 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, click at NakedBiblePodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on New Start Here at NakedBiblePodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 172 Melchizedek Q&A. I'm the layman, Tray Strickland and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey Mike, how you doing? Pretty good. Getting close to fantasy time, Tray. This time I brought it up. Yes, you did. I don't know why. I guess you love... It's my growing confidence. Let's put it that way. I'm getting ready for draft day. It's coming up. Yes, sir. I'm going to do all I can to avoid having you be insufferable for the rest of the year. Let's put it that way. Well, I don't want to hurt your feelings or get your hopes up, but it's going to be a tall order. I'm the People's Champion, Mike, and I've got the triple behind me. I can hear him cheering right now. You're doing it for the children, right? Yes, I'm doing it for them. That's right. From all over the world. For the children. I am the People's Champion. That is correct. Yes, sir. Well, Mike, we've got another Q&A and more Melchizedek, and we're not even done with Melchizedek after this because we still got the winner. Maybe we'll, yeah, we'll just skip. Skip seven and just go right to eight. Yeah, there you go. You're like one of those elevators where they don't have certain floors. What's at North Korea? They don't have floor seven. Is that what they skip? It's something like that. Yeah, there's some floor that they don't have. You just skip it. I think it's seven. I don't know. But we have a winner where I guess we need to announce that it's official. Hebrews won the voting poll. So next week by a considerable margin as well. Yeah, 52, 53%, something like that. Overwhelmingly, Hebrews it is. And next week we're going to be doing an introduction to Hebrews. Yeah, all the preliminary stuff. Yeah, that's what we do. We get into a new book study. The first episode of each one is just, hey, introduce the book. What's it about? Who wrote it? All that kind of thing. So, yeah. Well, good deal. Well, Mike, we've got some unanswered questions from the people here. And we hope... I'm shocked and amazed after three weeks. Go ahead though. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure you got something. I hope you got some answers ready because we've got lots of questions. And all about Melchizedek himself. Mike, the number one question from everybody all over the internet, all over the world, could Melchizedek have been Shem, son of Noah? Come on. How many people really ask that? I've seen videos. Did you get more than one? Yes, absolutely. I mean, there's videos all over you. Why would anybody think that Melchizedek is Shem? I mean, my answer to that is no. There's no reason to think they're the same person. There's nothing in the Old Testament that connects them in any way. So, why would the equation even pop into somebody's head? I mean, their lives could have overlapped chronologically a little bit. But there's just not a shred of evidence to say they're the same person. So, I'm pretty shocked. I don't know why that would be something in the forefront of anybody's mind. I don't know. A lot of people talk about if he was still alive. A lot of people think he is still alive during that time. Well, great. Me and you are alive at the same time. We're not the same person. I know one's a champion, one is not. So, very true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hope you got something better than that. Okay, so you're done just like that? I'm done just like that. Okay, wow. There is no trail to pursue there. There isn't an iota of evidence for that. Okay, okay. Second question is from Darryl from Sherwood, Alberta, Canada. And believe it or not, several other people have tracked on this too. And they want to know is it possible that the physical person that gives it that is Job. Wait, is this like, you know, it's almost like what's my line here? Say, you know, there's a little bit more to this because Job is the books just kind of strange. And frankly, a lot of people assume certain things about Job that they shouldn't assume. But again, there's no textual basis for Melchizedek. You know, the Melchizedek figure who meets Abraham being Job. There's no reason to suspect that Melchizedek is Job. Again, if that's the point of the question and it sounds like it. I know some people will say, well, hey, Melchizedek did priestly things, you know, before there was a priesthood and so did Job. Job offered sacrifices. Well, great. Guess what? You know, before there was a Levitical priesthood, which of course covered hundreds and hundreds of years, even in relationship to the history of the Israelites, lots of people were offering sacrifices. There's no reason to suspect that their identities overlap just because they perform a certain duty. So I would say again, with complete confidence, there's no textual basis for the idea. Again, lots of people perform priestly duties in the patriarchal era. Why? Because there was no priesthood. Job, I think we should add, was also geographically removed from Canaan. So again, there's no reason to suspect that he's Melchizedek. To be fair, there were probably two places called Uzz in the Bible. If you look it up, just concord it in software, like I have, or Strong's or something like that. One Uzz was the homeland of the daughter of Edom. That's Lamentations 421. So there's an association that Uzz was in Edom. Edom isn't the trans-Jordan. It's nowhere near Canaan proper where Abraham was running around, chasing a lot all the way up to Damascus. It's a considerable distance away than where he would have met Melchizedek. Again, on the one side of the Jordan, Edom is on the other side of the Jordan and to the south. That's Lamentations 421. You get the same sort of context in Genesis 36. Again, specifically in verse 4, Eliphaz is a descendant of Esau or Edom. Again, Eliphaz showing up with the book. Go to Genesis 36.1. Again, Edom and Esau are tied together there. So there is an association of a place, Uzz, and certain other factors in the Book of Job with Edom. So that alone, again, would sort of disqualify the whole Melchizedek thing. One little oddity, again, if you do concord Uzz. In Jeremiah 2520, there's an Uzz linked with the land of the Philistines. Again, that's nowhere near Edom as well. That's on the coast. Again, it's still not where Abraham is, but you have a totally different location. Again, it's just kind of bizarre. You know, you're on the coast. You go up a little bit northward and you start running into Syria. You've got the Syria thing with Aram. Aram is the biblical word for Syria. That's kind of interesting because if you go to Genesis 1023, for instance, you have the sons of Aram, Uzz. Again, a