The Love of David and Jonathan: Ideology, Text, Reception 9781845536756, 2011030120

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Battling for David and Jonathan
3. How open is the David and Jonathan narrative?
4. David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem
5. Conclusion
Bibliography
Indexes

Citation preview

The Love of David and Jonathan

BibleWorld Series Editors: Philip R. Davies and James G. Crossley, University of Sheffield BibleWorld shares the fruits of modern (and postmodern) biblical scholarship not only among practitioners and students, but also with anyone interested in what academic study of the Bible means in the twenty-first century. It explores our everincreasing knowledge and understanding of the social world that produced the biblical texts, but also analyses aspects of the Bible’s role in the history of our civilization and the many perspectives—not just religious and theological, but also cultural, political and aesthetic—which drive modern biblical scholarship.

The Love of

David and Jonathan Ideology, Text, Reception

James E. Harding

Published by UK: Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF US: ISD, 70 Enterprise Drive, Bristol, CT 06010 www.equinoxpub.com © James E. Harding 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permis­ sion in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harding, James E. (James Edward) The love of David and Jonathan : ideology, text, reception / James E. Harding. p. cm. -- (BibleWorld) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-1-84553-675-6 (hb) 1. David, King of Israel. 2. Jonathan (Biblical figure) 3. Bible. O.T. Samuel--Criticism, interpretation, etc.--History. 4. Bible. O.T. Samuel--Gay interpretations. 5. Homosexuality in the Bible. I. Title. BS580.D3H294 2012 222’.40608664--dc23 2011030120 ISBN   978-1-84553-675-6   (hardback) Typeset by CA Typesetting Ltd, www.sheffieldtypesetting.com Printed and bound in the UK by MPG Books Group

No sooner…had I sent it off than a curious reaction came over me. It seemed to me that I had given away my capacity for belief in the Willie Hughes theory of the Sonnets, that something had gone out of me, as it were, and that I was perfectly indifferent to the whole subject. What was it that had happened? It is difficult to say. Perhaps, by finding perfect expression or a passion, I had exhausted the passion itself. Emotional forces, like the forces of physical life, have their positive limitations. Perhaps the mere effort to convert any one to a theory involves some form of renunciation of the power of credence. Influence is simply a transference of personality, a mode of giving away what is most precious to one’s self, and its exercise produces a sense, and, it may be, a reality of loss. Every disciple takes away something from his master. Or perhaps I had become tired of the whole thing, wearied of its fascination, and, my enthusiasm having burnt out, my reason was left to its own impassioned judgment. However it came about, I cannot pretend to explain it, there was no doubt that Willie Hughes suddenly became to me a mere myth, an idle dream, the boyish fancy of a young man who, like most ardent spirits, was more anxious to convince others than to be himself convinced. Oscar Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr W. H.”

Contents

Preface ix Abbreviations xiii

1. Introduction 1. A convention of reading 2. A question of modern exegesis 3. What this book is, and is not 2. Battling for David and Jonathan: Scripture, Historical Criticism, and the Gay Agenda 1. Exegetical factional strife 2. Academy, church, and the gay agenda 3. A homosexual misunderstanding? (Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli) 4. The ideological use of word statistics? (Markus Zehnder) 5. Christian homophobia as divine order? (Robert Gagnon) 6. Transgressive reading? Que(e)r(y)ing David and Jonathan 7. David and Jonathan beyond foundationalism?

1 1 15 31 51 51 55 57 63 83 89 99

3. How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 1. Introduction 2. Texts and readers 3. What makes 1 and 2 Samuel “open” and how has it been “closed”? 4. D/J: an essay 5. Conclusion

122 122 126

4. David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 1. David and Jonathan/the invention of gay history 2. The ancient reception of Achilles and Patroclus 3. Davidic friendship in the Romantic period 4. The Oxford Movement and Catholic homosociality 5. Protestant manliness

274 274 291 298 306 314

134 160 227

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6. John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) 7. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and Teleny (1893) 8. Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) 9. E. M. Forster (1879–1970) 10. Conclusion

329 344 350 356 362

5. Conclusion: The Influence of Oscar Wilde on 1 and 2 Samuel

403



Bibliography 407 Index of References 429 Index of Authors 445

Preface Prefaces written to explain the objects or meaning of a book, or to make any appeal, ad misericordiam or other, in its favour, are, in my opinion, nuisances. Any book worth reading will explain its own objects and meaning, and the more it is criticized and turned inside out, the better for it and its author. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford (London: Macmillan and Co., 1892; 1st edn, 1861), vii

With apologies to Thomas Hughes, let me outline the aim and scope of this book. My aim is to explain why some modern scholars, and other interested parties, have come to ask whether the relationship between David and Jonathan in 1 and 2 Samuel could be understood as homosexual. I have sought the answer in three main areas: (1) the ideological agendas in which these scholars, and other interested parties, are implicated; (2) the degree of openness of the narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel to a variety of different interpretations; and (3) the reception history of the narrative, particularly under the direct, or indirect, influence of Oxford Hellenism in nineteenth-century England. I am not primarily interested in trying to work out the most probable original meaning of the narrative, which may seem odd for someone whose orientation as a biblical scholar has been constructed under the influence of the aims and methods of historical criticism. While much scholarly writing on David and Jonathan has had precisely this aim, it seems to me that a key task of the scholar should, in fact, be to work out why we ask the questions we do in the first place. This book also wanders way beyond the normal boundaries of Biblical Studies into territory usually occupied by academics from other fields, particularly classicists, literary critics, and historians of sexuality. By casting the net so widely I have run the serious risk, at many points, of dilettantism, or, which feels worse, the appearance of dilettantism. This is surely unavoidable if one seeks, within a single project on David and Jonathan, to take account of an Assyrian loyalty oath, a Cretan abduction ritual, medieval monasticism, Jeremy Bentham, and Death at a Funeral. Yet in order to explain why scholars, and other interested parties, ask

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the questions they do of David and Jonathan, an approach is needed that transcends artificial – not to say arbitrary – disciplinary boundaries. I have left some arguably vital works out of consideration, not because they are unimportant, but to prevent the book from becoming more bloated than it already is. It could have been written otherwise, drawing on a different range of primary and secondary sources, or within a different theoretical framework. Readers will certainly find gaps, especially if they are looking for them. A word is needed here about the context in which this book has been written. In the Christian churches in particular – of one of which, the Anglican Church, I am an ordained member – the question of the moral status of same-sex relationships has been a source of confusion, misunderstanding, antagonism, and pain in recent years. At the heart of this is the contested role, and meaning, of scripture. This complex, painful, and often frankly wearisome debate has, it seems to me, too often lacked a serious depth of historical perspective. Just why do we read and use biblical texts the way we do, and why do we ask the questions we ask of these ancient texts at this particular point in time, in the particular places in which we stand? Approaching one relevant biblical text with these questions in mind seemed a better option than trying to decide, once and for all, how communities of faith should interpret this and other relevant texts, or to decide how sexual relationships should be judged ethically within those communities of faith. If one thing should be crystal clear from this book, I have drawn no conclusions on matters such as these, even though I am convinced that taking the homophobic sting out of scripture and its interpretation is something to which energy should be devoted (cf. pp. 31–33, 93 below); in fact, to draw conclusions on such matters would require an entirely different approach, beginning not with authoritative historical judgments about the original meanings of texts (pace Robert Gagnon, et al.), but with a sense of what it means to engage with scripture from a perspective at once christologically, pneumatologically, and ecclesiologically defined. This I do not even pretend to have attempted here. Indeed, my approach will at times seem to be in profound tension with such a perspective – though, I hope, not irrevocably so. I am offering instead what I think is a necessary, corrective footnote to a troubled debate. Parts of this book have been presented to the Biblical Criticism and Literary Criticism Section of the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting; the Bible and Critical Theory Seminar; the Aotearoa/New Zealand Association for Biblical Studies; the European Association of Biblical Studies; the departmental seminar in the Department of Theology



Preface xi

and Religion, University of Otago; the Classical Association of Otago; and at meetings of two LGBT/Q Christian groups, Sacred Cocktails in San Francisco, and Ascent in Dunedin. I am grateful to the convenors and attendees of each of these gatherings and to all those who have responded to my thoughts, including the anonymous reviewers of my earlier article “David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem,” Relegere 1.1 (2011), 37–92, which covers some of the material discussed in Chapter 4 below. I am especially grateful to Janet Joyce, Philip Davies, and James Crossley for accepting the book for publication by Equinox Publishing in the BibleWorld series, and to Valerie Hall and Audrey Mann for guiding the manuscript to publication. Audrey deserves extra special thanks for her expert copy-editing and indexing work on a sometimes difficult manuscript. I must also express my thanks to many family, friends, and colleagues for support, loans and gifts of books, references of which I would otherwise have been ignorant, and for just criticism. I especially wish to thank: Arlene Allan; Maurice Andrew; Erica Baffelli; Miriam Bier; Roland Boer; Michael Carden; Bill Countryman; Philip Culbertson; Greg Dawes; John Franklin; Deane Galbraith; Barbara Green; David Gunn; Maureen Hagen; Karin Hügel; Jonathan Jong; Edmund Little; W. John Lyons; Christina Petterson; Eric Repphun; Kate, Summer, and Ella Sears; Will Sweetman; Max Whitaker; Yvonne Sherwood; the congregation of All Saints’ Church, North Dunedin; all the students who have taken part in my undergraduate course “From Samuel to Solomon”; and, of course, the many others who were forced to follow my obsession with David and Jonathan on Facebook, offering gratefully received advice, support, and encouragement along the way. None of them should be implicated in the conclusions I have drawn here. The faculty and students of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific made a three-month stay in Berkeley in 2010 both profitable and pleasurable. This was made possible by a generous research grant from the University of Otago, matching externally awarded scholarships granted to Kirsten Dawson and Deane Galbraith, two of Otago’s exceptional PhD students. Miriam Bier taught most of my introductory course on the Old Testament in 2010, freeing up more time for research. Thanks also go to the staff of the Jeremy Bentham archive at University College London, and to the staff of the John Addington Symonds Archive at the University of Bristol, which contains a print of the painting that graces the cover of this book – Hippolyte Flandrin’s Jeune homme nu assis sur le bord de la mer (1836) – a print that must once have hung in the Symonds’ house in Davos Platz. The staff of the University of Otago library managed to

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access sources of occasionally staggering obscurity with skill and efficiency. Anthony Heacock kindly shared the proofs of his book prior to publication, and Judith McKinlay read an earlier version of the entire manuscript, offering a healthy and necessary dose of just criticism, as well as many opportunities for fruitful conversations over coffee. The gaps, errors, infelicities, and eccentricities that remain are mine. Or the reader’s. James E. Harding Dunedin, New Zealand Feast of All Saints 1 November, 2012

Abbreviations Abbreviations for biblical books follow Equinox Publishing house style. All other abbreviations follow The SBL Handbook of Style (ed. P. H. Alexander et al.; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999), where possible. The following abbreviations are also used: FGrHist

Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (3 vols.; Berlin: Weidman, 1923–1958). PMG Poetae Melici Graecae (ed. D. L. Page; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Spec. car. Aelred of Rievaulx, Speculum caritatis De spir. am. Aelred of Rievaulx, De spiritali amicitia TrGF Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (ed. B. Snell, R. Kannicht, and S. Radt; 5 vols.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971– 2004).

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION So: Were David and Jonathan lovers? Apparently, only their hairdresser knows for sure.1

1. A convention of reading The story of David and Jonathan, part of the interwoven narrative threads of the demise of King Saul of Israel and the rise of his divinely anointed successor, David son of Jesse, has been much discussed in recent biblical scholarship. A particular source of excitement to scholars has been the question of whether or not the Hebrew text of 1 and 2 Samuel supports the view that David and Jonathan were homosexual lovers. But why has this question been so much discussed in this often dry and dusty, yet occasionally passionately contested corner of contemporary academia? What is at stake in the debate? What shapes the questions asked by those engaged in the debate? What aspects of the biblical narrative, and what threads in its history of reception, have made this debate possible at this particular point in time, and in these particular circles? These are the questions with which this book deals. It is not an attempt to resolve once and for all whether David and Jonathan had sex, or whether the biblical author(s) thought they did, or expected their readers to think they did. If those are the issues that interest you, if you think that this is the only true, authorized, and approved way in which biblical scholars should frame their questions with respect to the David and Jonathan narrative, then perhaps this book is not for you. Perhaps, though, the questions I have just posed might just be worth your time, for they focus on why it is that we biblical scholars ask the questions we do, and why the texts we study and the interpretations we offer have the kinds of effects they seem to have. In terms of what is at stake, a great deal seems to depend on a sense of ownership of the biblical text, and of the right to interpret it. This sense of ownership is by no means confined within the ivory tower of the academy, but is an aspect of the public role of the Hebrew Bible in societies where

2

The Love of David and Jonathan

the fate of this collection of texts has been strongly determined by the Jews and Christians for whom this collection is not merely of antiquarian interest, but of deep existential significance. This was well illustrated in early 2011 when an article on the website of the Christian Institute accused the BBC of marring the 400th anniversary of the translation of the King James Bible with a “gay slur” on the character of King David. The BBC has accused one of the Bible’s most beloved characters of having a homosexual relationship in a programme marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible… While introducing a reading from the historic Bible translation playwright Howard Brenton claimed that David had been in love with Jonathan, the son of King Saul. On Sunday’s broadcast Mr Brenton said: “To a secular reader the story of David and Jonathan’s love is obviously homosexual, the only gay relationship in the Bible.” The controversial remark was made as part of a series of biblical readings commissioned to mark the anniversary of the King James Bible. While he did acknowledge that the subject was controversial many Christians will see Mr Brenton’s comments as a gross distortion of the account.2

