Hello brothers and sisters,
I want to do something different today, and I want to be honest about it from the first line. I don’t have a thesis for you. I have a chapter that has bothered me for a long time and a collaborator who is bothered by the same thing.
Open Genesis 14. The first half is a war. Four kings out of the east sweep down through the Transjordan and put down one clan after another, names most of us read straight past. Rephaim. Zuzim. Emim. Horites. Then they take Sodom, and they take Lot with it, and Abram goes after them with three hundred and eighteen men and wins.
The second half is four verses.
A priest-king walks out of Salem with bread and wine, blesses Abram, receives a tenth of everything he recovered, and leaves the page. No father. No mother. No tribe. No lineage of any kind, in a book that will not let a minor son go unlisted.
And then he refuses to stay gone. He surfaces again in Psalm 110. He surfaces a third time in Hebrews, where an entire argument about the priesthood of Christ gets built on top of him.
Two things, sitting side by side in one chapter. I have never once heard them preached together.
That is where this is going. The war and the clans that were worth defeating first. Abram’s three hundred and eighteen. The blessing and the tithe. Every serious theory about who Melchizedek was, argued fairly before any of them gets chosen. Hebrews 7. Og of Bashan and that iron bed in Deuteronomy 3. And four more giants at Gath in 2 Samuel 21, generations after the conquest was supposed to be finished.
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A word about method
Now, a word about how I work, for anyone arriving here from Deeper Still or who is otherwise unfamiliar with my work.
When the Hebrew text and the Greek text of the Old Testament say different things, I generally don’t treat one as the original and the other as the damage unless the text forces that conclusion.
I believe God preserved both deliberately, and that where they diverge they are usually telling different sides of one truth rather than contradicting each other. That conviction is going to matter a great deal when we reach Psalm 110, because the Hebrew and the Greek of that psalm do not say the same thing about the figure Melchizedek prefigures. Neither one is wrong. Together they say more than either says alone.
Now. You should know that this was not my idea.
Meet my collaborator
Lawrence Campbell writes Deeper Still, and he came to me with three threads he wanted to pull. Melchizedek. The Rephaim and the conquest. Og of Bashan and the giants at Gath. It took about an hour of conversation before both of us realized they were not three threads at all. They were one, and Genesis 14 was where it started.
He is carrying the narrative and the history. I am handling the manuscripts, the Greek, and the seams where the two traditions part company. We do not agree about everything, and I want to be clear about that. We don’t always come to the same conclusions. But where we don’t, we are going to say so on the page instead of sanding it smooth.
I’ve built this publication around transparency and sharing my discoveries with you, so I think it’s important that you see where Lawrence and I disagree and why. And more importantly, you will be able to tell which of us is speaking throughout this series.
Now, Lawrence, welcome to The LXX Scrolls. Tell them where this came from.
A deceptively simple question
“So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’” Acts 8:30 NRSV
“Do you understand what you are reading?”
A simple question, if you don’t look at it too closely. But everything we think we know, our worldview, our sense of who God is and what He’s doing, comes from how we interpret what we see, what we feel, and what eventually rises up to become our desires. So when the subject is the Bible, where humanity stands in it, who God is, what His plan is for us, and how we make sense of a book chosen and preserved across centuries for exactly this purpose, then “Do you understand what you are reading?” isn’t a throwaway question. It’s one of the most important questions a person can build a life on.
Does your happiness depend on the answer? Your family, your peace of mind, the way you carry yourself through a hard year? And to put the full weight on it: does a believer’s salvation hang on it?
In Acts 8:26, we’re given a story I think is essential to how every believer, and every honest seeker, should approach the Bible. Not another feel-good conversion story to nod along to. A picture of the blindness every person carries by default, apart from the Spirit. No amount of knowledge changes that. No amount of wealth changes it either. Solomon already ran that experiment and called the result vanity. Understanding doesn’t come from accumulation. It comes from God opening the eyes.
Philip is directed south by an angel of the Lord, to the road running from Jerusalem to Gaza. There he finds an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official, reading the prophet Isaiah in a moving chariot. The Spirit tells Philip to go join him. And when Philip catches up, he asks the question that gives this whole series its shape: “Do you understand what you are reading?”
