tion, as distinguished from living-death in sheol, to light. And the devotion to Jesus for this was due to the belief that he had laid aside his heavenly glory and become a complete man, and had thus risked his all, his greatness, his very immortality, to make for both heaven and earth the tremendous venture; the slightest misstep, the least sin, or wrath, or impatience, and he would have had his abode in sheol, in bonds of Satan, through all eternity.

When this Epistle was written the believers already found immortality in such faith; with such hope and joy before them they were able to despise sensual joys, to conquer temptations, and to fulfill those duties and conditions of personal holiness which are described in this Epistle,-"Peace with all men, and holiness without which no man can see the Lord." The ecstasy did not last long, but it was a marvellous phenomenon while it lasted, and the most complete reflection of it may be found in this Epistle to the Hebrews, especially if it be approached by its prologue,-the "Wisdom of Solomon," but it is subtle, and can only be comprehended by patient and comparative studies.

At the heart of this earliest and swiftly lost Christianity was a sublime effort to humanize God.

CHAPTER XIV.

SOLOMON MELCHIZEDEK.

It is possible that the genealogies of Jesus started from no other basis than Hebrews vii. 14: "It is clear beforehand that our Lord hath arisen out of Judah.”* Yet nothing could be more subversive of the Epistle than a claim of any hereditary authority or advantage for Jesus.

The author of the Epistle, if he ever heard the phrase "Son of David," avoided it, for David is here in the background, and in a quotation from one of his Psalms his name is passed over, with the vague words, “one hath testified somewhere, saying," etc. It is an essential part of the writer's argument that Christ is "without genealogy" of that kind. To some it was no doubt grateful to be told that Jesus was not of the priestly tribe, not of that "apostolic succession," so to say; but it was more important to convince the conservative that their sacred history sanctioned faith in a high priest approved as such not by carnal descent, but by his sinlessness and by his resurrection. But it was not agreeable to any Jewish party to suppose that the new dominion was to be altogether in the heavens, or detached from the Solomonic Golden Age for whose

*It is doubtful whether this can be regarded as historical. The "clear beforehand" (pódŋλov) renders it more probable that it is a reference to Ps. lxxviii. 67, 68. "He refused the tent of Joseph, and chose not the tribe of Ephraim, but chose the tribe of Judah," etc.

return they were hoping. The writer therefore connects Jesus with a "first-born" forerunner, namely, with Melchizedek, concerning whom he "has many things to say, and hard of interpretation." So Christian commentators have to this day found what he does say, and Melchizedek is not surrounded by any dogmatic fence that can turn a new hypothesis into a trespass.

The Epistle applies to Jesus lines from Psalm cx.:
Thou art a priest for ever,

After the order of Melchizedek.

But in this anonymous Psalm there is reason to believe that Melchizedek is not a proper name at all. It is admittedly a combination of malki'-tzedek, "king of justice," and in the Jewish Family Bible (Deusch) the above lines are translated, "Thou art my priest for ever, my king in righteousness, by my word." The Septuagint, regularly followed by the Epistle to the Hebrews, has Melchizedek in this Psalm cx., which was also messianized by the LXX. in its very first line, "The Lord said unto my Lord," Kupios being the word for Lord in both cases, whereas in the original the words are different ("Jahveh declared to my Adonai"). And it is notable that Matthew xxii. whose Hebraic character is so marked, and Mark xii., both make Jesus follow the Septuagint in quoting these words.

In both of these Gospels the incident is evidently, in Mark clumsily, interpolated, and it would appear to have belonged to some legend of the Infancy, such as that of the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, where it occurs naturally:

"And when he was twelve years old they took him to Jerusalem to the feast. But when the feast was over they indeed returned, but the Lord Jesus remained in the temple among

the doctors and elders and learned men of Jerusalem, and he asked them sundry questions about the sciences and they answered him in turn. Now he said to them, Whose son is Messiah? They answered him, The son of David. Wherefore, then, said he, Doth he in spirit call him Lord, when he saith the Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, that I may bring down thy enemies to the footprints of thy feet?"

It is probable that this anecdote had floated down. from an early period when the notion of a royal descent of Jesus had not arisen.

Obviously a tremendous question arises here as to how a story should be found in Genesis xiv. about Melchizedek, which as a proper name really occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible,* and the mystery is increased by the absence of any allusion to such a personage in Jesus Ben Sira's enumeration of "famous men" (Ecclus. xliv.), or elsewhere. It almost looks as if Jesus Ben Sira had not read, or else had cancelled as spurious, the strange passage in Genesis-which is as follows:

"And Melchizedek, King of Salem, brought forth bread and wine; and he was priest of El-Elyôn. And he blessed him and said, Blessed be Abram of El-Elyôn, purchaser of heaven and earth; and blessed be El-Elyôn, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand. And he (Abram) gave him a tenth of all."

Professor Max Müller, in his third lecture on the "Science of Religion," gives some useful information concerning this peculiar name, “El-Elyôn,” after consulting his contemporaries at Oxford and in Germany:

"One of the oldest names of the deity among the ancestors of the Semitic nations was El. It meant Strong. It occurs in the Babylonian inscriptions as Ilu, God, and in the very name of Bab-il, the gate or temple of

*The King of Sodom came out to Abram at the same time, but no proper name is assigned him.

I1.

The same El was worshipped at Byblus by the Phoenicians, and he was called there the Son of Heaven and Earth. His father was the son of Eliun, the most high God, who had been killed by wild animals. The Son of Eliun, who succeeded him, was dethroned, and at last slain by his own son, El, whom Philo identifies with the Greek Kronos, and represents as the presiding deity of the planet Saturn Elyôn, which, in Hebrew, means the Highest is used in the Old Testament as a predicate of God. occurs in the Phoenician cosmogony as Eliun, the highest God, the Father of Heaven, who was the father of El."

It

According to Sanchunvaton (Euseb. Prop. i. 10) the Phoenicians called God Γιουν.

The combination El Elyôn occurs in but two chapters in the Bible,-Genesis xiv. and Psalm 1xxviii. (The Revisers translate it in Genesis, "God Most High," but in the Psalm (verse 35), "Most High God.") That the name was imported from the earlier into the later chapter is suggested by a similar association of each with the idea of purchase or redemption: "God Most High, purchaser of heaven and earth" (Genesis), "God Most High, their redeemer" (Psalm). But which is the earlier? Probably the Psalm; for it is a long résumé of the traditional history of Israel, but contains no allusion to Abraham. Had its unique name, "El Elyôn," been derived from any such traditional source surely some mention of Abraham would have been made.

The Psalm is Elohistic. Possibly the Phoenician name for God, Elioun, was used in order to set "El" above it. Or it may be that as Solomon had been