Abram's tithing to Melchisedeck, described in Genesis 14:17-24 was an important passage in the controversy the earliest Quakers had about the testimony against tithing. For example, in The Great Mystery, in his response to "William Thomas, a minister of the gospel at Ubley, (so called,) in his book called, 'Railing rebuked, or a defence of the Ministers.'" there is this exchange:

Thomas: "...Abraham paid tithes to Melchisedeck. If there be not a maintenance settled out to the ministry, we know we cannot subsist to do service to their soulds without a worldly support, a sufficient maintenance. They call us greedy dogs, because nursing fathers and mothers have provided for our nourishment a maintenance for us. To work or to beg are two straits, whereof the world might be ashamed, but especially the saints."

Fox: "The world would not be ashamed, nor the saints, to see you work, who have taken the people's bread for whom you do no work; and the saints do witness against you. The prophets, Christ, and the apostles, declare such to be greedy dogs, that can never have enough. And Christ came to put an end to tithes before the law, to tithes in the law, to a priesthood made by the law, which had a command to take tithes, whose is a priesthood for ever after the order of Melchisedeck, who was the similitude and likeness, (and not after the order of Aaron,) who continues a priest for ever. And so when the first priesthood was ended, tithes and all ended, and the command that gave them, and the priesthood. Christ reigns over the house of Jacob, who was before Abraham was, and Melchisedeck that Abraham paid tithes to, the similitude and likeness, which Christ is the end of. Here is the rock, and the substance..." (Works of George Fox, 1831, volume III, page 387)

This treatment of Old Testament (Old Covenant) people and events as "similitude and likeness" (or shadow) and Christ and/or the New Covenant as substance is typical of the thinking of the seventeenth century Quakers.

Contributed by JD