The Christian Institute frames Howard Brenton’s remarks as a secular attack on the Bible and, by extension, Christian truth in general, one of a series of such attacks that the anonymous author of the article goes on to list. The very suggestion that one of the “most beloved characters” in the Bible might have been sexually involved with a member of the same sex can only be regarded as an accusation, a slur against his moral integrity, and a “gross distortion” of an apparently unambiguous text, a distortion that “mars” the religiously significant anniversary of an “historic” Bible translation. The way this response is phrased seems to imply that regardless of how “controversial” the gay David idea might be, how “many Christians” read the text is either supposed to carry decisive weight in any final exegetical decision, or to be ipso facto sacrosanct. What “many Christians” think a text means must be respected, no matter what. Although one would not expect a detailed philological study in a brief, polemical note, the Christian Institute’s position is asserted rather than defended with reference to the specifics of the text, and its author seems blissfully unaware of the instabilities of the language he or she is using. Why should being “in love with” someone necessarily carry sexual connotations, rather than connotations of deep, emotional ties not necessarily related to sex? It is only linguistic conventions in a particular dialect of English at this particular time that limit the meaning of this phrase in this way. A more significant point, however, is this: the Christian Institute is effectively here claiming ownership of the right to interpret the text. It is not so much that 1 and 2 Samuel do not present the relationship between David and Jonathan as sexual. Rather,



Introduction 3

the biblical text cannot be allowed to suggest this possibility. This is an important distinction, but one that it would not be in the interests of the Christian Institute to make clear. Brenton’s own comments do not seem – to me, at least – to have the tone of an accusation. Brenton is aware that his statements are controversial, but he does not seem to be wilfully attacking Jewish or Christian readers whose sensibilities might be offended by his suggestion. His appeal to the “secular reader,” however, does seem to reify an otherwise far from clear-cut distinction between confessing and non-confessing approaches to the text, and thereby highlights the fact that the meaning of the text in question is not simply a matter of the dispassionate, objective exegesis of an ancient document, but is profoundly influenced by the ideological assumptions brought by the modern reader to the act of producing meaning: David is in love with Saul’s son Jonathan. To a secular reader the story of David and Jonathan’s love is obviously homosexual, the only gay relationship in the Bible. But there’s great controversy here, it was even recently debated in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in a furore over gay rights.3

The David and Jonathan narrative, then, is very much a bone of contention between readers from conflicting ideological positions. The controversy, moreover, is not simply an academic one, but one which has spilled over into the public square. Or, alternatively, perhaps the controversy has entered the academic world precisely because it already existed elsewhere. The walls of the ivory tower are often not as secure as one might assume. The nature of the relationship between these biblical characters is not, however, always a matter of controversy. The idea that the relationship between David and Jonathan was sexual has, in fact, become commonplace, so much so that the very mention of David and Jonathan can be shorthand for a gay relationship. Such uses of the David and Jonathan trope to some extent discard the biblical context in which the two characters originally appeared. This arguably problematizes the notion that David and Jonathan are any longer “biblical” characters at all, since they are detached from their “original” biblical context and have ceased to be controlled by it. The 2007 British film Death at a Funeral would be a good example here, if arguably an unexpected place to find an explicit citation from the David and Jonathan narrative,4 or of any biblical text at all for that matter. The film centres on the funeral of Edward who, unbeknown to the various members of his dysfunctional, rather conservative middle-class family, has been having an affair with another man. His lover, Peter, turns up at the funeral intending to blackmail Edward’s son Daniel, threatening to show the assembled mourners a collection

4

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of unambiguously salacious photographs if he refuses to hand over an ambitious sum of money. The first hint the viewer gets of Edward’s secret life is given at the start of the funeral service. The minister begins: I’d like to start with a favourite passage of Edward’s from the King James Bible. It’s the first book of Samuel, chapter 18. “And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more home to his father’s house. Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul. And it came to pass, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.5

No explanation is given as to why this passage was one of Edward’s favourites, and there is no suggestion at this stage that any of the characters knows the reason. As it happens, several of the main characters are not even listening, engaged as they are in a farcical argument while the minister drones on in the background. Viewers are left to their own devices to make the connection between the biblical passage and Edward’s secret sex life. A viewer who is aware that 1 Samuel 18:1-4 has been used in some Jewish and Christian circles to suggest the existence of at least one sexual relationship between men that is not condemned in scripture, or who knows that this passage and a few others – especially 2 Samuel 1:19-27 – have been excised from the Bible to take their place in a constructed “gay canon,”6 could immediately make the connection and anticipate Peter’s shocking revelation to Daniel. Such a connection implies a degree of intertextual competence that might encompass the biblical text itself, certain aspects of its reception history outside the scholarly guild, certain aspects of its use in Jewish and/or Christian debates, and possibly some elements of the scholarly debate on this text. It might, on the other hand, only encompass part of this. It might, indeed, be an unconscious intertextual competence, where viewers are unaware of why they interpret the minister’s use of 1 Samuel 18:1-4 in this way. Viewers who know none of these uses of the text may make no such connection, except on a subsequent viewing, having seen the film in its entirety. Their second viewing of the film might then, in turn, influence their reading of 1 and 2 Samuel, if indeed they feel moved to read this work at all. Crucial to the way the film works is the active engagement of the viewer in making essential plot connections, of which the characters themselves are initially oblivious. Thus Daniel himself has no idea



Introduction 5

that the part of his inept eulogy where he remarks, “Dad would roam around the countryside for hours with his close boyhood friend, Bob,” could be interpreted as a reference to Edward’s adolescent sexual experiments. Likewise, it is not until Peter has shown Daniel the incriminating photos that he suddenly becomes aware of the connotations of the decor of his father’s study and the books on his shelves. A book entitled Screen Goddesses is suddenly no longer just another book, though as with the citation of 1 Samuel 18:1-4 it is assumed that the viewer has the intertextual competence to recognize its connection with gay subculture.7 When a male mourner innocently remarks to Daniel, immediately after his encounter with Peter, that “…when we were boys together your father used to love to make us all go skinny-dipping,” it can now, for Daniel, mean only one thing. In order to understand the film adequately, an awareness of the textual difficulties of 1 and 2 Samuel, or the scholarly debates concerning the likeliest original meaning of the David and Jonathan narrative are arguably irrelevant. They may even be a distraction. The codes a modern viewer needs in order to make the connection between 1 Samuel 18:1-4 and Edward’s affair with Peter are hardly likely to be the codes the earliest readers employed to understand the relationship between David and Jonathan. Scholarly reconstructions of these codes have tended to suggest, for example, that Jonathan’s disrobing constitutes either the transferral to David of his right to succeed Saul as king of Israel,8 or his bestowal upon David of his military paraphernalia, investing him as his warrior companion.9 In Death at a Funeral, however, such construals would be at best superfluous to the plot, and at worst bizarrely out of place. The biblical passage has been excised from its place in the narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel to play a role in the elaboration of the deceased Edward’s character, while retaining its de facto authoritative status as an extract from the King James Bible. What the viewer does need to take from 1 Samuel 18:1-4 is the reference to a relationship of love between two men, whose literary representation culminates in one of the men stripping in front of the other. Though his family never knew it, Edward must, presumably, have liked this passage in the King James Bible because he thought it mirrored part of his own desire. In order to explain why this passage appears in the film in the first place, it is necessary to know something of its modern reception, because it is that modern reception that has made “David and Jonathan” more or less synonymous with “gay relationship.” Addressing this issue in detail, of course, is scarcely necessary for the average viewer, but is important to someone seeking to offer a critical interpretation of the film, or of the use of 1 Samuel 18:1-4 in the film as an instance of the reception history of a biblical text.10

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Interestingly, unlike films such as Priest,11 Saved!,12 Prayers for Bobby,13 and the documentary Trembling before G-d,14 each of which, in different ways, addresses the issue of the use of biblical texts to justify religiouslymotivated homophobia, Death at a Funeral evinces no interest in the use of biblical texts in contemporary Jewish and Christian debates around the ethical status of same-sex relationships in communities of faith. It is middle-class, English social mores that make Edward’s gay extra-marital affair unacceptable in Death at a Funeral, not Christian piety, though the extent to which the problem is Edward’s marital infidelity rather than his desire for other men is not entirely clear. A rather darker use of the David and Jonathan narrative appears in series 12 of the BBC crime drama Silent Witness. In the episode entitled “Judgement,”15 first screened in the UK on 22 and 23 October, 2008, the homoerotic construal of the David and Jonathan narrative is an essential element in a complex and potentially controversial plot that touches on a range of other themes, including the tensions in contemporary inner-city London between H9asidim and other elements in the community, represented in this case by the police and a group of migrant workers from Poland, and the potential for homophobia and homophobic violence within the H9asidic community itself. The battered body of a young hasid, Yitshok, is found. His wife claims he went missing on a Saturday night, that is, after the Sabbath had ended, but video footage of an attack on Yitshok and a post mortem confirm that his murder had taken place the evening before. In one of his pockets a page torn from a Hebrew Bible is found, which turns out to be 1 Samuel 18. Another young hasid, Chaim, explains its importance to the police. It is, he claims, a passage from scripture dear to gay H9asidic men because of its positive portrayal of a same-sex erotic relationship. Yitshok, then, had been attacked on a Friday night while out looking for sex, instead of sharing the Sabbath meal at home. His wife had lied about the time of his disappearance to protect his reputation and that of his Torah-observant family. The erotically construed David and Jonathan narrative then becomes the decisive clue that leads the police to conclude that Yitshok was killed in an attack that had homophobically motivated elements.16 The viewer arguably has to do less work to understand how the David and Jonathan narrative is being read here than is the case with Death at a Funeral, but that fact gives a misleading impression of the complex intertextual matrix Silent Witness is tapping into. In order for this use of the David and Jonathan narrative to be possible, there needs to be at least the recognized possibility of reading the narrative, in at least some Jewish contexts, as a portrayal of an erotic relationship. There also needs to



Introduction 7

be a recognition that this reading convention is, or at least could plausibly be, a private one among a sub-group of H9asidim. This convention need not, strictly speaking, exist in fact: it merely needs to be plausible in the context of a fictional portrayal of a H9asidic community, and for it to be plausible, the David and Jonathan narrative must be perceived as a potential resource for gay H9asidic Jewish men. The world of the story and the real world behind it need to overlap to some extent. Chaim is characterized as a highly scripturally literate, if wayward yeshiva bokher, who must explain to a scripturally illiterate investigator what 1 Samuel 18 signifies. Scriptural literacy is portrayed as a characteristic of members of a closed, strictly observant religious sect, but not of other members of British society. The police investigators need the resources of a scripturally literate friend of the deceased in order to make the connection, but it is difficult to imagine that such a degree of scriptural illiteracy on the part of someone in London charged with deducing the cause of a murder could have been portrayed a century earlier, when such literacy was taken for granted. Both Death at a Funeral and Silent Witness are evidence for a convention of reading the David and Jonathan narrative in the early twenty-first century as a portrayal of an erotic relationship. Neither requires a direct acquaintance with the agendas of academic biblical scholarship, but it is this very convention of reading that makes both those academic agendas and the two televisual representations possible. The same holds for two other, more direct portrayals of the relationship between David and Jonathan on screen, in the 1985 film King David,17 and in the 2009 NBC series Kings.18 In the case of King David, it is never explicit that the relationship between David and Jonathan has an erotic dimension, despite many longing, suggestive glances on Jonathan’s part. Yet after David and Michal have had sex on their wedding night, Michal addresses her man in a way that hints at just this. Michal: The people worship you as their god, while as for Jonathan… David: He loves me as a brother…as I love him. Michal: And his sister? David: The resemblance is marked. I suspect it’s only skin deep. Michal: So why did you marry me?

Notably, David’s dirge over Saul and Jonathan somehow omits the mention of “the love of women” in 2 Samuel 1:26, making it harder to construe their relationship in anything approaching erotic terms: “My brother Jonathan, thy love to me was wonderful.” Michal alone in the film suggests such a construal to David. It is interesting in light of this that in Stefan Heym’s 1972 novel The King David Report it is Michal who tells the

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The Love of David and Jonathan

narrator of David’s sexual relationships with Saul, Jonathan, and apparently an older man who served as a priest in Bethlehem. “Jesse was an obscure, poverty-stricken peasant with more sons than he could feed. Three of them joined the army; and David would have gone on tending his father’s few miserable sheep if one of the Bethlehem priests had not discovered the charms of his body and the qualities of his voice.”19 “Of all of us, I resisted him the longest. It was known that he shared the bed of my father Saul the very night his music drove the evil spirit from him. And there were those like Abner son of Ner, the captain of the host, who said that it was less David’s music than his buttocks which relieved the King.” The princess toyed with a bunch of grapes. “And then Jonathan. You surely know the dirge which David wrote upon his death: I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan. Very pleasant hast thou been unto me: Thy love to me was wonderful, Passing the love of women… Jonathan had a wife and children, he had concubines; but through David he seemed to have discovered a new meaning to his life. He stripped himself of his bow, his sword, his swordbelt, even of his robe, and clothed David with them; he would have given him half the kingdom, had it been his to give. David took it all with that grace of his; he smiled, and spoke his poetry, and played his lute. He let my father King Saul make love to him when that was my father’s need; he lay with my brother Jonathan, letting him kiss his feet, his thighs, his wrists, his throat; and in the night in which I lost my restraint and spoke to him in anger, he came to me, later, and took me.”20

This passage quotes 2 Samuel 1:26 directly, in a context that suggests that this character intends her listener to interpret 2 Samuel 1:26 in sexual terms. This raises the question whether the novel was intended as, or in any case whether it could be read as, a work not simply of fiction, but of biblical exegesis. There is, after all, no reason beyond scholarly convention to limit “exegesis” to the rarefied confines of academic commentaries, monographs, journal articles, and critical notes. On the other hand, this is a densely focalized novel that leaves the reader in some doubt as to whom to trust. That is, these words are presented by a narrator who has determined secretly to deceive the court of Solomon by presenting his version of the truth about David, not the sanitized “One Truth” to end “All Contradiction and Controversy”21 that he was employed to write; they are also the words of a character who may have a vested interest in maligning David whom, in turn, she presents as someone who may himself have been a master dissimulator. If we were then to use The King



