Deuteronomy/Hebrews study guide

How could Melchizedek have had no father or mother?

Q. How can the book of Hebrews say that Melchizedek, the priest who blessed Abraham, was “without father or mother” and “without beginning of days or end of life”? Wasn’t he human?

Here’s what I say about this in my study guide to Deuteronomy and Hebrews, where I note that the author of Hebrews talks about Melchizedek in the third of the four messages or sermons that make up the book:

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This message is based primarily on Psalm 110, but in it the author characteristically draws on other Scriptures for support, in this case the story in Genesis that describes who Melchizedek was.

The author first translates the word Melchizedek, explaining that it means “King of Righteousness.” Melchizedek was most likely not a given name, but an honorary title of the Jebusite kings who formerly ruled in Jerusalem, including the one in the Genesis story who greeted Abraham. (A similar example of an honorary title is the name Pharaoh that was given to all the rulers of Egypt.)

After the Israelites conquered Jerusalem, their own kings took over the title Melchizedek. Since the Jebusite kings had been priests, the Israelite kings also assumed an honorary role as priests and interceded for the nation in prayer. But they were not allowed to offer sacrifices; this was reserved for the descendants of Aaron under the law of Moses.

The author next explains that King of Salem (that is, of Jerusalem) means “King of Peace.” By translating these two terms, the author identifies Jesus, who is a priest in the order of Melchizedek by virtue of being the Messianic king of Jerusalem, as someone who helps people become righteous before God and so find peace with God.

Now come some more significant details—or rather, a significant lack of them. The Hebrew Scriptures usually introduce a new figure into their narratives by describing the person’s parentage and ancestry. They usually also report when a figure dies. But the book of Genesis doesn’t do either of these things in the case of Melchizedek.

This allows the author of Hebrews to observe that, when considered only in light of what the Scriptures say about him, Melchizedek seems to have no origin or ending. He appears to “remain a priest forever.” In this way he “resembles the Son of God,” and this allows him to serve as an earthly representation of the Messiah. This is why the Lord chose to name him as the head of the order of priests to which the Messiah (represented in Psalm 110 by the Davidic king) would belong.

This is a classic example of the author’s typological method, which is based on the understanding that transcendent spiritual realities are reflected in earthly replicas. A little later in this message the author makes the basis of this method explicit, noting how the earthly tabernacle had to be modeled after the heavenly pattern Moses was shown. The Greek word is typos, the source of the English word type, and so this interpretive method is known as typology.

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To summarize what I say in the guide, the author of Hebrews is able to establish a connection between Melchizedek and Jesus by considering Melchizedek in light of what the Scriptures say about him (that his title means “king of righteousness” and that he was king of Salem = “peace“), but only in light of what the Scriptures say about him, not what they don’t say. Since the details of his parentage, birth, and death aren’t reported, this allows an even stronger typological connection to Jesus, who has a permanent priesthood “on the basis of an indestructible life.”

In other words, the key to understanding how the Bible could say that Melchizedek was “without father and mother” and “without beginning of days or end of life” lies in appreciating the distinctive typological method of the book of Hebrews.

How can a man “commit adultery in his heart” with a woman if they’re both single?

Q. Jesus said that “anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” But what if neither one is married? How could that be adultery? And I don’t think many married couples would be together if there weren’t some lust involved.

The saying of Jesus that you’re asking about comes from the part of the Sermon on the Mount where he’s showing that legalistic interpretations of the law of Moses are contrary to its true spirit and intentions. The Pharisees taught that so long as you didn’t literally break a commandment, you were still law-abiding if you did anything just short of it. For example, you could lose your temper and beat somebody up terribly, but so long as you didn’t kill them, you wouldn’t have broken the commandment that says, “You shall not murder.”

Jesus teaches, by contrast, that the desire, intention, and attempt to commit an action are all of one piece with the action itself. The commandment against murder is actually meant to warn us away from hatred, bitterness, and assault, not just actual murder. Jesus taught an inward righteousness whose goal was to be “perfect . . . as your heavenly Father is perfect,” in thought, word, and deed.

