The mysterious figure of Melchizedek King of Salem haunted the memory of Hebrew writers in later times.[46] The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says, “Now consider how great this man was unto whom even the patriarch Abraham gave the tenth of the spoils.” Salem appears to have been Jerusalem, according to the Psalm[47] in which we read, “In Salem is His dwelling, and His abode in Zion”; and the “King’s Dale” is placed by Josephus near the city, where perhaps it is again noticed later.[48] The Samaritans, who grouped so many sacred sites round Gerizim, seem to have believed that Salem was the Shalem afterwards visited by Jacob, east of Shechem--the Salim of the Fourth Gospel, now the village of Sâlim, which is mentioned in the Paschal Chronicle; while in the fourth century, according to Jerome, “The palace of Melchisedec was there shown, its magnificence witnessed by the size of ruins of ancient workmanship.”[49] We may, however, accept the Hebrew belief that Salem (“safety”) is the same as _Uru-salimu_ (“the city of safety”), which we now know to have been the Amorite name for their royal city. Melchizedek appears and disappears suddenly, without any explanation as to his race or lineage. Josephus believed him to have been a Canaanite, and fixes his date as founder of Jerusalem about 2058 B. C. The chronology of the Hebrew text of Genesis would, however, make it about a century earlier, in the “days of Amraphel king of Shinar,” whom Sir Henry Rawlinson identified with ’Ammurabi, the famous sixth King of Babylon, who has been shown to have acceded in 2139 B. C.,[50] and who was thus the contemporary of Abraham. It would seem that this priest-king of Jerusalem was the suzerain of the petty kings of the cities in the Jordan Valley; but Abraham’s tithes are said to have been offered to Jehovah as the “most high God,” and not to Melchizedek as his over-lord. Jerusalem thus appears, even in the earliest notice, to have been a sacred city,[51] and we are no longer surprised--in reading the account in Genesis--at the civilisation of Abraham’s age, since we know that Canaan then shared, in some measure at least, the culture of the two ancient empires of Babylon and of Egypt, which disputed its possession.