The Lord of Spirits

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana. So, unlike most of our episodes, this one is actually pre-recorded; we’re not live, because when this actually does air, I’m going to be participating in the Ancient Faith Ministries staff retreat, so if you were to call right now, you’re not going to get anyone on the other end. But we should be back again live in the future.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Right now we’re talking to you from the past.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. We’re time-traveling voices.

Fr. Stephen: It’s like a message in a bottle, thrown into the airwaves.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So this message, for this episode, is that we’re going to be looking at the mysterious figure of Melchizedek. So Abram, who is later going to be called Abraham, meets him in Genesis 14. Melchizedek gets mentioned again in Psalm 110, and then he shows up one more time in the epistle to the Hebrews in its meditation on the priesthood. But, I mean, who is this guy? And why does Hebrews link him to Christ? Is he some kind of pre-New Testament appearance of the Son of God? What’s going on here, you know?

So to get us started, we’re going to focus on his appearance first in Genesis 14, but we’re going to need a little bit of contextual backstory. So what’s going on here, Fr. Stephen? What happens right before Abram actually meets Melchizedek?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this isn’t some arcane lore or unearthed arcana. You can find this by reading the previous verses. [Laughter] But a lot of times we’re like: “Okay, well, let’s talk about Melchizedek.” So we do a search, biblegateway: Melchizedek, okay. We read Genesis 14:18-20, which is where he appears, and don’t read what comes before that and what comes after that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in this case, no archaeological dig required, just read the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yes. You don’t need to know Ugaritic; you don’t need any of that. But so before these verses… Well, maybe first we should read these verses, and then we’ll do the context.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, just to remind everybody. Okay, so this is Genesis 14:18-20.

Then Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine, because he was a priest for God Most High. So he blessed him, saying, “Blessed is Abram by God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth, and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand.” Then he (that is, Abram) gave to him a tithe of everything.

And that’s it.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that is it. And there are further conversations that Abram has right after this, but Melchizedek is just gone at that point. He just disappears. He sort of comes out of nowhere and disappears into nowhere, and St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews comments on this fact, but we’ll get to that later on.

So in terms of the context, we’ll start with what comes before this, because of course this begins with a “Then…” [Laughter] So he’s doing this, Melchizedek shows up with the bread and the wine for a reason. So what we have at the beginning of Genesis 14 is a description of the war of the five kings, which sounds like something in Tolkien, but is actually…

Fr. Andrew: I mean, could this be described as a battle of five armies?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Not really. It’s just two armies, but yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Oh well.

Fr. Stephen: So what’s set up is that sort of our main figure at this time is this fellow, Kedorlaomer, sometimes pronounced Chedorlaomer by kids in Sunday school and then leading to cheese jokes. But Kedorlaomer, who is labeled here as an Elamite king, his name is from Kedor and Lagamar, which means servant of Lagamar, who was an Elamite goddess. So this fellow is a pagan, but, if you remember our last episode, Abram lives at the end of the Ur III period; the Elamites are expanding their territory at this time, and they’re the ones who ultimately end the Ur III period when they capture Ur. But so the Elamites are expanding, and what we’re reading about in Genesis 14 is them expanding into Palestine, into Canaan and its environs; they’re moving in that direction, and so he—and he as a number of Elamite kings who are vassals of his, whose forces are with him as they’re expanding and subjecting the city-states of that region to vassalhood and to send tribute to the growing Elamite territory—encounters resistance. Several of these cities, including Sodom and Gomorrah, decide that they want to resist and throw off the shackles of Kedorlaomer.

Now when we read about the expansion at the beginning of Genesis 14, the people whom Kedorlaomer is taking out and displacing as he expands into Canaan are a list of people whom we should probably be familiar with already, because we’ve quoted Deuteronomy 2 a whole bunch of times on this podcast. It’s the Gergazites and the Hivites and the Emim and the Amalekites. It’s all the giant clans that Kedorlaomer and his Elamite armies—remember, these are Mesopotamians, like Abraham, like Abram—and coming in and displacing them and taking their territory. So when Sodom and Gomorrah and the other cities of the plain decide they want to throw off and rebel against Kedorlaomer, they’re siding with the Amorites and the other giant clans against the Mesopotamians.

And interestingly, Genesis 14 names Kedorlaomer and his vassals who were on his side; it does not name the kings on the other side.

Fr. Andrew: So what’s that all about?

Fr. Stephen: The five kings who attack them are just “the king of Sodom, the king of Gomorrah…”

Fr. Andrew: Hmm. I see, for instance, Genesis 14:5, this explicit reference to Kedorlaomer and the kings who were with him came and defeated the Rephaites, the Rephaim, and the Zuzim, and the… This is literally a list of giant clans here.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Whom he came and defeated. But then when it gets to the kings, the five kings who are going to try to overthrow him, it’s just the king of this city, the king of that city, of this other city.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, verse eight.

Fr. Stephen: Their names are unimportant, because they’re the bad guys. In fact, the king of Sodom actually is going to, after the Melchizedek passage, have a conversation with Abram, and he’s not named there either; he’s just the king of Sodom, the guy who happened to be king of Sodom at that point, because he’s not important. So, remember, these are priest-kings who probably set themselves up as god-kings.

Fr. Andrew: Which means they’re receiving worship.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and in the place where Abram is living, these people are considered divine beings and sort of immensely powerful and important, and the biblical text doesn’t even bother to record their names.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, may their names be blotted out.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes, it’s not even there. So when they rise up, they’re essentially siding with those conquered giant clans, because even now, even at this level in Genesis, just we’re going to see as the Torah continues, there are your run-of-the-mill pagans, and then there are giant clans. And pagans are people who have become deluded, who are now being held captive to these spiritual powers whom they worshiped and that gave them power and control over them; whereas the giant clans are the ones who are participating in sort of demonic sexual immorality, human sacrifice, cannibalism: they’re the extreme end, and there’s this distinction made even here. So your run-of-the-mill Mesopotamian pagan is still better than a giant clan.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he at least gets mentioned by name.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and he can be used by God to render judgment against those giant clans for their actions. So, because he’s on the right side, Kedorlaomer and his vassals wipe out—make pretty quick work of the five cities of the plain and their kings, and go and plunder them. And plundering doesn’t just mean we take all their gold and silver and all their nice stuff; it also means we take a bunch of their people to be slaves. And one of those people who gets taken as a slave is Abram’s nephew, Lot.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because he’s hanging out in Zoar, which is one of the cities that just got conquered.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and which is near Sodom. He’s sort of… Every time we see Lot, he’s moved closer and closer to Sodom until, when Sodom and Gomorrah are going to be destroyed, he’s actually living in town. So he’s already in that area. So he gets taken to be a slave.

So Abram is not siding with the king of Sodom. He doesn’t go into the battle in the first place, but he is going to rescue his nephew, Lot, who’s a member of his family, who’s been taken captive by the Elamites. And so to do that, he goes and gathers together 318 fighting men. He’s made some agreements with some people near the land he’s living on. Those agreements would have been about who uses what water and how much for their crops and things. Remember, he’s living outside of the city, outside of civilization. And he gathers together 318 fighting men to go and pursue the Elamite armies to try to overtake them and get ahold of Lot and set him free. If you are Orthodox and you have heard this story, it was probably at vespers, probably before a feast of the Holy Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, especially the feast of the First Ecumenical Council, but any of the Ecumenical Councils. It’s the point where the reader stumbles over the name Kedorlaomer, which sometimes has a G inserted into it somewhere. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Between the A and the O; that’s actually correct.

Fr. Andrew: Kedorlagomer, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because there’s an I-N in there. It’s a long story.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. So my sense of the reason why that would be done… There’s this kind of facile… I’ve heard this facile explanation which is: Well, look, there’s 318 people in this little rescue operation, and, wow, there were 318 Holy Fathers at the First Ecumenical Council. I kind of wonder, like—

Fr. Stephen: Which is true—but not sufficient.

Fr. Andrew: Although I have to wonder sometimes, is this a little bit of a chicken-egg issue, like, do we say there were 318 because we’re modeling that? But anyway, it doesn’t super, super-duper matter, but the understanding that I would have that the reason why this reading is chosen for the feasts of these Fathers is essentially to say that they’re engaging in the same kinds of spiritual battles by virtue of what they’re doing in those councils as was happening in this specifically spiritual warfare, because it’s warfare against demonized cannibals and so forth, giant clans. Is my take on that…? Is that right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s the same kind of rescue operation. And just like Lot isn’t innocent, the person who falls into heresy in the Church isn’t innocent in it—they’re involved in following after the heresiarch or following after the heresy—but from the perspective of the Church, just like Lot got a little too close and now he’s been taken captive and needs to be rescued, that’s what happens to people in the Church with heresy. And so what the Fathers are doing is not trying to impose their power and impose their will, impose their views on the whole Church through this act of force at the councils; they’re trying to rescue people who’ve been taken captive by the doctrines of demons, and bring them back and set them free.

So, yeah, that’s I think the comparison that’s going on there.

Fr. Andrew: Cool.

Fr. Stephen: And, yeah, the “318” thing just, you know, a subpoint, an interesting subpoint.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. I’ve heard, I’ve read… People will say, “Okay, we don’t really have a full list of all the bishops who were at the First Ecumenical Council. The tradition is that it was 318; we don’t really know how many were there.” And, you know, I don’t know—from my point of view, it doesn’t really matter exactly how many were there, whether there were exactly 318, so, wow, what an amazing coincidence, or whether we assign that number because it connects back to this Lot rescue operation. To me it doesn’t matter, really. Either way, it works.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. This also should change our view of Abram a little bit. I think sometimes we’ve grown up with the kids’ Bible stories books, so we think he’s just this kindly old man, who sort of lives in a tent with a bunch of sheep and he’s just this really… Like, he just went to war with professional military of one of the great powers of his day and won with, like, a rag-tag militia he put together. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: The first A-Team, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes. “I love it when a plan comes together.” So, yeah, he’s… And this is, you know, he’s at age 80, 85.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Isaac hasn’t come along yet. This is still before that.

Fr. Stephen: He’s a force to be reckoned with. So that comes before, so it is after this victory and the recovery of Lot that verse 18 says that Melchizedek, the king of Salem, shows up with the bread and the wine and gives this blessing. So then immediately after that, sort of the conclusion of the overarching story, is that when Abram did this he not only recovered Lot, but he also recovered a bunch of other people who were being taken as slaves, because they didn’t have Lot separate. And he also recovered a lot of stuff, a lot of the gold and silver and other valuable stuff in the process. And so the king of Sodom shows up and says, “Hey! Thanks for getting back my stuff! I’ll cut you in for part of it as sort of a bounty, a finder’s fee, or a reward.” I dropped my wallet in the Wal-Mart parking lot; you found it: hey, here’s 20 bucks for being honest and returning it to me, right? And Abram says, “Nope.” [Laughter] Abram says, “I don’t want any of your stuff.”