Introduction 9

David Report as a lens through which to read 1 and 2 Samuel, we would then have to consider whether the biblical text itself is to be read as a series of layers of deception and dissimulation. In the case of Kings, not only does the plot of the series rely on a convention of reading the biblical narrative as referring at least to a gay Jonathan, but the early reception of the series has explicitly touched on that question. The characters and plot of the series are largely drawn from 1 Samuel, though the intertextual matrix in which the series participates is significantly richer and more complex than that, and significant liberties are taken with the biblical source. The setting is the fictional, modern-day state of Gilboa, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the United States.22 Gilboa is ruled by an absolute monarch, King Silas Benjamin (Saul), who believes himself to have been chosen by God for this role through an anointing by a cloud of butterflies. Silas has recently united his nation after a bloody civil war, though war continues sporadically with Gilboa’s northern neighbour, Gath (the Philistines). He holds court in the newly established city of Shiloh (Jerusalem?). His spiritual adviser is a preacher, Rev. Samuels (Samuel), and the tense relationship between preacher and king constitutes an ongoing, auxiliary plot line throughout the series. As the series begins, a soldier by the name of David Shepherd (David) rescues the king’s son Jack (Jonathan) from behind enemy lines. Jack is gay, but attempts to keep his sexuality, and his lover Joseph, secret from his family, particularly from his homophobic father. Notably, he and David do not become lovers, their tense relationship being rather dominated by jealousy and resentment on Jack’s part. David instead becomes engaged in an initially secret romance with the king’s daughter, Michelle (Michal). What is clear in this fine example of Transformationsgeschichte is that the characters and the plot could not be constructed in this way but for the existence of a convention of reading two of the underlying biblical characters as gay lovers. What is less clear is whether the construction of Jonathan as a closet homosexual with a deep resentment of David can justifiably be regarded as either a misreading of the biblical text, or as a “degaying” of an important, supposedly gay relationship from history. The writer of Kings, Michael Green, had this to say about the origins of the character Jack in an interview immediately after the series first began: [W]hen you read the biblical text that this is inspired by, there is a reading to be had – I can’t say whether it’s the right or wrong – but there is a reading to be had where Jonathan, Saul’s son, was madly in love with David. There are several lines repeated – he loved him as he loved himself, their souls were intertwined together, constantly promising each other, and Jonathan especially David, undying love and devotion. So when I spend

10

The Love of David and Jonathan my time sort of going through the text and gleaning things that interest me, that was something that I just thought, what if we went that route? What if we let that be what it’s hard not to see sometimes in it? Just the same, literally thousands, two thousands [sic] years of biblical scholarship has been spent trying to keep people from reading into those texts. You know, the Middle Ages, I believe there was no vellum that wasn’t scribbled with some sort of apologia for their love being a pure form of GrecoRoman brothers-in-arms sort of thing. And that’s a legitimate reading, too, but my approach isn’t religious as a storyteller. My approach is what would make the most interesting story and that’s what it was. It seemed the thing to do at the time.23

There is an awareness here of a degree of openness to the biblical narrative that for some modern readers is naturally closed down in the direction of a portrayal of a sexual, rather than some other kind of relationship. There is also an awareness of a tradition of censorship with respect to this narrative. Green is acknowledging the influence of a particular construal of the biblical narrative, while at the same time implying that there exists a deeply adversarial relationship between the narrative itself and more or less the entire history of its reception. Green is also setting his own use of the biblical narrative in opposition to this history of censorship, while simultaneously departing from the biblical narrative by discarding the love between David and Jonathan in favour of a conflictual relationship between them, combined with a romantic attachment between David and Michelle. What is reflected here is Green’s perception of both the biblical narrative and the history of its reception. Whether his perception of these things is justified or not is, strictly speaking, a different matter.24 Green’s portrayal of David and Jack has raised issues on several levels. On one level, there is the issue of whether a character modelled on the biblical Jonathan can justifiably be portrayed as gay. On another, there is the issue of whether characters based on the biblical David and Jonathan can justifiably be portrayed as adversaries rather than as friends. These are issues of the extent to which the biblical text, or particular construals of it, should control their derivative readings, uses, transformations, and effects. Later in the same interview Green comments I’m getting the…question from Christian sites saying, “What made you think that you were allowed to interpret Jonathan as gay?” which I think speaks to this sort of wonderful inscrutability of biblical texts in general in which there are no definitive right interpretations or right answers. A lot of people would read the stories of David and Jonathan and absolutely see in it a homosexual relationship. A lot of people would read into that and see a purely noble, Grecian friendship of, you know, two brotherly soldiers. My personal goals are not political. My personal goals for the characters of David and Jonathan and their relationship or David and Jack and



Introduction 11 their relationship are not political or religious. They’re purely storytelling. So I, at this point, really just went for what I thought made the best dynamics between them and what set up a longer-term arc for the two of them. So, whether there’s a relationship between the two of them or not, I won’t tell you purely because it would be considered a spoiler. And similarly, I was asked a question by a Christian reporter saying, “You took liberties with David and Jonathan’s relationship because you had them be adversarial, when in the Bible [they] started as friends.”

Whatever the most adequate understanding of the relationship between author, text, and reader may actually be, and leaving aside for the moment the question of whether any construal or use of a biblical text is ever as politically and religiously neutral as Green would like to claim, Green is drawing attention to the decisive role of the reader in constructing meaning out of biblical texts. He is also drawing attention to the desire of particular communities of readers to control the reception of those texts. In the case of the David and Jonathan narrative, it is not only communities of conservative Christian readers who are attempting to exclude certain readings. Green’s interviewer also seems to want to claim the relationship between David and Jonathan as an untouchable, sacrosanct element in gay history, revealing a third level, at which the issue is whether it is justifiable, perhaps on political or even ethical grounds, to discard a positive gay relationship in favour of an adversarial relationship based on the cliché of a positively portrayed straight character (David) and a negatively portrayed gay character (Jack). This question dominates Brent Hartinger’s response to Kings on the same website as the interview with Green cited above.25 Hartinger works with a dyad in which there is more or less “true” construal of the David and Jonathan story, and a “false” distortion of it, a dyad ironically similar to the one at work in the article from the Christian Institute cited at the beginning of this section. He remarks By far the biggest difference between Kings and its biblical source material is the fact that in the Bible, David is probably gay or bisexual too, and he loves Jonathan back. “David rose from beside the stone heap and prostrated himself with his face to the ground,” the Bible reads. “He bowed three times, and [he and Jonathan] kissed each other, and wept with each other. David wept the more.”26 When Jonathan is killed, David mourns him, saying, “I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”27 Whether or not David and Jonathan were actual lovers is the subject of debate, but many scholars interpret the relationship to have been a romantic one. Indeed, unless you’re blinded by anti-gay prejudice, it’s almost impossible not to see it as such. In short, the biblical chronicle of David and Jonathan is one of the Bible’s few gay love stories. It’s also

12

The Love of David and Jonathan one of very few positive gay elements in the entire notoriously homophobic Bible. Despite Kings’ claims that it is a “retelling” of David’s story, a gay love story is clearly not the direction the show is going. In the show, Jack may yet express his open love for David, and might even assist him somehow. But it seems pretty clear that David is thoroughly heterosexual and will almost certainly never love Jack back. In other words, Michael Green, the creator of Kings, has chosen to keep the Bible’s likely-gay aspect of the character of Jonathan, but then turned him into a scheming villain, while at the same time, completely eliminating any “gay” element to the story’s primary hero, David. It’s part of a long history where characters based on gay figures from history or legend – people such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Alexander the Great, and the ancient Spartan warriors – are “de-gayed” for movie or TV adaptations. In addition, Hollywood has a history of turning gay characters from fiction into heterosexual ones for the film versions, in projects such as Fried Green Tomatoes, and the plays of Tennessee Williams.

This is, at first blush, a strange and not entirely coherent assessment. Hartinger acknowledges that the biblical text is open to debate, then suggests that not construing the relationship between David and Jonathan as one between gay lovers can only be the result of anti-gay prejudice. He criticizes the “de-gaying” of plausibly same-sex oriented figures from history – by no means without justification – but does not acknowledge the role that modern constructions of sexual identity and gender performance, and the language we have come to use to represent these, have had in “gaying” these figures in the first place. What is interesting here is not simply how the biblical text is used and transformed, but how a particular instance of its reception can tell us something about not only how the biblical texts themselves are perceived, but how popular culture and biblical scholarship intersect, how this intersection connects with claims to the ownership of the right to interpret and retell a given biblical story, and how the reception history of that biblical story has been understood and used. One last example of the use of the Bible in modern film on which I wish to draw is the gritty 1994 British drama Priest. David Lodge, in his novel The British Museum is Falling Down, has a rather-too-believable doctoral student by the name of Camel explain the comprehensiveness of his research on sanitation in Victorian fiction by arguing that the absence of references to sanitation in Victorian fiction is as significant as explicit references to the same.28 Just so here: Priest makes no reference to or use of the David and Jonathan narrative, yet this gap may itself be significant. There can be little question that the Christian, and especially the Roman Catholic condemnation of same-sex relationships, and the manifold tensions this position engenders, lie behind the use of biblical texts



Introduction 13

in Priest. The film focuses on the moral struggles of a young Catholic priest in inner city Liverpool. Father Greg is a deeply closeted homosexual struggling on the one hand with the contradiction between his vow of celibacy and his desire for his lover, Graham, and on the other hand with the conflict between his commitment to the seal of the confessional and a young girl’s admission in confession that her father has been raping her. The climax of the film involves a showdown at the start of a Mass between Father Greg and his fellow priest Father Matthew, and two parishioners disgusted that Father Greg, who had earlier been arrested after being caught having sex in a public place, is being allowed to celebrate at the Altar. Echoing the duel in the synoptic Gospels between Jesus and Satan, one of the parishioners engages in a scriptural duel with Father Greg on the subject of homosexual acts: Parishioner: It’s in the Bible. The Bible! Do you read the Bible, you, you pervert? It’s there in black and white. “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination!”29 Father Greg: “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.”30 Parishioner: “And the LORD rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire!”31 Father Greg: “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”32 Parishioner: “Keep my statutes and my laws and do none of these abominations!”33 Father Greg: “Judge not, that you be not judged.”34 “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?”35 Parishioner: You know what the Holy Father says about it. You know! I don’t suppose you listen to the Pope either, do you? Father Greg: “I do not say seven times, but seventy times seven.”36 Parishioner: “And Lot’s wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt!”37 Father Matthew: Who was the first to see him when he was risen? Mary Magdalene, a prostitute. Parishioner: “Jesus wept!”38 … Father Greg: I’m here to ask your forgiveness.

The interpretation of Priest is a more open matter than the interpretation of Death at a Funeral, Silent Witness, King David, or Kings. For what is Father Greg asking forgiveness: his affair with Graham? His lack of discretion in being caught having sex in a public place, resulting in a slur on the reputation of the Catholic Church, and of his parish? His disregard for the religious convictions of his parishioners? His disregard for his own vocation, and the vows he has taken? The texts the parishioner hurls at Father Greg might suggest the first of these, but the viewer must

14

The Love of David and Jonathan

choose. The broader perspective of viewers of the film in comparison with the characters means, further, that they have a wide range of options for disambiguating Father Greg’s plea for forgiveness and for assessing both the extent of his moral cowardice and the degree to which he is culpable with respect to it. In any case, the significance of the scene just cited for our purposes is the way it mirrors the conflict over the ownership, interpretation, and application of biblical texts in a particular interpretive community. It is noteworthy that all the texts cited by the parishioner, with the exception of the last – which in any case is spoken with exasperated irony rather than cited as a proof-text – are taken from the Old Testament. They pertain to the sexual commandments of the Holiness Code and to the narrative of the destruction of Sodom, which have all been used in the Christian condemnation of same-sex erotic relationships. Father Greg’s texts, however, are taken from the words of Jesus in the Gospels. There is no suggestion on Father Greg’s part that his sex life is not somehow culpable. Earlier in the film, Father Matthew has suggested that the teaching of Christ cannot be squared with a condemnation of a gay relationship, suggesting that at some level the Gospels are being made to stand here for a more liberating vision incommensurate with the narrow legalism apparently associated with the texts cited by the parishioner. Notably, the David and Jonathan narrative is absent from Priest. There is no suggestion in the film that the Old Testament could be used as a positive resource for gay Christians. While there is no suggestion that the non-use of the David and Jonathan narrative is the result of a conscious decision, its absence is noteworthy: to a viewer whose intertextual competence connects David and Jonathan with the use of biblical texts in discussions of same-sex relationships, their absence leaves a trace. The effect of the trace left by the absence of David and Jonathan from the parishioner’s roll call of Old Testament texts is to highlight the unmitigated condemnation they collectively convey. What the material surveyed here shows is that, in the early twentyfirst century in certain corners of the West, “David and Jonathan” automatically connote “gay lovers.” This has become, for some, a conventional reading of the biblical narrative, regardless of what that narrative may, or may not, originally have meant. At the same time, for others, the notion of David and Jonathan as lovers is at best unknown, and at worst anathema. But the idea that David and Jonathan may have been involved in a sexual relationship has also become a key question addressed by professional biblical scholars, without, for the most part, any conscious dependence on the reception history of the biblical narrative beyond the ivory



