The Melchizedek Teachings in the Levant

95:1.1By 2000 B.C. the re­li­gions of Mes­o­po­ta­mia had just about lost the teach­ings of the Sethites and were largely un­der the in­flu­ence of the prim­i­tive be­liefs of two groups of in­vaders, the Bed­ouin Semites who had fil­tered in from the west­ern desert and the bar­bar­ian horse­men who had come down from the north.

95:1.2But the cus­tom of the early Adamite peo­ples in hon­or­ing the sev­enth day of the week never com­pletely dis­ap­peared in Mes­o­po­ta­mia. Only, dur­ing the Mel­chiz­e­dek era, the sev­enth day was re­garded as the worst of bad luck. It was taboo-rid­den; it was un­law­ful to go on a jour­ney, cook food, or make a fire on the evil sev­enth day. The Jews car­ried back to Pales­tine many of the Mes­o­po­ta­mian taboos which they had found rest­ing on the Baby­lo­nian ob­ser­vance of the sev­enth day, the Sha­bat­tum.

95:1.3Al­though the Salem teach­ers did much to re­fine and up­lift the re­li­gions of Mes­o­po­ta­mia, they did not suc­ceed in bring­ing the var­i­ous peo­ples to the per­ma­nent rec­og­ni­tion of one God. Such teach­ing gained the as­cen­dancy for more than one hun­dred and fifty years and then grad­u­ally gave way to the older be­lief in a mul­ti­plic­ity of de­i­ties.

95:1.4The Salem teach­ers greatly re­duced the num­ber of the gods of Mes­o­po­ta­mia, at one time bring­ing the chief de­i­ties down to seven: Bel, Shamash, Nabu, Anu, Ea, Mar­duk, and Sin. At the height of the new teach­ing they ex­alted three of these gods to su­prem­acy over all oth­ers, the Baby­lo­nian triad: Bel, Ea, and Anu, the gods of earth, sea, and sky. Still other tri­ads grew up in dif­fer­ent lo­cal­i­ties, all rem­i­nis­cent of the trin­ity teach­ings of the And­ites and the Sume­ri­ans and based on the be­lief of the Salemites in Mel­chiz­e­dek’s in­signia of the three cir­cles.

95:1.5Never did the Salem teach­ers fully over­come the pop­u­lar­ity of Ishtar, the mother of gods and the spirit of sex fer­til­ity. They did much to re­fine the wor­ship of this god­dess, but the Baby­lo­ni­ans and their neigh­bors had never com­pletely out­grown their dis­guised forms of sex wor­ship. It had be­come a uni­ver­sal prac­tice through­out Mes­o­po­ta­mia for all women to sub­mit, at least once in early life, to the em­brace of strangers; this was thought to be a de­vo­tion re­quired by Ishtar, and it was be­lieved that fer­til­ity was largely de­pen­dent on this sex sac­ri­fice.

95:1.6The early prog­ress of the Mel­chiz­e­dek teach­ing was highly grat­i­fy­ing un­til Na­bo­dad, the leader of the school at Kish, de­cided to make a con­certed at­tack upon the preva­lent prac­tices of tem­ple har­lotry. But the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies failed in their ef­fort to bring about this so­cial re­form, and in the wreck of this fail­ure all their more im­por­tant spir­i­tual and philo­sophic teach­ings went down in de­feat.

95:1.7This de­feat of the Salem gospel was im­me­di­ately fol­lowed by a great in­crease in the cult of Ishtar, a rit­ual which had al­ready in­vaded Pales­tine as Ash­toreth, Egypt as Isis, Greece as Aphrodite, and the north­ern tribes as As­tarte. And it was in con­nec­tion with this re­vival of the wor­ship of Ishtar that the Baby­lo­nian priests turned anew to stargaz­ing; as­trol­ogy ex­pe­ri­enced its last great Mes­o­po­ta­mian re­vival, for­tunetelling be­came the vogue, and for cen­turies the priest­hood in­creas­ingly de­te­ri­o­rated.

95:1.8Mel­chiz­e­dek had warned his fol­low­ers to teach about the one God, the Fa­ther and Maker of all, and to preach only the gospel of di­vine fa­vor through faith alone. But it has of­ten been the er­ror of the teach­ers of new truth to at­tempt too much, to at­tempt to sup­plant slow evo­lu­tion by sud­den rev­o­lu­tion. The Mel­chiz­e­dek mis­sion­ar­ies in Mes­o­po­ta­mia raised a moral stan­dard too high for the peo­ple; they at­tempted too much, and their no­ble cause went down in de­feat. They had been com­mis­sioned to preach a def­i­nite gospel, to pro­claim the truth of the re­al­ity of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther, but they be­came en­tan­gled in the ap­par­ently wor­thy cause of re­form­ing the mores, and thus was their great mis­sion side­tracked and vir­tu­ally lost in frus­tra­tion and obliv­ion.

95:1.9In one gen­er­a­tion the Salem head­quar­ters at Kish came to an end, and the pro­pa­ganda of the be­lief in one God vir­tu­ally ceased through­out Mes­o­po­ta­mia. But rem­nants of the Salem schools per­sisted. Small bands scat­tered here and there con­tin­ued their be­lief in the one Cre­ator and fought against the idol­a­try and im­moral­ity of the Mes­o­po­ta­mian priests.

95:1.10It was the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies of the pe­riod fol­low­ing the re­jec­tion of their teach­ing who wrote many of the Old Tes­ta­ment Psalms, in­scrib­ing them on stone, where later-day He­brew priests found them dur­ing the cap­tiv­ity and sub­se­quently in­cor­po­rated them among the col­lec­tion of hymns as­cribed to Jew­ish au­thor­ship. These beau­ti­ful psalms from Baby­lon were not writ­ten in the tem­ples of Bel-Mar­duk; they were the work of the de­scen­dants of the ear­lier Salem mis­sion­ar­ies, and they are a strik­ing con­trast to the mag­i­cal con­glom­er­a­tions of the Baby­lo­nian priests. The Book of Job is a fairly good re­flec­tion of the teach­ings of the Salem school at Kish and through­out Mes­o­po­ta­mia.

95:1.11Much of the Mes­o­po­ta­mian re­li­gious cul­ture found its way into He­brew lit­er­a­ture and liturgy by way of Egypt through the work of Amen­emope and Ikh­na­ton. The Egyp­tians re­mark­ably pre­served the teach­ings of so­cial obli­ga­tion de­rived from the ear­lier And­ite Mes­o­po­ta­mi­ans and so largely lost by the later Baby­lo­ni­ans who oc­cu­pied the Eu­phrates val­ley.