So we see already here a foreshadowing of this stuff from Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain, this stuff that belongs to the giant clans isn’t just sort of neutral stuff. You say it’s just gold or silver or whatever; it’s just objects, right? Melt it down, make something else out of it. Even if it’s a gold idol, melt it down and make something else out of it, like a plate.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we should underline that this is a deeply weird thing to do in the ancient world. You defeat somebody, you take their stuff. Like, that is… No one would ever leave it aside. That would be a stupid, stupid thing to do. And it might even threaten your survival. You take the stuff that you win on a raid or in a battle, because that’s going to be useful for you. Why would you ever leave it? But here you have Abram saying, “No. This is all yours, king of Sodom. Take it.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and he does say… During the trip some of his fighting men had to eat something, so they ate some of this stuff that they retrieved. He says, “That’s sufficient. Whatever they ate, that’s our cut.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s verse 24.

Fr. Stephen: But so he wants none of it, and that’s because these objects, the material has been tainted and it is connected to… It’s the same reason why you’re going to see Israel commanded not to take the plunder from the giant clans. If someone attacks Israel, according to the laws of war in Deuteronomy—if someone attacks Israel and Israel defends itself and Israel wins, they can take those people’s stuff—but not the giant clans’. Not their stuff; their stuff has to be destroyed.

Fr. Andrew: Right, again, this just underlines that Abram has been called out by God not to participate in the civilizations around him, and especially, then, not the giant clans, because they are the worst.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I mean, Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain here end up shortly hereafter in Genesis being portrayed as worse than the giant clans. The giant clans get to go on longer than they do after this.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, God takes out Sodom and Gomorrah directly.

Fr. Stephen: And not very long after this. So that’s sort of the overarching context. So it’s in the middle of this story that Melchizedek shows up.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it’s interesting if you look at the chapter, you get the story about the victory from the war, and they grab hold of Lot, they rescue him, they make the trip back, they bring back all the stolen property, and then the end of the chapter is Abram having the conversation with the king of Sodom, and then suddenly, boom, verse 17—I’m sorry, verse 18: Melchizedek just shows up. It seems like… It says the king of Sodom went out to meet Abram, and then Melchizedek just shows up with bread and wine, like, in the middle of this meeting? That’s how it looks, as I’m reading this!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, and has this interaction with Abram, and then disappears, and then Abram goes, then sees the king of Sodom. So, once again he’s gotten demoted as less important than someone else. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it’s interesting to look at just how this kind of works out in the text. If this is a kind of… It’s so disconnected from the rest of the text. Like there’s nothing about those few verses, the Melchizedek verses, that seems to connect to anything else around them, at least on the face of it. And so you might suggest, oh, well, this is some kind of interpolation or something like that. Well, this is badly done, if it’s an interpolation, because it says, “Abram met the king of Sodom and the other kings… Oh, and then Melchizedek showed up! Okay, and Abram had this conversation with this other king of Sodom…” It’s not a really… It doesn’t make sense as an interpolation.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah, you end up with the weird thing that you end up with with most modern source critical method, where you divide up the text and try to reproduce the notorial process. Where you at once have someone who’s a literary genius and a complete bumbler, like at the same time.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! Whatever looks the worst.

Fr. Stephen: He did all these amazing things, amazing literary things with the text, but, like, left all these seams showing, like he couldn’t smooth them over at all.

Fr. Andrew: And no one noticed that after him.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it was really obvious about everything he did.

So what, then, is going on and what does connect this? Well, we’re told right off the bat that Melchizedek— And there really should be… We’re not used to it, but there really should be a hyphen in the middle of his name.

Fr. Andrew: Melchi-zedek.

Fr. Stephen: Melchi-tzedek, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Some -tz-, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So we’re told that he’s the king of a city, so that’s one connection, because we’ve got a whole bunch of kings of cities here, and he’s the king of a city, so that’s kind of a vague connection at least.

Fr. Andrew: “Salem” is what is usually given in most English Bibles. He’s the king of Salem.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and sometimes people want to try to turn “Salem” into “Shalom” and trying to—he’s the king of peace or something. And you can do sort of allegorical things like that. We’ll talk about that in a second, but originally, on the material level, this is referring to a city that we’re all familiar with from later in the Bible, Jerusalem, because Jerusalem, the name “Jerusalem” is derived from Ulu-shalim, which also has a hyphen in it. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, take that apart for us.

Fr. Stephen: So Uru-shalim is the Akkadian name for that city-state, and it has two pieces; there’s a hyphen in there. The first part is uru, which you may recognize from Ur and Uruk. That’s a Sumerian word that has come over into Akkadian, that means “city” or “settlement.” And then Shalim is a Canaanite god.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so it’s the city of Shalim.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the city or settlement of Shalim, and that’s why you get it referred to as just Salim or Shalim here.

Fr. Andrew: Right, just like here in Pennsylvania, we have Pittsburgh: the burgh part means a city or a fortified area, and William Pitt is the divinized god that is worshiped in Pitt—no, probably not. [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: St. Petersburg might work better.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, there you go! [Laughter] So I just need a little inter-Pennsylvania cattiness, since I’m on the Eastern Pennsylvania…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so that uru Sumerian word actually makes its way through Akkadian, being loaned into Akkadian, makes its way into—this is just a language word fun-fact—into northwest Semitic dialects, which would be, like, Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic, as the word yeru, which means a foundation and is used in the Bible to mean foundation.

So that’s the city that he’s the king of, and his name means… the Melchi-: Mel- is from melech which means “king” in Hebrew, and the -i- there, the Melchi-, the -i- is a first person possessive, so it’s “my king.” Melchi- is “my king.” And then -tzedek is a word that means “justice,” but it’s also the name of a god, a Canaanite god.

Fr. Andrew: Who could have guessed that? [Laughter] So for those maybe familiar with Arabic, for instance, there is malik, which again means “king.” And then even the word Melkite, in reference to people involved with the imperium, with the empire. So all these words are connected, so when you look at that Melchi- at the beginning of Melchizedek, that’s this root, that “king” root. “My king”: “My king is tzedek.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so there are ways to try to get around this referring to a pagan god that people try to do, but there are a bunch of problems with them. The biggest one is the name of the next king of Jerusalem whom we see, which is the book of Joshua, the next one who’s named, and his name is Adonizedek.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which would be “Zedek is my lord.”

Fr. Stephen: “My lord is Zedek.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Which suggests there’s this cult of Zedek there, and he continues to be worshiped.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and Zedek is the main god who’s worshiped particularly once you start getting into the Jebusite period at that city. And so here’s where we’re going to have a conversation, us and the listeners…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, because he’s describing a priest of God Most High…

Fr. Stephen: Well, before we get to that, we’ve got to explain who Zedek is, and we feel like our listeners are old enough now for us to have this talk, to sit down and have this talk. This is what I’ve been a little leery of, because—it’s not that someone might: someone on the internet will take this and run all kinds of weird directions with it and misinterpret it.

Fr. Andrew: Well, “no press is bad press”? I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But here we go.

If you’ve read Religion of the Apostles or other things I’ve written, I’ve talked about how—and we’ve talked about it on the show before—how the Israelites and Judeans of the Second Temple period already had the idea that their God was more than one Person.

Fr. Andrew: Right. At least two.

Fr. Stephen: What we would now call trinitarianism, a version of that or the beginnings of that or the form of that without that particular language yet. So the reason they were able to have that kind of idea in the ancient world is that pretty much everyone in the ancient world had a similar idea—not the same, but similar; there’s continuities and discontinuities. But in the ancient world, they believed that—all the pagans; we’ll just talk about the pagans. The pagans believed that any given pagan god could have a whole bunch of different bodies, a whole bunch of different localizations.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this is where… This is something that we’ve occasionally gotten questions about. This is where the notion of the sun, moon, and stars are bodies of gods. That’s a pagan idea, whereas the Israel idea about that is that they are two separate created things that the one takes care of the other, that angels are not stars, identical to stars, and stars are not the bodies of angels—that’s a pagan notion—but that angels are assigned to take care of stars and the association is so close that the Scriptures have no problem kind of referring to stars as angels and angels as stars, but there’s still this understanding that they’re two separate things, whereas the pagan version is that these are bodies of gods.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so, for example, you can have a sun-god, and you believe that he is on top of a mountain somewhere in the council of the gods, and he’s the actual sun in the sky, and he’s in the local temple to the sun-god, inside the image, the idol there, and he’s the king.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, all at once.

Fr. Stephen: Those are all bodies of his, and he doesn’t have to leave one to use another. The sun doesn’t disappear from the sky when you’re doing a ritual at the sun temple.

Fr. Andrew: Right, meaning that the spirit isn’t hopping from one body to the next.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that they all exist at the same time. And the word that’s used uniformly by scholars to talk about this is to say that any given localization of one of those gods— We also see this with the Greek gods, like there’s Zeus Boanerges, there’s Zeus of a certain place, or Baal of a certain place. And they’ll be depicted looking very different, for example. The word for these different bodies in these different localizations is hypostasis.

Fr. Andrew: What!

Fr. Stephen: Don’t freak out!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No!

Fr. Stephen: That’s the word that’s used. So the idea that a given god could have multiple hypostases is a universal idea in the ancient world.

Fr. Andrew: Right, now did pagans…?

Fr. Stephen: So that’s the point of continuity.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say: But did pagans mean by that the same thing that we mean by it when we refer to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: And the answer to that is—not exactly.

Fr. Stephen: No. The answer’s no, okay. So that’s the continuity. The continuity is the idea that one god can be the same god but have multiple hypostases at the same time that are all him or her.

Here’s the discontinuity, or a list of discontinuities, I should say. So in the pagan world, huge discontinuity, and you’ll notice as we go through these that a lot of the Old Testament commandments about worship and a lot of the things that Yahweh the God of Israel says to his prophets are going to be trying to accentuate these differences, because the temptation is always going to be for the Israelites to think the way their neighbors and other ancient people do. So here’s the first big discontinuity. For the pagans, you can make a body for the god. You can go and craft an idol; you can craft an image. You can perform the opening of the nostrils ritual or whatever parallel ritual is practiced in your place. And now that is a body of the god; it is now connected to it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: And what Yahweh the God of Israel says is, “No, you cannot do that.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and thus the constant references to: he does not dwell in things made by hands.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and he even has to then go beyond that to… Well, they’re like, “Okay, we can’t make an image and put him there, but maybe we could make a building and put him there.” And that’s why he has to keep telling them with the temple: “I am not bound by your building.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: “We’ll use it, but I’m not in that. I’m not bound by it.”

Fr. Stephen: “The building itself is not an image of me.” So that’s a major discontinuity.

In the pagan idea, relatedly, those hypostases can come into existence and go out of existence.

Fr. Andrew: Hmm. They’re not eternal.