The first two examples that Jesus chooses to illustrate this teaching come from the Ten Commandments: “You shall not murder” and “you shall not commit adultery.” The Ten Commandments themselves were not meant to be interpreted legalistically. That is, their meaning was not supposed to be limited to a strict literal reading, as if they were forbidding only the specific named practices. Rather, they were all provided as examples of the kinds of things that God does and doesn’t want us to do. We are supposed to determine from them, by inference and analogy, many other kinds of things that we should and shouldn’t do.

This principle is illustrated right within the Ten Commandments themselves, when the last one says not to covet your neighbor’s wife, or his house or land, or any of his servants, his ox or his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. In other words, specific examples are given to illustrate a principle that is meant to be applied generally. As I write in my Deuteronomy-Hebrews study guide, “The Ten Commandments are a brief but powerful moral code because they teach general principles through specific rules that can be applied to a wide range of contexts. The literal application of these rules is narrow, but they all provoke reflection on their underlying principles, and these can speak to a broad variety of situations.”

The commandment against adultery, therefore, is not meant to show just that a person who is married shouldn’t have sexual relations with someone else they’re not married to. Rather, it shows more generally that sexual relations should take place only between a husband and wife within marriage. This general application would also rule out sexual activity between two people who aren’t married. And Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount shows that there should also not be the desire, intention, or attempt on their part to have sexual relations—even through that long, lingering look. This teaching also shows that any use of pornography is not in keeping with God’s intentions.

But how, then, would anyone get married “if there weren’t some lust involved”? I think it’s important to distinguish between sexual attraction and lust. I believe that people can experience a pure sexual attraction for another person that is actually expressing a deep admiration for everything about them—their body, yes, but also their character, personality, passions, abilities, and even the depth of their Christian commitment. Feeling this kind of attraction can be a sign that perhaps you should think and pray carefully about marrying this person.

Lust, on the other hand, is a shallow, self-indulgent desire. It wants simply to consume something of another person based on their most superficial characteristics. Someone who’s attracted to you in that way isn’t paying you much of a compliment (they hardly know you) and it’s not time to think about marrying them.

Put simply, without that sexual spark in a marriage, it’s going to be a long 50 years. But that spark is supposed to be ignited when everything about one person finds companionship, challenge, help, and mystery in everything about another person. If it’s simply a mating instinct, there’s a whole lot more both people could discover about themselves, each other, and God’s purposes for their lives by waiting before mating.

Who was the book of Hebrews written to?

Q. A friend and I recently read out loud through the book of Hebrews using The Books of the Bible. I can definitely recommend this way of experiencing the Bible.

We do have a question, though. Your introduction says that the recipients of this letter “seem to have lived in Italy.” But as we read through Hebrews, it seemed to us that it was addressing instead a pre-70 A.D. Jerusalem audience—people who needed encouragement to stand strong while on the receiving end of persecution from temple-observant Jews. This seemed to us to account better for the letter’s encouragement to persevere and endure persecution.

We thought that the reference in the letter to people “from Italy” sending their greetings was actually describing people who were in Italy at the time, and not, as you say, people who used to live there who were now sending greetings back to their friends in Rome.

We don’t know any Greek and we haven’t looked in any commentaries; this is simply two reasonable laymen looking at each other and reflecting on what we’ve read—both in the text, as well as in the preceding intro.

It strikes me that the questions you’re asking are the kind of broad and comprehensive ones that arise naturally from the consideration of an entire book. You and your friend clearly got the big picture as you read through and listened to the book of Hebrews. All the more reason to present the Bible in a format that encourages that kind of experience!

