H8004

• {"n":"Genesis 14:18b","s":"Melchizedek, king of Salem. His name means king of righteousness; Salem means peace.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-14-18b","r":"Genesis 14:18","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads Melchizedek and Salem as bare proper names, transliterated, since neither carries any built-in meaning once rendered into English letters."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"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."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"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."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"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."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"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."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"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."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05de\u05b7\u05dc\u05b0\u05db\u05b4\u05bc\u05d9\u05be\u05e6\u05b6\u05d3\u05b6\u05e7 Malki-tsedek \/ \u05e9\u05b8\u05c1\u05dc\u05b5\u05dd Shalem \u00b7 H4442 \/ H8004"}],"src":["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"]}