The New Century Bible

In the Hebrew Bible, Melchizedek was the king of Salem and priest of El Elyon (often translated as "God Most High"). He is mentioned in Genesis 14:18–20, where he brings out bread and wine and blesses Abram (Abraham), following the Battle of the Vale of Siddim and Abram's subsequent rescue of the captives and plunder taken in the battle, and in Psalm 110:4. In Christianity, according to the Epistle to the Hebrews, Jesus Christ is identified as "High priest forever in the order of Melchizedek", and so Jesus assumes the role of High Priest once and for all. Chazalic literature – specifically Targum Jonathan, Targum Yerushalmi, and the Babylonian Talmud – presents his name (מלכי־צדק‎) as a nickname for Shem. Joseph Blenkinsopp has suggested that the story of Melchizedek is an informal insertion into the Genesis narration, possibly inserted in order to give validity to the priesthood and titles connected with the Second Temple.

Studying animal behavior to understand human behavior. "For eons, humanity's greatest minds--philosophers, theologians, and scientists--have lacked confirmable answers to the questions that define and explain the meaning of human existence: what we are and what created us. In [this book], Edward O. Wilson, examining evolutionary history further back than he has ever done before, delivers a revelatory account of the deep origins of society. Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Wilson argues that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to appreciate the long, complicated evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least seventeen--among them the naked African mole rat and sponge-dwelling shrimp--have developed advanced societies based on similar levels of altruism and cooperation found among humans. Just as Darwin, in his 1871 Descent of Man, proposed humanity's origins through the study of apes and human behavior, Wilson here synthesizes the most updated research in evolutionary science to offer a pithy yet path-breaking work of evolutionary theory. In Genesis, Wilson eloquently braids twenty-first-century scientific research with the lyrical biological and humanistic observations for which he is known and admired."--Dust jacket.