Strange Bible Interpretations

This week we’re looking at bible character Melchizedek in our devotionals, and today’s may be slightly disorienting. Hopefully by the end it’s also a bit freeing - so hang on for it.

Melchizedek comes up just three times in the Bible - the original story in Genesis 14 that we’ve looked at so far this week, as a piece of a prophecy of the Messiah in Psalm 110, and then there’s the whole bizarre chapter of Hebrews 7 that interprets those other two passages.

In Hebrews, the author starts off with the strangest riff on the Melchizedek story: by making a jump from the fact that there’s no family genealogy of Melchizedek in the Bible to the conclusion that Melchizedek is eternal. Yes, that’s the leap. Read it for yourself:

The name Melchizedek means “king of righteousness”; then also, “king of Salem” means “king of peace.” Without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, resembling the Son of God, he remains a priest forever. - Hebrews 7:2-3

So what do we make of this approach to biblical interpretation? Is it reasonable to assume that since no genealogy is recorded for a person that they lived forever beforehand; and is it reasonable to assume that since there’s no record of them dying that they are still alive? This is a strange interpretation indeed. But it’s not totally unlike how Jesus interpreted some passages (like he does with Exodus 3:6 here).

A helpful way to think about these sorts of biblical interpretations - which themselves are enshrined in scripture - is that they are midrashic. That was the standard Jewish approach to scripture, meant not to close down conversation or ‘shut the case’ on the interpretation but to open up the conversation and to re-imagine how God might be using the scripture. The midrashic approach looks between, above, and beneath the words to find hidden meaning and to tie into those deep themes of love, justice, sacrifice, and holiness.

So the question for you now is simple this: will you interpret the Bible the way the the Bible interprets the Bible? Given the above text, that might sound a bit threatening to the encoded and systematic body of interpretation that you are used to… but it also might be incredibly freeing. You might meet Jesus in some radically new ways. You might find yourself falling in love with God more and more deeply. And you might find yourself swept up in God’s mission to renew the whole earth in ways that you couldn’t have imagined before. Apparently, God is willing to take that risk. Are you?