ACTS BIBLE
Abraham week 5 · Genesis 14
Four kings against five, giants named in the record, and a priest-king with bread and wine. The Bible's first war report ends at Salem.
Genesis 14 reads like a chronicle because it is one: four eastern kings under Chedorlaomer of Elam against five cities of the plain, named kings, named places, a named battlefield of slimepits in the vale of Siddim. Sodom falls, and Lot, who moved toward the city in chapter 13, is now carried off with it. The choice by sight has matured into captivity.
On the eastern army's route the record lists the peoples they broke: the Rephaims in Ashteroth Karnaim, and the Zuzims in Ham, and the Emims in Shaveh Kiriathaim, and the Horites in their mount Seir (14:5-6). Later Scripture calls several of these peoples giants, and a modern reader's first instinct is that giants belong to legend, so the chapter's credit dies here. Say that objection out loud, and then watch how the text actually handles these peoples: as military geography. No wonder, no folklore, just who got defeated where, in a list. Deuteronomy treats them the same way, as displaced-population history: the Emims, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; which also were accounted giants (Deuteronomy 2:10-11), the Zamzummims whom Ammon dispossessed (2:20-21), and Og king of Bashan, of the remnant of giants, whose iron bedstead is measured for the record at nine cubits by four, roughly thirteen and a half feet by six (Deuteronomy 3:11). A legend does not come with furniture dimensions and a museum location.
The thread runs the length of the Old Testament, and Stoney's original notes for this course traced it: the spies meet the sons of Anak and feel like grasshoppers (Numbers 13:33); Joshua cuts the Anakim from the hill country from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab until a remnant is left in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod (Joshua 11:21-22); and out of Gath, generations later, comes a champion six cubits and a span, whom a shepherd boy drops with a sling stone (1 Samuel 17). David's men later finish four more born to the giant in Gath (2 Samuel 21:16-22). The peoples Chedorlaomer defeats in Abram's day are the same stock Israel meets in Moses' day, Joshua's day, and David's day. One record, one continuity, and the God who delivers is the same in every generation.
When the news reaches him, Abram arms his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen (14:14), divides his men by night, routs the coalition that just flattened five kings, and brings back Lot, the goods, and the people. The number 318 is a household census, not an army; the victory is as lopsided as Gideon's, and means the same thing.
Coming home, Abram meets two kings. The king of Sodom offers a deal: keep the goods, give me the persons. Abram refuses down to a thread even to a shoelatchet, so that no man can say Sodom made Abram rich (14:23). But before that refusal, another king appears from nowhere: Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God (14:18). He blesses Abram, and Abram gives him tithes of all. Psalm 110 makes this stranger the pattern of the Messiah's priesthood, a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek, and Hebrews 7 spends a chapter on the arithmetic: the man who carries the promise bows to a greater priesthood than his own line will produce. The chapter that proves Abram can win a war ends with him kneeling, and that is the lesson.