Now we come to the four verses this whole series has been walking toward.
Because Genesis 14 does not end with the battle. It ends with a man coming down a road with bread and wine, blessing the one person in the chapter who had just proved he could not be beaten, and taking a tenth of everything before disappearing out of the book entirely.
No father. No mother. No tribe.
And then refusing to stay gone. He surfaces in Psalm 110. He surfaces again in Hebrews, where an entire doctrine of the priesthood of Christ gets built on top of him.
One thing hiding in the verse you quote, and the NRSV covers it up for you.
Genesis 14:20 in Hebrew is va-yitten lo ma'aser mikkol. And he gave to him a tenth of everything. There is no subject in that clause. The Hebrew does not say who handed the tithe to whom, and readers have argued both directions for a very long time, which matters because Hebrews 7:4-6 builds the entire superiority argument on the direction of travel.
The earliest witness that settles it is not Hebrews. It is the Genesis Apocryphon, column 22, which retells the scene and says Abram gave him the tithe of all the possessions of the king of Elam and his companions. So a Jewish text from before the New Testament had already fixed the subject, and fixed the source as the Elamite plunder rather than Abram's own estate.
Given what you have both been doing with the Greek all series, this is the Aramaic doing the same job. Somebody had to decide, and somebody did, two hundred years before Hebrews needed the answer.
However, my view is that vv. 19-20a and 21 make it clear who the subject is.
While there's nothing in the grammar, per se, the logical inference of exchange and closing the Abram/Melchizedek loop signals pretty decisively that it's Abram giving Melchizedek the tenth.
And that signal works just as well in Hebrew and Greek as it does in English.
Taking that. The inference from 19-20a into 21 does the work and I was treating a grammatical gap as a live question when the paragraph had already closed it.
What the Apocryphon still adds is not the subject but the object. Genesis says a tenth of everything and leaves everything undefined. 1QapGen 22 says the tithe of all the possessions of the king of Elam and his companions, which makes it the recovered plunder rather than anything of Abram's own.
That is worth having because of what happens three verses later. Abram will not take a thread or a sandal strap from the king of Sodom, in case anybody says he made Abram rich. He has just given a tenth of that same spoil to a priest of God Most High and he refuses the rest of it from a pagan king. The Apocryphon is the earliest witness that the two decisions are about the same pile.
Kevin, yes. The Apocryphon shows how one Jewish retelling filled the gap Genesis 14 leaves, and that is all I'd ask of it. Genesis is still the text it is commenting on.
I appreciate your work. I would recommend a read through of the battle for the bibles truth by Doug van dorn. His argument solves the dilemma that you couldn’t. The early church witnessed the rabbis editing texts. They were losing arguments to Christian apologists, we have these testimonies from Justin martyr and Iraneus. What van dorn argues is according to Van Dorn, the rabbis were losing ground to Christian arguments that Melchizedek pointed to a divine/eternal priest-king fulfilled in Jesus, so they (1) edited the genealogy numbers to enable Shem = Melchizedek and (2) promoted that identification (plus related demotions of Melchizedek’s priesthood in some rabbinic texts) to undercut the Christian reading.
I appreciate you bringing that source into the conversation. That’s exactly the kind of argument worth examining rather than simply accepting or dismissing.
The question of textual transmission, Melchizedek, and the relationship between Jewish and Christian readings is fascinating, especially when you put the Masoretic Text, Septuagint, early Christian writers, and later rabbinic traditions alongside one another.
I’ll definitely add Van Dorn’s argument to the breadcrumbs worth following. Even when a proposed explanation ultimately needs to be tested, it can raise questions that force us to look more carefully at the evidence. That’s exactly the kind of deeper study I’m after.
Thanks, Chris. The demotion half you can check in the Talmud. Nedarim 32b has R. Zechariah, in R. Ishmael's name, saying God meant to bring the priesthood out of Shem, but because Melchizedek blessed Abram before he blessed God, it went to Abraham instead: "he was a priest, but not his seed."
The numbers are the half I'd want a witness for. In the Hebrew of Genesis 11 Shem outlives Abraham by thirty-five years, which is what lets Shem be Melchizedek at all. But when Justin lists what he says was cut out of the Scriptures (Dialogue 72 and 73), he names a saying of Esdras, two of Jeremiah and a line of Psalm 96, and nothing from Genesis. Is there an early writer who points at the genealogies?
Van Dorn argues in chapter 9, Jewish myths and genealogies, that there was already a Jewish understanding that Melchizedek was a heavenly figure. It was being debated amongst the Jews in the second temple period and the Dead Sea scrolls provide evidence of this. While he doesn’t cite any specific early source that draws his conclusion, he argues that the rabbis saw many of there people converting to Christianity and part of that reason was the strength of the supernatural worldview/2 Yahweh/Christ=Melchizedek argument.
In response, the genealogies are reconstructed to make Shem=Melchizedek possible. And the supernatural understanding of genesis 6, 1 Enoch as a source etc all rejected.
Thanks, Chris, I read it. Scipio is answering the exact question I left you with, since he names Eusebius, Augustine and others as noting the dispute over the Genesis numbers. Augustine is the one I could check, and he's more cautious than the company the post puts him in. In City of God 15.13 he reports the charge that the Jews altered the ages to undercut the Greek, then says no prudent man would believe either the Jews or the Seventy did it on purpose, and he puts the hundred-year shifts down to the first copyist of the Greek in Ptolemy's library. So there is an early writer pointing at the genealogies, and he points away from the rabbis.
