Was Melchizedek without father or mother?

Hebrews is speaking about the written record, not about biology. The third of its three words explains the first two: agenealogētos (Strong’s G35) means ‘without genealogy’, with no recorded pedigree. Jewish usage spoke the same way: Adam Clarke notes that a man who could not show his pedigree was said to be ‘without father’. Hebrews makes its meaning plain three verses later, where Melchizedek is the one “whose descent is not counted from them” (7:6), that is, not from Levi.

The writer’s point turns on how priests were chosen under the law. A priest had to show his descent from Aaron, and men who could not find their names in the register were put out of the priesthood (Ezra 2:62). Genesis brings Melchizedek in as a priest of God with no parents, no birth and no death recorded. The writer reads that silence as a picture of Christ, a priest not by descent from Levi but “after the power of an endless life” (Hebrews 7:14–16). That is how Melchizedek was “made like unto the Son of God” (7:3). The ancient Syriac version already took the phrase this way; Gill renders it ‘whose father and mother are not written in the genealogies’. So Hebrews does not say that Melchizedek had no human ancestry, only that Scripture records none. Nothing here conflicts with Eve as the mother of all living, or with Paul’s words that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men” (Acts 17:26).

Christ himself appearing to Abraham

Some Christians take Melchizedek to be an appearance of the Son of God before his birth, so that he truly had no parents. Most commentators, Gill among them, reply that Hebrews says he was ‘made like’ the Son of God, which sets the two apart. On either view, Hebrews does not speak of a human being born outside Adam’s family.

Shem

An old Jewish tradition identified Melchizedek with Shem, Noah’s son, who on the figures of Genesis 11 was still alive in Abraham’s day. Gill objects that Shem’s parentage is well known, so he could hardly be described as without father or mother.

Who Melchizedek was remains open. Genesis gives only his city, his office and his blessing of Abram; Josephus, followed by Gill, took him for a Canaanite king who served the true God.