Introduction 15

tower of academia. There is some overlap between the questions scholars ask and those asked within the Jewish and Christian faith communities to which many professional biblical scholars belong and for whom the biblical narratives are authoritative scripture, but on the whole the question of whether or not David and Jonathan were lovers is asked, and partially answered, by scholars as if it arose naturally from the biblical text. In the next section, I want to pose this question and wrestle with at as a peculiarly and distinctively modern one. What does it mean to ask this question at this point in time, and what are the pitfalls that get in the way of trying to solve it? 2. A question of modern exegesis Were David and Jonathan gay lovers? It may seem perverse to some even to pose this question.39 It is clearly a tissue of anachronisms, and biblical scholars, who should by now be well versed in discussions of the social construction of human sexuality,40 would rarely pose such a question so bluntly. It would, that is, rarely be posed thus by biblical scholars aware of the gulf between how human relationships, particularly erotic and sexual relationships, are understood and lived in the modern societies biblical scholars inhabit, and how such relationships were understood and lived in the societies represented by the biblical texts these scholars seek to interpret.41 Yet a question more or less along these lines had, by the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, come to dominate certain aspects of the scholarly exegesis of 1 and 2 Samuel. In his brilliantly unorthodox commentary on 1 Samuel David Jobling makes the following remarks: The story of David and Jonathan, and [2 Sam. 1:26] in particular, assume great importance for gay rights activists, who find in them virtually the only positive presentation of male homosexuality in the Jewish Bible. Here is a man telling of his love for another man, comparing it with heterosexual love, and saying it is better. A reading of 1 Samuel that claims to be in touch with issues of ethics and human liberation can no longer overlook the central importance of the book for one of the urgent and vibrant discourses of our time… Nothing in the text rules out, and much encourages the view that David and Jonathan had a consummated gay relationship. The text does not force this conclusion on us; there are obvious cultural reasons why it would not. But it is at least as valid as any other… The text is open to a gay reading, and this is no bland statement, for one can easily see ways in which it could have discouraged such a reading. The non-trivial, politically important claim stands that the Bible here shows itself able to say what it has to say through the dynamics of what appears to be a gay relationship.42

16

The Love of David and Jonathan

Jobling does not make clear what “obvious cultural reasons” might have prevented the text from forcing upon us the view that David and Jonathan had a consummated gay relationship, but presumably he is implying that the ancient Israel out of which this text emerged was a context in which sexual relationships between men were frowned upon.43 At first sight, Jobling appears to be succumbing to a range of essentialist pitfalls: can we term an ancient relationship between two men “gay” without further ado? Can we discuss “homosexuality” as such outside the context of the modern legal, psychological, and medical discourses that defined, perhaps even created – that is constructed – “sexuality” as a category of human experience, and “homosexuality” as a particular manifestation of it? But Jobling is not unaware of these pitfalls. He approaches the text with an open admission of his own cultural embeddedness, and seems, in fact, to be exploring the relationship between David and Jonathan in light of the interplay between the limits allowed by the text and the agendas of particular modern readers. His concern is with the relationship between scholarly work on the biblical narrative and a particular “urgent and vibrant discourse of our time,” not with some timeless, unchangeable essence that the external husk of the text protects, and that it is the task of the scholar to discover come what may. What problems arise, then, when we start to probe beneath the words of our question? To think of the relationship between David and Jonathan as one between “lovers”44 immediately raises the problem of the degree of disjunction between the semantics of “love” language in modern English and the semantics of bh) and its cognates in ancient Hebrew.45 The plural noun “lovers,” for one thing, would tend to connote in modern English the partners in a sexual relationship that may or may not be exclusive, though both the noun “lover” and the verb “love” have in the past reflected a broader semantic range than this.46 What, for example, would we make of the following passage in Christina Rossetti’s devotional work Letter and Spirit, were we to interpret the noun “lover” under the definition I have just offered? For another aspect of friendship we may study Hiram who was ever a lover of David, and whose intimacy with Solomon led to his assisting in building God’s Temple; a marvellous privilege indeed if we must assume (in default of any record to the contrary) that he lived and died an alien from the commonwealth of Israel (I Kings v.): so vast a profit may there accrue from a wise friendship.47

For Rossetti, “friendship” exists between “lovers,” but since she wrote the relationship between the language of “love” and the language of “friendship” have, in English, undergone a significant shift. Furthermore, the



Introduction 17

relationship between the language of “love” and that of “friendship” in modern English is not only different from earlier periods of English, but is also significantly different from the use of broadly comparable terms in cognate languages at different periods, as Michael Screech’s comments on the difficulty of accurately translating the title of Michel de Montaigne’s essay “De l’amitié” make clear. …in Renaissance French amitié includes many affectionate relationships, ranging from a father’s love for his child (or for his brain-child) to the friendly services of a doctor or lawyer, to that conjugal love felt by Montaigne for his wife, and to that rarest of lasting friendships which David shared with Jonathan, Roland with Oliver or Montaigne with [Etienne de] La Boëtie. Several terms are needed in English to render these different senses; they include friendship, loving-friendship, benevolence, affection, affectionate relationships and love. The basic meaning of amitié is rooted in aimer (to love); but it often excluded amour, love between the sexes, and always folle amour (‘mad love’) which was sexual and extra-marital.48

The meaning of “love” also shifts depending on the qualifiers with which the word appears. According to Louis Crompton, for Lord Byron, whom Xavier Mayne dubbed “an idealistic, Hellenic, romantic homosexual,”49 and for Byron’s contemporaries, the notion of “Greek love” would have carried quite specific homoerotic connotations: [I]f homosexual and gay are both words that would have puzzled Byron’s contemporaries, the expression Greek love…would have been intelligible to them and would have carried resonant historical and literary associations. From moral prejudice, scholars in England had made an effort to keep a knowledge of the ancient Greeks’ approval of male homosexuality from men and women who could not read the relevant documents in their original language. But to anyone as intimately familiar with the classics as Byron was, the phrase would have brought immediately to mind such poetic or historical traditions as the legends of Ganymede and Hyacinth, the exploits of Aristogiton and Harmodius, and the story of Antinous. Indeed, Byron himself refers to all of these in his writings. He was, if anything, even more familiar with the classical tradition of male love as it was reflected in the Latin of Catullus, Horace, Virgil and Petronius. Byron was to translate or quote homoerotic passages from all these writers, in moods that varied from the heroic to the playful. In his Cambridge circle, “Horatian” became a code word for “bisexual.”50

Crompton’s summary is not significant only for its clarification of the connotations of the phrase “Greek love” in the Romantic Period. It also points to how a deep intertextual competence with respect to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome that touched on homoerotic themes was an essential part of the evolution of awareness of a long heritage of

18

The Love of David and Jonathan

same-sex desire. It points further to the way such literature could provide for the cognoscenti a source of coded language for homoeroticism, in a social context in which what we might now term “homophobia” was pervasive. John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), a student of Benjamin Jowett at Oxford, was widely read not only in the literature of the Renaissance and Romantic periods, but especially in the literature of ancient Greece, which he studied in depth under Jowett. By the time Symonds wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics in 1873, “Greek love” could be used to define a very specific phenomenon in ancient Greece (specifically Athens), namely the “noble” and “spiritual” love of an older man for a younger man that was termed in Greek paiderasti/a, and was to be distinguished from both “base” or “sensual” expressions of same-sex eroticism, and from heroic comradeship, as portrayed, for example, between Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad. Thus: The immediate subject of the ensuing inquiry will…be that mixed form of paiderastia upon which the Greeks prided themselves, which had for its heroic ideal the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, but which in historic times exhibited a sensuality unknown to Homer. In treating of this unique product of their civilisation I shall use the term Greek Love, understanding thereby a passionate and enthusiastic attachment subsisting between man and youth, recognised by society and protected by opinion, which, though it was not free from sensuality, did not degenerate into mere licentiousness.51

A Problem in Greek Ethics is an important landmark in the evolving discourse of human sexuality, and is noteworthy not least because it is an attempt to restore an awareness of how same-sex love once functioned in classical Greece, and might again function in the modern West, as a positive and ennobling force in human society. What is most important to note is that the “Greek love” Symonds has in mind cannot, for him, be associated with “effeminacy”52 (malaki/a): “Greek love” indicates, rather, “masculine affection of a permanent and enthusiastic temper.”53 If “Greek love” carried connotations such as these at these particular points in the evolution of modern English, ancient Greek itself had a rich vocabulary of “love” that overlaps imperfectly with both modern English and ancient Hebrew.54 The Greek distinction between e1rwj and fili/a cannot easily be replicated in Hebrew or English, because these languages simply do not provide lexically for an equivalent distinction.55 This is complicated further by the fact that the distinction between the respective word-groups around these two terms, and other Greek words corresponding to “love,” cannot be reduced to simple distinctions such



Introduction 19

as between sexual and non-sexual love. Moreover, they can be used in collocation in a way that obscures the fine distinctions we might like to find between them (cf. e.g. Plutarch, Pel. 18). In the context of Christian theological reflection in particular, Greek words corresponding to “love” have been unhelpfully overloaded with precise nuances and distinctions that the evidence of the use of these words in context does not in fact support.56 Latin, furthermore, seems to have had a fractionally broader vocabulary of love than Hebrew and English, with amor, caritas, dilectio and their cognates, though for Augustine no firm distinction could be maintained between them.57 This is complicated yet further by the various ways in which different languages represent emotions that are, in turn, culturally constituted. In an important article drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Ellen van Wolde has distinguished sharply between the way the Tanakh suggests that “love” (hbh),  bh)) was culturally constituted for speakers of classical Hebrew, and how “love” is generally thus constituted in modern English. Thus, it emerges that the verb bh) functions in a different cultural context and that it is an instantiation of a cultural schema different from our Western idea of love. In the Hebrew Bible “love” is not described as reciprocal, not as love between a man and a woman, but as the sentiment, attitude and behaviour of a man towards a woman. “The geometry of love” often presupposed by the dictionaries and mainly based on a romantic idea of love is not present in the Hebrew Bible. Whereas in Western culture, “love” is primarily associated with women, in the Hebrew Bible it is primarily associated with men.58

In 1 and 2 Samuel Saul is said to “love” (bh)) David (1 Sam. 16:21), Jonathan is twice said to “love” (bh)) David (1 Sam. 18:1; 20:17), and there are several further references to Jonathan’s “love” (hbh)) for David, three more from the viewpoint of the narrator (1 Sam. 18:3; 20:17),59 and one from the mouth of David (2 Sam. 1:26). But it is not clear in what sense Saul and Jonathan “love” David. Does the same sense of bh) obtain on each of the layers of the composite text? Can the reader juggle more than one sense of bh) or hbh) in a single reading? Is the text ambiguous, or polyvalent enough to support this? It is clear that a number of uses of bh) in classical Hebrew overlap to only a very limited extent with the English “love.” Thus in 2 Samuel 19:7, for example, when Joab refers to David’s hatred for “those who love you” (Kybh)), he is referring to the “costly loyalty of those who are subordinate in relation to the king,”60 and in 1 Kings 5:15 Hiram’s “love” for David denotes his political loyalty under the terms of the treaty that exists between the two kings.61

20

The Love of David and Jonathan

The breadth of the semantic range of bh) and its cognates is noteworthy, and relevant as an illustration of the distance that exists between the various possible idioms that must have existed in the living language of which the Tanakh is but a collection of splintered fragments, and the various idioms available in the living languages into which this collection of splintered fragments has been rendered. But this points to two problems, one general and one specific. The general problem is that the Tanakh is a chronologically and dialectically diverse, ideologically determined collection of often composite and sometimes corrupt texts. This makes the Tanakh an exceedingly problematic resource for disambiguating difficult passages in any one of its constituent parts. The specific problem is that the inadequacy of the Tanakh as a resource for dealing with philological uncertainties means that it is very difficult to determine the precise nuance(s) of bh) and hbh) in the David and Jonathan narrative, which has no analogue in classical Hebrew literature. An ideologically determined canon unfortunately contains the bulk of our primary evidence for dealing with thorny philological problems. Thus the risk is that evidence relevant at the level of the canon can be mistaken for evidence relevant at the level of philology.62 What about the term “gay”? Scholars rarely use this word to refer to the relationship between David and Jonathan. There is a preference for a variety of other terms, often inadequately distinguished, such as “homosexuell,” “gleichgeschlechtlich,” and “homoerotisch,” in German, or “homosexual” and “homoerotic” in English. Indeed, the precision implied by this limited range of terms is itself a recent phenomenon: until the term “homosexual” entered English usage in the late nineteenth century, there was a profusion of terminology relating to same-sex desire and same-sex erotic relationships. As Alan Bray remarks in his influential study of the evidence for “homosexuality” in Renaissance England (accounting for the transition from the kjv to the rsv in the translation of malakoi/ and a)rsenokoi/tai in 1 Cor. 6:9):63 It was not until the 1890s that the term homosexual first began to be used in English, and none of its predecessors now survive in common speech: ganymede, pathic, cinaedus, catamite, bugger, ingle, sodomite – such words survive if at all in legal forms or deliberate obscenity, or in the classical and theological contexts from which they were drawn. They are creatures of their times. The provenance of the older terms is that amalgam of Christianity and the classical world characteristic of the Renaissance; that of the later term the new psychology of the late nineteenth century.64

What Bray points to here is what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick – in a work that takes the conclusions of Foucault’s History of Sexuality as “axiomatic”65



Introduction 21

– subsequently called a “sudden, radical condensation of sexual categories” that not only resulted in a limiting of the language available for sexual activity and desire, but also in the arbitrary linkage of “sexual orientation” with the gender of object choice rather than with some other dimension of sexual desire or expression. It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of “sexual orientation.” This is not a development that would have been foreseen from the viewpoint of the fin de siècle itself, where a rich stew of male algolagnia, child-love, and autoeroticism, to mention no more of its components, seemed to have as indicative a relation as did homosexuality to the whole, obsessively entertained problematic of sexual “perversion,” or, more broadly, “decadence.”66