Fr. Stephen: They’re not eternal. They’re not eternal, and you can make them. So there’s potentially infinite numbers of them, and potentially none at all, whereas Yahweh the God of Israel has revealed himself in three—only three, exactly three—hypostases, which are eternal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you think about this from a kind of spiritual logistical point of view. If you’re a demon and you want to deceive mankind, potentially infinite hypostases is the way to go, because how many opportunities would that be? “I want to be everywhere,” because that’s what a demon kind of needs in order to be everywhere, is numerous, numerous bodies that he can inhabit and interact with people through. So it makes sense—not that I’m saying I know what it is to be a fallen angel; I don’t. I don’t even know what—

Fr. Stephen: Or even a bat.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I don’t even know what it’s like to be the guy in the office next to my studio. He seems nice, though. But just at least what I imagine might be the case, it seems a good strategy to have as many idols and hypostases as possible for the demon so that he can connect on a local level with as many people that he can try to dupe as possible.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and once you understand this, it makes sense of a whole bunch of things. So for example, the golden calves in the Old Testament, all of them, both when Aaron makes the one and when Jeroboam makes the golden calves, it’s not like: “Okay, I now made this idol; we’re going to worship this object.” In both cases, they point at them and say, “This is Yahweh, your God who brought you out of Egypt.” So they’re trying to craft a body; they’re trying to craft a hypostasis for Yahweh the God of Israel, to confine him and locate him.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which, I mean, without this notion of hypostasis from the ancient world, that action looks just royally stupid. Like: “Wait, we were brought out by the God of all—the Most High God, and, look, I made this golden calf. This is your God!” If you don’t understand that that’s what’s going on, that’s just really stupid, and you… Maybe one crazy person would have come up with that, but why would all those Israelites then fall for it? “Oh yes. Oh, right, that’s our God. Sure!” Because it plugged into their pre-existing experience of what spiritual life is about and how you connect with a god.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that laid out— To put a fine point on it—and I know this won’t be the part anyone quotes—Yahweh the God of Israel is eternal existent, is the Most High God, three hypostases—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—that’s it; there’s no more. They didn’t come into being; they’re not going to go out of being. That’s it. That’s in contrast to sort of the demonic parody of it, which is infinite and changing and malleable and the pagan thing.

So, that established, why did we go into that now of all times? Why did we risk everything? [Laughter] To make the point that this Zedek, this god, is a hypostasis of Shemesh.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so who—remind us who Shemesh is, Fr. Stephen!

Fr. Stephen: Shemesh is—

Fr. Andrew: Isn’t he the one that Samson is named after?

Fr. Stephen: Yes! Actually, he is the pagan god whom Samson was named after, suspiciously, despite him having been promised as Yahweh’s chosen… Anyway! Someone might make something out of that. But Shemesh, in addition to being the northwest Semitic word for the sun, is also the sun-god. And there were a few other hypostases of Shemesh, but Zedek is one of the main ones. So sometimes you will find him referred to as just Zedek; sometimes he’s referred to as Shemesh Tzedakah, where it’s the tzedakah, that second word, is telling you the name of the hypostasis, like Zeus Boanerges. That language—and this is an aside that we won’t go into now but may at some point in the future—that Shemesh Tzedakah language is picked up by the prophets. That’s the “sun of righteousness” language that gets applied to Yahweh the God of Israel, and specifically to Christ. It’s actually a re-purposing of that pagan language, sort of in the same way that the Baal’s “cloud rider” language gets taken over and given to Yahweh as the true Most High God.

Fr. Andrew: The real cloud rider.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So this is a particular form— We’ve talked about justice before. Justice is the right relation between things, and so the idea here is that this particular hypostasis of Shemesh is the sun as he establishes order upon the earth.

Fr. Andrew: Right, thus sun of justice, sun of righteousness.

Fr. Stephen: And so there’s more about this, the fact that he’s worshiped in Jerusalem in the Old Testament when you look closely. So we’ll bring up again Deuteronomy 4:19, that the sun and moon and stars were some of the divine beings to whom the nations were assigned at Babel. But then more specifically, 1 Kings 1:4-8 talks about the judgment that comes against Solomon, David’s son, for having built all these pagan shrines and set up all these pagan altars in and around Jerusalem. And there are a few details given, nothing specifically having to do with Shemesh, but when you go to 2 Kings 23:11, we get to the second righteous king of Judah—there’s not a lot of them—and that’s King Josiah, who is the other king… When you see the traditional icon of the Anastasis, of the Resurrection, the Harrowing of Hades, on the one side there’s the prophets, and then on the other side there’s the kings, and the kings you always have are David and Josiah, and then sometimes you see some other crowns in the background or there’s some kind of non-descript guys. It’s hard to find righteous kings in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Or in general!

Fr. Stephen: But Josiah is— Right, yeah, there aren’t a lot of Byzantine emperors who are saints.

Fr. Andrew: True.

Fr. Stephen: But one of the things that made Josiah so righteous is that he went and destroyed all of those shrines, those pagan shrines in and around Jerusalem, many of which had been there since the time of Solomon.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right, and so then the reference is given in 2 Kings 23:11, speaking about Josiah:

He removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to Shemesh at the entrance to the temple of Yahweh by the chamber of Nathan-Melech, the chamberlain, which was in the temple precincts, and he burned the chariots of Shemesh with fire.

So that’s letting us know, then, who these… So we were told that Solomon set up these pagan shrines, and here’s Josiah… It’s actually identifying then whom the shrines were to. It’s Shemesh who was this locally worshiped god.

Fr. Stephen: Right, who had been the pagan god of that city. So people have asked about sort of pagan creep. Can these fallen powers, once they’re ousted, start creeping back in? Well, this is an example. David had taken the city from the Jebusites and purified it, dedicated it to Yahweh the God of Israel, made the plans so that Solomon could build a temple there so that God would be on Mount Zion—that’s the place where Yahweh the God of Israel chose to place his name—and, oh here comes Shemesh sneaking back in!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is actual syncretism, where you’re worshiping multiple beings. This is not the same as the way that pagan imagery in stories and stuff get used by ancient Israel and by the Church, in which there’s not actual worshiping being offered to these other beings but rather there’s a sense that their story gets kind of included in the Christian story in some way. That’s the difference. I mean, this to me is a really important point, actually, because sometimes when people—when Christians talk about paganism a lot, or even, for instance, as I like to do, read pagan mythology, the accusation can be one of syncretism, because suddenly you’re including these stories and these beings and so forth in what you’re talking about and what you’re doing. But that is not the same thing as actually setting up shrines and altars to them and worshiping them. That’s actual syncretism. It’s one thing to say, “These things fit into our story in the following ways”; it’s another thing entirely to say, “Not only do they fit into the story, but here, let’s go ahead and offer a sacrifice to them. Let’s go ahead and go into communion with them.” That’s not the same thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Very different things. And this is full-on. They have constructed… So Shemesh—this is common iconography for all sun deities in the ancient world, pretty much, from Shemesh here in Canaan to Helios later, that the sun god rides through the sky in this chariot with horses. So, based on what Josiah destroys, they had a full-on sculpted horses, constructed chariot idol of Shemesh in the Temple courts in Jerusalem, for hundreds of years.

Fr. Andrew: So many yikes.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And now note, this is according to the Bible. I just want to make this point again, because people who are Old Testament scholars who have devoted their life to studying this text will still do these kind of insane documentaries that I have to watch through a bitter, terrible compulsion, where they will say, “Well, according to the Bible, Israel was monotheistic,” so, first of all—[Buzzer sound] Thank you for playing on that one, but… And then say, “But, we found in the archaeology all these pagan shrines and amulets and stuff.”

Fr. Andrew: “Ha! Busted!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it’s like: “Well, if you actually read the Bible, the Bible said you would find all that stuff.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so how many… How long is it between Solomon and Josiah, Solomon setting these things up and Josiah purifying them out?

Fr. Stephen: A couple hundred years.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Man! Not good.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this is most of Judah’s history. [Laughter] There’s active paganism going on in the Temple. So this is… There isn’t really… And the closest thing you get to a golden age is the 40 years of David’s reign, and even that, David has his problems.

Fr. Andrew: He does. But fortunately he repents. So all of this combined together, then, you get a guy showing up, this priest-king whose name means “my king is Zedek,” this hypostasis of Shemesh, the sun-god, and he rules over a city named Shalim, Uru-Shalim, which is another pagan name, and then you later get these references to Shemesh being worshiped there in the courts of Yahweh’s Temple. Why is Melchizedek not a pagan god-king-priest? Like, everything about him says that he should be, except for this line that says that he’s not. [Laughter] That he’s a priest of the Most High God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, that’s why he appears in three verses, and it says over and over: God Most High, God Most High, God Most High: he’s a priest of God Most High. Because anyone in the ancient world reading that first sentence, a guy named Melchi-zedek, who’s the king of Uru-Shalim, that’s a pagan! He’s just as pagan as Kedorlaomer and everybody else.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Literally, every single—of these three verses, every single one has the phrase “Most High God” or “God Most High” in them. Every single one! Over and over.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so that’s why they keep saying it over and over, because it’s kind of like: “I know what you’re thinking, but no.” [Laughter] Now of course, he didn’t name himself. He would have been named by his father, whose heir he was. And he didn’t name the city; the city already had a name when he showed up and became king. So what this is trying to tell us over and over again is that, like we saw with Abram in chapter 12 and his “call,” which isn’t really a call, Melchizedek here is another one of those people—apparently there’s at least two, and presumably more—out there in the world, even this far after the tower of Babel, who are still worshiping the Most High God and not worshiping these lesser divine beings, these fallen demonic beings, even though they’ve… He, like Abram, is living in a city and a culture, and Abram even his father in a family, likely, that are all involved in this paganism, who have all fallen into this kind of worship. Here’s one more guy who has kept himself pure, and he comes out and he finds Abram.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Now, we should underline that there’s no indication in the Scripture that there are any nations or tribes who have retained the worship of Yahweh. We just have—

Fr. Stephen: As a whole.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Just have these individuals that are mentioned. And, I don’t know, potentially families? Certainly Abram’s family is that kind of family with him and his children and stuff, but, yeah, there’s no… Because this is a question we sometimes get: Did all of the principalities that governed the nations really fall? Like, there’s literally no indication that any of them didn’t. That’s why God makes a new nation for himself starting with Abram.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but there are these individuals, and yeah, just like with Abram, you would assume in Ur… You would assume—but he’s not, and the same thing with Melchizedek.

So what’s the significance of that? Well, Abram has just won this battle, and it’s really, as Abram is going to indicate—it’s really Yahweh who won the battle for him, because it’s not really that Abram’s just a military genius, so he and his rag-tag group of 318 people could beat one of the most powerful armies in the world at the time and rescue and take all this stuff. [Laughter] It’s that Yahweh was on his side.

So what you would expect to happen after that would be thank-offering to the god after the victory, which normally would involve—like in the pagan context you would have offered some of the tribute that was taken. So some of that wealth would have been in flocks and herds and stuff, so you would have sacrificed some of that; depending on how pagan you were, maybe some of the people, some of the slaves, some of the captured enemy military, as human sacrifices—but there would have been a sacrifice afterwards, because you don’t want to be ungrateful when you’re worshiping pagan gods, because they’re pretty fickle and they’ll turn on you pretty fast. [Laughter]

But so Melchizedek comes out and finds Abram for this purpose, to offer the thank-offering, which in this case is bread and wine. It’s a thank-offering, meaning it’s a Eucharist, as it were. But the… Why does he bring bread and wine? Remember, Abram wants nothing to do with any of the spoils. The spoils are all tainted; that means you can’t offer them to God either. He doesn’t want them either. That’s what gets Saul into trouble. Remember, that’s his excuse? He seizes the Amalekites’ livestock that he was supposed to kill, and he says, “Oh no, I was going to offer it as a sacrifice!” Yeah, sure I was. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: But here’s a guy that Abram can actually worship with, because they worship the same God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and when Abram takes an oath in Genesis 14:22—so, right after this, when he’s talking to the king of Sodom—and says… He takes an oath and says that he’s not taking any of the tribute, he says, “I have lifted my hand to Yahweh, God Most High, the possessor of heaven and earth,” which is: he’s mimicking Melchizedek’s language, who said, “Blessed is Abram by God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. “I’m with that guy,” that’s what he’s saying.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and adding the name Yahweh, just to make it clear: That’s the Most High God we’re talking about. And that “possessor of heaven and earth” is not coincidental; that those territories don’t really belong to those gods who are over them right now; that it’s not he’s… We’re not saying, “Oh, yeah, there’s a whole bunch of gods, but Yahweh’s the best one, or he’s the toughest one, he’s the bestest one.” [Laughter] It’s: “He’s in a whole different category. He possesses everything that is. Everything that is really belongs to him.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is not something any pagans ever said about their gods that I can recall.

