Genesis 14:18 And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God.

To reveal Melchizedek in any manner that is not purely spiritual in nature, a divine revelation of God, we can only examine the elements given to use in context. We must examine the entry point, his beginning. What can we discover here?

I want to jump forward to the most obvious aspects here but will resist that for the sake of order. In this introduction, the place, Salem, is also a first time entry. As we know from previous studies, names often carry deep meaning to their locale and residence.

These are the meanings of Salem; Strong’s H8004: whole, perfect, completed, finished, cherishing peace and friendship. Along with this is a footnote that Jewish commentators credit this place to be Jerusalem. This stems from a conquered people the Jebusite (Exodus 33:2) with a name meaning, trodding down, threshing floor. This points once again to Ornan the Jebusite, Mount Moriah, and the Temple Mount. Judges 19:10 names the city of Jebus as Jerusalem.

Attach that to a name for Jesus Christ, King of Peace, by reference in the whole of Hebrews 7. He being the high priest of a better covenant. Now we are being drawn into imagery, a revelation of insight into a man who had never been seen before of whom we knew nothing about until Abraham bore witness to His existence, His purpose, and His calling.

How could Abraham bear witness to this Melchizedek as being the high priest to the most high God, if Abraham had never met him before? Once again we are left with this issue of the record being given to Moses by God. Abraham did not write his own history, Moses did that at God’s divine instruction.

So how do we know with any certainty that all this is true? By what I left out, the bread and the wine.

Hebrews 7:3 Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually.

There is nothing in all of scriptures to support this assertion. Neither is there anything in scripture to controvert this assertion. So how is it that the writer of Hebrews can say with any confidence that this is the truth?

Moses wrote the first five books of the bible, the Pentateuch. He penned these words during the forty year march from Egypt to the Promised Land. He never got to enter in but he did get to see it from afar.

I can see a historical significance in Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers. People who lived those experiences with them had every right to contradict those written words, but there is no record that anyone denied there authenticity. No hint in the next books of the bible, penned by different authors that those first five book held any error.

That leaves us with the issue of Genesis which was penned purely by divine inspiration because no one living during those times was still alive to bear witness. The people saw with their own eyes this mystical and majestic relationship that Moses had with God. There was no reason to doubt that the words penned by Moses were anything but what God told him directly to write.

Here in Genesis we find the first traces of this King of Salem, this Melchizedek. Nothing prior to this contact with Abraham as related to Moses by God was ever noted. Nothing after Moses was ever written by any author which exposed the life and death of Melchizedek. Not until the writer of Hebrews.

How did the writer of Hebrews know? For that matter, what do you know of any certainty about anything written so long ago?