The terms that have been used for same-sex desire, moreover, have not developed and succeeded one another in a simple, linear fashion, as if it were merely a matter of an evolution of terms referring to the same thing, because different terms have been used by different groups and different individuals, in various contexts determined by variables such as class, linguistic or literary competence, relation to the tools and agents of repression, the need for discretion, the desire to ostracize through labelling, or the wish, for whatever reason, to lay claim to a particular marker of identity. Terms and labels common in one context – be they “queer,” “bent,” “homo,” “faggot,” “poof,” “gay,” “buller,” “batty boy,” or whatever – may be entirely incomprehensible or open to radical misunderstanding to persons in another context, even at the same time.67 Furthermore, as a result of the peculiarities of the emergence of the modern discourse of human sexuality in Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, terms were either borrowed between German, English, and French, or awkwardly translated from one to another. All such terminology is inadequate,68 but this inadequacy is multilayered. The problems include: the extent to which sexual identities are inborn and innate to a person’s identity (an “essentialist” position) or fluid and primarily determined by socialization (a “social-constructionist” position);69 the limitations of artificially invented terminology faithfully to represent phenomena in the world, especially in social locations far removed from those in which such terminology had been coined; the fluid, evolving

22

The Love of David and Jonathan

character of human languages; the shifts in how human beings are constructed as subjects, and construct themselves as subjects;70 the difference between how “sexuality” is understood in the modern West, and how the various aspects of human experience that now generally fall under that label were understood in cultural contexts more or less removed, geographically and temporally, from the modern West;71 and the extent to which we can meaningfully distinguish between sex, gender, and sexuality as categories.72 Anachronism is an obvious problem here, as with all historicallyoriented analysis, and has been well stated by Emmanuel Cooper with reference to the imposition of modern categories on Renaissance artists whose work has been appropriated as part of the heritage of contemporary same-sex oriented persons: The concept of what constitutes “the homosexual” has altered greatly over the last five hundred years and this has influenced the expression of homosexual desire. For instance, in Renaissance Italy the homosexual as we think of him/her today did not exist. Expressions of love (such as those found in Michelangelo’s poetry for other men) and sexual acts between men were well known, and, if made public, condemned. Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli were accused publicly of such acts. Yet they were thought of as committing such acts rather than as “homosexual.” Since then, particularly in the last one hundred years, a major change has been the emergence of the homosexual as an identity separate from the heterosexual. The term “homosexual,” meaning someone who has an emotional as well as a sexual identity with members of the same sex, was not coined until 1869. The use of the term “gay” to signify the homosexual’s chosen form of identity has only come into widespread use in the West in the last fifteen or twenty years.73

The term “gay,” referring to people, but especially to men who are predominantly or exclusively attracted to, and/or sexually involved with members of their own sex, is thus a relatively recent linguistic shift, and has already undergone a further linguistic shift in some quarters.74 In Theology and Biblical Studies the terms “gay” (for men) and “lesbian” (for women) have been used, but for several reasons issues that could have been dealt with using the terms “gay” or “lesbian” often now fall within the ambit of the reclaimed, formerly pejorative label “queer” – “queer theology,” “queer hermeneutics,” and so on – or the catch-all acronym LGBT/Q (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer).75 This in turn points to an important distinction that addresses the thorny problem of essentialism. Much of the work that has employed categories such as gay/lesbian has had a recuperative purpose, attempting to draw on the resources of the Jewish/Christian traditions to recover



Introduction 23

a heritage for those who wish to claim gay/lesbian positively as an identity while continuing to exist within those traditions. “Queer,” however, points to the inherent instability of all such identities, and problematizes the entire system of male, heterosexual privilege that positive affirmations of gay or lesbian identity can do nothing to shift, for the simply reason that they buy into the homo/heterosexual binary and thus help to perpetuate it. “Queer,” on the other hand, stands for what transcends this binary and can never be contained within it. In the introduction to an important collection of essays exploring the complex borderlines between Jewish, Christian, and queer, Frederick Roden has offered the following summary: As in the humanities, the language of “gay/lesbian” has often moved to that of “queer.” It is important to note that not every gay/lesbian approach is necessarily compatible with a queer one. Certain attempts to reconcile a “tradition” with contemporary categories of identity can be limited, particularly if the idea is to locate the nonheteronormative person too literally within the history. Scripture, law, and practice will inevitably contradict any insertion that fails to be mindful of how desire and identity are experienced differently across time and space. Queer theology’s strength is its use of metaphor to authorize and explain difference rather than to make accommodations between past and present.76

As will become clear in the next chapter, both approaches have been taken to the David and Jonathan narrative, with significantly different hermeneutical and political implications. The key problem with “gay/lesbian” is not simply with the implicit essentialism of such terminology, but with the reinscription of the binary oppositions between gay/lesbian and straight, and between non-heteronormative and heteronormative, that fails to observe the troubled, fluid boundary between these categories. It also fails to observe the presence within a heteronormative culture of the queer, a presence that disrupts, and highlights the artificiality and arbitrariness of, the heteronormative.77 Furthermore, while gay/lesbian have connotations explicitly of sexual identity, this is no longer necessarily the case with “queer.”78 The fluidity of language stands in a complex relationship here with the perceived fluidity or fixity of sexual identity. But surely “David and Jonathan” are unproblematic. Unfortunately not. Which David and Jonathan are we referring to? Real, flesh and blood Israelites of the period of the early monarchy, perhaps the late eleventh century bce, or the literary characters named David and Jonathan in the narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel,79 whenever that was written? The connection between the two is extremely problematic: there is no evidence at all that a relationship between David and Jonathan existed outside the biblical narrative,80 and only slender evidence outside the mass of biblical

24

The Love of David and Jonathan

material, namely the difficult ninth-century bce Aramaic inscription from Tell Dan, that a figure called David existed, ruled over Israel, and founded the dynasty that ruled in Judah until the Babylonian invasions of the early sixth century bce. The very fact, however, that such an issue can be raised points to a deeper question of authority. What is at stake for the reader, the consumer, the user of the text of 1 and 2 Samuel, is if a historical David and Jonathan existed and had a relationship of some description with one another or not? Would it be more or less of a problem for a modern gay reader, troubled by the apparent absence of positive role models in the Tanakh, to have to reckon with the possibility that this relationship is no more than a figment of a rich literary imagination, than it would for a conservative, non-gay reader irrevocably committed to the absolute historical veracity of his/her Bible to have to reckon with the possibility that the historical David and Jonathan were actually sexually involved with one another? That is, does the authority lie with the text or with the historical veracity of what the text represents? If the question of authority is neither here nor there for a particular reader, would there be any reason to be concerned about the relationship between David and Jonathan at all? To talk about “the biblical text,” however, is itself problematic, because in the case of 1 and 2 Samuel in particular, it is not at all clear what text is being referred to. The Masoretic Text of 1 and 2 Samuel is notoriously problematic textually, and is almost certainly composite. Are there, then, significant differences between the various redactional layers with respect to the relationship between David and Jonathan? To what extent do later redactional layers already reflect within the biblical text itself – to buy into this problematic construct for a moment – a process of interpretation of the earlier layers? This applies likewise to the versions: how is the David and Jonathan narrative presented differently in the Greek uncials, in the later Lucianic recension, in Targum Jonathan, in the Vulgate? Any translation reflects a process of interpretation; it is, in the words of Umberto Eco, “…an actualized and manifested interpretation.”81 How, then, do the David and Jonathan of the versions reflect an interpretive process that alters the way their relationship is represented? David and Jonathan – by whom I mean David and Jonathan together, not as individuals – have, furthermore, had a rich, multi-faceted afterlife, in visual art, music, and literature, and in contemporary debates among Jews and Christians as to the nature and import of their relationship. Unless we take the step of dividing the “text” radically from the history of its interpretation, reception, effect, use, and influence, we must reckon with David and Jonathan as characters whose relationship has lived on



Introduction 25

and continues to live in ways the creator of their literary personae can no longer control. Given that the text of 1 and 2 Samuel is almost certainly composite, and that the evidence of manuscripts such as 4QSama from Qumran, together with the reworking of the narrative by the likes of Pseudo-Philo and Josephus, suggests an ongoing process of supplementation, it seems difficult to justify making a clear distinction between the text and its interpretation. Indeed, the process of interpretation is part of what constitutes 1 and 2 Samuel as a text. It is also not clear that a rigid distinction should be made between the reception history of 1 and 2 Samuel outside the academy – its außerwissenschaftliche Rezeption, if you will – and its wissenschaftlich interpretation within the academy, nor that a solid line be drawn between pre-critical and critical modes of interpretation. It is certainly possible to observe a degree of critical distance, including a significant measure of ethical self-criticism, between oneself as an interpreter, the text one is interpreting, and the other interpreters with whom one is engaged in dialogue, but every element of this process is bound up with the immensely complex interaction between a text and its readers. The borderlines we draw between different modes of interpretation and between different periods in the history of interpretation are historically determined inventions, though they cannot, by the same token, be regarded as random flights of fancy. What of the verb, “Were…?” Once we have decided whether or not our concern is with the relationship between David and Jonathan in the narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel or with the historical events that might lie behind that narrative, the goal would then seem to be to determine the nature of the relationship between the two men in one or other of those domains (or in both). The form of the question, however, conceals hidden agendas. The verb is in the simple past tense. The implication is that the relationship between David and Jonathan belongs in the past, notwithstanding the fact that this relationship has endured a long and complex afterlife and has issued in a problematic question in the present. Although the narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel began to emerge at a fixed, though more or less indeterminate point in the past, the text continues to exist and is the object of scrutiny in the present. The literary David and Jonathan are encountered by the reader, consumer, or user of the text in the here and now. A further implication would seem to be that the nature of this past relationship has some kind of import in the present, otherwise why would the question be asked? In whose interests, then, is it to pose and try to answer such a question? Who will benefit, or be in some way affected by the answer? Then there is the question of authority. Why

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The Love of David and Jonathan

should an answer to this question carry weight in the present? What authority do the narrative into which the relationship between David and Jonathan is woven, and the events represented in that narrative carry? If the question is of no more than a matter of antiquarian curiosity, why should anyone care whether it is asked, or how it is answered? In point of fact, it has rarely, if ever, been a question of antiquarian curiosity. The nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan has become a key plank in many of the arguments either supporting or opposing the acceptance of persons in same-sex relationships in communities of faith.82 It is with this point that Markus Zehnder introduced his first, influential article on the David and Jonathan narrative: Biblical texts that, supposedly or actually, can refer to the theme “homosexuality” have received heightened attention in recent years. This attention is doubtless connected with the prominent position given to this theme in the discussion in both the church and society in general. Among these texts just referred to the David-Jonathan-narratives exhibit a peculiarity inasmuch as their reference to the theme “homosexuality” is clearly disputed.83

Thus, for Zehnder, it is a modern agenda, together with the highly questionable relation of the David and Jonathan narrative to it, which makes his discussion both possible and necessary.84 Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli, who are Zehnder’s principal targets, are clearly concerned to demonstrate that the David and Jonathan narrative offers a biblical example of a “partnership-like” mutual relationship, “as homosexual persons in our contemporary cultural context desire and seek to achieve,”85 in contrast with Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, which according to them probably refer to a form of coercive sex.86 Likewise, in a response to the use of biblical “prooftexts” in letters to a local paper prior to the legalization of civil unions for same-sex couples in Vermont,87 Susan Ackerman notes that, “Supporters of the legislation…pointed out … that the Bible celebrates a homosexual relationship in 1 Samuel’s stories of David and Jonathan.”88 This use of the biblical text is made possible not by a tradition of learned exegesis, but by a non-academic appropriation of the text. While Ackerman laments that the opinion of scholars was not sought on the meaning of the various biblical texts cited in correspondence, the more significant point is that the David and Jonathan narratives had long before taken on a life of their own, regardless of scholarly exegesis. This use of ancient texts to support a modern political agenda is, moreover, not a particularly recent development, and certainly not as recent as Zehnder and others seem to suppose. John Addington Symonds’s A Problem in Greek Ethics must be understood as a corrective work of historical criticism directed



Introduction 27

to a context in which same-sex desire was becoming increasingly subject to legal and medical categorization. Symonds began a trend in this work that has been followed, perhaps unconsciously, by many others who have sought to ground their views on same-sex relationships in ancient precedents. Derrick Sherwin Bailey’s 1955 work Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition cannot be adequately understood without reference to the developments that led to the 1957 Wolfenden Report and the subsequent decriminalization in England and Wales of homosexual acts in private between consenting adults.89 More recently, the discussion of contemporary Catholicism in the conclusion to Roden’s Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture shows that the historical dimension of his work is defined by and oriented towards a range of contemporary issues in the Roman Church.90 B. R. Burg’s 2001 book Gay Warriors cannot be adequately understood without reference to the debate on the status of gays and lesbians in the contemporary United States military.91 And finally, the use that has been made of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the David and Jonathan narrative as resources for understanding combat stress and the exceptionally deep bonds formed between soldiers who have fought alongside one another in combat falls into a similar category,92 that of historical sources whose use and interpretation are determined by contemporary interests and agendas. In the last of these examples, it is noteworthy that one particular modern agenda has no need of a sexual reading of the ancient stories of Achilles and Patroclus and David and Jonathan. There is another dimension to the historical situatedness of this question in the current moment of biblical scholarship. The recent efflorescence within the Biblical Studies guild, and within communities of faith who are interested parties with respect to the work of that guild, of studies connected with sexuality is a reflection of the emergence of modern discourses around sexuality more generally. Before this, readers certainly brought particular concerns to their engagement with the David and Jonathan narrative, and interpreted it through the lens of a particular, historically determined range of codes, but it would have been impossible to interpret the text in relation to the precise question with which we have begun. It is noteworthy that while sex is an important factor in many biblical texts, the Tanakh offers nothing in the way of a discourse of human sexuality: what we have instead are scattered texts, artificially linked by canon and tradition, which have been press-ganged into the service of modern religious debates about sex. Between the text and us, moreover, in the post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment West at least, there stands a rich and complex web of discourse around human sexuality, with respect to which Foucault remarked