Fr. Stephen: Right, any authority the other ones have is delegated to them.

Fr. Andrew: Right, even what pagans themselves say about their gods is limited. There’s not competing omnipotent gods. No one else is saying that about their god.

Fr. Stephen: Right, there’s “mine could beat up yours,” but there’s not “mine’s omnipotent and created all the others from nothing and assigned them their places.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, so I wanted to bring up this question that I know sometimes comes up with regards to Melchizedek, because of the apparent… I mean, we’ve just explained why this is not the case, but the apparent sort of sudden appearance in the middle of an irrelevant narrative—not actually true, but… He’s this priest, he’s offering bread and wine, wow that’s eucharistic. Some people say, “Oh, is this Jesus? Is this the Son of God showing up in the guise of a priest-king from the local city?” I thought it would be useful just to take a couple minutes and say why the answer to that is—no.

So certainly the angel of the Lord—the angel of the Lord or the word of the Lord—shows up a bunch of times in the Old Testament, but there’s all kinds of ways that that’s talked about and ways that the text lets you know that that is Yahweh, the God of Israel, and none of that happens here with Melchizedek. For instance, Abram does not offer sacrifice to this man. That’s usually—that’s one of the things that often happens when the word of the Lord shows up. There’s not—he’s not called Yahweh; there’s no language specifically identifying him as being God. There’s not—it’s not a vision.

All of these ways that tend to indicate that someone is encountering the angel of the Lord are not happening in this case. There’s no indication that this is anything but a human person who’s coming out and worships the same God as Abram and is the king of this nearby city, probably a pagan city, weirdly enough, and his family clearly was pagan, given his name, but somehow he worships the one true God. We don’t know why; there’s no context for why he’s a worshiper of Yahweh. We just simply do not know. But there’s also no indication in the text that this is the angel of the Lord. All the markers that you would normally look for, none of those are here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and two chapters before, Yahweh just talks to Abram, and he says, “I will bless you. I bless you, and I will do this.” First person.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, why would Melchizedek say, “You’re blessed by my other hypostasis”? That doesn’t make any sense if that’s what’s going on there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the chapter after this, Yahweh comes with two angels and eats with him at the oak of Mamre. So there’s a pattern here that this is in the middle of, and it doesn’t match that pattern. So this is a different thing; this is a person. And as you mentioned, he doesn’t sacrifice to him. He does tithe to him, but that’s something you do to a priest who’s a representative. That’s not offering a sacrifice. And he tithes from his own— Again, that’s a part of a thank-offering, giving thanks to God through the priest who is acting as an icon or an image, as we’ve talked about before.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so before we take a break at the end of our first half here, there’s a few things in this scene that actually kind of set up some other big issues for the future in Scripture. Why don’t we kind of quickly go over them?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, we get a little bit of the very first seeds of what we talked about as remnant theology in the episode on St. John the Forerunner, this idea that really starts with the Prophet Elijah, but you get the seeds of it here, that even though, in this case in Genesis, a few chapters before this at the tower of Babel God had to distance himself from sinful humanity, that he hasn’t abandoned humanity, and it’s not just Abram; there’s also Melchizedek. So there are these people who are still faithful to Yahweh, the Most High God, scattered here and there, and they may not know that they all exist, but they’re out there, who are still faithful.

Fr. Andrew: The faithful few.

Fr. Stephen: We also get from this whole story this pattern of doing battle with the giant clans, with this spiritual evil, and then victory and then the emergence of a king to offer sacrifice, and that pattern’s going to play out sort of throughout the Old Testament and into the New Testament in ways you can probably immediately see. And we see within the figure of Melchizedek someone who is not a pagan, who is uniting the roles of king and priest in his person. And so he’s going to become sort of archetypal for the… the Venn diagram overlap of king and priest, theologically in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, we’re going to go ahead and take a break, and we will be right back with more.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. This is the second half of the show. Now normally we would start taking your calls here, but, despite what the Voice of Steve just said, this is a pre-recorded episode, so we’re not going to be receiving any calls for this one. If you call the number, no one’s going to be home.

Fr. Stephen: I could do a funny voice and ask you easy questions.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Very good. That’d be fun. “Hello, hello, from Lafayette…”

Fr. Stephen: Do a whole Phil Hendrie thing, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I could just grab someone from the hall here in the tower of podcasting and see what they have to say. That would be fun, wouldn’t it? [Laughter]

Okay, well, we just finished up talking about Melchizedek’s appearance in Genesis 14, and now we want to actually connect to one of the themes that we talked about in the last episode, where we talked about Abraham, but then we also talked about Isaac in particular, and how Isaac is this singular seed, this unique son of Abraham, and then, as we mentioned—go listen to that episode first if you haven’t listened to it yet, okay? As we mentioned—

Fr. Stephen: Welcome back.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Welcome back, everybody, from doing that. Thank you.

And that Christ is that seed. He is the seed, the unique Son of the Father, who is the One who fulfills all these things. So, yeah, we’re going to connect, actually, this question of “Who is Melchizedek?” with that. Pretty cool. [Laughter] Wait, what? Actually, yes. All right, help us out here, Father, because that’s probably not obvious to most people. Not to me, for sure.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so, well, we talked about how Melchizedek becomes— where we left off in the first half, how he becomes sort of the co-location, theologically, in the Old Testament, of king and priest. And we talked, as you mentioned last time, about this idea that, in addition to seed, plural, and this multiplication language that’s used in the promises to Abraham, there’s also the promise of this unique, singular seed, this unique, singular son. And as anybody with sort of a passing familiarity with the Bible and/or Christianity or even Judaism probably knows, that idea, of a single descendant of Abraham who’s sort of unique and special, becomes sort of alloyed with the idea of kingship in the form of the Messiah, Mashiach, the Anointed One, or Christos, the Anointed One in Greek.

So really what we’re going to be talking about in this second half is really how that happens. So we see this image here, early on in the story of Abram, of a faithful king, who is also a faithful priest, because there is one somewhere; that’s a thing that exists. And that’s the first image of that that we get in the Scriptures, is Melchizedek. He’s the first king who gets any kind of overall positive mention. And so now how does that kingship get connected to this singular person? We talked about last time how—and St. Paul makes this point in Romans 9—that you see the singleness first reflected in the line of Abraham, that there is an individual line that is going to lead to this ultimate seed. So it’s Isaac and not Ishmael who’s in that line, and that’s why, as we talked about last time, Isaac becomes sort of the icon for that ultimate chosen, unique son. But then it also goes to the next generation; it’s Jacob, not Esau, as St. Paul points out.

But it then continues after that, and after you get through Jacob or Israel, you now have twelve kids, with four different women, where it spreads out even more, and these become fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel. So when the time comes that Jacob or Israel is dying—he’s on his deathbed—he gives what is now called his testament. This is the use of “testament” that’s in “last will and testament,” but we find this several times in the Old Testament, where someone will be dying, and they will sort of give final words to their children or other descendants, and often those have a prophetic nature.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sometimes it’s blessings and stuff, too, but not always.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that there’s this sort of wisdom imparted of patterns and what’s going to happen and who they’re going to be and what’s going to happen. And there is within Second Temple Judaism a vast array of apocryphal non-canonical testaments of different figures: Testament of Abraham, Testament of Isaac, everybody.

Fr. Andrew: Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs is a very key and important one that people should read, because that actually gets referenced and possibly even quoted at one point in the New Testament. And our manuscripts for it are from Mount Athos.

Fr. Andrew: Hey!

Fr. Stephen: That’s where it was preserved, not in Jewish circles. But so within this particular one that we find in Genesis 49, which is the second-to-the-last chapter of Genesis, Jacob or Israel is giving his testimonies, and some of them are kind of harsh, like Benjamin and Dan in particular get basically told they’re the devil by their dad as he’s dying. But that’s talking about things that are going to happen in the future.

Fr. Andrew: Harsh, Dad! Like, really?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, wow. You could have skipped me.

Fr. Andrew: These are your last words? [Laughter] “I never liked you!” No…

Fr. Stephen: And we talked about how firstborn status is not necessarily the same thing as being the firstborn child. So Jacob/Israel’s firstborn son is Reuben, with Leah. Reuben was not good.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he was the ringleader that got rid of Joseph, if I recall correctly.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and he also slept with one of his father’s concubines to try to take control of the family.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, as one apparently does.

Fr. Stephen: Should not do, yes. That’s one of the episodes of that in the Old Testament out of several. And he and Simeon, who’s the second son, also masterminded the whole “Let’s go murder all the men of Shechem for violating our sister” episode, in disobedience to his father. So Reuben and Simeon get left out. Levi is next. Levi has his own special destiny we know with the priesthood. So that brings us to number four. Note, by the way, number four son of Leah: Judah. Judah is one of the sons of Leah, not of Rachel.

Fr. Andrew: Not the sort of favored wife.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so things take interesting turns. And so he gets to Judah and offers this blessing to Judah that becomes critically important for what comes to be called the messianic tradition in the rest of the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so let’s read it. So this is Genesis 49:8-12.

Judah, your brothers shall praise you; your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies. Your father’s sons shall bow down before you. Judah is a lion’s cub; from the prey, my son, you have gone up. He stooped down; he crouched as a lion, and as a lioness—who dares rouse him? The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he comes to whom it belongs, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples, binding his foal to the vine and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine. He has washed his garments in wine and his vesture in the blood of grapes. His eyes are darker than wine and his teeth whiter than milk.

Which— I mean, you know, I’m just imagining hearing this being the last thing my dad says to me. I’d be like: “Wait, what? I don’t see how this applies… I like the scepter stuff; I’m on board with that, but I don’t really know about the rest.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, right. And this, despite Judah himself not being perfect—see Tamar. Now, a note on how you read it. You read the scepter bit. “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he comes to whom it belongs.” That is, by all accounts, what the text says. Now when I say, “by all accounts”… Okay, so the oldest Hebrew of Genesis we have, of course, which comes from the Dead Sea Scrolls, does not have vowels notated. Semitic languages are generally written without vowels. And how things are vocalized, meaning what vowels you pronounce them with, can change how things read.

Fr. Andrew: Right, you know, in English, the words “net,” “nit,” and “not” all have the same consonants, but, boy, that vowel makes a big difference.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “Better, batter, butter, bitter.” [Laughter] So when you’re translating from a Hebrew text that has no vowels into another language, you have to make certain choices, and those choices you make will reflect a certain understanding of the text. So the way the translators of the Septuagint, the Greek translators; the way the Aramaic translators who translated the Aramaic targums; and the way the Syriac translators, who translated the later Aramaic, the Syriac, read that verse was the way you just read it, that “the scepter will not depart from Judah until he comes to whom it belongs,” until the person to whom it belongs arrives.

