Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Genesis 14:18b
Melchizedek, king of Salem. His name means king of righteousness; Salem means peace.
Genesis 14:18, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine a story where a stranger named Justice arrives from the city of Peace, and later readers treat both names as meaningful rather than coincidental. That is exactly the case Hebrews later makes about Melchizedek, and it only works if you know what his name and city mean in the original language.
Because Melchizedek's own name and the name of his city both mean something in Hebrew, king of righteousness and king of peace, and the epistle to the Hebrews later reads both meanings as deliberate theological signals, a wordplay English transliteration of a proper name cannot carry at all.
Every version reads Melchizedek and Salem as bare proper names, transliterated, since neither carries any built-in meaning once rendered into English letters.
מַלְכִּי־צֶדֶק Malki-tsedek / שָׁלֵם Shalem · H4442 / H8004
Melchizedek is built from melech, king, and tsedek, righteousness, giving king of righteousness, while Salem, shalem, shares its root with shalom, peace, giving king of peace, or king of Salem read doubly. Hebrews 7:2 explicitly draws out both meanings, treating the king-priest's very name and title as prefiguring the righteousness and peace later associated with the Messiah, an argument that depends entirely on the reader knowing what the Hebrew names mean.
English transliterates both Melchizedek and Salem as bare proper nouns, so a reader meeting Hebrews 7's argument about righteousness and peace can't tell where those concepts come from unless someone explains that the names themselves are doing the work.
When a name is significant enough that a later biblical writer stops to explain its meaning, as Hebrews does here, treat that explanation as confirmation that Hebrew names throughout Scripture are regularly meant to be heard, not simply used as labels.
Melchizedek and Salem draw no real disagreement among translators as proper names; there is no live alternative rendering. What matters here is that the meaning behind both names, preserved and explained in Hebrews 7:2, stays otherwise completely inaccessible to a reader working only from the English text of Genesis.
- Hebrews 7:2 explicitly translates both names, king of righteousness and king of peace
- Psalm 76:2 uses Salem as a poetic name for Jerusalem