person now is listed as the sons of Aram. That's in the area of Syria. So you've got at least two places that are called Uzz in different locations than where Abraham is. You also have a person, again, associated with being in the area of Syria. So again, you've got more than one Uzz and none of them can really be specifically tied to where Abraham is. So I don't see really any hope of a coherent connection between the events of the Book of Job or Job himself with Abraham. And then, of course, then with Melchizedek. Elizabeth from New Mexico and Dr. Heiser's book, The Unseen Realm on page 102. It states, many of the Upkalu were considered evil. If only many, but not all of the Upkalu, could it be that Melchizedek could still be of that origin and intentionally set aside by God to set the record the way straight again? Well, again, there's no reference to Melchizedek being a divine being or even partially a divine being. We talked about that a lot in the first installment. Melchizedek, he's a guy. He's not a divine being. He's never called an Upkala. That's not even a biblical word. And in Unseen Realm, when I'm talking about some of the Upkalu, or even many of them being considered evil, that's a comment about Mesopotamian thought. In Mesopotamian texts, you have the Kenea form material. You have the Upkala being good guys, because the Mesopotamians love the thought that their knowledge comes from the gods. But then they also show up in witchcraft texts. They're called in the Maklu series of Upikadian texts. So there also can be sinister figures as well. So that comment was really aimed at Mesopotamian material, nothing really that has anything to do with the Bible. You're going to have ancient traditions in other parts of the world that associate knowledge with the gods. That's nothing unusual. You can't take such an idea and say, oh, these are the Upkala. You can't really do that. You need some sort of textual association with that wisdom tradition, maybe connecting it to a flood story. Well, then you might have some reason to suspect that one culture's text is talking about the same incident or the same era, and thus the same idea with another culture, if they're both talking about the flood. In other words, if the context is the same. But as far as Melchizedek being connected to any of this, he's never referred to in the Old Testament as being divine or partially divine. And of course, he's not going to be referred to as an Upkala because it's not a public term anyway. And Melchizedek, to be kind of honest about it, his name has to do with righteousness. Again, if you take it adjectively or descriptively, why would we think that Melchizedek was so wise? I mean, he's never really referred to as a super wise person. He's the priest of the Most High God. Okay, my name is Zedek and all that kind of stuff. But there's actually nothing in the biblical tradition to connect him specifically with any of that. So my answer would be, no, I don't see anything there. James wants to know if there is a connection between Metatron and Melchizedek in the Second Temple period. Oh yeah, yeah, there is. I would recommend people who are really interested in this to, you know, if you're interested enough just to read a few paragraphs, then Charles Worth's Old Testament pseudopigrapher volume one, because that's where the book of Enoch is in that two volume set. He's going to have some material on Melchizedek and Metatron. If you're really interested in it, Andre Orlov, who is now David Burnett's advisor at Marquette, has a whole book on Enoch and the Metatron tradition. So if you're really, really into it, that would be the thing to read. But let me just, let me pull something up from Charles Worth here. This is from, like I said, his first volume Old Testament pseudopigrapher. He writes, Both figures hold exalted, if not preeminent, positions among the angels, for instance. Both are heavenly judges. Metatron's court is mentioned in Third Enoch 16-1. And both apparently had earthly lives prior to their exalted heavenly states. When you start talking about Metatron and you start talking about Third Enoch, you're also going to get a relationship between Metatron and Enoch. Now, the question was specifically about Melchizedek and Metatron. And again, just that little section from Charles Worth gives you a few of the indications about how the two are related. Again, the bigger relationship, though, is between Enoch and Metatron. And we don't really need to dive into that because Enoch and Melchizedek were not the same figure. So it might be confusing to go into the Enoch-Metatron connections. Let's just restrict our comments here to Melchizedek. And again, there are a few of them. I should also say about Third Enoch. Third Enoch is a late text. It is grouped in the Second Temple literature. Obviously, it's in Charles Worth's first volume here. Old Testament pseudopagraphy. But the date of Third Enoch is going to be after the era of the New Testament, certainly. It's written entirely in Hebrew. But it gets the name Third Enoch because a lot of its content is like First Enoch and of course like Second Enoch as well. But there's going to be new stuff in here. And the Metatron material is chiefly tied to the Third Book of Enoch and not the others. But you're obviously going to get some things in there. But as far as the specific question, is there a relationship between Melchizedek and Metatron? Yeah, they're exalted mediator figures. Again, the sort of second power in heaven candidates. Again, if you remember some of the discussions that we've had here on the podcast, I know this has taken a lot for granted because I can't assume everybody's listening to all the episodes. You may have also recall this from maybe something in Unseen Realm or something on my website 2powersinheaven.com. There was a lot of speculation in the Second Temple period between or among I should say Jewish writers as to who the second Yahweh figure was. And some opted for an exalted angel. Others opted for a deified or a glorified human. So right there you have sort of the foundation of the connection. Melchizedek was one of those figures in Second Temple literature that could either be conceived of and to get sort of the full feel for this, you need to listen to the second installment of our Melchizedek series. But Melchizedek could sort of fit in either category. Either he was considered a human being that was then exalted and he becomes sort of this second Yahweh figure in some Jewish texts. Others would say, are there something going on here about Melchizedek that he might have been a divine being? Maybe fall into the second category of having an angel occupy the second Yahweh figure slot. So Melchizedek sort of gets discussed for the same reason but in terms of both of those