Suspiciously, when you look at the medieval Masoretic text, which is if you go and buy a Hebrew Bible, a Hebrew Old Testament today, that’s what you will get. And the reason it’s called the Masoretic text is that they’ve taken the Hebrew text— which is that Hebrew text, the Hebrew itself is identical, literally identical to the Hebrew we found in the Dead Sea Scrolls in terms of the written letters, but it’s called the Masoretic text because these fellows, the Masoretes—that’s whom it’s named after—were scribes. They went in and put in vowel pointing. They put in marks to indicate the correct vowels, and they put in these marginalia, these two sets of masorah, these two sets of marginal notes, about the text. So they preserved the text exactly as they found it, but then they annotated it for how they thought it should be interpreted.

And interestingly, by 1000 AD, “until he comes to whom it belongs” becomes “until he comes to Shiloh.” There’s no explanation as to what that would mean, because, I mean, even they—even Rabbinic Jewish communities of the 11th century AD—would say, “Well, yeah, this was talking about the Davidic king.” So, yeah. So that dog don’t hunt. So that’s why we read it the way you read it, even though, if you pick up a given English Bible, some of them will have… Some of them will have this, and have the Shiloh thing in a footnote; some of them will have the Shiloh thing, and this in a footnote. They pretty much all preserve it in a footnote because it’s kind of obvious what’s going on here, that this promise of a specific messianic king has been edited out by the Rabbinic Jewish scholars.

But, be that as it may, what we see here is that we see this kingship language with the scepter, that is applied to Judah and his descendants, but then specifically that there’s going to be— because the scepter is going to be there, and the ruler’s staff is going to be there in Judah, there’s going to be a line of kings that is going to culminate in a singular king. There is going to be… It’s not just “this is prophesying that David’s going to show up.” That doesn’t work because it says it won’t depart, and David is the first king from the tribe of Judah, not the last, and there are promises made to his line that we’re going to talk about here in a little bit.

So here we have this idea of this singular seed we’ve been tracking from Isaac to Jacob, and now it’s going to go to Judah, and now we have this element of monarchy and kingship being brought in. And you even have this language of, first, your father’s sons shall bow down before you. That’s the first part: your father’s sons, the tribes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which kind of also suggests an elimination of them from this line of the seed.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So this is saying it’s going to be the king of Israel first, but then “his hands shall be on the neck of his enemies.” He’s the one who’s going to defeat those enemies. Remember, that was part of the promise to Abraham originally. They would camp in the gates of their enemies.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which means you really got their city.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! And having your hand on their neck is pretty much… You get the idea, right? [Laughter] Like, you win. So you have that kingship idea. Now, elements of this get picked up. We talked briefly in our Christmas/astrology episode about the fact that in this text, in this testament, there’s this animal imagery associated with each of the tribes, and that’s not unrelated to certain constellation. We have this lion language with Judah, lion of the tribe of Judah. There is actually Orthodox iconography depicting Christ as a child, usually lying on a mat which then will quote this thing about Judah being a lion’s cub, who is crouched…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that icon is called anapeson, which I think is just the Greek word for that sort of lying down. You often see this on the back wall sometimes of churches or of narthexes. That’s one place that I’ve seen it in a number of churches.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so there’s this rule over Israel, culminates in someone who’s going to rule then over all the nations through the defeat of the enemies, and this person is then who comes to be comes the Mashiach, the Anointed One, the Messiah; that the promised seed, the promised son, the unique son, is going to be a king. And Christ himself, of course— Well, this gets further elaborated; this gets picked up again in Zechariah 9:9, which is an explicitly sort of messianic passage talking about the Messiah coming, riding on a donkey’s foal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s the Palm Sunday prophecy as we would— but here it is again in Genesis 49.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Zechariah is picking up on this imagery to say he’s coming; don’t forget about this; it’s been a long time. It had been probably a good 1300 years by that point, but don’t forget about it. And then that Zechariah passage: this then comes through that Zechariah passage into the story of Christ’s triumphal entry in Jerusalem (Matthew 21:2, Mark 11:4). Remember, when he tells them to go and find the donkey, he says it’s going to be tied to a vine. So Christ is explicitly identifying himself as this figure by acting this out, and that’s why it’s totally clear to the crowds on that day that’s what he’s saying. That’s why they’re all yelling, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” Because they know: “Hey, Messiah! He’s doing Messiah stuff!” So that all gets drawn in here.

So we mentioned this very briefly in the past, in our episode about the Theotokos, “The Queen Stood [at Thy] Right Hand,” but we’ll talk about it a little again here in terms of the Davidic monarchy which is then connected to this. We talked there about how the Davidic monarchy serves as kind of this icon, then, or, as the language we used in our last episode, it’s sort of the sign. The coming of the first king from the line of Judah is then a sign of the ultimate King who’s going to come, the beginning of this fulfillment of this prophecy that’s made to Judah. And we talked about that time about how there’s this misunderstanding, because of our Puritan ancestors, in this country—and by that, I mean the United States; we have listeners all across the globe—

Fr. Andrew: Hello, New Zealand! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But in the United States, at least, our ancestors are a bunch of Puritans who got thrown out of Europe for being heretics.

Fr. Andrew: Our cultural ancestors. Some of us are not literally descendants… I mean, I’m sure I probably am on some level, but, yeah…

Fr. Stephen: I’m literally descended from some of the people who threw them out! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Hey, guys!

Fr. Stephen: But we’ve read… We’ve tended to read what goes on in 1 Samuel (or 1 Kingdoms) 8, this whole thing where Israel demands a king—we’ve been taught to read that as “Kings are bad, see? The Bible says kings are bad. God doesn’t want kings.”

Fr. Andrew: Israel wants a king; God says no. I guess, of course, monarchy is bad… I mean, and I have to admit that I myself have actually made that argument while I was yet ignorant.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s interesting that even though so many of us imbibed that as children in Sunday school and sort of culturally imbibed that, like it never crossed our mind: “Wait, how did that work with the whole Messiah thing?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, the problem isn’t kingship; it’s the wrong king and/or the wrong kind of king.

Fr. Stephen: Right, a deformed type of kingship. So in Deuteronomy 17 there are the commandments, as we talked about before, where God says, “When you get into the land and you have a king, here’s the dos and don’ts.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, so basically saying, “Look, God knew that there was going to be a king, and so here’s the commandment…” He didn’t say, “You’re going to get into the promised land and you’re going to want a king. You better not do that ever, because you’re not supposed to have a king.” He gives commandments related to kingship.

Fr. Stephen: Right. “We’re keeping this a theocracy, people!”—no, there was none of that. And even, you know—let’s make the obvious point. At the beginning of the book of Samuel, when they ask for a king, Samuel’s the judge of Israel; he’s the one who’s ruling over and judging Israel and is the prophet. And the text says he’s training his—in verses 19-20—he’s training his son to take over. When you have one person in charge, and that passes on to his son… What do you call that? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s basically primogeniture monarchy.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, right! So the situation of a monarchy is not that different than the situation with Samuel, in that respect, in that sort of just detailed respect. So what is the difference and what is the problem there? since Deuteronomy 17 says there’s going to be a king, and he even says, in Deuteronomy 17, he’s not just talking about David and the Davidic king, because in verses 18-20 of that, the positive command that Yahweh, God of Israel, gives for the king is that the king is to make his own copy of the Torah to study it and learn it so that the king’s dynasties—plural—may be successful and may be blessed.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so he’s setting it up in view of a long-term…

Fr. Stephen: A whole set of things in those commandments.

Fr. Andrew: So what makes the desire for Saul different from God’s vision that he’s imparting to them is they want a king who’s going to act like the kings in their area. They see that; they see a king who conquers. That’s what they want; they want a conquering king, a human person to be their conquering king, but that’s not what… the kind of kingship that God had described to them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and in 1 Samuel 8:19-20, they use that language of “We want a king to lead us out and bring us in.” And that’s war.

Fr. Andrew: That’s military, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: “Lead us out to war and bring us back. That’s what we want.”

Fr. Andrew: And I was going to say, I think, as an interesting side-comment on this, within modern Orthodox circles, there’s sometimes a debate about monarchy amongst some people in some really kind of lionize it—see what I did there?—and kind of a thing in and of itself. But it’s interesting that often the image that they have is exactly this image of monarchy: the conqueror, this military hero; whereas God’s image of monarchy is Christ, ultimately. He’s the image of what the king is supposed to be. Yeah, it’s fascinating to me that people can say, “Well, look, the kingdom of heaven is ruled by a king,” and then they conclude from that “That means that any kind of kingship must be the right way.” But no, actually, lots of kings were clearly unfaithful and they get judged by God for their unfaithfulness. It’s because the kind of kingship that they practice is not the sort that God was talking about when he was talking about kingship.

Fr. Stephen: So let me just say, since in Deuteronomy 17:18-20 the primary job there of the king is to copy and study the Torah, it really means that biblical scholars should be king.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So not Plato’s philosopher kings!

Fr. Stephen: So when my administration starts, which should be any day now, as people realize the truth, all those of you who have been kind to me will have favored positions.

Fr. Andrew: When you come into your kingdom.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes. I’m somehow dubious that that will actually happen… But so, yes, the problem here: the rejection of Yahweh, the God of Israel, here is not that they want a human government with a single head, who is a representative of God on earth, because that’s what they had with Samuel. It’s that they’re no longer, as they were called upon to do throughout the end of the Torah and Joshua and Judges, they’re not willing to have Yahweh lead them into battle and fight the battle for them and win the spoils and bring them back. They want to do it under their own power with a strong king to lead them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because prior to this, at some points, he literally was leading them into battle, not just sort of inspiring them, like “Oh, I really feel that God is with us today.” Like, they saw him fighting in the battle; he was literally leading them. So what they’re asking for is to replace him; they want to replace that role that God had.

Fr. Stephen: And you say, “Why would they do that?” Well, because sometimes when they were unfaithful and sinful, as happened throughout the book of Judges, they lost.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and he left them.

Fr. Stephen: And they don’t like them having to be responsible to God. [Laughter] They don’t want to have to toe the… to keep the covenant to have God fight for them and to bring them victory; they just want to have a man do it who’s accountable to them. Because, of course, once you have a human king, if you don’t like him, you can just axe him, literally, and bring in a new one—just ask the Puritans!

Fr. Andrew: There we go. Full circle. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So that’s the issue there. That’s the issue there, and so then, of course, there’s also… When David becomes king in what’s normally called the covenant with David, these promises made to David about his line are really then just the expansion of what was said in Genesis to Judah, because the scepter’s going to come to Judah. Well, David’s the one in whom it came, so there’s this sign-prophecy relationship. So when he comes and speaks to David, he says, “Look, you’re the sign. You’re here on the throne now,” and so reiterates the prophecy part, the promise part.

And there are a couple of interesting things to note. This is recorded twice: in 2 Samuel (or 2 Kingdoms) 7 and in 1 Chronicles (or 1 Chronicles) 17—it’s 1 Chronicles either way. [Laughter] And there’s some interesting things to note. In both of them, when Yahweh the God of Israel is speaking to David about this, he doesn’t say at the opener, “Look, I have made you king over my people Israel.” In both 2 Samuel (or 2 Kingdoms) 7:8 and 1 Chronicles 17:7, he says, “I have made you prince over my people.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so he’s second in command at best.