Questions like yours, about the background to a whole book, won’t necessarily lead you to a “gem of the day” devotional thought that you can carry around with you. But they still matter tremendously. As Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart write in their book How to Read the Bible For All Its Worth, we can never really recognize what the Bible is saying to “us now” until we appreciate what it was saying to “them then.” All of the biblical documents arise out of real-life experiences of communities of believers. The better we can understand those situations, the more clearly we can hear how the word of God was speaking into them, and so into our situation as well. Anything less does not do justice to the believers whose faith and courage in following Jesus brought us the New Testament in the first place.

You’ve raised an interesting question about the book of Hebrews that other readers and interpreters have also posed. Why couldn’t the audience of this book have been in Jerusalem, where we would expect the strongest opposition from those who wanted to maintain temple observances and sacrifices? Why couldn’t the greetings of “those from Italy” be from people who were actually living in Italy, meaning that the book was sent from there, not to there?

The answers to these questions don’t depend on knowing Greek. The Greek phrase translated as “those from Italy” could mean either people who live in Italy or people who came from Italy. But there are some other things in the epistle that suggest it wasn’t written to people living in Jerusalem:

– The writer says near the beginning, “This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him.” So neither the writer nor the audience were eyewitnesses of the ministry of Jesus. If this letter was addressed to believers in Jerusalem before AD 70, it’s almost certain that some of them would have seen and heard Jesus when he was alive on earth.

– From the rest of the New Testament we know that the believers in Jerusalem were very poor. (This is why, for example, Paul took up a collection from wealthier believers elsewhere in the empire to help them.) But the writer to the Hebrews notes, “You suffered along with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you had better and lasting possessions.” This would fit the wealthy situation in Italy much better.

– The writer also says, “In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” This also wouldn’t fit the situation of the Jerusalem believers, who had already seen some of their number killed for their faith. But there was a large and strong Jewish community in Rome, and Hebrews could be reflecting the threat that was beginning to be perceived from them.

– Finally, as I note in the introductory session to Hebrews in my Deuteronomy/Hebrews study guide, “At the end the author calls the whole work a ‘word of exhortation,’ the technical term for a sermon or homily in the Jewish synagogue.” There were, of course, synagogues in Palestine as in other parts of the empire, but if the question is whether the letter arises out of Diaspora Judaism or temple observance in Jerusalem, the synagogue language points more naturally towards the Diaspora.

None of these considerations are, of course, absolutely conclusive, but they are the kind of things that lead me to believe that Hebrews was written to the community of Jesus’ followers in Rome, not in Jerusalem.

Ancient Rome, the likely location of the people addressed in the book of Hebrews.

Should Christians read books and watch movies that have magic in them?

Q. Is it all right for Christians to read books and watch movies that have magic in them?

There are certainly many warnings against magical practices in the Bible. One of the strongest is in Deuteronomy, which forbids any use of divination, sorcery, spells, etc. (This is discussed in Session 8 of the Deuteronomy-Hebrews study guide.)

But I’d say the answer to your question actually depends on how the concept of magic is being used in a book or film. If it’s essentially a literary device, as in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and readers aren’t encouraged to think that they should practice magic for their own personal power and wealth, then it can be understood as a legitimate element of literature or film or drama.

Even if magic is presented as something real, but its connection with the devil and the occult is explained, and people are warned away from it, then that’s a good and helpful message for people to get. It would be like in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, when Banquo warns Macbeth, “The instruments of darkness tell us truths to win us to our harm.”

But if a book or film or play suggests that there’s a difference between “black magic” (bad) and “white magic” (good), even though both rely on spells and charms but not God, then that’s very dangerous. This encourages people to get into magic and the occult and not look to God for protection and provision. And if a book or film or play encourages people to use magic for their own power and wealth, to take revenge against people they’re holding a grudge against, etc., then that’s even more dangerous.

So in your own reading and viewing, if you know that a book or a film is going to send a dangerous message like this, you should probably stay away from it. But if you don’t know, and you watch it or read it innocently, then you need to be discerning about the message. Talk to yourself and with others about it. Recognize how it differs from biblical teaching. Talk back to it. Actively engage your culture, but from an informed biblical perspective.