28

The Love of David and Jonathan From the singular imperialism that compels everyone to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse, to the manifold mechanisms which, in the areas of economy, pedagogy, medicine, and justice, incite, extract, distribute, and institutionalize the sexual discourse, an immense verbosity is what our civilization has required and organized. Surely no other type of society has ever accumulated – and in such a relatively short span of time – a similar quantity of discourses concerned with sex. It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that we have never said enough on the subject, that, through inertia or submissiveness, we conceal from ourselves the blinding evidence, and that what is essential always eludes us, so that we must always start out again in search of it. It is possible that where sex is concerned, the most long-winded, the most impatient of societies is our own.93

The modern debate around the possible sexual dimensions of the David and Jonathan narrative is a reflection of a prior explosion of discourse about sexuality in general. It is not simply a matter, however, of the collision between a reticent ancient text and legions of modern interpreters enmeshed in societies in the grip of a grotesque attack of logorrhoea apropos of sex. It is also a matter of the limits of textual interpretation and, importantly, both the drive decisively to delimit the meaning of the text and the drive to determine where David and Jonathan are situated with respect to sexual activity and bodily desire are bound up with strategies of power that aim to determine, once and for all, that this is the way things naturally are. The form of the question with which we began, at least in the stark form in which I have posed it, admits no range of options. The answer may be positive or negative. We are not offered the option of choosing to read the narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel for ambiguity or polyvalence. Of course, a reading of 1 and 2 Samuel may confront the interpreter with ineluctable evidence of ambiguity, polyvalence, or openness, but that is yet to be decided as a result of the interpreter’s encounter with the text. This points to an important tension in the way scholars and other interested parties treat the texts under their scrutiny. Even though the text has a limiting function in the interpretive process, avoiding certain possibilities while suggesting others, modern interpreters of biblical texts in particular often approach them with predetermined assumptions about their degree of closedness or openness. These assumptions may have nothing much to do with the properties of the text as such: because 1 and 2 Samuel is a biblical text it is assumed to mean a particular thing or to admit a particular, tightly prescribed range of possibilities. Since the rise of postmodern approaches to the biblical texts the situation has



Introduction 29

altered markedly, but to take a stand of any sort in relation to the issue of what range of possible interpretations is permissible for a given text itself reflects a range of preconceptions and presuppositions about the limits of interpretation.94 What about the broader context in which the David and Jonathan material appears? In modern scholarship, a particular range of questions has focused on David and Jonathan without paying due attention to the broader narrative context. There is a narrative of David and Jonathan, but it exists within a broader narrative concerned with the demise of Saul and the rise of David. It is possible to ask questions about the erotic or sexual aspect of the relationship between the two men, but how meaningful is it to ask such questions without paying due attention to the role David and Jonathan play together in the wider narrative of which the portrayal of their relationship forms a part? For readers approaching the text from some kind of confessing standpoint, an additional problem might be created by the attempt to interpret the David and Jonathan narrative separately from its reception in orthodox rabbinic literature such as the Mishnah and Talmud, or from its place in a Christian canon whose interpretation is governed by a christocentric or trinitarian hermeneutic, or by an interpretive code that points to various senses of scripture that enable the books of the Old Testament to be read as Christian scripture. For the Venerable Bede, for example, and more recently for Wilhelm Vischer,95 it is not the David and Jonathan narrative in isolation that is important, but the narrative in the context of a canonical body of works that somehow bears witness to divine self-disclosure. It is thus not simply the literary context of the David and Jonathan narrative within 1 and 2 Samuel, or within the Deuteronomistic History, or within the entire narrative complex of Genesis to Kings that is at issue. The David and Jonathan narrative is only part of a much more complex intertextual matrix. Furthermore, there exist several re-writings of the David and Jonathan narrative that seem to function independently of both the wider narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel, and its canonical contexts. The King David Report would be a good example of this kind of transformation, as would Stephen Schecter’s explicitly erotic poetic rewriting.96 The David and Jonathan narrative has also been excerpted from its canonical context and treated, in whole or in part, as a foundational element in gay anthologies and even a gay “canon.” These uses of the David and Jonathan narrative no longer belong within the delimiting framework of a theological canon or tradition of interpretation, and thus cannot any longer be controlled by that canon or tradition. The existence of such anthologies, and the place of David and Jonathan within them, must surely create problems

30

The Love of David and Jonathan

for interpreters whose ideological positions would lead them to view such uses as the imposition of an alien hermeneutic.97 Our question – were David and Jonathan gay lovers? – is wilfully contrived, posed deliberately in modern terms to serve as a foil in order to raise a host of methodological issues. It is, however, by no means random. Rather, as Jobling implied in his “commentary,” it is a question for a particular time and place, conditioned by a range of factors that made it possible for it to be asked now. In 1995 Walter Dietrich and Thomas Naumann began their survey of scholarly views on David and Jonathan by asking, “Is it a lack of respect for the Bible or a necessity in our time to consider whether Jonathan’s love, which David praises in his touching lament for his fallen friend as ‘more wonderful than the love of women,’ was homoerotic love?”98 Similarly, in his important 1999 article, Martti Nissinen gave shape to his own engagement with the David and Jonathan narratives by posing a series of questions, which he only partially answered. His starting point was the problematic use of the adjective “homosexual” (homosexuell) and the noun “homosexuality” (Homosexualität) in connection with the relationship between David and Jonathan by Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli,99 and Markus Zehnder.100 If, then, the term “homosexuality” is needed in connection with the DavidJonathan scenes, it must first of all be clear what is required in order to be able to label the relationship of these two men properly as “homosexual.” Which features of the relationship are emphasized? The personal sexual orientation of the participants, or their concrete behaviour, or both? If it is not concerned with orientation, but only with behaviour, which kinds of same-sex behaviour are to be labelled “(homo)sexual” – all expressions of affection and desire, or only intimate physical contact, or exclusively sexual union? Can the word only be applied to the relationship between the two men, or does the societal assessment of this relationship also necessarily play a role; in other words, is there a “homosexuality” apart from the societal interpretation of the behaviour of the participants? Who needs an answer to the question whether the relationship of David and Jonathan was “homosexual”? Why is this question even put? These questions are not hair-splitting, if we are seriously asking after the applicability of the term “homosexuality” to the sources of the ancient world.101

This is an exceptionally clear presentation of the problem. Nissinen is concerned with determining the kind of relationship represented by the narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel, and thus does not treat all the questions he poses with equal depth. Indeed, he does not fully answer his final two questions. This is the starting point for the present book. I am not concerned here with determining once and for all what kind of relationship between David and Jonathan the author(s) of 1 and 2 Samuel intended to



Introduction 31

portray. Indeed, as Chapter 3 will make clear, I do not think this can be determined at all. Instead, I am interested in a range of metaquestions that have, as yet, been dealt with only partially. 3. What this book is, and is not This book is concerned with what it means to address the issue of whether there was a sexual relationship between David and Jonathan as a question of modern exegesis. It breaks down into three separate, but ultimately related, discussions. The first, the focus of Chapter 2, deals with a group of scholarly studies of David and Jonathan that attempt either to defend, or oppose, a sexual construal of their relationship. It is not a solemn account of research, a Forschungsbericht, that might establish the point scholarly research on the David and Jonathan narratives has reached thus far, what questions have been asked, how they have been answered, in what areas consensus exists, in what areas is their still doubt, disagreement, or confusion, and so on. Such an account has its place,102 just not in this book. Instead, I offer a kind of metacommentary, that bears a certain family resemblance to the studies of, for example, David Clines on scholarly commentaries on Amos,103 Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes on commentaries on Hosea 2,104 Deryn Guest on the academic/ecclesiastical debates on biblical texts concerned with homosexuality,105 and more recently Gillian Townsley on the assumptions scholars make about gender and sexuality in their discussions of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16.106 It seeks to determine how and why scholars disagree on the nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan, what agendas determine their approaches and conclusions, and what assumptions they bring to the texts. As such, it can be read as an extended, and updated, footnote to Mirko Peisert’s criticism of readings of the David and Jonathan narrative that categorically exclude a homoerotic dimension: “It seems to me that this way of dealing with the texts is a good example of the still strong proscription (Tabuisierung) of homosexuality in the sphere of Church and Theology, and of the ideology of ‘natural’ heterosexuality. Is it the anxiety about that which should not be?”107 Where I differ from Peisert is in not believing that affirming a homoerotic reading of the narrative necessarily solves the problem. In Chapter 3 I turn from scholars to the text, asking what it is about the text of the David and Jonathan narrative that makes it open to readings that perceive the homoerotic in the relationship of the two men. In other words, to what extent is the narrative “open,” and to what extent is it “closed”? Where are the limits of interpretation? This is the most technical part of the book, and assumes at least a passing acquaintance with

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The Love of David and Jonathan

classical Hebrew, though the argument as a whole can be grasped without such knowledge. In Chapter 4, I turn from scholars and the text to the reception history of the narrative, tracing the way the narrative, and the “David and Jonathan” trope taken by itself without its narrative context, gradually came to acquire connotations of same-sex erotic desire. I am particularly interested in the way David and Jonathan came to be read alongside ancient Greek and Roman examples of same-sex comradeship and same-sex desire, so that by the time E. M. Forster wrote his novel Maurice in 1913–1914, it could be assumed that the biblical narrative of David and Jonathan could be read as a story about two male lovers. The overall argument of the book can be stated simply. David and Jonathan have come to be understood as same-sex lovers by some readers and biblical critics for three reasons: because this reading serves certain ideological agendas at work in synagogue, church, academy, and society; because the text is open enough for different generations of readers to bring such an understanding to it without doing irreparable violence to the text; and because, due to the particular way it has been transmitted and received, the David and Jonathan narrative has gradually acquired homoerotic connotations that have, in turn, influenced the way the narrative has been read.108 It would be misleading to see this as simply a question of later readers imposing alien ideas on the text and thus misconstruing it. Rather, the meaning of the text shifts and settles, and then shifts again depending on who, in what context, for what reasons, under what conscious and unconscious influences, with what sort of linguistic and literary competence, and alongside which consciously or unconsciously appropriated intertexts, is construing the meaning. A few words are in order about what this book is not. Most obviously, it is not an attempt to determine the nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan. In point of fact, shocking though it may appear for a biblical scholar to admit, this issue is of only mild antiquarian interest to me, and I have no vested interest in the answer. My faint “antiquarian” interest in the nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan is not, though, wholly separate from an aesthetic interest in the richly poetic narratives of 1 and 2 Samuel,109 nor is it separate from the vested interest I most certainly do have in why others want to determine the nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan and, more generally, in the ways in which scholars and other interested parties interpret, use, and claim ownership of putatively authoritative religious texts. In relation to this, this book might be understood as the outcome of a fundamentally anti-homophobic project, perhaps even as the result of my wrestling with the last vestiges of my own internalized homophobia. This



Introduction 33

is despite the fact that I see no anti-homophobic mileage to be gained in forcing the narrative to appear unambiguously as portraying a gay relationship. The text must be apprehended as far as possible for what it is, not for what it is not. The anti-homophobic dimension of this work is to be found most clearly in the attempt to unravel the ideological commitments that have shaped the scholarly use of the David and Jonathan narrative, in the attempt to unshackle the narrative from the forces that have closed its meaning down, and in the attempt to trace how the memory of David and Jonathan has helped to shape a very modern sense of an ancient heritage of love between men. But moreover, it is to be found in the idea that the ways in which same-sex relationships, regardless of the presence or absence of an obvious erotic element, have been negotiated across cultures through time cannot be reduced to a single, unitary, normative category, perhaps least of all the category to which we – whoever “we” happens to be – would prefer to reduce them. If one thing has forcibly struck me more than anything else in my research for this study, it is just how extraordinarily peculiar it is to read these ancient texts and their interpreters from the vantage point of a society in which heterosexuality and its cognate institution of opposite-sex marriage are not only normal but normative, naturalized, culturally central, to the point where alternatives are measured and judged against that rule. I have come to wonder whether, rather than modern Western notions of homosexuality anachronistically shaping homoerotic readings of the David and Jonathan narrative, it is the modern Western ideology of heteronormativity that is more truly peculiar, anachronistically excluding the homoerotic from a narrative that may have more than enough room for it. Yet to assert this is in no way to suggest that the use of more or less homoerotically charged language in this narrative entails an explicitly sexual relationship between the two men. This book also makes no attempt to resolve larger questions about the nature of gender, sex, and sexuality (whatever they may be), or of “biblical teaching” on sexual ethics (if there is such a thing, which I seriously doubt),110 nor does it seek to come up with a nomenclature for describing ancient erotic relationships that everyone should be able to agree upon (a largely futile task).111 Furthermore, with the exception of parts of Chapter 3, this is not even a book about a biblical narrative, but rather about its interpreters, and about the effects of its transmission. Perhaps, then, it is best understood as an attempt, through one particular example, to understand what biblical scholarship might be, and why it operates the way it does.