Fr. Stephen: Right, bringing out this sort of iconic or sign role, this preliminary fulfillment idea. And then when the promise is made, there’s an interesting difference between the two records. In 2 Samuel (or 2 Kingdoms) 7:16, he promises David that he will establish—he says, “I will establish your house and your kingdom”—meaning David’s house and David’s kingdom—“forever.” And so this record, this historical book, is written at the time that Israel’s going into exile, so this is the earlier of the two. And so it’s focusing on it in this way to make the point that, hey, yes, we’re going into exile; yes, everything looks as bad as it can get—the Temple’s been destroyed—but, number one, we had it coming, and, number two, God did make these promises about David’s line. So it’s not all over.

Then in 1 Chronicles 17:14, which is written after the return from exile, when the same thing is said, God says, “I will establish you”—or David’s descendant—“in my house and my kingdom”—God’s house and God’s kingdom—“forever.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, an indication that the kingship really belongs to God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but also this indicates that whoever this figure is, this ultimate king—David’s the prince; he’s the icon; he’s the sign—this ultimate king is going to make David’s house and kingdom and God’s house and kingdom the same house and kingdom.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which, again, we talked about this in some detail in our episode, “The Queen Stood at Thy Right Hand” from—boy, it’s almost been a year now, actually, I think, since we had that episode.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t think so. We just celebrated our one-year anniversary, so I think it has to be less than that.

Fr. Andrew: It’s almost been a year.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Almost been a year. I think it was November or early December of last year, so it’s not that far away. It’s closer to having been a year than to having not, I guess. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: Well, having established all of that, we’re going to go ahead and take another break, and we’ll be back with the third half of the show.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the third and final half—that’s right. We get that question a lot. “Did you say ‘third half’?” It’s because it’s a show and a half. So again, this is a reminder, though, that while we do love the Voice of Steve, his own pre-recorded voice does not know that this is also a pre-recorded episode, so there are no calls being taken for the one on Melchizedek.

Okay, well, we’re now in the final, the third half of the show, and now we’re going to talk about Melchizedek’s mention in Psalm 110, which, as you said a whole bunch of times, is the most cited text from the Old Testament in the New Testament, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it’s Psalm 110, or 109 in the Greek numbering, in case you’re looking it up in your Orthodox Study Bible, then you won’t get confused. Yeah, it is the most often quoted text, and usually when it’s quoted, people don’t even notice what we’re going to be focusing on in this third half, in that it’s very clearly the first verse which is usually quoted. We talked before about how there weren’t chapter and verse divisions, and so when a New Testament author quotes a line, they’re quoting the first line of a passage, of a section, of the Scriptures, and you’re to understand the whole section. So you quote the first line of a psalm to reference the whole psalm.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s basically kind of like hypertext, essentially. And the line that everyone’s heard, and the translation that probably most people have heard, begins, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet,’ ” or something like that. “The Lord said to my Lord…” which, of course, Jesus himself quotes that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, right. Everybody quotes that, frankly. [Laughter] Yeah, and it’s— The first “the Lord” is of course Yahweh, so it’s really, “Yahweh said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies the footstool…” But, yeah, there’s no psalm number for them to reference; there’s no title to the psalm, so you quote the first line. And that would still work today. I mean, this show is evidence. I can quote the first line of a song, and automatically everybody knows what song I’m talking about.

Fr. Andrew: Sure, right!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So that’s how it’s referenced, and that first verse, if we don’t take the time to go and look up the whole psalm, or we’re not reading Hebrews, then that is very clearly a messianic thing; that’s very clearly… Yahweh is on his throne; the Messiah sits on a throne at his right hand. So this is a messianic thing; it has to do with the king.

Fr. Andrew: And he’s going to defeat his enemies.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and… But, of course, deeper into the psalm, Melchizedek shows up again.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there are more verses to the psalm, ladies and gentlemen.

Fr. Stephen: Melchizedek, all of a sudden, pops up, and if you’ve been reading straight through the Old Testament, as we’ve all done many times successfully—

Fr. Andrew: Last week alone.

Fr. Stephen: —then, you know, Melchizedek who pops up for those three verses back in Genesis is a distant, faded memory by the time you get to Psalm 110.

Fr. Andrew: He’s not been mentioned at all.

Fr. Stephen: And then all of a sudden—boom! Melchizedek! Why is he getting looped back in here to this messianic tradition? I mean, you may have bought it earlier in this very episode when I told you, well, he’s sort of an image of kingship, and that’s how it’s connected—hopefully, several of you at least bought in that much—but now this, now we’re getting to, as usual, in the third half, why we’re talking about this. That the Scriptures themselves draw Melchizedek back into this messianic picture, and this psalm is the main place they do it. And then this psalm sort of gets dissected and applied in 13 different ways once we get to the various texts that make up the new testament.

So, as you mentioned, Christ quotes this verse himself, that first verse himself, and one of the places where he references it, he quotes it to the Pharisees and scribes who are coming and badgering him with questions and trying to trap him. So he says, “I have a question for you,” and so in Luke 20:44, for example, he asks them… So they all agree that this is about the Messiah, and they all agree that David wrote this. So he says, “If it says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand,’ and if the Messiah is the son of David”—that’s one of his titles; that’s who he is—“how is it that David calls him his lord?”

Fr. Andrew: Right, which—the reason why that question is a question, in case it’s not obvious to people, is that in… well, most of world history almost everywhere, no one’s son is their lord; there’s always a relationship: it always goes the other direction. The son’s lord is his father. There’s never a: “You done good, son; now you’re in charge of me.” Like, that’s never a thing. So that’s why this question is a question: How could David call him lord even though he’s the son of David? Shouldn’t David be above him?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is testimony that the son of David is going to be greater than David; the Messiah is something bigger. But part of what Christ is doing there, by pushing that rhetorical question in that way, is he is using an interpretation of this text that we also see in the vision of Daniel 7, that we’ve also talked about before in the podcast, which is this scene where the Ancient of Days comes to sit on his throne, and the thrones, plural, are set. We have this sort of divine council judgment seat that takes place in Daniel, and that’s where the Son of man comes riding on the clouds, and the Son of man is enthroned. Well, if the son of David—if the Messiah is this Son of man, this heavenly Son of man, well, that would make him greater than David. And we have this enthronement scene: “Sit at my right hand.” And within Daniel 7, that’s within the context of: we have these beasts, and he’s enthroned, and then there’s this period of time before the beasts are judged. So there’s this lapse.

So in the second verse of Psalm 110, that’s referred to. The scepter—remember that scepter from back in Genesis 49? the one that was hanging around—

Fr. Andrew: Judah, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: It goes out from Zion, goes out from Zion to extend over—to extend over the nations. So this is picking up that prophecy, that it’s going to happen with this figure, but there’s this element of ruling in the midst of his enemies, and that’s the… that’s parallel to the “until I make your enemies your footstool.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, this is verse two of that psalm, just in case you’re following along, looking at your copy of Psalm 110/109.

Fr. Stephen: And so he is enthroned, he is ruling, he is ruling not only over Israel but over the nations—because it’s gone out from Zion to Jerusalem—but his enemies are still out there. There’s this period of time, as we saw in Daniel 7, that’s referred to as “a long time” after the enthronement of the Son of man. This is the idea that was called—referred to as the messianic age.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this is what we’re in now.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that there is this this— Once the Messiah comes, that starts the messianic age, and then the end of days is at the end of that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, you know, this answers the question of why it is that, despite Christ having defeated his enemies, why they are still around and messing with us. Of course, we’re talking about the demonic powers here. It’s because this is part of the prophecy that he’s going to rule in the midst of his enemies. He’s ruling—he is ruling—but the enemies are still around. So think about what that means in terms of a battle. The battle can be won, but then there’s a kind of rout that occurs; there’s a retreat that is happening from the defeated enemies, and often they try to burn and pillage and do all kinds of mischief as they go, and that’s what we’re living through. That’s what the current era is about.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is why— Now, I don’t want to publicly shame or embarrass anybody, but there are still folks out there who once in a while think that “AD” means “After Death,” that it’s after Christ’s death, like “BC” is “Before Christ.” Now, the big problem there would be: What would it be during Christ’s life? There would be, like, 33 years of, what, DC, During Christ?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m not a DC guy, so.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] I am. But anyway…

Fr. Andrew: No, Anno Domini, the year of the Lord.

Fr. Stephen: Anno Domini, the year of our Lord. It is the year of our Lord “whatever.” Embedded in that understanding of time is this understanding of the messianic age; that this is the period when Christ is ruling in the midst of his enemies. The year of our Lord meaning the year of our Lord’s rule. You start dating when the king takes his throne.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, in the Roman period, that’s the way it was: Tiberius 6 or whatever. I don’t remember how long he ruled, but that’s the way that ancient chronologies always went. It always reset when there was a new emperor.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, well, in Genesis 14 that we just read: “In the 14th year of Kedorlaomer…”

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. Everybody writing this, except now it’s 2021—or 2024 if you do it that way…

Fr. Stephen: So I have to throw in a “Sorry, pre-millennialists…” because it’s been utterly clear to the Church from the beginning—it was utterly clear what was going to happen in Second Temple Judaism, that the coming of the Messiah would start this messianic age that would then end with the end of days and the final judgment, and that there would be this intermediate period in which the Messiah would rule over the world when his enemies would still be there. That’s not another period that’s still in our future.

Fr. Andrew: Right, “the millennium.”

Fr. Stephen: Dog don’t hunt—with the Bible, with the way Christians have always interpreted the Bible, with the way we figure out what year it is… [Laughter] It just doesn’t work. And it’s a sorry/not-sorry, I’ll admit it.

So then, keeping going through the psalm, it’s describing this messianic age. Verse three: “The people”—“the people of the messianic king—offer themselves on holy mountains, on the holy mountains.” Now this is another place where the Hebrew could be read a couple of different ways, but “holy mountains” is the way St. Jerome reads it, and he had a cool lion for a pet, so I’m going with him. [Laughter] But if you understand what’s going on here, it talks about their garments, their clean garments, and that they’re offering themselves, mountains make sense, because these are high places, and the idea that they’re holy mountains, plural, means there’s been a change. Because, remember, the scepter goes out from Zion, from Jerusalem, which was the one holy mountain with the one sanctuary.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’m seeing an alternative reading of this is: “in splendor of holiness” rather than “holy mountains” or “holy hills.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah… Nyeh. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I suppose… Does that depend on where you put the vowel points, or…?

Fr. Stephen: Exactly. It’s vowel pointing.

Fr. Andrew: Man, those vowel points again!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right? But in the context, we have them offering themselves. This is sacrificial language, and their purification of themselves and sanctification of themselves with the garments. So it being sacrificial language, “splendor of holiness” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and just the context of it being at sunrise, and then there’s dew… Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is this idea of living sacrifice as it gets picked up in the New Testament. So that the people… Notice also, it’s “your people.”

Fr. Andrew: Mmm. Identifying the Messiah with his people.

Fr. Stephen: They’re his people. Israel is the Messiah’s people. Yahweh’s people are the Messiah’s people. But also, this extension, that there’s going to be, all over the place… The scepter going out from Zion in Jerusalem does not go and just crush everyone who’s a Gentile. It goes out there and makes a hundred other Jerusalems where people are gathering in holiness for worship during this messianic period.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, echoing, of course, the thing that Christ said to the woman at the well, that God’s going to be worshiped in spirit and in truth in every place.