Philip doesn’t just explain a passage. He hands the man a new set of eyes. The eunuch’s whole framework shifts. He starts to see the way God sees, and once that door opens, everything else, the good, the hard, the theologically uncomfortable, becomes something he can actually wrestle with instead of something he has to flatten to survive.
So as Kevin and I take on this text together, that’s the posture. Not certainty performed for an audience. A mind fixed on God, on His wisdom, on what He has for believers to know in this stretch of history we’re standing in. I’d ask you to bring the same posture. Wrestle with the text. Wrestle with God. Let Him unsettle the small, safe reading you’ve inherited, so He can hand you something truer in its place.
Ten people can read one story and walk away with ten different interpretations. The goal was never to defend your own. The goal is to wrestle until you’re holding God’s.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight.” Proverbs 3:5 NRSV
This is the posture this series asks of you:
“Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’” Genesis 32:26 NRSV
Holding a question with an open hand instead of grabbing for the nearest comfortable answer. This is exactly the discipline the next several thousand words are going to ask of you, because the passage we’re about to enter is one most readers skim past without ever noticing what it’s doing.
Before We Start
Kevin: Before we get into the meat of today’s post, I want to show you where Lawrence and I land in different places. Better to do that now, while we still have a chapter neither of us has started debating.
I asked him to say where he stands going in.
Lawrence: Kevin and I won’t agree on everything throughout this series. We’ll lay out our positions honestly, point to where the other’s reading is strong, and press on the places where we think it isn’t. My goal is to carry the careful reader through this ancient lineage we call Christianity, and through the findings I believe the facts actually support.
I believe the Bible is woven together with precision, telling God’s people who we are, who we are in relation to Him, and what mission has been laid on us for this particular age.
And I say age deliberately.
I believe we’re living inside what Scripture calls the Church Age, one chapter in a much longer story. Read the Bible as a whole, and it traces the history of a family, the lineage every believer has been grafted into. Picture the body of Christ as a tree that has been growing since before recorded history, and picture us, right now, as its newest branch.
Real as that growth is, faith, resilience, the knowledge of who God actually is, the Bible is doing something more than tracking it. It’s handing us a battle plan, showing us exactly where we stand inside a war most people never see.
That’s my stance for this series, and here’s where I’ll take it.
I’ll give you background on the offspring of fallen angels, the giants themselves, who weren’t simply an act of rebellion. They were an assault aimed directly at God and at His plan for heaven and earth. The flood was God’s response to that defiance. It was sent to wipe that creation out, and the uncomfortable possibility that some of what the flood was meant to end may have survived it anyway.
The elephant in the room
Kevin: That last line is where we part company, and it is the question a careful reader is already forming, because verse five of this chapter walks right past it.
Genesis 6 tells us the Nephilim were on the earth before the flood. Genesis 7 tells us that only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark. Then Genesis 14 lists three giant clans still standing in the Transjordan centuries later, as though nothing happened.
So which is it?
My answer is fairly simple, and it is not without its own hiccups. Put simply: I think it happened again.
Genesis 6:4 says the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man. That last clause does work most of us skate over. The text seems to be telling us this was not a one-time event. There were later incursions, spiritual beings coming back to do again what was done before, trying to corrupt the bloodlines ahead of the Messiah. It is the most natural reading, in my view.
I take that road partly because the alternative asks the flood narrative to mean less than it says. Scripture tells us nothing living outside the ark survived. Once I start carving exceptions into that, I am not reading the text anymore. I am negotiating with it.
Lawrence is not far from me on this. When I put it to him, he said he agreed, and made a point I have not stopped thinking about since. People watch others go to prison for a thing and then do the thing anyway. Knowing the penalty has never been the same as being stopped by it.
But he raised an objection, and it is a good one. Those first Watchers were thrown into the worst imprisonment Scripture describes. Would a second group really look at Tartarus and decide it was worth trying again?
Here is the best answer I have, and I hold it loosely.