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The Love of David and Jonathan Notes

1. Robert Drake, The Gay Canon (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 16. 2. Anon, “Audio: BBC mars anniversary of KJB with gay slur,” 13 January, 2011 (http://www.christian.org.uk/news/audio-bbc-mars-400th-anniversary-of-kjv-biblewith-gay-slur/), retrieved 17 January, 2011. These comments head a list of allegedly anti-Christian remarks made publicly by the BBC. 3. Howard Brenton’s comments were part of a long series of readings from, and comments on the King James Bible broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 9 January, 2011 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio4/2011/01/king_james_bible_podcasts.html, accessed 17 January, 2011). Though no longer accessible via the Radio 4 Blog, the relevant portion of Brenton’s broadcast was made available on the Christian Institute website (see the link in n. 2 above), and on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Fp1ySjAQoBM, accessed 17 January, 2011; I wish to thank Deane Galbraith for sharing this link with me). Brenton’s reference to the use of the David and Jonathan narrative in the Knesset may be to Yael Dayan’s quotation of 2 Sam. 1:26 in the context of a debate in the Knesset on homosexuals in the IDF on 10 November, 1993 (see e.g. Robert Block, “Gay King David theory starts Goliath of a row,” The Independent [11 November, 1993], http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/gay-kingdavid-theory-starts-goliath-of-a-row-1472290.html, accessed 17 January, 2011), which caused immediate offence to members of the Shas party present, and which itself subsequently became a bone of contention between supporters (e.g., Sharonah Fredericko, “Homosexuality, King David, and Israeli Pop: A Dilemma Judaism Prefers to Ignore,” Doing Zionism [29 June, 2003], http://www.doingzionism.org/resources/ view.asp?id=1463, accessed 17 January, 2011), and opponents (e.g., Paul Eidelberg, “Israel’s Most Dangerous Enemies,” Jewish Magazine [November 2002], http://www. jewishmag.com/61mag/israelsenemy/israelsenemy.htm, accessed 17 January, 2011), of gay rights in Israel. It is worth noting that it is only 2 Sam. 1:26, and just possibly 1 Sam. 20:17, depending on how one construes the ambiguous syntax, that have any real hint that David was “in love with,” or even felt anything at all, for Jonathan. Elsewhere David is the object of the love of others. 4. Death at a Funeral (dir. Frank Oz; 91 mins.; Verve Pictures, 2007). An American version of the film was released in 2010 under the same title (dir. Neil LaBute; 92 mins.; Parabolic Pictures Inc., 2010), which also uses 1 Sam. 18:1-4 at the equivalent point in the film, though the biblical text seems to function slightly less clearly than in the English version as a hermeneutical key to interpreting the private life of the deceased. 5. 1 Sam. 18:1-4 (kjv). Note the repetition of part of verse 1 between verses 3 and 4. 6. Drake, The Gay Canon, 3–18. In a massive survey by Noel I. Garde of “notable” same-sex oriented figures from political and cultural history (Jonathan to Gide: The Homosexual in History [New York: Vantage, 1964]), Jonathan (p. 7) and André Gide (pp. 693–97) provide the chronological bookends. Reflecting the fact that David is never himself said unambiguously to “love” Jonathan, David is omitted, on the grounds that he was “[t]he object of another’s homoerotic affections, without any substantial reference to similar dispositions on his own part” (p. 3). In his 1896 tragedy Saül Gide himself, of course, portrayed the relationship between Jonathan and



Introduction 35

David as both homoerotic and mutual, and Saul’s jealousy of this relationship is rooted in his own sexual attraction to David. In between these bookends, there is a vast array of recuperated same-sex oriented figures. 7. In André Gide’s novel Corydon (trans. R. Howard; New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1983), 4, it is a photographic reproduction of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” and a portrait of Walt Whitman that bear the equivalent connotations for the narrator when he enters Corydon’s apartment, highlighting the difference in codes between the implied early twentieth century reader of Gide’s dialogue, and the implied early twenty-first century viewer of Death at a Funeral. For Neil Bartlett, a photo of Marlon Brando serves the same function (Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde [London: Penguin, 1993; 1st edn, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988], 24). For Wolfgang Popp, Michelangelo’s statue of David bears these connotations: “In Wohnungen Homosexueller galt und gilt [der David des Michelangelos] als Signal zur dezenten Offenbarung der sexuellen/erotischen Orientierung des Wohnungsinhabers” (“Der biblische David als schwule Ikone der Kunst und Literatur,” in Ikonen des Begehrens: Bildsprachen der männlichen und weiblichen Homosexualität in Literatur und Kunst [ed. G. Härle, W. Popp and A. Runde; Stuttgart: M & P, 1997], 67). 8. E.g., Julian Morgenstern, “David and Jonathan,” JBL 78 (1959), 322; Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, King and Messiah: The Civil and Sacral Legitimation of the Israelite Kings (ConBOT, 8; Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1976), 34; David Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative: Three Structural Analyses in the Old Testament (JSOTSup, 7; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1978), 12; idem, 1 Samuel (Berit Olam; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 93–99, 114–15; P. Kyle McCarter, I Samuel: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB, 8; New York: Doubleday, 1980), 305; Diana V. Edelman, King Saul in the Historiography of Judah (JSOTSup, 121; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), 136–37, 318; Yaron Peleg, “Love at First Sight? David, Jonathan, and the Biblical Politics of Gender,” JSOT 30 (2005), 181. This view is often asserted rather than backed up with evidence from relevant comparative sources. In a recent article Gary Stansell, for example, can assert, “Scholars agree that this symbolic action reverses their status, for David now possesses the emblems of power and perhaps succession. Jonathan has in effect abdicated his right to succession” (“David and his Friends: Social-Scientific Perspectives on the David-Jonathan Friendship,” BTB 41 [2011], 123; italics mine). Well, maybe; but it is not enough to cite scholarly agreement in this way without discussing the evidentiary basis on which the probity of the interpretation stands. For an alternative – admittedly not unproblematic – reading in light of the bond between Glaukos and Diomedes in the Iliad, see Chapter 3, pp. 185–86, 257 nn. 285 and 290 below. 9. E.g., Theodore W. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel (London: Continuum, 2005), 25. 10. The distinction I am making here is akin to that between the “reader” and the “analyst” with which Ellen van Wolde precedes her painstaking and illuminating semiotic analysis of Gen. 2:4b–3:24. The analyst’s role is to employ a carefully worked-out method, which in van Wolde’s case is drawn from the works of Algirden Julien Greimas and (especially) Charles Sanders Peirce, to clarify, in a way that can be tested against the evidence of the text, how the text and the reader interact in the production of meaning. See Ellen van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3: A

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Semiotic Theory and Method of Analysis Applied to the Story of the Garden of Eden (SSN, 25; Assen: Van Gorcum, 1989), 71. Cf. the distinction between the “traditional exegete” and the “intended reader” on p. 121. 11. Priest (dir. Antonia Bird; 108 mins.; BBC Films, 1994). 12. Saved! (dir. Brian Dannelly; 92 mins.; United Artists, 2004). 13. Prayers for Bobby (dir. Russell Mulcahy; 86 mins.; Once Upon a Time Films, 2009). 14. Trembling before G-d (dir. Sandi Simcha Dubowski; 84 mins.; Pretty Pictures, 2001). 15. Dir. Diarmuid Lawrence; 120 mins.; BBC, 2008. 16. For a fuller synopsis of what is a rather more complex plot than my brief outline suggests, see http://uk-tv-guide.com/pick-of-the-day/22+October+2008/dramasilent-witness-judgement-part-1-of-2-unravelling-the-truth/ and http://uk-tv-guide. com/pick-of-the-day/23+October+2008/drama-silent-witness-judgement-part-2-of2-grim-discoveries/ (both retrieved 25 March, 2010). The Silent Witness website has no mention of David and Jonathan in its synopsis (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f3nzx and http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f3pnj, both retrieved 25 March, 2010). In Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen (London: Penguin, 2009; 1st edn New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), which deals in a very different way with tensions between different communities of immigrant orthodox Jews in 1940s Brooklyn, the deep friendship between Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders is associated with David and Jonathan by Danny’s sister – “She was forever teasing Danny and me and referring to us as David and Jonathan” (p. 192) – though there is no explicit suggestion of sexual desire between them. By contrast, in a series of case studies of “uncomplicated Greek love affairs,” J. Z. Eglinton notes David and Jonathan as having been regarded as a positive precedent by a “Rabbi Chaim M.,” a conservative rabbi who, according to Eglinton, had engaged in an unimpeded paiderastic love affair (Greek Love [New York: Oliver Layton, 1964], 159). 17. King David (dir. Bruce Beresford; 114 mins.; Paramount Pictures, 1985). 18. Kings (dir. Francis Lawrence, Ed Bianchi, Tucker Gates, and Clark Johnston; 556 mins.; Universal Media Studios, 2009). 19. Stefan Heym, The King David Report (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1972), 32. Heym uses 1 and 2 Samuel to reflect obliquely the political situation in the DDR under Erich Honecker. He wrote it in English, translating it into German as Der König David Bericht (Munich: Kindler Verlag, 1972). 20. Heym, King David Report, 35. 21. Heym, King David Report, 9. 22. That said, the writer of the series, Michael Green, suggests in a 2009 interview with After Elton that it was modern day Israel that served as the inspiration for Gilboa. See “ ‘Kings’ Deserves a Gold Crown – But Does the Character of the Gay Son?,” an interview with Michael Green posted on the After Elton website on 16 March, 2009 (http://www.afterelton.com/people/2009/3/michaelgreeninterview, accessed 29 October, 2010). 23. See the URL in n. 22 above. 24. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 below will deal with the biblical text and its reception in greater detail. Here we are concerned with how they are perceived and used in Kings. 25. See Brent Hartinger, “ ‘Kings’ Warps the Story of David and Jonathan,” 16



Introduction 37

March, 2009 (http://www.afterelton.com/TV/2009/3/kingswronggaypart, retrieved 29 October, 2010). 26. 1 Sam. 20:41. 27. 2 Sam. 1:26. 28. David Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965), 40. 29. Lev. 18:22. Cf. Lev. 20:13. 30. Jn 14:2. 31. Gen. 19:24. 32. Jn 8:7. 33. Lev. 18:26. 34. Mt. 7:1; Lk. 6:37. 35. Mt. 18:21. 36. Mt. 18:22. 37. Gen. 19:26. 38. Jn 11:35. 39. Cf. the article from the Christian Institute website cited above (n. 2). Among scholarly works, Ronald Youngblood’s comments on 2 Sam. 1:26 may serve as an example: “David’s further statement that Jonathan’s ‘love’ for him was ‘more wonderful than that of women,’ although occasionally (and perversely) understood in a homosexual sense, should rather be understood to have covenantal connotations, ‘love’ in such contexts meaning ‘covenantal/political loyalty’ ”: “1, 2 Samuel,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary (ed. F. E. Gaebelein and R. P. Polcyn; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992), 3:816 (italics mine). Quite how a primarily covenantal/political bond could inspire such an outpouring of intense emotion on the poet’s part Youngblood omits to explain. The title of this section, incidentally, is taken from an excellent 1999 article by Martti Nissinen (see n. 40 below). 40. The old and rather tired conflict between “essentialist” and “social constructionist” approaches to issues connected with “sexuality” will not be rehearsed in this book, though it will be blatantly obvious at many points that I lean more decidedly in the direction of some form of the latter than the former. Works most relevant to the present study would include David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); David M. Halperin, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,” in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (London: Routledge, 1990), 15–40; idem, “‘Homosexuality’: A Cultural Construct (An Exchange with Richard Schneider),” in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 41–53; and esp. his brilliant study How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Holt N. Parker, “The Myth of the Heterosexual: Anthropology and Sexuality for Classicists,” Arethusa 34 (2001), 313–62. Although “social constructionist” is a label that could not unproblematically be affixed to Michel Foucault (Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 8), the three published volumes of his History of Sexuality have been massively influential. The first volume, Introduction to the History of Sexuality (trans. R. Hurley; New York: Random House, 1978), offered an important account of the explosion of discourse about sex in Europe since the early seventeenth century, which is also, notably, the context in which other key intellectual currents such as historical criticism of

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the Bible flowered. The second volume, focusing particularly on sexuality in ancient Greece (The Use of Pleasure [trans. R. Hurley; New York: Random House, 1985]), was in turn strongly influenced by the first edition of Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, 2nd edn [1st edn, 1978]). The works of Dover, Foucault, and to a lesser extent Halperin have recently been subjected to incisive, and occasionally sardonic, critique by James Davidson in The Greeks and Greek Love (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2007), 101–66. Daniel Boyarin has made a particularly strong case for a social constructionist approach to the categorization of eroticism in biblical, and subsequently talmudic cultures: “Are There Any Jews in ‘The History of Sexuality’?,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1993), 333– 55 (the title of Boyarin’s article alludes to Foucault’s work). On the essentialist vs. social constructionist issue with respect to the David and Jonathan narratives see Martti Nissinen, “Die Liebe von David und Jonatan als Frage der modernen Exegese,” Bib 80 (1999), 250–63 (esp. p. 251); Thomas Naumann, “David und die Liebe,” in König David: Biblische Schlüsselfigur und europäische Leitgestalt (ed. W. Dietrich and H. Herkommer; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003), 63; Susan Ackerman, When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Story of Gilgamesh and David (GTR; New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 1–30; Anthony Heacock, “Wrongly Framed? The ‘David and Jonathan Narrative’ and the Writing of Biblical Homosexuality [sic],” The Bible and Critical Theory 3.2 (2007), 22.1–22.14; Markus Zehnder, “Observations on the Relationship between David and Jonathan and the Debate on Homosexuality,” WTJ 69 (2007), 127–74 (esp. pp. 131–34); cf. Martti Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective (trans. K. Stjerna; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998). Heacock criticizes both Nissinen and Ackerman for failing to live up to their anti-essentialist claims, but part of the problem is that it is exceptionally difficult to maintain one or other position with absolute consistency. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sought to move beyond the impasse, switching instead to the language of “minoritizing” vs. “universalizing” approaches to issues of sexuality (Epistemology of the Closet [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990], 40–44; cf. pp. 85–90). Sedgwick is particularly clear on the homophobic use that can be, and has been made of the social constructionist position (Epistemology of the Closet, 41; cf. Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love, 149–51), but that simply means that we need to be as self-critical and ethically aware as possible in working with this approach. In a work that could be brought profitably into dialogue with that of Davidson, David Halperin has sought to revivify social constructionism, taking on board and responding to Sedgwick’s critique (How to Do the History of Homosexuality, esp. pp. 10–13). More recently, Caroline Gonda and Chris Mounsey have once again tried to push beyond the essentialist/social constructionist binary. See “Queer People: An Introduction,” in Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700–1800 (ed. C. Mounsey and C. Gonda; Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 9–37. 41. Holt Parker has offered a more succinct definition of the social constructionist approach, drawing on the terminology of linguistics and anthropology: “In a nutshell: social constructionism states (or should state) that social categories (here specifically sexual categories) are emic not etic” (“The Myth of the Heterosexual,” 318). James Davidson offers a very extreme summary of the social constructionist position at the outset of his lengthy study of Greek love: “In fact, it was argued, the ancient Greeks



