For once, I’m not walking with Heiser very closely. I’ll be paralleling his podcast series on Melchizedek, but relying on studies from other authors. The difficulty I have here is that, if you really need footnotes and references, I no longer have much. Most of this comes from lectures at Oklahoma Baptist University in classes taught by Dr. Robert Clarke and Dr. Rowena Strickland. The rest will be from their associates at the same school, books and papers they suggested, and other readings I’ve picked up over the years. My study notes disappeared long ago. You’ll have to trust me that I’m not making up stuff.
Re: Episode 166: Melchizedek, Part 1a
First, a little historical background. Heiser’s disciple, Dale Moreau, makes much of how the Conquest was mostly about the Nephilim tribes scattered across Canaan Land. That’s only half-true. Some of the destroyed cities were notorious pagan shrines that had drawn the attention of those who traveled through those lands for centuries.
Think of ancient Palestine as not a destination in itself, but just a highway between truly important places. It’s a highway dotted with a few gas stations and motels with bars. The pagan shrines were an industry in itself, designed to siphon off some of the wealth these travelers carried. Instead of high toll road fees, they relied more on seducing the polytheistic traders with the likes of temple prostitutes and maybe some wine and wild potions, alongside the food and lodging.
The entrapment was made worse by the presence of incarnated Nephilim, but Israel operated under the assumption that the only reason the major shrines existed was because of the Nephilim. Thus, they could focus on the shrines and clobber any Nephilim they spotted in the process. To the pagan residents, the issue was that a new upper class (displacing the Egyptians) were seizing the land and subjecting the inhabitants under feudal dominion. However, instead of their peculiar collection of deities, the Hebrews had only one, and they enforced worship for Him alone under their Noah Code for Gentiles.
Israel did not destroy every city, nor slaughter every pagan tribe. They went after those who had built up shrines that would violate God’s command that they not tolerate pagan worship in the land they were to conquer. Some of the shrines were simply destroyed and defiled. Others were converted to Israel’s purposes.
By the same token, of the conquered cities that were destroyed, some were rebuilt with a Hebrew name. Others already had a name that the Hebrews could use for their own agenda, so it stayed. Heiser digs down into the name of Jerusalem and rattles off a lot of studies (some contradictory) but seems to get one thing completely wrong: Zion and Jerusalem were originally two different facilities, two different peoples.
The Jebusite fortress was just about halfway down the ridge, just above the Gihon Spring. When David seized the fortress, he didn’t slaughter the troops inside, just drove them out and subjected them to Israeli feudal control. It became the City of David. The terms eventually became a single geographical reference in Hebrew usage, but the ancient City of Urushalem grew up around the Jebusite fortress on Zion. By David’s time, the city had already been destroyed once under Joshua (Joshua 10), rebuilt and and then eventually seized from the inhabitants. But Joshua was unable to take the Jebusite fortress, so it remained occupied until King David.
Genesis 14 reveals to us Melchizedek as king of the ancient city with Canaanite inhabitants, probably in alliance with the Jebusites in the fortress, but they were a completely different people with a different culture. They both used the shrine Abraham visited above the fortress on the hilltop (Mount Moriah). But this was probably just an open space with an altar, with nothing marking it as belonging to any particular deity. It later became Araunah’s (alternative spelling Ornan) threshing floor, which David bought from the surviving Jebusite tribe to be the future site of the Temple.
Side note: Later references to “Jebus” point back to the founder of this particular tribe of people. So far as we know, they lived mostly in the area around that fortress, minus the western hillside across the Tyropean Valley where the city of Jerusalem stood. Any use of the name “Jebus” can, in Hebrew grammar, be an acceptable reference to the place — the fortress on the ridge.
After Abraham deals with the invading coalition of kings from the Mesopotamian Valley, he comes back and meets with Melchizedek. Heiser recounts a lot of conflicting studies over that name. As I’ve noted before, Heiser likes to get lost in the factual data, but seems just a bit out of touch with the ancient Hebrew philosophical background. It doesn’t matter where the name comes from. The Hebrew people treated it as a title, not a proper name. As far as they were concerned, it meant what it sounded like to them in their language.
That the Canaanites had various deities named Malk, Tzedek, and Shalem makes no difference. Yes, we recognize that, according to proper Hebrew grammar, against the proper grammar of the Canaanite languages (very similar to Hebrew), there are some strange possibilities. Notice that Melchizedek as king in Abraham’s time becomes Adoni-zedek in Joshua’s time. It’s a very similar title, but it may not have been the same tribe of people occupying the city. However, none of that mattered to Abraham nor his descendants who returned to conquer the land.
The figure of Melchizedek exceeds the facts; he became a mythic figure. He was a king and priest. We meet him several centuries before the Law on Mount Sinai, back when it was common for the senior head of household to also be the priest for his people. The two roles became divided at the time of Moses because he balked at keeping them both. Thus, his brother Aaron became priest, while Moses was made the elder of the tribe. God kept this arrangement — Two Witnesses — for the balance of human time in this world, though His Son reunited the roles in Heaven after His resurrection (already but not yet).