One thing hiding in the verse you quote, and the NRSV covers it up for you.
Genesis 14:20 in Hebrew is va-yitten lo ma'aser mikkol. And he gave to him a tenth of everything. There is no subject in that clause. The Hebrew does not say who handed the tithe to whom, and readers have argued both directions for a very long time, which matters because Hebrews 7:4-6 builds the entire superiority argument on the direction of travel.
The earliest witness that settles it is not Hebrews. It is the Genesis Apocryphon, column 22, which retells the scene and says Abram gave him the tithe of all the possessions of the king of Elam and his companions. So a Jewish text from before the New Testament had already fixed the subject, and fixed the source as the Elamite plunder rather than Abram's own estate.
Given what you have both been doing with the Greek all series, this is the Aramaic doing the same job. Somebody had to decide, and somebody did, two hundred years before Hebrews needed the answer.
100% correct.
However, my view is that vv. 19-20a and 21 make it clear who the subject is.
While there's nothing in the grammar, per se, the logical inference of exchange and closing the Abram/Melchizedek loop signals pretty decisively that it's Abram giving Melchizedek the tenth.
And that signal works just as well in Hebrew and Greek as it does in English.
Taking that. The inference from 19-20a into 21 does the work and I was treating a grammatical gap as a live question when the paragraph had already closed it.
What the Apocryphon still adds is not the subject but the object. Genesis says a tenth of everything and leaves everything undefined. 1QapGen 22 says the tithe of all the possessions of the king of Elam and his companions, which makes it the recovered plunder rather than anything of Abram's own.
That is worth having because of what happens three verses later. Abram will not take a thread or a sandal strap from the king of Sodom, in case anybody says he made Abram rich. He has just given a tenth of that same spoil to a priest of God Most High and he refuses the rest of it from a pagan king. The Apocryphon is the earliest witness that the two decisions are about the same pile.
That's true, so long as we keep in view that the Apocryphon reading is an interpretation and not Scripture.
Kevin, yes. The Apocryphon shows how one Jewish retelling filled the gap Genesis 14 leaves, and that is all I'd ask of it. Genesis is still the text it is commenting on.
I appreciate your work. I would recommend a read through of the battle for the bibles truth by Doug van dorn. His argument solves the dilemma that you couldn’t. The early church witnessed the rabbis editing texts. They were losing arguments to Christian apologists, we have these testimonies from Justin martyr and Iraneus. What van dorn argues is according to Van Dorn, the rabbis were losing ground to Christian arguments that Melchizedek pointed to a divine/eternal priest-king fulfilled in Jesus, so they (1) edited the genealogy numbers to enable Shem = Melchizedek and (2) promoted that identification (plus related demotions of Melchizedek’s priesthood in some rabbinic texts) to undercut the Christian reading.
I appreciate you bringing that source into the conversation. That’s exactly the kind of argument worth examining rather than simply accepting or dismissing.
The question of textual transmission, Melchizedek, and the relationship between Jewish and Christian readings is fascinating, especially when you put the Masoretic Text, Septuagint, early Christian writers, and later rabbinic traditions alongside one another.
I’ll definitely add Van Dorn’s argument to the breadcrumbs worth following. Even when a proposed explanation ultimately needs to be tested, it can raise questions that force us to look more carefully at the evidence. That’s exactly the kind of deeper study I’m after.
Thanks, Chris. The demotion half you can check in the Talmud. Nedarim 32b has R. Zechariah, in R. Ishmael's name, saying God meant to bring the priesthood out of Shem, but because Melchizedek blessed Abram before he blessed God, it went to Abraham instead: "he was a priest, but not his seed."
The numbers are the half I'd want a witness for. In the Hebrew of Genesis 11 Shem outlives Abraham by thirty-five years, which is what lets Shem be Melchizedek at all. But when Justin lists what he says was cut out of the Scriptures (Dialogue 72 and 73), he names a saying of Esdras, two of Jeremiah and a line of Psalm 96, and nothing from Genesis. Is there an early writer who points at the genealogies?
Van Dorn argues in chapter 9, Jewish myths and genealogies, that there was already a Jewish understanding that Melchizedek was a heavenly figure. It was being debated amongst the Jews in the second temple period and the Dead Sea scrolls provide evidence of this. While he doesn’t cite any specific early source that draws his conclusion, he argues that the rabbis saw many of there people converting to Christianity and part of that reason was the strength of the supernatural worldview/2 Yahweh/Christ=Melchizedek argument.
In response, the genealogies are reconstructed to make Shem=Melchizedek possible. And the supernatural understanding of genesis 6, 1 Enoch as a source etc all rejected.
https://dfreality.substack.com/p/erasing-the-messiah-on-the-septuagint-108?r=xsjx0&utm_medium=ios
He has some relevant information regarding this topic as well
Thanks, Chris, I read it. Scipio is answering the exact question I left you with, since he names Eusebius, Augustine and others as noting the dispute over the Genesis numbers. Augustine is the one I could check, and he's more cautious than the company the post puts him in. In City of God 15.13 he reports the charge that the Jews altered the ages to undercut the Greek, then says no prudent man would believe either the Jews or the Seventy did it on purpose, and he puts the hundred-year shifts down to the first copyist of the Greek in Ptolemy's library. So there is an early writer pointing at the genealogies, and he points away from the rabbis.