Note 3 — Chapter XIV · Solomon Melchizedek.

Josephus is careful to identify Salem as Jerusalem, and in vi. ch. 10 of the same work states that the King’s Dale (identified as the Shaveh where Abraham met Melchizedek, Genesis xiv.) is “two furlongs distant from Jerusalem.” This carefulness may have been intended to distinguish Melchizedek’s Salem from the northern Shalem (Genesis xxxiii. 18), a place associated with Jacob, and apparently representing an attempt to set up a rival temple to that in Jerusalem. It was an old competition about tithes. Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek, King of Salem, but Jacob, after his vision at Bethel, recognized that as the “house of God,” and vowed to give to God a tenth of all that was given him (Genesis xxviii).3 This quarrel between rival towns and temples, trying each to draw all tithes to themselves, harmonized in the later legends of the Bible, need not detain us, but it is of importance to remark that the story of Abram meeting the King of Justice and Peace near Jerusalem, and establishing the sanctity of that city, corresponds with, and is counterbalanced by, Jacob’s meeting with angels, and wrestling with a mysterious “man,” who, it is hinted, was some form of God himself. This reply to the story of Abram suggests that at the time of that tithe controversy between Bethel and Sion Melchizedek was not thought of as a flesh-and-blood king or a mere man, but as a shadowy shape, evoked from actual conditions for certain purposes, and named in accordance with the history or traditions out of which the conditions and the aims were evolved.