categories. And Metatron, of course, is an exalted angel. But he's also this deified human figure. He's Enoch transformed into an angel. So in that respect, yeah, there's a relationship between Melchizedek and Metatron. In that respect, again, being second power and heaven candidates, there's a relationship also between Melchizedek, Metatron and Enoch, if you want to look at it that way. But I think that's sufficient for here where we're at in the Q&A. The figure of Metatron and the figure of Melchizedek do overlap in that respect. They are sort of exalted figures in second type of literature, specifically 30 Enoch, which is a later text. Videl asked a question and it's, Canaan was cursed because of Ham's sin. Is this one of those cases where a curse became a blessing? He was ordered by the patriarch to not be raised by his loser of a father's house but be raised in the homes of his godlier uncles. Could this have resulted in a healthy respect and love for Yahweh? Could this have been passed down to a son and grandson that may have been called Melchizedek? Could Melchizedek have been one of many descendants of Canaan that were living in the land and still worshiped Zedek and lived in peace with a fellow follower of Yahweh, Abraham? I realize that this is conjecture, but is there any scripture of extra biblical sources that could refute this possibility? That's really oddly worded. Correct. It's totally conjecture and there's absolutely no substance to it at all. To ask, are there texts that refute it? Well, of course not because no one was thinking it. That's like, are there texts that refute that pigs can fly? Of course not. The question is kind of worded a little bit oddly. I'm not sure that's what the questioner wanted. We did an episode on the curse of Canaan, the whole Genesis 9 thing. I would even add that the characterization of the curse question is a bit misguided. Canaan's not cursed so that he wouldn't be raised by losers. The godlier uncle's thing is a little questionable, especially because Ham was the father of Canaan. We get that. Godlier uncle's, well, maybe, maybe not. But that wasn't the point of the curse. The Bible never tells us in direct language. It never sort of defines or unlocks, explicitly describes what the curse of Canaan was directly. Although in the episode that we discussed, the implications of the curse are pretty clear. Canaan is cursed because Ham committed maternal incest with his mother, Noah's wife. And so Canaan was the product of that. That's why the text in Genesis 9 stresses that Canaan was the son of Ham, and Ham was Canaan's father. So I would refer the questioner back to that episode. Now, if that's the case, and I think it's certainly the most exegetically defensible view, that we have a case of maternal incest and then Canaan is the product of that, then the curse of Canaan meant that his status was illegitimate. He was the illegitimate son of Ham by virtue of his mother, and so he would not inherit the leadership of the tribe when Noah passed on. So the curse wasn't about not having him raised by losers and having him raised by better people. That just isn't even in the view. It's just not in the picture. So I don't really know what else to do with the question. None of this has anything to do with Melchizedek. I guess maybe that's a good way to sort of wrap this up. There's no textual support from Melchizedek being from the line of Canaan because there's no lineage from Melchizedek ever given. That was the point of part of his description. In later Second Temple texts, later New Testament, the whole without father, without mother sort of thing. That was about his priesthood not deriving from a specific lineage, a specific line, a specific tribe. So you couldn't say that if he had had a lineage in the Old Testament and he doesn't. So there's no way to trace this. Trace Melchizedek back to Canaan. It would be as the questioner said, it's entirely speculative. All right. Tim from Wisconsin, Shannon from Great Bend, Kansas, and Henry in Ethiopian Orthodox Christian from Northamptonshire, England, UK, are all tracking on the same thing here. And they want to know if there is a connection to the bread and wine offering from Melchizedek to Abraham in Genesis 14 to Melchizedek being a prototype of Jesus. Yeah. I think there is. I think it's part of the typology. We didn't get into the specific elements of the typology in the third installment in the Melchizedek series because we're going to do that in the book of Hebrews. So we cut some of that out. But I would say, yeah, the short answer is sure. He serves bread and wine. He becomes a typological figure, again, for certainly Jesus for New Testament writers. He also has something of a mediatorial role in Second Temple text. But specific to the New Testament, I do think if you're looking at Melchizedek and you're thinking of Jesus, this is going to be part of it. So I would say, yeah, that's a good trajectory. I think that we're going to get into a little bit more when we hit that point in the book of Hebrews. But yeah, that's a good observation. All right. The next one is from Pee, the letter Pee as in Paul. Pee, I have no idea other than just Pee, Michael. So it's Pee. It's like the Pee source, J-E-D-Pee. So hey. So here we go. Pee wants to know, did the other nations conceptualize the God of the Israelites with their own gods like El, Anu, or maybe Zedek? In Abraham's encounter with God in Heron, would he have thought of God as an Anu, like figure from his time in the Third Dynasty of Ur? How do we view this Anu-El figure in relation to God? Well, how do we view this Anu-El figure in relation to God? You know, it's hard for me to hear sentences like that and know how to parse them. There's no direct in the Hebrew Bible anyway. There's no direct connection between the term El and Anu. But Anu is just the God of heaven. And of course, Old Testament thinking would assume that the God of Israel is the God of heaven. So I don't know if the questioner is looking for some sort of linguistic link. There's not, but there's certainly a conceptual link. I mean, every civilization is going to imagine that the gods, again, either live in the skies or on mountains or in the seas, these places that humans don't live, that are inaccessible and frankly lethal to human life, that sort of thing. So sure, any given ancient person, you could have run into an Akkadian or a Samaritan and he'd have been talking about the God of heaven and somebody could have run into that. Oh, well, Yahweh is the God of heaven. You're in Canaan now and we worship Yahweh here. And so sure, there's going to be some sort of conceptual connection. Every Pantheon has the gods or I would say most of the gods are probably going to be, at least the high gods are going to be in heaven. You