Psalm 82 ends with God telling the rebellious sons of the Most High that they will die like men and fall like any prince. Their sentence is already written. If you are already condemned, deepening the rebellion costs you very little and might buy you something. One more run at the world you wanted, instead of the Pit you have been promised.
Not calculation. A last gamble against the promise made in Genesis 3:15.
Neither of us is pretending that settles it. He still holds open the possibility that something came through the water. I still think the text closes that door. What we both grant is everything downstream: there were giant clans in Canaan, their existence is tied to the rebellion in Genesis 6, and Israel is going to have to deal with them.
We will come back to this.
And a word about the word “giant”
Kevin: One more thing before the war, because Lawrence sets it up perfectly later in this post.
He is going to point out that Rephaim gets absorbed into English as “giants” and left there. Background detail. A note explaining why this war sounded impressive.
He is right that it happened. I want to push on where.
Roughly two centuries before Christ, Jewish translators in Egypt faced the same problem your English Bible faces. A word attached to peoples who no longer existed, for readers who no longer spoke the language it came from. They had to say something. At Genesis 14:5 they decided to interpret, and the Greek reads that Chedorlaomer struck down the giants.
So the flattening happened in Alexandria, about two thousand years before English existed.
But they did not do it consistently. Not remotely. In some books they transliterated and declined to explain the word at all. In one place they reached into Greek mythology and called them Titans, which is a startling thing for a Jewish translator in Egypt to do with a valley outside Jerusalem.
I am going to spend a full section on that next time. For today, just this. When your Bible prints “giants” here, “shades” somewhere else, and plain “Rephaim” in a third place, that is not modern translators being careless. That is a two-thousand-year-old argument still running, and your Bible is a participant in it.
Now let me turn the time over to Lawrence.
Genesis 14 and the war nobody remembers for the right reasons
Genesis 14 is one of the strangest chapters in the whole book, and most people never register the strangeness, because they never read it as one chapter. There’s a war in the first half. There’s a priest-king in the second half, a man who appears out of nowhere, blesses Abram, receives a tenth of everything, and disappears from the record almost as fast as he arrived. Two events, most readers assume, loosely filed under the same chapter number. A battle report, and then, separately, a strange interruption.
They are not two stories. They are one argument, told in two movements, and you cannot understand what the second movement is doing until you have sat with the first one long enough to feel its weight. That’s the part almost every treatment of Melchizedek skips. They want to get to the mystery. They rush the setup to reach the payoff faster. But Genesis didn’t build it that way, and if we skip ahead the way most readers do, we inherit an answer without ever understanding the question it’s answering.
So before we get anywhere near the priest-king, we have to sit in the war. Not as background. As the argument itself, half-finished, waiting for its resolution.
Here’s why that matters beyond just getting the story right. Genesis 14 is quietly establishing how this book, and eventually the whole canon, measures power, legitimacy, and who gets to stand at the top of the order.
That’s not an academic question.
It’s the question underneath every time you’ve wondered why the strong don’t always win, why the pedigreed don’t always inherit, why God keeps handing authority to people and lines that look, by every worldly measure, like the wrong choice.
Genesis 14 is where that pattern gets its first full demonstration in Scripture, laid out in numbers and geography and casualty lists before it ever gets stated as a principle. If you don’t diagnose how the chapter defines power in its first half, you will misread what the second half is claiming was defeated.
Four Kings Against Five
Genesis 14 opens with a coalition. Four kings from the east, Amraphel of Shinar, Arioch of Ellasar, Chedorlaomer of Elam, and Tidal of Goiim, allied with five kings of the plain: Bera of Sodom, Birsha of Gomorrah, Shinab of Admah, Shemeber of Zeboiim, and the king of Bela, which the text tells us is Zoar.
This isn’t the opening skirmish of a conflict. It’s the twelfth year of service. Verse 4 gives us the arrangement plainly: the five kings of the plain had served Chedorlaomer for twelve years, and in the thirteenth they rebelled.
In the fourteenth, Chedorlaomer came to collect.
