The meeting of Abram [Abraham] and Melchizedek, the high priest and king of Salem, who brings bread and wine (Genesis 14:18-24)

This Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek from 1466 forms part of Bouts's masterwork—the Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament in Leuven's Sint-Pieterskerk, commissioned by the Leuven Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament. The wings depict four Old Testament prefigurations of the Eucharist: the Passover, Elijah fed by an angel, the gathering of manna, and this meeting between the patriarch Abraham and the mysterious priest-king Melchizedek, who offered bread and wine. Typological theology read these Hebrew Bible scenes as foreshadowing Christ's institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. Bouts's rendering combines doctrinal precision with naturalistic landscape and figure painting that roots sacred history in tangible Flemish reality.

The biblical encounter is rendered with Bouts's characteristic precision and spatial clarity, the exchange of bread and wine depicted with the eucharistic significance that connects Old Testament narrative to Christian sacrament.