Hebrews 7:3

ἀφωμοιωμένος ABK. The less correct form ἀφομοιωμένος is found in CDEL.

3. ἀπάτωρ, ἀμήτωρ, ἀγενεαλόγητος, “without lineage” or “pedigree” as in Hebrews 7:6. The mistaken rendering “without descent” is ancient, for in consequence of it Irenaeus claims Melchisedek as one who had lived a celibate life (which in any case would not follow). The simple and undoubted meaning of these words is that the father, mother, and lineage of Melchisedek are not recorded, so that he becomes more naturally a type of Christ. In the Alexandrian School, to which (whether he was Apollos or not) the writer of this Epistle belonged, the custom of allegorising Scripture had received an immense development, and the silence of Scripture was regarded as the suggestion of mysterious truths. The Jewish interpreters naturally looked on the passage about Melchisedek as full of deep significance because the Psalmist in the 110th Psalm, which was universally accepted as a Psalm directly Messianic (Matthew 22:44), had found in Melchisedek a Priest-King, who, centuries before Aaron, had been honoured by their great ancestor, and who was therefore a most fitting type of Him who was to be “a Priest upon his Throne.” The fact that he had no recorded father, mother, or lineage enhanced his dignity, because the Aaronic priesthood depended exclusively on the power to prove direct descent from Aaron, which necessitated a most scrupulous care in the preservation of the priestly genealogies. (See Ezra 2:61-62; Nehemiah 7:63-64, where families which could not actually produce their pedigree are excluded from the priesthood.) Moreover this was particularly remarkable in the Book of Genesis where the genealogy of all the leading characters is given, and where they form the framework of the Book, as Ewald has observed. The idiom by which a person is said to have no father or ancestry when they are not recorded, or are otherwise quite unimportant, was common to Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. In a Greek tragedy “Ion” calls himself “motherless” when he supposes that his mother is a slave (Eurip. Ion, 850). Scipio said scornfully to the mob of the Forum “St! tacete quibus nec pater nec mater est” (Cic. De Orat. II. 64). Horace calls himself “a man nullis majoribus ortus” (Hor. Sat. I. Hebrews 6:10). In the Bereshith Rabba we find the rule “a Gentile has no father,” i.e. the father of a proselyte is not counted in Jewish pedigrees. Further the Jews mystically applied the same sort of rule which holds in legal matters which says “that things not producible are regarded as non-existent.” Hence their kabbalistic interpretation of particulars not mentioned in Scripture. From the fact that Gain’s death is nowhere recorded in Genesis, Philo draws the lesson that evil never dies among the human race; and he calls Sarah “motherless” because her mother is nowhere mentioned. There is then no difficulty either as to the idiom or its interpretation.

ἀμήτωρ. The mention of this particular may seem to have no hearing on the type, unless a contrast he intended to the Jewish Priests who were descended from Elisheba the wife of Aaron (Exodus 6:23). But “Christ as God has no mother, as man no Father.” The primitive Church neither used nor sanctioned the name Θεοτόκος “Mother of God” as applied to the Virgin Mary.

ἀγενεαλόγητος. “Without a genealogy.” Melchisedek has no recorded predecessor or successor. Bishop Wordsworth quotes “Who shall declare His generation?” which however is not the meaning of the Hebrew.