He didn’t come alone, and he didn’t come straight at his target. Verse 5 through 7 trace a campaign that sweeps south and east before it ever turns toward Sodom, striking the Rephaim at Ashteroth-karnaim, the Zuzim at Ham, the Emim at Shaveh-kiriathaim, and the Horites in the hill country of Seir, all the way to El-paran on the edge of the wilderness. Then the army turns back, strikes En-mishpat (which is Kadesh), moves through the country of the Amalekites, and finally reaches the Amorites at Hazazon-tamar, before the actual battle against the kings of the plain even begins in the Valley of Siddim.
That’s not incidental geography. That’s a coalition army methodically clearing every fortified people group along its flank before it ever engages its real target. Chedorlaomer isn’t marching to a battle. He’s running a campaign, and the Transjordan is the theater. This is realpolitik on the scale of empire, four eastern powers projecting force a fifteen hundred mile journey from home to keep a rebellious vassal region in line, and doing it by making an example of every clan strong enough to interfere.
Which tells you something about who those clans were. You don’t route an army through hostile territory to strike people who can’t fight back. The Rephaim, the Zuzim, the Emim, the Horites, these weren’t soft targets. They were obstacles worth the detour. Whatever else Genesis wants us to understand about them later, chapter 14 establishes it first, in the plainest way a text can establish anything: by showing us who a four-king coalition thought was worth defeating before it dared move on Sodom.
The battle itself, when it finally comes, is almost anticlimactic by comparison. Verse 10 tells us the Valley of Siddim was full of bitumen pits, and as the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, some fell into them while the rest escaped to the hills. The coalition takes everything, the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah, all their provisions, and they leave. Among what they take is Lot, Abram’s nephew, who had settled in Sodom.
That’s the setup. A regional war, fought at empire scale, over vassal loyalty and border clans, with Abram’s family caught in the debris almost as an afterthought. Nobody in verse 12 is thinking about Abram yet. He’s a footnote to somebody else’s war.
Verse 13 changes that.
Abram Wins
A survivor comes and tells Abram his nephew has been taken. Abram is described here, for the only time in Genesis, as “the Hebrew.” He’s dwelling by the oaks of Mamre the Amorite and his brothers Eschol and Aner, who were Abram’s allies. And his response is immediate. He arms 318 trained men, born in his own household, and pursues.
Sit with the number for a moment, because the text wants you to. Three hundred eighteen men. Against a coalition that had just finished a campaign methodical enough to defeat the Rephaim, the Zuzim, the Emim, and the Horites in sequence, on their own ground, before turning to crush five kings at once. This isn’t an even fight on paper. It isn’t close to one.
And Abram doesn’t just win. He wins decisively. Genesis 14:15 tells us he divided his forces by night, struck the coalition, and pursued them all the way to Hobah, north of Damascus. He recovers everything, the goods, the people, Lot, the women. A household militia routs an army that had just humbled clans strong enough to make an imperial coalition go out of its way to deal with them first.
Read the two halves of this chapter next to each other and the contrast is the whole point. Genesis has just spent twelve verses establishing a scale of power measured in stature, in fortified cities, in campaigns that sweep entire regions. Chedorlaomer’s coalition is the biggest thing on the page. And then it loses, not to a rival empire, but to a shepherd with 318 men and a covenant nobody else in the chapter knows he’s carrying.
This is not a story about Abram being a better tactician than four kings. Nothing in the text credits strategy for the outcome, though the divided night attack is real enough as a maneuver. The chapter is doing something else. It has just shown us, in careful and repeated detail, that raw power in this world gets measured by size, by conquest, by the ability to defeat the biggest clans on the map. And then it shows the covenant line winning without any of that. No standing army. No imperial reach. A household band and a rescue mission, and somehow that’s what walks away with everything.
Genesis doesn’t explain why yet. It just lets the reversal sit there, unresolved, a question with no answer attached.
That question doesn’t stay open for long. Abram is returning from the defeat of the kings, Lot and the recovered goods in tow, when the king of Sodom comes out to meet him at the valley of Shaveh (King’s Valley).
Then a second king comes out to meet him. Not from the east this time. From Salem (remember that the scholarly consensus is that this is Jerusalem). And this one doesn’t come with an army.
