How To Argue over a Psalm

Melchizedek’s walk-on part in the bible, and the dispute he caused.

Heins- The meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek

Most years Easter and Passover fall at the same time. They coincide because the events that Easter commemorates happened during Passover. The Last Supper was a Passover meal at which, according to the gospels, they ate bread, wine and the paschal lamb. The two festivals also share a similar idea in commemorating the transition from suffering to redemption. For Jews the transition is from slavery to freedom, for Christians it is from crucifixion to resurrection. In French, Passover and Easter even have the same name.

We don’t know too much about Christianity’s relationship with Judaism in its early years but as time passed the two religions diverged substantially. The biggest change came as the idea of the Jesus’s divinity became accepted, which took some time to develop, but there were practical differences even before then. The Acts of the Apostles records a disagreement between early Christians as to whether they were obliged to keep the Jewish dietary laws; whether they were required to eat kosher meat.

As time passed theological differences emerged too. Again we no longer know much about this, very few records have survived chronicling the discussions that must have taken place between the first Christians and Jews. But one debate has been preserved. The Christian side of the discussion is recorded in The Letter to the Hebrews, the Jewish response is found in the Talmud and its commentaries. The debate itself is over a couple of sentences in Psalm 110.

Psalm 110 opens with the words “The Lord (i.e. God) said to my lord ‘sit at my right hand’.” It doesn’t explain who ‘my lord’ is but a few verses later he is told “You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek”. The language of the psalm is ambiguous; the phrase that I have translated as “according to the order of” can also be translated as “according to the words of.” It is this ambiguity, and the question of who Melchizedek was, that lies at the heart of this early theological dispute between the two religions.

Melchizedek appears only once in the Bible, in a brief scene in the book of Genesis. Abraham had fought and won a battle against a gang of northern warlords who had kidnapped his nephew. He had also rescued the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah in the same battle and was in the process of telling them that he didn’t want to accept a reward, when suddenly Melchizedek turned up. The Bible calls him the King of Shalem and describes him as the Priest of the Most High God. He appeared out of the blue, there had been no mention of him before, and he brought with him bread and wine, which of course are the key items on the menu at the Passover meal and the Last Supper. Melchizedek dispensed blessings, first to Abraham and then to God. Abraham gave him a tithe, the traditional gift given to priests.  

We still don’t know who ‘my lord’ is. But we now know that the reason that he is “a priest forever” is something to do with Melchizedek, who was himself the Priest of the Most High God.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews is in no doubt about who ‘my lord’ is. He says that he is Jesus. In his understanding of the psalm God is instructing Jesus to sit at his right hand, in the place of honour, and is giving him the eternal priesthood that once belonged to Melchizedek.

Having established that the Psalm is addressed to Jesus, the Letter to the Hebrews goes on to argue that the fact that Melchizedek blessed Abraham proves that he must have been superior to him. And because Melchizedek was also a priest he must therefore be superior to the Jewish priests who were descended from Abraham. So,  according to this argument, when God tells Jesus in Psalm 110 that he was a priest according to the order of Melchizedek, he is telling him that Jesus’s priesthood is superior to the priesthood of the Jews.

The Letter to the Hebrews was written to persuade Jews to accept Christianity. The author of the Letter used Psalm 110 and the story of Melchizedek to argue that Christianity was superior to Judaism; that the eternal priesthood belonged to Christ.

The Jewish commentators disagreed. They argued that Psalm 110 was no proof of anything because the mention of ‘my lord’, who was to sit at God’s right hand, was not a reference to Jesus. It was a reference to Abraham who is specifically addressed as ‘my lord’ further on in Genesis (23,11). And neither was Melchizedek a stranger who suddenly appeared on the scene. Melchizedek was just another name for Noah’s son Shem, an ancestor of Abraham. That is why Melchizedek blessed Abraham: he was his great-great-etc. grandfather.

Furthermore, the Jewish argument goes, the Letter to the Hebrews was written in Greek, not Hebrew. The Greek speaking author of the Letter clearly didn’t fully understand the Hebrew of the psalm, because his translation You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek was not correct. The correct translation of the Hebrew, according to the Jewish view, was You are a priest forever according to the words of Melchizedek. The words of Melchizedek were the careless words that he uttered when he blessed Abraham before he blessed God. It was a grievous error; God should obviously have been blessed first, he is far greater than Abraham.

According to the Jewish interpretation of the psalm the whole point of God telling my lord that he is a priest forever, was that the priesthood was to be taken away from Melchizedek. It was to be given instead to Abraham because Melchizedek had failed to show proper respect for God by blessing Abraham first. Rather than Psalm 110 proving that the eternal priesthood belonged to Jesus as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews maintained, the ancient Jewish argument contends that it belongs to Abraham and that Christianity is therefore not superior to Judaism.

This theological dispute occurred very early on in the history of Christianity. It was eventually supplanted by much more fundamental differences between Christianity and Judaism and the question of which religion was superior soon ceased to be important. Each side was right in its own eyes.

From a historical perspective the debate over the meaning of Psalm 110 shows that the gap between and Judaism in the early days was still quite small; they argued over the nature of priesthood rather than fundamental beliefs. Their differences at that early stage, were insubstantial. In certain ways they still are. As Leonard Cohen put it when singing about the two religions a few years before he died: ‘We find ourselves on different sides, of a line that nobody drew.’