can have gods on earth and under the earth and all that sort of thing. So every Pantheon is going to have that. Every Pantheon is going to have at least one or a pair or let's just say like an oligarchy, a small group of gods that are sort of above the other ones. Even in polytheistic systems, even within the oligarchy, you're going to have one that sort of has primacy in place. Maybe that one's the creator or something like that. But it's actually really difficult because like in Mesopotamia, you have olden gods that were like the elements, the physical elements of the earth. One was earth, one was water, one was wind. You have these sort of primeval stuff out of which reality is made. Well, they're all gods and they all pre-exist when all that stuff sort of takes form. When the gods decide to become active in the place where humans live, of course they have to create that place first. So it's a little hard to isolate a sky god to some level of primacy because all of these things are absorbed into Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible. We're not talking about an original pair. We're not talking about Yahweh being isolated to heaven or Yahweh being associated only with that place. Whereas on, yeah, on might be a high god, he might be the god of heaven, but is it the god of earth? No, that's somebody else. Again, there are these disconnects that are just inherent within the systems. And so to draw equivalences is really, really tenuous. And frankly, I would say inadvisable. So I would say it's sort of pure speculation to say XYZ deity was in XYZ religion, Yahweh. In other words, if you ran into somebody in the ancient world and you could sort of like lay out, you had them on trading cards or something, all the deities, you know. It's pure speculation on our part that your ancient person would see a deity name and say, oh, that one is this one. So your deity here is this one over here in my land. Again, there might be conceptual connections, but there's going to be disconnections that are significant as well. So it's really tenuous. It's a really sort of hard game to play. Frankly, you can really only strike analogies. And even the creator deity is a difficult analogy because of the original pairs and olden gods. And let's take Egypt. Even within Egypt, you have different gods that are perceived as creators. And then later on, they all get merged to sort of fix that problem or fix that confusion. It's just really hard, other than speaking sort of in analogical terms and very general analogical terms, to say, well, this deity in this ancient Near Eastern religion corresponds directly to Yahweh because Yahweh subsumes all of them, all of their attributes, all of the places that it's associated with. So is that a correlation? Well, kind of sort of, is it a disconnection? Yeah, kind of sort of that too. So I just wouldn't go beyond that. I mean, there's no evidence for Yahweh, by name, in any other ancient Near Eastern text in terms of that text's religion or that religion's pantheon. This is another good... I'll just open up Dedede here. Dedede, in the entry on Yahweh, kind of summarizes this issue, this problem. I'll read a little bit from VanderTorn here. He says, there's no evidence for Yahweh in other ancient Near Eastern texts, again, so on and so forth, blah, blah, blah. The abbreviated, or he's going to use a fancy academic term here, the abbreviated or hypochoristic form of the name betray regional predilections. Thus, U, or like YW in Neo-Assyrian sources, is especially found in a North-Israelite context. In other words, when you find YW in an Assyrian text, well, they get it because they've run into Israelites in the North and then they talk about that deity. It's not because YW is a member of the Assyrian pantheon, and that's where the Israelites get it. It's actually the other way around. The Assyrians run into this and then they write about it in their texts, but you don't have a text that would like list a Yahweh equivalent in an Assyrian pantheon. But you do see the names show up in places, YW, YH, in these kind of texts, because they run into each other. And then the Assyrians will be writing about something they did, and they'll mention the God of the Israelites, and they'll use that name. That's why anything that looks like a Yahweh name shows up in any ancient Near Eastern texts. He does not show up as though he's a member of their pantheon. So there's no mention of him in a pantheon, and there's no text that actually lists out deities and then does a comparison for us so that we would actually know. Again, the best you can do is just talk about analogies. And you have to acknowledge the really significant disconnects as well. In Egyptian texts, you know, Van Der Torneau gets into this. Well, before we get there, he has a nice little comment about Eblah. This is something you're going to see on the Internet that is just bluster. He says, before 1200 BCE, the name Yahweh is not found in any Semitic text. The stir caused by Petenato, for example, at Eblah, that's E-B-L-A, and its relationship or its perceived relationship of those texts to the Bible, is basically misguided. He says the stir caused by Petenato, who claimed to have found the shortened form of the name Yahweh, Yah specifically, as a divine element in theophoric names from Eblah is unfounded. Now, you should know, listeners to this podcast should know what a theophoric name is because we've been talking about Melchizedek. It's a name that includes the name of a deity in it. So Van Der Torneau is referencing Petenato's work, like in the 80s, when he was working in Eblah texts. He said, I found the name Yahweh as a theophoric name in Eblah texts. Later on, scholars who looked at Petenato's work and were doing their own work in the Eblah texts discovered that now that's really not the case, continuing with Van Der Torneau. He says, as the final element of personal names, Yah, Y-A, is often a hypochoristic ending, not a theonym. In other words, it's not a divine name, it's a hypochoristic ending. What's a hypochorism? A hypochorism is a diminutive form of a name. It's like a pet name. And we actually have good examples in English that actually use a Y at the end, kind of like Eblah did, using a Yah at the end. Like if we have the name Bill, and then we put a Y on it, Billy. We take Bill, which is sort of, it feels more adult, more masculine, and then we have Billy. And that makes it sound like a kid, or it's a pet name. That's what a hypochorism is. A hypochoristic ending there would be the letter Y. Melissa gets changed to Missy. Okay, there's another example. A little bit more of a change going on there, but you get the Y at the end. That's what's going on here with the Yah element in names at Eblah. It is not a deity name. So there's, it