He comes with bread and wine and to bless Abram. And Abram responds by giving the tithe — Hebrew מעשר (maʿaser) literally “a tenth” or “tenth part” — to him, while in the same breath refusing to accept anything from the king of Sodom.
Whatever the war just proved about power measured by size, the next few verses are about to complicate it in a direction nobody in the chapter saw coming.
Lawrence
The Man Who Had No Reason to Go
Amazing work, Lawrence. I think this has given us a lot to think about.
Let’s take a minute to go back to the moment the war becomes Abram’s problem.
For twelve verses it isn’t. Four kings march, five kings rebel, cities burn, and none of it has anything to do with a herdsman camped under the oaks at Mamre. Abram is not in this story. He is not a party to the treaty, he holds no city, and nobody has come for his flocks.
Then one sentence changes everything.
“Then one who had escaped came and told Abram the Hebrew.”
Somebody ran. Somebody survived the rout at the tar pits, made it across open country, found Abram’s camp, and said the words. And from the moment those words land, Abram is no longer a man who is not involved. He is a man who knows.
Look at what he could have said next, because he had three good answers ready and he used none of them.
He could have said he did not ask for this. Nobody consulted him. The news arrived uninvited, and there is no obligation in simply being told a thing.
He could have said Lot made his choice. And he would have been right. Lot looked out over the whole Jordan Valley, saw that it was well watered like the garden of the Lord, and pitched his tent toward Sodom. They had separated. That was Lot’s decision, freely made, and the consequences that followed it were the consequences of the road he picked.
He could have said he did not have enough. Genesis names his allies but never counts them. It counts only his own: three hundred eighteen men born in his household, against a coalition that had just rolled up five kings and three giant clans in a single campaign. That is not an army. That is a household with weapons.
Not one of those three held.
“When Abram heard that his kinsman had been taken captive, he led forth his trained men.”
He heard. And then he went.
Lawrence opened this post with Philip running alongside a chariot and asking a stranger whether he understood what he was reading. Notice how that story ends. Philip explains, the man understands, and his very next words are, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?” He does not schedule it. He does not go home and think about it. Understanding arrives and he is out of the chariot.
That is the same shape. Abram hears and arms his house. The eunuch understands and asks for water. In neither case does the knowledge sit politely and wait.
I think that is the quiet warning underneath a chapter that looks like a war story. Understanding is not a possession. It is a summons. The moment you actually see something in Scripture, you have lost the option of being a person who does not know, and every reason you had for staying out of it has just gotten weaker.
And here is what makes me sit still with this one.
Abram went after a man who had walked away from him toward the worst city in the narrative, and he went with three hundred eighteen against four kings. I am not going to claim Genesis wrote that scene to be a picture of the gospel, because the text does not say so and I would rather leave the seam visible.
But I cannot read it without noticing the shape.
God comes after people who chose worse than Sodom. He comes without owing anything to any of us. And He comes with what looks, from the outside, like nothing at all: A carpenter turned itinerant preacher. The most horrific death the Romans could dream up. And a borrowed tomb.
Three hundred eighteen against four kings is still better odds than a cross against the grave.
So the question this chapter leaves is not whether you understand it. You will, by the time we are finished. The question is what you are going to do on the morning after somebody tells you.
What’s Coming
Next time we pick up the question of who the Rephaim really were and we’ll be doing it from Lawrence’s publication at Deeper Still. And I’ll expand on the case that the Greek translators of this passage made a decision about the Rephaim that your English Bible inherited without telling you.
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One text to have on the pile for part two, if it is not there already. 11QMelchizedek, from Cave 11.
It is the missing middle between your four verses in Genesis 14 and Hebrews 7. In it Melchizedek is a heavenly figure who proclaims the year of release and carries out the judgments of God, and the scroll applies Psalm 82:1 to him, God has taken his place in the divine assembly, with Melchizedek standing in the elohim slot. Somebody at Qumran had already made him considerably more than a Canaanite king with bread, and they did it before Hebrews was written.
That is the part I have never settled for myself. Whether Hebrews is arguing against that reading or quietly assuming it. The no father and no mother line lands differently depending on the answer.
Excellent!!! I love the tandem writing also!