Solomon and Solomonic Literature

by Moncure Daniel Conway

“Jahveh said to my lord [Adonai], Sit thou at my right hand,

Until I make thine enemies thy footstool.”

The leader of these kings was Adonai-Zedek, who, like Melchizedek, was King of Jerusalem; they are certainly mythical relatives, their names meaning “Lord of Justice” and “King of Justice.” It is philologically impossible that any persons with those proper names could have existed in Jerusalem before the invasion of the Hebrews. And “Adonai-bezek,” the “radiant lord,” whose thumbs and toes Joshua cut off when he captured Jerusalem, is a transparent variant of Adonai-zedek.

When the city, originally named Jebus, began to be called Salem (see Psalm lxxvi. 2), the aboriginal people who continued to dwell there might naturally dream of their ancient kings, as the Welch and Bretons so long did of Arthur, “flower of kings,” and perhaps similarly expect their return to restore their ancient freedom; and it may have become a useful political device to find beyond the ugly legends of Joshua’s cruelty to their “just” and “shining” lords a prettier one, made out of an old song, of an earlier “King of Justice,” whose bread and wine Abraham had eaten, to whom he had paid tithes, whose deity, El Elyôn, the father of Israel had recognized as his own, and with whom he had made a treaty of salem, or peace,—Jebus thus becoming Jebus-Salem (Jerusalem).

Josephus records the legend as it was no doubt generally accepted among the Jews in the first century of our era: “Now, the King of Sodom met him (Abram) at a certain place which they called the King’s Dale, where Melchizedek, King of the City of Salem, received him. That name signifies the righteous king, and such he was without dispute, insomuch that on that account he was made the priest of God. However, they afterward called Salem Jerusalem.” (Antiq. Bk. i. ch. 10.)

Josephus is careful to identify Salem as Jerusalem, and in vi. ch. 10 of the same work states that the King’s Dale (identified as the Shaveh where Abraham met Melchizedek, Genesis xiv.) is “two furlongs distant from Jerusalem.” This carefulness may have been intended to distinguish Melchizedek’s Salem from the northern Shalem (Genesis xxxiii. 18), a place associated with Jacob, and apparently representing an attempt to set up a rival temple to that in Jerusalem. It was an old competition about tithes. Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek, King of Salem, but Jacob, after his vision at Bethel, recognized that as the “house of God,” and vowed to give to God a tenth of all that was given him (Genesis xxviii).[3] This quarrel between rival towns and temples, trying each to draw all tithes to themselves, harmonized in the later legends of the Bible, need not detain us, but it is of importance to remark that the story of Abram meeting the King of Justice and Peace near Jerusalem, and establishing the sanctity of that city, corresponds with, and is counterbalanced by, Jacob’s meeting with angels, and wrestling with a mysterious “man,” who, it is hinted, was some form of God himself. This reply to the story of Abram suggests that at the time of that tithe controversy between Bethel and Sion Melchizedek was not thought of as a flesh-and-blood king or a mere man, but as a shadowy shape, evoked from actual conditions for certain purposes, and named in accordance with the history or traditions out of which the conditions and the aims were evolved.

In investigations of this kind, concerned with ages really prehistoric, it is necessary to remember at every step that our search is amid eras when words and names were at once counters of actual forces and factors of history. How serious a play on words may be even in historic times is illustrated by a Papacy founded on the double meaning of Peter—a man’s name and a rock,—and as we approach earlier epochs, whose issues and struggles have long passed away, and their once antagonistic leaders harmonised by pious legends, it is largely by the aid of words and names that we are enabled to reach even historic probabilities.

As to Melchizedek, my inference above stated, derived from the two tithe legends, that his supernatural character is reflected in that of the corresponding phantoms met by Jacob may not be generally accepted, but that he (Melchizedek) was so understood by the writer to the Hebrews can hardly be disputed. Melchizedek is there (Hebrews vii.) declared to have been “without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, being assimilated unto the Son of God.”

In the third century the Melchizedekian sect maintained that Melchizedek was not a man but a heavenly power superior to Jesus, and the Hieracites held similar views. Some eminent theologians have believed that Melchizedek was Christ himself. Most of the Christian theories concerning the mysterious king are virtual admissions that only the eye of faith can see in him any actual being at all. How then was this mythical being formed?[4]

1. A suitable nest for the Melchizedek Saga existed near Jerusalem, in a vale called the King’s Dale. It seems to have been a royal racing ground (Targum of Onkelos, Gen. xiv. 17) or hippodrome (lxx. xlviii. 7), and its name in Hebrew was Emek-ham-Melech.