We thus find Solomon,--the glorious cosmopolitan and secularist, whose name Jahvism could not utter without a shudder,--distributed in fable, legend, psalm, through Hexateuch and Hagiographa, and finally transfigured into a type of divine and eternal Sonship. Thus he appears in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to which we now return. In the Epistle to the Hebrews Christ is invested with the mystical robes of Solomon. To Christ are applied the words, "I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son," quoted from Jahveh's promise to David concerning Solomon (2 Sam. vii. 14). To Christ are twice applied the words, "Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee," quoted from Psalm ii. 7, admittedly Solomonic. From Psalm xlv., verses 6 and 7, ascriptions to Solomon, are applied to Christ in this Epistle. And Melchizedek is here declared to be "a great man," "assimilated unto the Son of God." We may here recall the words of Josephus, a contemporary of our writer, who says that Melchizedek was made the priest of God on account of his righteousness (Ant., Bk. i. ch. 10). It may have been that there was a popular belief in the time of Josephus that Melchizedek received his ordination from Abram himself, but there is no doubt that the mysterious king's priesthood was believed to rest upon his righteousness and above all his peacefulness. With these preliminaries we may find the Epistle's argument about Melchizedek less "hard of interpretation" than the writer says it is. After speaking of Abraham as having "obtained" the promise, not merely because it was God's promise, but because he "patiently endured," having argued that Christ, "though he was a Son, yet learned obedience by the things that he suffered", this Epistle maintains (vi. 20) that this is the believer's hope, whereby he enters within the veil, "whither as a forerunner Jesus entered for us, having become a high priest forever after the manner of Melchizedek." (The sense of this is lost in the E. V. by rendering genomenos "made": the argument is that though he was a Son of God even that could not make him a high priest; this he had to "become" by his own merits, uninheritable even from God, as was the case with Melchizedek.) "For this Melchizedek, being of Salem, priest of God Most High, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed him, to whom also Abraham divided a tenth part of all (being first by interpretation King of Righteousness, and next also King of Salem, that is Prince of Peace; being without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but assimilated (echôn aphômoiômenos) unto the Son of God), abideth a priest perpetually" (vii. 1-3).