Fr. Stephen: Well, that doesn’t mean in every place.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, but, you know…

Fr. Stephen: I got to “Um, actually…” you on that.

Fr. Andrew: So not only in Jerusalem or on that mountain.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the “in spirit and in truth” is a response to… is talking about the Holy Trinity.

Fr. Andrew: All right, yes, that I got.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s as opposed to the other question she asks that we ignore, where Christ says, “You worship what you do not know; we worship whom we know, because salvation is from the Jews. But the time will come where everyone will worship in spirit and in truth,” meaning everyone will know God through the revelation of the Holy Trinity. Anyway. Sorry. Had to do it.

Fr. Andrew: I agree with you. That’s what I meant!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So now we come to verse four of the psalm.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes, this is the one that actually does mention Melchizedek.

Fr. Stephen: And here’s where he pops up, and this is important for how we understand verse three also, because, remember, verse three, if we understand these holy mountains, this is this sacrificial language, this worship language on all these hills. So verse four: “I have sworn”—it’s usually “I have sworn and will not repent,” meaning not change my mind, not reverse course.

Fr. Andrew: It’s a usage of “repent” that’s a little bit older than… We tend to think of repent as meaning “I’m sorry for my sins” or some version of that, which is not wrong, but to repent means to change your mind; that’s all it really… And thus, that’s why you get some language in the Scriptures of God “repenting.” It’s not that God has sins that he has to repent of; it’s this notion that from the point of view of the person observing this that God seems to have changed his mind.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or changed what he was going to do. He was threatening something, but then the person repents, and so he doesn’t do it, yeah. So he’s sworn and will not repent. “You are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek.” So here’s where Melchizedek pops up, again out of the blue, and there’s a switch to “the order of Melchizedek,” where there’s no “order” back in Genesis.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s just Melchizedek.

Fr. Stephen: Melchizedek doesn’t show up with, like, a bunch of followers or a school. So “order” here shouldn’t be translated too literally. We tend to think of “order” like an order of monks or an order of…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the NET has it as “after the pattern of Melchizedek.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, this order or organization, the style, the type, the pattern, the genus.

Fr. Andrew: “You’re the kind that he was.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. So there’s a superficial level at which we can immediately understand this. Well, this is saying that—and this is part of—we’re going to go into more depth, but this is the beginning—not only is he a king, but he’s also a priest, and specifically he’s serving as a sort of high priest. So he is in Zion; his scepter has gone out from there. So he is sort of serving as the high priest over the people who are offering their worship in all of these scattered places, that it’s sort of being taken up by him as high priest in addition to being king. So since he is both king and high priest, that’s like Melchizedek, who is both priest and king in Zion. So that’s our first sort of superficial level; so it’s sort of: “Oh, yeah, like that guy was.”

Fr. Andrew: Which is true. It is true, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so, noting this now, especially in St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews, he’s going to go deeper. I mean, you can see right away where he’s going to get the language of Christ is the great High Priest from this, how you get the Messiah and the High Priest together. But also, he’s going to make a contrast between the priesthood of Aaron and the priesthood of Melchizedek.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what’s that all about?

Fr. Stephen: Well, part of it is that, as he says, Christ is not a Levite. So he would not be eligible to be part of the Aaronic priesthood, and so he says, no, Christ is in this—when Christ is the High Priest, he’s the High Priest in this other priesthood. But also this is where he talks about—and this is where, as you were talking about, people want to say Melchizedek is the “pre-incarnate”—that’s problematic, but…—Christ in Genesis, they’re taking this a little too literally, so he makes some comparisons between Melchizedek and Christ, in that Melchizedek kind of shows up out of nowhere; there’s no genealogy of Melchizedek. And he kind of disappears into nowhere. So his priesthood is, in a certain way, kind of eternal, not in that it literally was, but in the sense that we’re not told when it began and when it ended. He’s not enclosed within the text. There is no story of Melchizedek. And in the same way, Christ’s priesthood is not sort of limited and bounded the way Aaron’s was and the Aaronic line was. And we talked before in a previous episode when we were talking about sacrifice about how priesthood was separated, was taken away from leadership and kingship within Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It gets split.

Fr. Stephen: Which was sort of a further limitation. So the priesthood of Melchizedek, in the understanding of St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews, is understood to be this kind of limitless and eternal priesthood, of which the Aaronic priesthood was sort of a shadow or… “icon” is too firm; it’s even more shadowy than that. Melchizedek would be the icon in this case. So it’s this eternal, unending priesthood, and it is, for Hebrews, a priesthood that is carried out not in an earthly sanctuary, but in the heavenly sanctuary. So this is another place where our understanding of the Messiah… If we understand that the Messiah is going to be the Son of man, the heavenly Son of man from Daniel 7, the heavenly Son of man does what in Daniel 7? He’s enthroned in the heavenly places, and he, as God’s Son—God the Father’s Son, Yahweh the Son—presides over the divine council.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so that the kingship that the Melchizedek, messianic priest has is a kingship that’s not bound… it’s not limited to earth. It’s actually the kingship, the presidency over the highest possible court that can be the court truly of the heavens.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’ve talked about… When we’ve talked about theosis, when we’ve talked about sainthood, we’ve talked about that primarily from the king side in the past on this show, that Christ is the king and then he has his royal court, and the divine council’s like his royal court, through which he administers—he shares, out of love he shares administration of the creation with them. But there is also, remember, this priestly aspect that we haven’t talked about as much, that we’re going to talk a little more about now. Remember, as is reiterated in St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews, when the tabernacle is constructed, it’s constructed after the pattern of what Moses saw on the mountain. He ascends the mountain and goes into the divine council, and he’s there with Yahweh, speaking face to face with him, with the angelic beings—the Law is given through angels—and he then creates the tabernacle, the place where the priests serve as the image.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I was going to say, this is reflected… So we’re recording this on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on our calendar. That’s where we’re speaking to you from. So this morning we just celebrated Liturgy for the feast, and this kind of thing is reflected all over the Divine Liturgy, but I just thought, just now, for instance, about the prayer that gets said right before what’s called the Little Entrance which, in the ancient Church, would have been the point at which the clergy and the people are really entering into the church. At the time it would not have just been the clergy leaving the altar and then coming back into it real quick; it was really their first entrance into it, and that prayer explicitly asks God to make that entrance be accompanied by angels.

And there’s all kinds of references, then, in the Divine Liturgy, to angels serving alongside the celebrant who’s there. So like you said, there’s this image of the royal court and the king on his throne and so forth, but at the same time, this is the Priest—Christ is the Priest—and the angelic beings serve alongside him the way that deacons and altar servers do. And indeed, their vestments—those servers’ vestments are designed to remind one of angels. This is all going on, that we still need to do episodes on the Divine Liturgy; we have to. But that this is all going on there as well, and it is—mystically speaking, it is the same thing; both are really the same thing. These are just two different angles of talking about it, two different images that are given in Scripture of it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they overlap, and they’re drawn together. In St. John’s Apocalypse—and we’ve quoted this before when we’re talking about the saints—he says that in the first resurrection, they’ll come alive and reign with him during this period and that they will be priests. Those two things go together, and Christ, as the second Person of the Holy Trinity, the second Person of Yahweh the God of Israel, presiding over the council, also means that he is the High Priest who is leading the worship of that council, because that’s what they do. And he as the great High Priest, because he is both God and man, can both worship, lead worship, and receive worship, validly, unlike the pagan priest-kings and god-kings of Abraham’s day.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that he’s the only one that can do that, correctly, rightly—is justifiably able to do it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Anyone else who does is an antichrist, in the most literal sense.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the rest are usurpers in one way or another.

Fr. Stephen: And so that is the picture we’re getting from verse three and four of the psalm, of Psalm 110, is this image of earthly and heavenly worship being united in the figure of the messianic king who is also a priest like Melchizedek, during this messianic age. And so the primary thing, from the perspective of the psalm, from David’s prophetic vision—the primary thing that characterizes the messianic era, between now and the end, is the worship of the Liturgy. That’s the character of this age, and then outside of that there are the enemies.

And so in verses five and six of Psalm 110, we get the final destruction of those enemies, the demonic kings and chiefs of the nations.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he executes judgment against the nations. That’s how it begins.

Fr. Stephen: And smashes their kings and their chiefs. So those enemies are finally done away with, and then in verse seven we have this image of him stooping and drinking out of a brook, and the idea there is it’s a pastoral scene of peace, this final era of perfect peace with the enemies gone within the creation.

So Psalm 110 is quoted more than anything else, obviously because it gives this important span, this important prophetic layout of what’s to come, and then, once Christ comes, and then the New Testament authors are now saying, “This has now arrived.” So they go back to it again and again to characterize the age that’s now begun.

So over the course of this episode we’ve sort of pulled a whole bunch of things together from all over the Old Testament based on how they’re used in the New Testament in different things, and we’ve even pulled in some things from the last episode, from Abraham and Isaac. And a lot of times Christians get accused, especially by some of our Jewish friends, Rabbinic Jewish friends, and even sometimes by non-religious people, that we just kind of go to the Scriptures, especially the Hebrew Scriptures, and just kind of pillage them for stuff that sounds a little bit Christ-like. [Laughter] Nietzsche said that any stick of wood that shows up in the Scriptures automatically becomes the cross. And like we’re just kind of playing fast and loose and kind of constructing Christian theology, this sort of foreign edifice, to it. And that we’re only doing that sort of a posteriori; we received this Christian religion, and so we’re now going back and looking for evidence of it in the Old Testament and, lo and behold, when that’s what you’re looking for, you find it.

So, to counter that, here at the end of our third half, I would like to offer an ancient text, which is called 11Q13—rolls off your tongue.

Fr. Andrew: It’s a great title.

Fr. Stephen: It sounds like somebody’s non-personalized license plate. This is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So the way the Dead Sea Scrolls are labeled is the first number is which cave they came out of, so 11Q13 came out of Cave 11. The Q is for Qumran, which is the place where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. And then the second number is just the order in which they found and identified them. So this is 11Q13; it’s sometimes called the Melchizedek Document, or the Coming of Melchizedek. This text was written around 100 BC, so this is 100 years before the birth of Christ, by this incredibly fundamentalist Jewish group that’s living out in the desert because they thought the Pharisees were too liberal, and this is actually their exegesis about the commandment about the jubilee year in Leviticus 25.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so if you look at Leviticus 25, what gets commanded there is called the year of jubilee, and it’s basically this big sort of economic reset, like all the debts are forgiven, all the captives released. Everyone has to go back; everyone gets the land back that belonged to their forefathers.

Fr. Stephen: Slaves are freed, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so it’s… I mean, we could have a whole episode about the jubilee…

Fr. Stephen: And we may! at some point in the future.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we should. It’s a great idea. But that’s the context. So if you haven’t read Leviticus 25… Okay, welcome back! [Laughter] So, as you said, this text is about that. This is their sort of commentary on that. So I’m going to read it to you, to everybody. I’ll just… There are… It’s fragmentary, so there’s bits where the manuscript got damaged, so where that happened, I’m going to say dot-dot-dot, just so you know that there’s a break in what I’m saying. And then also, it quotes a number of places in the Old Testament, so when it does quote it, then I’m just going to mention what that reference is as I read it here. It’s a little long, but please just bear with me. So listen to this.

