The Bible's first war. Four kings from the east — Amraphel of Shinar (Shinar is Babylonia, the land of Babel, 10:10; 11:2), Arioch of Ellasar, Chedorlaomer of Elam (Elam is western Iran, and his is the name that leads the coalition), and Tidal king of Goiim — march against five kings of the cities of the plain. "Goiim" simply means "nations," so the last title is really "Tidal king of Nations," perhaps a chief over a bloc of peoples. For twelve years the five kings of the plain had been Chedorlaomer's vassals; in the thirteenth they rebelled; in the fourteenth he came to collect.

Is it history? No outside record names this exact coalition, and the once-popular identification of Amraphel with Hammurabi of Babylon has been given up — the names don't match and the dates don't line up. But the chapter has the texture of an old, independent war-record folded into Abram's story: archaic Hebrew, precise king-lists, a battlefield map — the kind of detail a late inventor would have no reason to fabricate. Every version simply transliterates the names; the interest here is entirely historical, and this translation keeps the lists exactly as they stand.

The old giants. Chedorlaomer's sweep down the highway east of the Jordan runs over a string of legendary peoples — the Rephaim, Zuzim, and Emim, and the Horites of Seir. These are the "giants" of pre-Israelite memory; the Rephaim and Emim resurface in Deuteronomy 2–3 as the tall aboriginal peoples the later conquest displaced. The geography is real — Ashteroth-karnaim in the Bashan, Seir (later Edom), El-paran down toward the Gulf of Aqaba, then a loop back to Kadesh (glossed here by its older name, En-mishpat, "spring of judgment") and the oasis of Hazazon-tamar (En-gedi, on the Dead Sea). The narrator knows the map.

The tar pits. The five kings form up in the Valley of Siddim, which the text pauses to gloss as "the Salt Sea" — the Dead Sea (v. 3). It was "pit after pit of tar" (be'erot be'erot chemar): the Dead Sea basin still seeps bitumen, and the doubled Hebrew ("wells, wells of tar") paints a battlefield pocked with asphalt pits the fleeing kings tumble into. Chemar is the very word for the bitumen the builders of Babel used for mortar (11:3) — the tar of human ambition, here turned into a trap.

"For he was living in Sodom." The raiders strip the cities and march north with the plunder — and with Lot. The narrator drives it home in seven words: "for he was living in Sodom." Lot had lifted his eyes to the well-watered plain and pitched his tent toward Sodom (13:11–12); now the choice has a price, and Abram — who took the land Lot left behind — is the one who has to go and save him.

"Abram the Hebrew." Here the word "Hebrew" (ha-ivri) enters the Bible, and it is fitting it lands on Abram. Back in the Table of Nations we flagged Eber (10:21, "the father of all the children of Eber") and promised the name would return — this is the payoff: ivri reads most naturally as "the descendant of Eber." (An older theory tied it instead to the apiru of the ancient Near East — landless outsiders and migrants — which would make "Hebrew" mean something like "the wanderer"; but the text's own genealogy points to Eber.)

The 318, and the "Dan" problem. Abram musters — the verb vayareq is rare and uncertain, something like "he emptied out" his men, variously "armed" (KJV), "led out," "called out" — 318 chanikhav, "his trained men," a word found nowhere else in the Bible. He chases the four-king army the length of the land, "as far as Dan." That is an anachronism worth naming plainly: the town was not called Dan until the tribe of Dan captured and renamed it centuries later (Judges 18:29) — a later editor's update of an older place-name, exactly like "Ur of the Chaldeans" (11:31). The rescue is total: all the goods, Lot, the women, the people.

Melchizedek. Out of nowhere steps one of Scripture's most mysterious figures: Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of God Most High. His name means "my king is righteousness" (or "king of righteousness"), and Salem (shalem, "peace, whole") is almost certainly the old name of Jerusalem ("in Salem is his tent," Psalm 76:2). He is the Bible's first priest, and he arrives with bread and wine and a blessing.

"Maker of heaven and earth." He blesses Abram by El Elyon, "God Most High," qoneh shamayim va-arets. Qoneh spans "maker, creator, possessor" — KJV GNV "possessor," NIV DRB "Creator/Maker," and Mister keeps "Maker" — from the root qanah Eve punned on at Cain's birth ("I have gotten/made a man," 4:1). And Abram gives him a tenth of everything — the Bible's first tithe, from the patriarch to this priest-king.

Two long shadows. A priest older than Aaron, with bread and wine and no recorded death, made Melchizedek the great type the New Testament reaches for: Psalm 110:4 swears the coming king is "a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek," and the letter to the Hebrews builds a whole argument on it (Hebrews 5–7) — a priesthood not descended from Aaron and not bound to him. The bread and wine, too, have echoed through Christian worship ever since. The Hebrew text claims none of that; it simply records a Canaanite priest-king who serves El Elyon, the Most High — and Abram, strikingly, treats that God as his own.

"Not a thread or a sandal-strap." The king of Sodom makes his offer — keep the plunder, just give back my people — and Abram's reply is a small masterpiece of integrity. "I have lifted my hand" — the gesture of an oath — "to Jehovah, God Most High, Maker of heaven and earth." Watch what Abram does with the name: he takes Melchizedek's title for the deity, El Elyon, and prefixes it with the personal name YHWH — his God is that same Most High God. (The Samaritan and Greek traditions read only "God" here, without the divine name; the Masoretic keeps YHWH, and this translation follows it.) He will not take "a thread or a sandal-strap," nothing at all, "so that you can never say, 'I made Abram rich.'" The man who let Lot choose first (ch. 13), and who now refuses to be enriched by Sodom, will be made rich by God alone — which is exactly the promise the next chapter opens on.