μήτε�.τ.λ. The meaning of this clause is exactly the same as that of the last—namely that neither the birth nor death of Melchisedek is recorded, which makes him all the more fit to be a type of the Son of God. Dean Alford’s remark that it is “almost childish” to suppose that nothing more than this is intended, arises from imperfect familiarity with the methods of Rabbinic and Alexandrian exegesis. The notion that Melchisedek was the Holy Spirit (which was held by an absurd sect who called themselves Melchisedekites); or “the Angel of the Presence”; or “God the Word, previous to Incarnation”; or “the Shechinah”; or “the Captain of the Lord’s Host”; or “an Angel”; or “a reappearance of Enoch”; or an “ἐνσάρκωσις of the Holy Ghost”; are, on all sound hermeneutical principles, not only “almost” but quite “childish.” They belong to methods of interpretation which turn Scripture into an enigma and neglect all the lessons which result so plainly from the laws which govern its expression, and the history of its interpretation. No Hebrew, reading these words, would have been led to these idle and fantastic conclusions about the superhuman dignity of the Canaanite prince in himself, and apart from his purely typical character. If the expressions here used had been meant literally, Melchisedek would not have been a man, but a Divine Being—and not the type of one. It would then have been not only inexplicable, but meaningless, that in all Scripture he should only have been incidentally mentioned in three verses of a perfectly simple and straightforward narrative, and only once again alluded to in the isolated reference of a Psalm written centuries later. The fact that some of these notions about him may plead the authority of great names is no more than can be said of thousands of the absolute, and even absurd, misinterpretations in the melancholy history of slowly-corrected errors which passes under the name of Scripture exegesis. Less utterly groundless is the belief of the Jews that Melchisedek was the Patriarch Shem, who, as they shewed, might have survived to this time (Avodath Hakkodesh, III. 20, &c. and in two of the Targums). Yet even this view cannot be correct; for if Melchisedek had been Shem (1) there was every reason why he should be called by his own name, and no reason whatever why his name should be suppressed; and (2) Canaan was in the territory of Ham’s descendants, not those of Shem; and (3) Shem was in no sense, whether mystical or literal, “without pedigree.” Yet this opinion satisfied Lyra, Cajetan, Luther, Melanchthon, Lightfoot, &c.

Who then was Melchisedek? Josephus and some of the most learned fathers (Hippolytus, Eusebius, &c.), and many of the ablest modern commentators, rightly hold that he was neither more nor less than what Moses tells us that he was—the Priest-King of a little Canaanite town, to whom, because he acted as a Priest of the True God, Abraham gave tithes; and whom his neighbours honoured because he was not sensual and turbulent as they were, but righteous and peaceful, not joining in their wars and raids, yet mingling with them in acts of mercy and kindness. How little the writer of this Epistle meant to exaggerate the typology is shewn by the fact that he does not so much as allude to the “bread and wine” to which an unreal significance has been attached both by Jewish and Christian commentators. He does not make it (as the Jews do) in any way a type of the shewbread and libations; or an offering characteristic of his Priesthood; nor does he make him (as Philo does) offer any sacrifice at all. How much force would he have added to the typology if he had ventured to treat these gifts as prophecies of the Eucharist, as some of the Fathers do! His silence on a point which would have been so germane to his purpose is decisive against such a view. As regards the μήτε we may observe that as in Modern Greek μὴ has become the invariable negative with participles, so we find a tendency in this direction in Hellenistic Greek. Here for instance though the reference is to one person, the attribute implied by the participle is ascribed only in conception. Comp. Luke 7:33, ἐλήλυθεν Ἰωάννης μήτε ἐσθίων … μήτε πίνων. See Winer, p. 607.

ἀφωμοιωμένος δὲ τῷ υἱῷ τοῦ θεοῦ, “having been likened to the Son of God,” i.e. having been invested with a typical resemblance to Christ. The expression explains the writer’s meaning. It is a combination of the passage in Genesis with the allusion in Psalms 110, shewing that the two together constitute Melchisedek a Divinely appointed type of a Priesthood received from no ancestors and transmitted to no descendants. The personal importance of Melchisedek was very small; but he is eminently typical, because of the suddenness with which he is introduced into the sacred narrative, and the subsequent silence respecting him. He was born, and lived, and died, and had a father and mother no less than any one else, but by not mentioning these facts, the Scripture, interpreted on mystic principles, “throws on him a shadow of Eternity: gives him a typical Eternity.” The expressions used of him are only literally true of Him whose type he was. In himself only the Priest-prince of a little Canaanite community, his venerable figure was seized upon, first by the Psalmist, then by the writer of this Epistle, as the type of an Eternal Priest. As far as Scripture is concerned it may be said of him, that “he lives without dying, fixed for ever as one who lives by the pen of the sacred historian, and thus stamped as a type of the Son, the ever-living Priest.”

εἰς τὸ διηνεκές, in perpetuum.