And concerning what the Scripture says, in this year of jubilee, you shall return, every one of you, to your possession (Leviticus 25:13), and what is also written: “And this is the manner of the remission: Every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbor, not exacting it of a neighbor who is a member of the community, because God’s remission has been proclaimed” (Deuteronomy 15:2). The interpretation is that it applies to the last days and concerns the captives. Just as Isaiah said, “To proclaim the jubilee to the captives” (Isaiah 61:1). (…) Just as (…) and from the inheritance of Melchizedek, for (…) Melchizedek, who will return them to what is rightfully theirs. He will proclaim to them the jubilee, thereby releasing them from the debt of all their sins. (…)

Then the Day of Atonement shall follow after the tenth jubilee period, where he shall atone for all the sons of light, and the people who are chosen for Melchizedek (…), upon them (…) for this is the time to create, for the year of Melchizedek’s favor, and by his might he will judge God’s holy ones and so establish a righteous kingdom; as it is written about him in the songs of David, “A god has taken his place in the council of gods; in the midst of gods he holds judgment” (Psalm 82:1). Scripture also says about him, “Over it, take your seat in the highest heaven; a god will judge the peoples” (Psalm 7:7-8).

Concerning what Scripture says, “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality with the wicked” (Psalm 82:2), the interpretation applies to Belial and the spirits chosen for him, because all of them have rebelled, turning from God’s precepts and so becoming utterly wicked. Therefore, Melchizedek will thoroughly prosecute the vengeance required by God’s statutes; also, he will deliver all the captives from the power of Belial and from the power of all the spirits chosen for him. Allied with him will be all the righteous gods (Isaiah 61:3). (…)

The visitation is the day of salvation, that he has decreed through Isaiah the Prophet concerning all the captives, inasmuch as Scripture says, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion: Your God reigns” (Isaiah 52:7). This Scripture’s interpretation: the mountains are the prophets, they who were sent to proclaim God’s truth and to prophesy to all Israel. The messenger is the anointed of the Spirit of whom Daniel spoke: “After 62 weeks, an anointed shall be cut off” (Daniel 9:26). The messenger who brings good news, who announces salvation, is the one of whom it is written, “To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, the day of the vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn” (Isaiah 61:2). The Scripture’s interpretation: “He is to instruct them about all the periods of history for eternity and in the statutes of the truth (…) dominion, that passes from Belial and returns to the sons of light” (…) by the judgment of God, just as it is written concerning him, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns” (Isaiah 52:7), Zion is the congregation of all the sons of righteousness, who uphold the covenant and turn from walking in the way of the people. “Your God” is Melchizedek, who will deliver them from the power of Belial. Concerning what Scripture says, “Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud in the seventh month” (Leviticus 25:9).

Before you go into… talk about this, I just wanted to mention something that I noticed as I was reading it, which I kind of love. There is this interpretation out there of Psalm 82 saying that this council, this divine council that God stands up in the midst of, is really just human rulers or the rulers of the people of Israel, and I just wanted to point out that here is this Judean text from 100 years before the birth of Christ that explicitly says that this is about God judging the demon Belial and those who are allied to him. I just wanted to point that out: this Second Temple Jewish text explicitly says that this is about God judging the fallen angels. So. Just wanted to point that out.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that what we would call the “literal” interpretation, the fact that every 50 years they were supposed to release their slaves and forgive their debts, that’s like the sign of the real prophecy, which this is saying is about this figure they’re calling Melchizedek coming, who is both the anointed one who gets cut off, you may have noticed—

Fr. Andrew: And called “your God”! Like, that’s the last thing it says, that “Your God is Melchizedek.” Now, again, it’s this figure they’re calling Melchizedek. We’re not saying that this means that the man whom Abram met is going to come back and do these things.

Fr. Stephen: Right, no.

Fr. Andrew: The point is when David said they’re going to do X, Y, and Z, they don’t mean King David; the point is that there is this figure who, in himself, is what David is in his fullness, and that this figure is Melchizedek in his fullness…

Fr. Stephen: Melchizedek is the pattern, remember, the order, the sign. And so, yes, this is Messiah, divine Messiah who stands in the council of the gods and renders judgment against Belial, frees the people from their sins, remits their debts—all the language we’ve been talking about today is all drawn together here, plus stuff we’ve talked about in the past, as you’ve just pointed out. This was all being drawn together and understood—100 BC. And so the New Testament authors are not making anything up. Christianity is a continuation of this religion that already existed when Christ came, but it’s now shifted to: Now we know who that Person is, whom Melchizedek was the pattern of, and it’s Jesus Christ. That’s the only thing that’s changed, is that what was prophesied to happen has now happened. We’ve now moved into this new phase, into this new period.

So it’s not us a posteriori coming back and pulling all these things together; this was all pulled together beforehand. This is how the Scriptures were understood by the people who took it seriously and were studying it and were reading the Hebrew Scriptures at the time. Nothing new; very old.

Fr. Andrew: Well, to wrap up this episode about Melchizedek, the thought that I had that to me ties it all together is it’s often the case that a lot of the things that we discuss that people could take a superficial image of them and kind of walk away and think, “Okay, a lot of this stuff is a kind of bestiary; it’s a collection of weird and mysterious and strange things you find in the Bible,” and they have this kind of antiquarian, exotic feeling about this stuff. And of course Melchizedek is one of these kinds of figures. Like, who is this guy? He’s really strange and mysterious. Of course, you know, we talk about giants and angels and demons and the various names of fallen angels, and I think that it can be possible for some people to, as the cliché goes, miss the forest for the trees, meaning that we can get really caught up in looking at individual figures or stories or whatever it might be—which are, I mean, cool! this is really interesting, fascinating, fascinating stuff—but if it’s not finally all being referred back to Christ, then we’re not only wasting our time; we actually might be harming ourselves. The Bible is not a collection of ancient texts that you can find weird, cool, mysterious things in—I mean, that’s probably literally true on some level, but that’s not its point. It’s not a kind of book of magic spells. It’s not… Again, it’s not a collection of curiosities and things to just sort of titillate the mind. It all points toward Christ.

And to me, this episode is one of the ones that… I think we, God willing, we’re doing this in every episode, but I love where the last part where we ended on with this text from 100 BC from the Qumran community, talking about Melchizedek as being this messianic, kingly savior figure who’s proclaiming release to his people from demons, and how… It’s like: Whoa! That’s so Christian! It’s so clearly Christian, and yet this is a hundred years before anyone was… or 130 years before anyone was being called a Christian. That was not even a term at this period. It’s clearly about Christ. You don’t even have to stretch it at all to see Christ in that. This is about him.

And that’s the goal of everything that we’re doing on this podcast, is to direct people to Jesus Christ, to direct them to worshiping him, to direct them to being faithful to him, to direct them to knowing him better. And I think this particular topic we discussed on this episode is especially about that latter bit: it’s about knowing Christ better. When people say, “I look at the Old Testament and I see Christ everywhere,” that’s not a stretch. It’s not a stretch! That’s reality. And so we’ve looked at one figure from the Old Testament, this image of Melchizedek, who, as far as we know, is a real person: Abram meets him. But he also, in himself, just as David does, he in himself is an icon of the One who is to come, the One who is the Prophet, the Priest, the King, the Messiah, the Savior of captives, the Messenger for proclaiming the good news, the Defeater of the demons—he’s an image of all of that, as we’ve heard summarized in this text from the Dead Sea Scrolls. So, again, it all points to Jesus Christ. That’s where we should always end up in every single journey that we take. Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so building off that a little, one of the most basic questions when you start studying the Scriptures seriously is essentially whether the Bible is a thing. And what I mean by that is, obviously, we, of course, buy a Bible and it’s a book, but in actuality it’s a collection of texts across centuries—millennia, virtually, that have been touched by countless hands, different authors, and especially when you take into account the fact that modern scholarship—you know, our 19th century German friends—have done everything possible to try to make not just every book of the Bible, but every piece of every book of the Bible, look as disparate from every other piece as possible, whether this collection we have actually constitutes anything, whether it’s just put together by habit, whether it’s just put together by historical accident, whether there’s anything connecting it other than those series of historical accidents.

And I think this is a place of differentiation that you can clearly see between the Christian understanding of Scripture and the Rabbinic Jewish understanding of Scripture, because on the Christian side, once you delve deep into the Scriptures—and I hope this is what comes out on this show; this is the thing that in this show, in this podcast, in the Bible studies I do, the thing I most want to bring people in touch with —is the fact that, once you start digging into the Scriptures even a little bit, you start to see that there is this—there are these structures that lie beneath the Scriptures that connect the texts to each other, the different parts of a text to each other, that connect the whole; there are ideas, there are realities that the text is an expression of, and trying to draw those out.

And the interesting thing, coming at it as an Orthodox Christian, is that it doesn’t even really matter what canon of the Old Testament you use. Whether you’re using the Hebrew Bible canon, the usual Greek collection, usual Slavonic collection—you can go get yourself an Ethiopian Old Testament, with the extra dozen books—any of those you take, you will find the same structure and the same themes. You will find the whole thing and all of its parts, when you see the links and tie them together, all pointing toward the one Person of Jesus Christ. You can include or exclude 1 Enoch: you still get the same Christ. You can include or exclude 3 Maccabees: you still get the same Christ. It fits. We don’t have to go back and cut out pieces of the tradition we’ve received from our forefathers in the faith. I’m talking about the ones before the coming of Christ. We don’t have to go and weed out pieces of that tradition in order to make ours hang together. I don’t think you can say that about the Rabbinic Jewish view of the Old Testament. I don’t think there is a logical, internal reason why Ecclesiastes is in and Tobit is out. I don’t see any cogent reason for most of those decisions other than to obscure as much as possible those links and structures and themes that I was just talking about.

When we let the tradition we’ve received—since Abraham—when we let that speak for itself, all of it orients us toward the Holy Trinity—God the Father, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit—Yahweh the God of Israel; all of it orients us towards that. All of it orients us toward who Christ is and what he will do. All of it gives us the same picture of who Christ is and what he will do. All of it gives us the same picture of how we find our salvation. So it becomes a unit sort of in and of itself, and that, to me, is the greatest argument not only for the fact that the Bible is a thing, that the Scriptures are a thing, that they are a cohesive whole, but also that they’re a cohesive whole with the whole rest of the Orthodox faith, which also speaks with that same voice—the same voice that the apostles spoke with; the same voice that Second Temple Jewish teachers spoke with; that the teachers of ancient Israel who were faithful spoke with; the same understanding that Abraham had, and that Isaac had, and that Jacob had, and that David had, and Ss. Peter and Paul had.

The fact that we find it in the Scriptures, regardless of our Christian tradition—[that] we find it in our liturgy, regardless of our ancient Christian tradition, shows us that this is not just a construct—this is not just something we built over time—but this is an expression of a deep and eternal reality. So that’s what I wanted to focus on here at the end.

Fr. Andrew: That’s our show for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. This was not a live broadcast, but we would still nonetheless love to hear from you, either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We do read everything, but we don’t respond—can’t respond to everything—that’s why we don’t respond to everything: we can’t respond to everything—and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: Some of those things I just don’t respond to. Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific.

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Fr. Andrew: And buy my new book, Arise, O God, and make sure you pick up Fr. Stephen’s book, Religion of the Apostles. You can get both at store.ancientfaith.com. Thank you, good night, God bless.