Genesis 14:18: The first time Jerusalem appears in the Bible, under a shorter name

"And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. (He was priest of God Most High.)" One verse, one place name, and a man who arrives from nowhere. Melchizedek is not introduced, not descended from anyone, and not seen again in Genesis — he appears between the king of Sodom's arrival and the king of Sodom's offer, blesses Abram, receives a tenth of everything, and is gone. Hebrews spends most of two chapters on the fact that the text gives him no father, no mother and no genealogy. Salem is the reason this verse is worth a map. The name means peace and is almost certainly the short form of Jerusalem: Psalm 76 uses it that way — "His abode has been established in Salem, his dwelling place in Zion" — and the sources put it on the ridge where the city stands. If that is right, this is the first appearance in the Bible of the place the rest of the Bible is about, and it appears as a town whose king is already a priest of God Most High, four hundred years before Israel exists and eight hundred before David takes the citadel. It is drawn as an open ring rather than a pin because the identification, though old and widely held, is an argument rather than a fact — a few readers have put Salem in Samaria instead, near the Shechem of Genesis 33. The ring says the sources place the name here without fixing a site under it. The map is nearly empty on purpose. There is one name in the verse, it is on a ridge above a valley the previous verse has just filled with two kings, and everything else on this frame — the wilderness falling east, the terraces running west — is the country Abraham has been walking up and down for two chapters.