just doesn't occur. If you go to Egypt, I mentioned this earlier. We just scroll down here in Banditorn's entry, because it's pretty long. He gets to have an account, we should mention Misha, because that is the one exception here to the chronology. Let's see. The earliest West Semitic text mentioning Yahweh, specifically as a deity, that's not Biblical. Okay, the earliest West Semitic text mentioning Yahweh is the Victory Stella, written by Misha, the Moabite King from the 9th century BC. So that's the Moabite Stella, also known as the Misha Stella. There are also two Egyptian texts that mention Yahweh. In these texts from the 14th and 13th centuries BC, Yahweh is neither connected with the Israelites, nor is his cult located in Palestine, Canaan. The texts speak about Yahoo, this is a quote now, Yahoo in the land of the Shasu Bedouins, unquote. The one text is from the reign of Amenhotep III, it's 14th century BC, and the other is from the reign of Ramses II, 13th century BC. In the Ramses II list, the name occurs in a context which also mentions Seer. Again, that would be Edom. It may be tentatively concluded that this quote, Yahoo in the land of the Shasu Bedouins, unquote, is to be situated therefore in the area of Edom and Midian. Well, lo and behold, isn't that where we find the divine name revealed according to Scripture to Moses? Moses is there with Jethro, shepherding at this flock in Midian. Well, that makes a lot of sense. He says, in these Egyptian texts, why HW Yahoo is used as a toponym? In other words, it's part of a place name. Yet a relationship with the deity by the same name is a reasonable assumption. That's all I'll read from van der Torne. So there's just not much evidence of the name Yahweh as a deity anywhere in the ancient Near East. You get it as toponyms, you get it because the Akkadians or the Assyrians ran into Israelites and then they write about the Israelite God. You don't get Yahweh in a list of deities in any other ancient Near Eastern religion. You just don't. And so therefore, to try to say, well, this deity from the Akkadian or the Sumerian pantheon is Yahweh, it's just pure speculation. It's guesswork. The only thing you can do is try to create some sort of conceptual analogies like I tried to illustrate early on in the question. That's about the best you can do, but you got to be honest with the problems of doing that, the sort of the method problems and even the conceptual problems. Because in a strictly monotheistic system, where Yahweh is unique, let's put it that way, in a system like in the Old Testament in the Hebrew Bible where Yahweh is species unique, he is one among Elohim certainly, but he is unique. He transcends everything. He is not limited to parts of the world or geographical regions like other deities are. It's really hard to compare that to anything else and make really coherent analogies or make a real coherent connection. The best you can do it again is a sort of analogous thinking. All right. Our next question is from Dennis in Birmingham, Alabama. Realizing now that the name Zedek plays such a pivotal role in understanding the various issues involved in resolving the mysteries and questions surrounding how to understand the relevance and theological messaging of the person of Melchizedek, I can't help but wonder if the fact that the last king of Judah was named Zedekiah also has theological significance. Well, you know, I think the fairest way to answer this is it might. I mean, there's really no way to know for sure why the child was named this. You'd have to know if the parents were thinking something like on one hand, we believe Yahweh is Zedek and vice versa. So we're naming our child in honor of him, in honor of Zedek or whatever. They could have been thinking that. They could also have been thinking this. You know, we want to praise Yahweh's righteous character. So we're choosing this name. The second option wouldn't have anything to do with the deity name. Zedek is a deity, but Zedek has righteousness. It's just hard to know, again, what was going through the mind of the parents, a particular person when they chose the name, unless we're actually told in scripture. Sometimes we are. Sometimes we're not. We just have to guess. And this is, I think this is one of those. So, yeah, it could have been some sort of statement, you know, like that, but ultimately we don't know. We're still left with a couple of options. All right, Merrill has a question. You stated several times that the Levitical priesthood was plan B in response to Moses's unbelief. You refer to the incident in Exodus 4, 10 through 16, where Aaron was commissioned as, quote, the mouthpiece of Moses, unquote. Yet this text does not explicitly state anything about or presuppose a future priesthood of Moses. Can you explain your reasoning behind the statement? If the Levitical priesthood via Aaron was plan B, what then, in your estimation, was plan A? Are you assuming that Moses and his progeny were to be the priestly tribe over the nation? Trying to understand your train of thought of this. Yeah, I think you're getting sidetracked on thinking of Moses as a priest. And that really isn't the point. So there's not going to be any talk about Moses being a priest or priesthood or anything like that. So you need to go back further than that to sort of understand the trajectory. The point was that from Eden, beginning in Eden, the pattern, as God is working with a human being in his relationship to other human beings, really at the beginning, all human beings, the point is that from Eden on, the pattern was to have a human be both a ruler, a king, ruler over God's creation. We're talking about Adam now. And also have that same person be a mediator to all other humans. And this was Adam's role. Again, within the patriarchal culture, even though male and female are created equally at the same time and all that sort of stuff, relatively at the same time anyway. Within this culture, being what it was, Adam would have been zeroed in on as the lead ruler and the lead mediator to his children. Again, he would have been the patriarchal figure, thinking the patriarchal mode, because the patriarch, you had the rulership of the tribe as it were, and also he would do the priestly duties. He'd offer sacrifice and whatnot. So this is a template that emerges all the way back from Genesis all the way back to Eden. Adam played both roles. He was the ruler and the mediator to all other humans. Patrarchs picked that up later. The patriarch is the ruler of his people. Abraham is the progenitor of Israel. He would have been when he was alive. He is leading the clan. He's leading the nation, so to speak. And he's also doing priestly things. Well, that's going to get picked up by whoever inherits the leadership. You have Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, so on and so forth. And Jacob, of course, is renamed Israel. So you have over Israel, you have one person who rules the nation, rules the tribe. It's a much smaller scale at that point. And then also is in charge of being the mediator between his people, the nation, as it were, and God. He occupies both roles. So that is consistently the pattern. It actually takes us up to Egypt. And then we've got the years of slavery in Egypt, years of isolation there. And it's reasonable to assume that coming out of Egypt, Moses was to occupy this status, the same role. Moses is certainly God. He was the intended mouthpiece. He's the intended leader. He's the one that gets charged with bringing them up out of Egypt. By definition, that's a priestly role and a rulership role. Now, he goes, he meets with the elders of Israel and Egypt because they're not descending into anarchy because Moses leaves Egypt or something like that. They still have leadership, obviously, among the people. And there's a whole lot more of them now than what there were before. But Moses, again, is called by God to play the same sort of role. He's the one from whom the people are going to get all their direction from. Why? Because he is the mediator between them and God. It's very obvious there. So it picks up where it left off through the figure of Moses. But then Moses hymns and haws about playing the mediatorial role. He's the one who's supposed to represent the nation, not only before God, but also to present God's demand to Pharaoh. He's the mediating. I don't want to do that. I got this problem. I got that problem. And so God says, okay, I'll let Aaron do that or we'll bring Aaron into the picture. That's what we're talking about here. We're not talking about is there a verse that says Moses was supposed to be a priest? Well, no, there's not. But he's doing priestly things all up to that point. He is being a mediator between God and his people. That's what priests do. So he is a priest in that sense. But there's nothing spelled out about Moses fathering a line of priests and high priests and all that stuff. That isn't the point. So we shouldn't get distracted by looking for that or sort of wanting to see that or expecting that. It's this template of rulership. Authority might be a better way to put it, but the person in whom is the ultimate authority over the group and then that same person playing the role of mediator between God and those people. And the template was consistently to have that in one person up until the time of Moses, where we get, again, the famous scene. And it's not just Exodus 4. It's Exodus 4 through 6. You have the same kind of, maybe cowardice might be too strong of a word, but you have the same kind of reticence or hesitation on Moses' part, same kind of unbelief on Moses' part when they get to Egypt as we witnessed in Exodus 4 when they're on Sinai. And so out of that, the argument is, the priesthood of Aaron comes into play to make up for Moses' weaknesses. And that's why a number of scholars view it as plan B or derivative or a concession. And I think, again, if you think about it in those terms, there's really something to be said for that. It makes good sense as to why now we have two figures in the era of Moses went all the way up to this time. We didn't have two. We had one. Again, it's mercy extended toward Moses. But the plan, God's ideal, going all the way back to Abraham, again, who is blessed by Melchizedek and Melchizedek, priest of the Most High God, he's king of Salem. He foreshadows Jerusalem. He foreshadows priestly role there in Jerusalem and being the king of Jerusalem. All that stuff we talked about with Melchizedek. He's a type of what is to come, and not only what is to come, but what God had preferred up to that point. One ruler over his family, his earthly family, his people, and one mediator. And again, I think, incidentally, this is why it's important for Jesus to be not only a son of David, a son of Abraham, tracing it back through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, all the way back to Adam. This is what you get. The king, priest, Messiah is a return to the ID and his lineage runs back to and through the patriarchs and Adam. And it doesn't, incidentally, run through the Mosaic line. Moses is not part of the lineage of Jesus, obviously, because Moses is not of the tribe of Judah. We get that. But again, there's this undercurrent, I think, going on, too, about what God's ideal was for how he would relate to his people and how he wanted his people governed, that goes all the way back to Eden, where both roles are fused into one. Seth has our next question. In 1 Peter 2, 9 through 10, where it refers to us as a holy nation, rural priesthood, can this be seen more in the light of the priesthood of Melchizedek? It seems this passage is popularly understood in light of the Levitical priesthood. But when you stated the priesthood of Melchizedek is one of God's appointing and not one of the lineage, it would make more sense to view it in light of the priesthood of Melchizedek, which is also Christ's priesthood. Can you unpack that a bit and perhaps let's bounce on the practical work? That's a really good observation and I would agree again that there's something to that. I wouldn't go as far to say that the priesthood of believers has nothing to do with the Levitical priesthood because you do have Old Testament passages that get quoted that are very obviously contextually rooted in the Levitical system. But I also don't think that that fact cancels out this Melchizedek angle. So on the one hand, let's just think about it on the one hand, there's secure reason to link the priesthood of believers to the Old Testament priesthood by virtue of the Old Testament concept that Israel was to be a kingdom of priests. Well, those kind of statements are rooted in Torah. They're rooted in the Mosaic context. But there's even more to that as we've talked about on this podcast a lot. As the church is the temple, so the church is also Israel in some sense. Again, we've talked a lot about that in earlier podcasts. Again, for people who have been new to the podcast, no, we don't articulate a rabid, died in the wall, you know, supercessionism here. I frustrate supercessionists because I do think there's a future for national Israel and all that kind of stuff. But yet we have this talk in the New Testament. So if you're interested, go back to earlier episodes. But you have the church is Israel in some sense and therefore the church is the new kingdom of priests. So it is tied, you know, to Israel, conceptually you have this kingdom of priests idea which is rooted in Torah. It's Exodus chapter 19 verse 6. That's where it's drawn from. So we have to, we can't cut off the idea from the