Sarah

93:9.4But Abra­ham was not long to be de­terred in his mis­sion as the suc­ces­sor of Mel­chiz­e­dek. Soon he made con­verts among the Phil­is­tines and of Abim­elech’s peo­ple, made a treaty with them, and, in turn, be­came con­tam­i­nated with many of their su­per­sti­tions, par­tic­u­larly with their prac­tice of sac­ri­fic­ing first-born sons. Thus did Abra­ham again be­come a great leader in Pales­tine. He was held in rev­er­ence by all groups and hon­ored by all kings. He was the spir­i­tual leader of all the sur­round­ing tribes, and his in­flu­ence con­tin­ued for some time af­ter his death. Dur­ing the clos­ing years of his life he once more re­turned to He­bron, the scene of his ear­lier ac­tiv­i­ties and the place where he had worked in as­so­ci­a­tion with Mel­chiz­e­dek. Abra­ham’s last act was to send trusty ser­vants to the city of his brother, Na­hor, on the bor­der of Mes­o­po­ta­mia, to se­cure a woman of his own peo­ple as a wife for his son Isaac. It had long been the cus­tom of Abra­ham’s peo­ple to marry their cousins. And Abra­ham died con­fi­dent in that faith in God which he had learned from Mel­chiz­e­dek in the van­ished schools of Salem.

93:9.5It was hard for the next gen­er­a­tion to com­pre­hend the story of Mel­chiz­e­dek; within five hun­dred years many re­garded the whole nar­ra­tive as a myth. Isaac held fairly well to the teach­ings of his fa­ther and nour­ished the gospel of the Salem colony, but it was harder for Ja­cob to grasp the sig­nif­i­cance of these tra­di­tions. Joseph was a firm be­liever in Mel­chiz­e­dek and was, largely be­cause of this, re­garded by his broth­ers as a dreamer. Joseph’s honor in Egypt was chiefly due to the mem­ory of his great-grand­fa­ther Abra­ham. Joseph was of­fered mil­i­tary com­mand of the Egyp­tian armies, but be­ing such a firm be­liever in the tra­di­tions of Mel­chiz­e­dek and the later teach­ings of Abra­ham and Isaac, he elected to serve as a civil ad­min­is­tra­tor, be­liev­ing that he could thus bet­ter la­bor for the ad­vance­ment of the king­dom of heaven.

93:9.6The teach­ing of Mel­chiz­e­dek was full and re­plete, but the rec­ords of these days seemed im­pos­si­ble and fan­tas­tic to the later He­brew priests, al­though many had some un­der­stand­ing of these trans­ac­tions, at least up to the times of the en masse edit­ing of the Old Tes­ta­ment rec­ords in Baby­lon.

93:9.7What the Old Tes­ta­ment rec­ords de­scribe as con­ver­sa­tions be­tween Abra­ham and God were in re­al­ity con­fer­ences be­tween Abra­ham and Mel­chiz­e­dek. Later scribes re­garded the term Mel­chiz­e­dek as syn­ony­mous with God. The rec­ord of so many con­tacts of Abra­ham and Sarah with “the an­gel of the Lord” refers to their nu­mer­ous vis­its with Mel­chiz­e­dek.