Like, if you read Plato, he talks about Cronus doing things. There’s a later myth where Cronus is done away with by Zeus, but he has Cronus doing things, and Zeus is under him. And you have with Baal the same thing. Technically Baal’s father El is the most high god, but you never read about El doing anything. You don’t see anybody worshiping El. They’re worshiping Baal, whoever they conceive of is the most high god just drifts off into the background.

Interlocutor 1: Brahma in Hinduism.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yeah. It’s all over the world that there’s this highest god, but he’s nowhere near. And there’s this other layer right underneath that everybody’s interacting with, but we see it this time, there are these figures. So Melchizedek is one of these figures, and that remnant idea plays out all through the Old Testament. One of the most famous places is Elijah, the prophet Elijah, Saint Elias. After he wins that victory on Mt. Carmel against the priest of Baal, remember he kind of despairs. He says to God, “I’m the only one left who’s still following you.” And God says, “No, there’s 10,000 people out there who are still my—” There’s always this remnant that he always keeps for himself: this remnant, even in the worst kind of periods.

So that’s what’s being presented there. That Melchizedek and Abram are sort of these kindred spirits, and that they’re two of the people out there in the world who are still following and relating to the Most High God.

Interlocutor 2: That was very clarifying on a number of things.

Fr. Stephen De Young: So that after this, St. Paul moves into interpretation of the story here in this summary. So he says, “the first being translated.” Translated isn’t a good word because translated makes it sound like St. Paul doesn’t know how Hebrew works, which St. Paul knew how Hebrew works. “Being interpreted” would be better. “King of righteousness,” it’s not—“king of righteousness” would be spelled differently in Hebrew. St. Paul knew Hebrew better than me. He knew that. And the same thing with “and also king of salem, meaning king of peace.” He knew that was referring to Jerusalem. He knew that’s what it was referring to. But also “shalom” in Hebrew means peace. So he’s saying this is an additional interpretation.

He’s now making a move from talking about historical Melchizedek as it were, in the literal level of the text in Genesis, and now to interpretation, to say he’s a king of what? What are the things that characterize Melchizedek as a figure? Righteousness or justice and peace. Why? Because these are going to be things that characterize the Messiah. They characterize Christ, and if you think I’m stretching by saying that’s interpretation and not literal, then I point you to verse three: “without father, without mother.” St. Paul is not saying he literally did not have parents, but the text doesn’t tell us who they were. The text doesn’t tell us who his parents were. So in the text, he doesn’t have parents. “Without genealogy.” Again, he was descended from somebody, but we’re not told the genealogy. “Having neither beginning of days nor end of life.” St. Paul is not saying Melchizedek, historical Melchizedek, was immortal. But we don’t read about his birth, and we don’t read about his death in the text.

“But made like the son of God, remains a priest continually.” So this is the final point he’s making. He’s talking about what “according to the order of Melchizedek” means. Because, again, he’s not preaching on Genesis 14. He’s preaching on Psalm 110. “I have made you the Messiah, a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.” Well, there’s no order of Melchizedek in the Old Testament, the Torah. He doesn’t start an order. Melchizedek is just there.

So he’s saying, “what are the things that characterize Melchizedek,” that you would say are properties for what makes the order. “Of the order of Melchizedek” means, I made you a priest forever like Melchizedek. Like Melchizedek in what ways? Righteousness, peace, no beginning and no end to your priesthood. Your priesthood is not derived from the priesthood of your father or mother’s line, your lineage. It’s not based on your genealogy.

These are things that didn’t characterize the earthly priesthood, the priesthood in the temple. Israelite history, [Judean] history, and Judea later. The priests were not very righteous and just. It’s what we were just talking about right—they weren’t always making peace. They derived their priesthood from their genealogy, from their parentage. It was derivative, it was handed down. Their priesthood had a beginning, and it had an end.

So by saying that the this priesthood, the Messianic priesthood is like Melchizedek, it’s saying those things. That’s what St. Paul is getting at here, these first three verses. Now he’s going to start to unpack that in more detail. He’s dropped that whole thing there in a quick summary, and now he’s going to build it out a little bit.