Levitical system of which these sort of statements are a part. We have the church being the new kingdom of priests and it has to be because the church is the kingdom already. I mean, it's appropriate to talk about the church, those of us in the church as a kingdom of priests because the church is in some sense the kingdom as well. Colossians 1.13. He has translated us into the kingdom of his dear son. It's a perfect tense, something that occurred already but the implications are still ongoing. We get the already but not yet thing. Interestingly enough though for, again, people who might be new to the podcast are thinking, well, we can only talk about the kingdom in the future in the book of Revelation. You know, Mike, don't you understand dispensary and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, I understand it all. Have you looked at Revelation 1.6? Revelation 1.6, do you actually have instances in the book of Revelation that say things like that God has made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father. Christ has made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. That's Revelation 1.6. Revelation 1.6 has believers being a kingdom of priests. This is before the so-called millennium passage of Revelation 20. Same thing, again, in Revelation 1.9, I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation, which apparently was already present, and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus. You get this language even in the book of Revelation so the already but not yet is real. It's a phenomenon of Scripture and ultimately, again, we can't divorce that from the Levitical system. Now, all that said, on the other hand, it makes sense to say as extensions and constituent members of the body of Christ, we are members of Christ's priesthood and he is a high priest after the order of Melchizedek. So there is something to this idea. 1 Peter 2.9, let's just look that up. You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Again, 1 Peter 2.9 is coherently linked to Exodus 19.6 which had the Israelites in view, but there are other passages that suggest Gentiles are going to be made priests of God. Gentiles, which by definition can have no relationship to the tribe of Levi and its priesthood. Okay, the only way to quote, unquote, legitimize Gentiles being priests is if you have a different priesthood that isn't dependent on a specific tribe. That would be Ergo, the priesthood of Melchizedek. You have Isaiah 66, you know, 18 through 23. I'll just look the passage up, I'll read it. For I know their works and their thoughts and the time is coming to gather all nations and tongues and they shall come and shall see my glory and I will set a sign among them and from them I will send survivors to the nations, to Tarshish, Pol and Ludd who draw the bow to Tubal and Javan, to the coastlands far away that have not heard my fame or seen my glory and they shall declare my glory among the nations. And they shall bring all your brothers from all the nations as an offering to the Lord on horses and chariots and on litters and on mules and dromedaries to my holy mountain Jerusalem, just as the Israelites bring their grain offering in a clean vessel to the house of the Lord and some of them also I will take for priests and for Levites says the Lord. So you have this sense of the nations being, and that's just one passage, I mean there are others, but you have this sense of the nations being incorporated into the family of God and that, when God does that it's okay again that the Old Testament would use this language of some of those people from the nations being made priests and Levites. That's okay. Why? Because in New Testament theology this regathering is a reference to the building up, the creation of the building up of the body of Christ. And again, we are all Jew or Gentile are members of the body of Christ. And that means again, just by definition you have Gentiles being members of the body of Christ and Christ is the high priest after the order of Melchizedek. So it makes sense to say that we are part of that. So I think there is something to this idea. But I wouldn't say that it excludes or does away with the other connection. Let's put it this way, this is a theme we're going to get in the book of Hebrews once we jump into it beginning very, very soon. It supersedes what was in the Old Testament. It doesn't like say to us that we shouldn't look at this anymore where we should seek to erase connections to the Old. It supersedes it. It's better. It's more comprehensive. It's better in some way. It's superior. And that's a big theme in the book of Hebrews. So this whole notion about being a high priest after the order of Melchizedek if we're members of that body we are extensions of that and so we can't help but be connected to that priesthood because Christ is connected to that priesthood. Sebastian from Amsterdam the Netherlands wants to know if Dr. Heiser said that Melchizedek's name for the Most High God could be Zedek and that Abraham's name for the Most High God is El, Elohim, El Shaddai implying that Zedek and El are both names for the same deity Yahweh. If God disinherited the nations of Babylon and started his own family with Abraham, how could Yahweh still be Melchizedek's Most High God? I would say because anybody could choose to worship the true God and it would depend on them learning of the true God, the Most High God. Remember after Babel, Abraham was an outsider. There was no Israel. Abraham was just as on the periphery as everybody else. So if we're asking, well how could Melchizedek worship the Most High God? We could also ask how could Abraham worship the Most High God because they're both on the outs. There is no people of God after Babel until God starts one. He goes to Abraham. He reveals himself to Abram, the spelling Abram in that particular chapter. He reveals himself to Abram whose family were polytheists. Again, this is post-Babel situation. You have a lot of time elapsed between Babel and when we get to the time period of Abraham or Abram, again in Scripture it's chapter 11 and the next chapter is 12. But if you look at the chronology of the situation, we've got a good amount of time and we know from Genesis 11, 31 and 32, Abraham's father is terror. You go to Joshua 24, 2 terror is a polytheist. This is the context out of which Abram comes from like everybody else. So if we're going to ask how could this be with Melchizedek we also have to ask how could this be with Abram. And the answer is God revealed himself to Abram. Abram had to believe. Abram had to choose, believe in the Most High God. And so we have to assume and we don't have a reverse for Melchizedek's conversion out of polytheism. We don't have anything like that, but he's in the same context as Abram. So we have to assume that it would have worked the same way. Somehow Melchizedek learns of the Most High God and chooses to believe in him and becomes a priest in his service. He's a priest of the Most High God. We just don't have specific information as to like we do with Abraham or at least we have a little bit with Abram. We don't have specific information for Melchizedek. We don't have his story. We don't have his testimony. We just know that he worshiped Yahweh. He worshiped the Most High. Keith from Upstate New York has a question and it is, assuming the name Melchizedek is theoretical and we are to understand that this title, King of Righteousness is similar to the word Christ, meaning anointed one. Jesus is a first name. Is there any evidence that Melchizedek may have had a first name? The connection is kingship, anointed one or anointed to do what, of course in the messianic sense that would be anointed to be king. There is a connection here so there is something to discuss here but Christ Christos was not a last name but nevertheless I follow the thought. In the first century Jesus full name would have been something like Jesus son of Joseph. It wasn't Jesus Christ. Christ is a title. You know, again it's a title if you want to call it an epithet I guess you could call it that too but Jesus Christ means Jesus, the one who is the Christ, the one who is the anointed one. So it's not a last name, it's a title. Melchizedek again isn't really one of the options is that Melchizedek just the whole thing is a title. So if Melchizedek as we talked about in the first installment was nothing more than a title then the guy who bore that title his name would have been XYZ whose king is righteous or something like that. XYZ Melchizedek being translated my king is righteous. So it's not quite the same thing when it comes to an equivalence between Melchizedek and Jesus but it's not totally different either. You have again Christ being descriptive of Jesus, of Nazareth and if you take Melchizedek as a title it could be it's not really descriptive in terms of Melchizedek isn't described as the one being righteous whereas Jesus is described as the one who is the Christ. So there's a bit of a disconnect there but again I follow the thought that if we take Melchizedek as a title we have Christ as a title maybe there's something going on there so that's the way I would end it. I would say it's not quite the same thing because in Jesus' sake the title is also self-referential in Melchizedek's case that's not the case XYZ guy whose name is Melchizedek or whose king is righteous and it's talking about somebody else it's not talking about the guy who bears the title so there's a bit of a disconnect there but they could both be titles it's just that the trajectory, the thought trajectory operate in a slightly different direction one is self-referential the other's referring to somebody else who the bearer of that title serves. Our last question is from Darrell Did God lead Abraham to Melchizedek's altar in Salem to sacrifice Isaac? Well there's no direct textual reason to make the association specifically now I hope it's obvious to a lot of listeners where the question comes from I mean you can make a circumstantial case for not, how do I say this the question suggests or requires too much specificity, too much precision here's what I mean so Abraham goes to offer Isaac. Now according to Genesis 22 verse 2 let's just read it God tells Abraham take your son, your only son Isaac whom you love and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burned offering on one of the mountains which I shall tell you so here Moriah is a land it's not a mountain it's a land so right away we have a bit of a disconnect because Solomon according to 2 Chronicles 3 1 is going to build the temple on Moriah and it's on a mountain because it's on mountain Zion but back in Genesis 22 Moriah is a land and if you're looking at Abraham's the circumstances of his life like following where he's gone it's about three days travel from where he's at so he travels to Moriah this land and he's instructed to go to this land and sacrifice Isaac on one of the mountains there the mountain is not specified Moriah is not a mountain in Genesis 22 and Moriah has more than one mountain so which one did Abraham pick or Abraham pick I don't know we're not told so the question sort of assumes with let's be honest no textual basis the question assumes that the very same mountain that Abraham wound up at with Isaac is the same mountain that Solomon builds the temple on there's really no way to prove that there's really no way to establish that you have the names of the same Moriah but again the Moriah of Abraham had several mountains Jerusalem itself where the temple is is one mountain now there are mountains around Jerusalem in the surrounding area we learn that verses like Psalm 125-3 they're just how can I say this again without messing it up too much again there's mountains surrounding Jerusalem Jerusalem itself associated with a mountain Zion there's no way to know that that particular mountain even though 2 Chronicles 3 1 says that the temple is built on Moriah there's no way to know that that particular mountain is the mountain that Abraham went to when he went to the land of Moriah and wound up on one of the mountains there you can see the obvious association because of the terms but we just don't have the kind of precision that the question sort of assumes and requires so we can't really be much more precise than that so that's why I said you can't I can't just say yes to this question I could say maybe possibly could be but beyond that we just don't have any sort of biblical textual material to be any more precise okay Mike we appreciate it no more questions about Melchizedek until Hebrews 7 probably unless we go do we miss anything that we need to add can you think of anything else that needs to be said a lot of people are going to be disappointed about your shim not being shim whatever I'm just kind of flabbergasted as to why that's even an item I don't know I just can overlap without biblical characters being the same person that feels kind of obvious to me but I don't know maybe there's some other reason why people gravitate toward that I don't know I don't know either Mike I'm not the scholar I'm just the layman so well it's the scholar like I said it's kind of flummoxed by that question anyway I'm not sure why it's even an issue but there you go alright Mike well we appreciate your questions and I just want to thank everybody else for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast God bless thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast to support this podcast visit www.nakedbibleblog.com to learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs go to www.brmsh.com