Introduction 39

did not have sexual orientation at all, from which it followed that sexual orientation per se was not an inherent, hard-wired human trait, but instead was constructed from scratch on each occasion by each different culture” (The Greeks and Greek Love, 4). Few, if any, social constructionists would accept such an extreme version of this approach (equally problematic is Davidson’s caricature of Christianity on pp. 38–39), and in fact Davidson’s own approach is a modified version of social constructionism that seeks to avoid the more serious problems Davidson identifies in the works of Dover, Foucault, and Halperin. 42. Jobling, 1 Samuel, 161–62. 43. Presumably Jobling is alluding to Gen. 19:1-28; Lev. 18:22; 20:13; Judg. 19:1-30. This point is made a little more clearly by Yaron Peleg, who remarks that, “[w]hile the exceptionally close relations between Jonathan and David certainly invite such readings, especially in our gender-conscious age, I think that the ambivalence of this ancient story and the Bible’s fairly clear stance against such (sexual) relations, both legally and narratively, ultimately work against interpretations of this kind. One of the main difficulties in reading this text as a homosexual love story, I think, is not the impossibility or even the apprehension of such love as much as the usefulness of it as an exemplary literary paradigm. While the story might certainly resonate as such for readers today, it was probably much less so for the original readership of this old text” (“Love at First Sight?,” 173 [italics mine]). The problem here is with reifying “the Bible” as an ideologically unified work (cf. p. 175 n. 13), and then extrapolating from this “Bible” a set of societal norms and prejudices that must have obtained in the Israel behind the text. Peleg is using this judgment to justify why an ancient reader would be unlikely to construe the relationship of David and Jonathan as sexual, while Jobling is using a similar judgment to justify why the text is not more explicit in portraying this relationship as sexual. Both seem to assume, however, the same reconstruction of ancient Israelite societal norms and prejudices. Regardless of whether we side with Jobling or Peleg, this whole approach is extremely problematic. L. William Countryman notes, in a similar vein but with a greater degree of historical-critical discrimination, that the authors of the David and Jonathan narrative could have discouraged an erotic construal, had they been aware of, and perceived themselves to be under the authority of the sexual purity codes in Leviticus: Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and their Implications for Today (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007, 2nd edn), 41 (italics mine). The problems are scrutinized in more depth in Chapters 2 and 3 below. 44. Tony Cartledge’s disavowal of homosexual connotations in 2 Sam. 1:26 appears under the rubric, “Does ‘Love’ Mean ‘Lover’?” in 1 & 2 Samuel (Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary, 7; Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2001), 358. 45. See further e.g. John Boswell’s discussion of the vocabulary of “love” in The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (New York: Fontana, 1996), 3–9, and Robert Brain’s still valuable sketch of the fluidity of the language of “love” and “friendship” in English (Friends and Lovers [London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1976], 14–20). 46. Although when he touches on David and Jonathan he places their relationship in the context of “similisexual friendship,” Xavier Mayne (the pseudonym of the American author Edward Irenaeus Prime Stevenson, 1858–1942) sought to force a

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The Love of David and Jonathan

distinction between “love” in sensu stricto, which necessarily includes sexual desire and the wish both to possess and to surrender to the object of desire, and friendship, which contains no element of sexual attraction (The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life [privately printed, Rome, 1908; repr. New York: Arno, 1975], 21–22). Yet Mayne later opines that “all real friendships between men have a sexual germ” (The Intersexes, 36; cf. p. 202). Furthermore, in the case of the friendships Mayne has in mind, “The link is a marriage of the body as well as of the soul. It is a love: not a friendship. It is the supremely virile love, expressing itself as human nature, naturally and inevitably, ever has expressed itself in a vast proportion of all races and grades of mankind” (The Intersexes, 37). 47. Christina G. Rossetti, Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (London: SPCK, 1883), 62. 48. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (trans. and ed. M. A. Screech; London: Penguin 1991), 205. Reflecting particularly on Plato’s Symposium, Montaigne regarded the inherent inequalities of Greek paiderasti/a as precluding true amitié as he understood it, and experienced it with Etienne de La Boëtie. In this essay Montaigne actually makes no mention of David and Jonathan, who belong rather to Screech’s own intertextual encyclopedia. Indeed, Screech is assuming his reader already accepts a particular understanding of the relationship between David and Jonathan (i.e. a lifelong, exclusive, non-sexual bond), which Screech can then use to make Montaigne’s discussion of amitié more comprehensible. The use of ancient Greek texts pertaining to paiderasti/a in the nineteenth century in particular will be a significant theme of Chapter 4 below. 49. Mayne, The Intersexes, 356, where Mayne describes Byron’s same-sex desire as “his philhellenic enthusiasms,” and cf. esp. p. 359: “That Greece, and everything Hellenic appealed to Byron from the first, is appropriate. Greek in his intellectual and sexual nature, he was Englishman by birth but Athenian by heart.” Mayne also cites a letter in his possession from the grandson of an acquaintance of Byron, who recalls Byron saying, “let me tell you I expected while ago to write a drama on Greek Love – not less – modernizing the atmosphere – glooming it over – to throw the whole subject back into nature, where it belongs now as always – to paint the struggle of the finer moral type of mind against it – or rather remorse for it, when it seems to be chastized… But I made up my mind that British philosophy is not far enough on for swallowing such a thing neat. So I turned much of it into ‘Manfred’” (The Intersexes, 359–60). 50. Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 11. Cf. Mayne, The Intersexes, 46 (and in general pp. 46–52): “The [similisexual] passion early received one of its names, ‘Greek love’ from significance in almost every period of Hellenic society. It was instinctive to the Greek temperament, a temperament at once rugged and yet aesthetically sensitive as in no other race”; Mayne’s view of the Italian Renaissance: “That homosexuality should flourish in the Renaissance in Italy, was natural, as a part of the return to Greek cults of the Beautiful” (The Intersexes, 241); his remark with respect to King James I of England that “James was always eager to teach an ephebus Greek or Latin – and Greek and Latin morals” (The Intersexes, 234); his reference to Goethe’s “mysterious feeling for a young Italian ephebus who crossed his path,” which



Introduction 41

“would be part of Goethe’s hellenism” (The Intersexes, 296); his characterization of Friedrich Hölderlin as “a sort of revenant from the Greek Academy, embodied in a German” (The Intersexes, 297); and his comment that General Gordon’s relationship with Lord Arthur Hamilton, in the later nineteenth century, “was of the truly hellenic colour” (The Intersexes, 194; cf. also pp. 193, 195). As an illustration of how the term “gay” could be used in the mid-nineteenth century, consider John Dobree Dalgairns’s description of Peter Abelard as “a canon of the Church, and at the same time a gay and handsome cavalier” in his “Life of St Aelred,” Lives of the English Saints (ed. J. H. Newman; vol. 5; Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1901 [London: James Toovey, 1845, 1st edn], 195). Notably, when Mayne remarks that “[t]he uranistic temperament is especially mercurial: now wildly gay, now sombre, easily changed” (The Intersexes, 84), the word “gay” cannot mean “homosexual” (cf. pp. 198, 209). 51. John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists (London: Privately Printed for the AREOPAGITIGA Society, 1908). This work was first privately circulated in 1883, but originally written in 1873, when Symonds was engaged on research for his Studies of the Greek Poets (2 vols.; London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1873, 1876). Cf. Percy L. Babington, Bibliography of the Writings of John Addington Symonds (London: John Castle, 1925), 49–50. A Problem in Greek Ethics has been recently reprinted as Appendix A to Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition (ed. I. Crozier; London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 227–95. The passage cited here is from p. 235 (§6); references to this work will be to the page number in the 2008 reprint with the section number in brackets. This identification of “Greek Love” with paiderasti/a is the basis of J. Z. Eglinton’s lengthy apologia for the latter, which he distinguishes both from modern same-sex erotic relationships between adult men, and from what we would now call paedophilia (Greek Love, 3–5, 7, 41–42). Davidson takes his cue from Symonds in writing about “Greek love” (The Greeks and Greek Love, 36), but he is clearly interested in the entire phenomenon of same-sex love across ancient Greece, not a single manifestation of it. 52. The association of male same-sex desire with effeminacy seems to be very recent, and appears to have much to do with the impact of the figure of Oscar Wilde, his trials, and imprisonment. An important aspect of Linda Dowling’s study Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) was to detach the notion of effeminacy from that of homosexuality with respect to the nineteenth century, echoing strongly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s earlier recognition of the shifting relationship between masculinity/femininity and male homoerotic desire. In her seminal study Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Gender and Culture; New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), Sedgwick remarks that, “The virility of the homosexual orientation of male desire seemed as self-evident to the ancient Spartans, and perhaps to Whitman, as its effeminacy seems in contemporary popular culture” (pp. 26–27). See further Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (Between Men – Between Women; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995); James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints:

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Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and, more generally on the distinction between “effeminacy” and “male passivity, inversion, and homosexuality,” see Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 110–13. The works of Sedgwick, Sinfield, and Bristow have identified the emergence of the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual man as part of the impact of the Wilde trials of 1895, while the distinctly non-effeminate vision of male homoerotic bonding advocated by Edward Carpenter was effectively brushed under the carpet (cf. Sedgwick, Between Men, 217). Antony Copley has similarly wondered “how differently homosexuality would have been regarded had Carpenter with his rather pious observations been identified with the issue rather than Wilde with his ‘immoralism’ and provocation” (A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writings of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006], 76). 53. Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, 256 (§13). Symonds is concerned to detach same-sex love between men from connotations of effeminacy (cf. n. 52 above), and this concern shapes his appropriation of ancient Greek works that touch on the themes of both heroic comradeship and paiderasti/a. Sinfield places Symonds in the wider context of authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for whom same-sex passion was the very antithesis of effeminacy (The Wilde Century, 109–17). 54. Davidson offers a very helpful account of the problem of dealing with the Greek language of love, especially through the medium of English, in which the language of love is far more slippery than is often acknowledged (Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love, 11–37). Davidson focuses on the word-groups around a0ga/ph, e1rwj, i3meroj, po/qoj, fili/a, and e0piqumi/a – though not ste/rgw – paying attention to the variety of contexts in which they each appear, and to the possible chronological and dialectical differences between them. 55. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 52–53; Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 147. 56. For this criticism see e.g. Geoffrey Faber, Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement (rev. edn; London: Faber & Faber, 1936; repr. London: Penguin, 1954), 221 n. 1; Boswell, The Marriage of Likeness, 5–9; L. William Countryman, Love Human and Divine: Reflections on Love, Sexuality, and Friendship (Harrisburg, PN: Morehouse, 2005), 14–15, 77. Certain distinctions could indeed be made with respect to love: in Amat. 758d, to pick an example at random, Plutarch invokes an ancient distinction between the “love” (fili/a) of “kin” (fusiko/j), of “hospitality” (ceniko/j), of “comrades” (e9tairiko/j), and of “sexual desire” (e0rwtiko/j). For James McEvoy, the Christian preference for the word-group around a0gaph/ had the effect of centralizing the language of “love” in Western languages and marginalizing that of friendship, overturning an earlier primacy in classical and Hellenistic Greek sources for fili/a (“Philia and Amicitia: The Philosophy of Friendship from Plato to Aquinas,” Sewanee Medieval Colloquium Occasional Papers 2 [1985], 13). But this is a vast and complex issue, requiring fuller treatment than can be offered here. The overview by Davidson (n. 54 above) is a useful place to start. 57. Based on his reading of Jn 21:15-17 (Vulg.), in which amare and diligere seem to be used interchangeably, Augustine claimed the authority of Scripture for his view



Introduction 43

that no distinction should be made between dilectio, caritas, and amor (Civ. 14:7: sed scripturas religionis nostrae, quarum auctoritatem ceteris omnibus litteris anteponimus, non aliud dicere amorem, aliud dilectionem vel caritatem insinuandum fuit). Augustine’s broader claim is that the language of love can be used in both good and bad senses, which draws attention to the quality of the emotion thus described, rather than to what these nouns precisely denote. The author of the fourteenth century Vita Edwardi Secundi likewise uses amare and diligere in parallel when he compares Edward II’s devotion to Piers Gaveston unfavourably with Jonathan’s love for David on the grounds that Edward exceeded the “proper limit of affection” (modus dileccionis): Ionathas dilexit Dauid, Achilles Patroclum amauit; set illi modum excessisse non leguntur, “Jonathan loved David and Achilles loved Patroclus, but we do not read of them that they exceeded the appropriate limit” (Latin text: Vita Edwardi Secundi: Re-edited Text with New Introduction, New Historical Notes, and Revised Translation based on that of N. Denholm Young [ed. and trans. W. R. Childs; Oxford Medieval Texts; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005], 28; cf. p. 50). 58. Ellen van Wolde, “Sentiments as Culturally Constructed Emotions: Anger and Love in the Hebrew Bible,” BibInt 16 (2008), 19. Van Wolde deals only briefly with the special problems raised for this definition by the Song of Songs (p. 19 n. 32), and, partly due to a problematic dependence on word statistics (cf. my critique of Zehnder in Chapter 2, pp. 63–83 and Chapter 3, pp. 150–54 below), is arguably too quick to assume that the norm in classical Hebrew would have been for bh) to connote hierarchy. But she is right to criticize some of the standard dictionaries for imposing a post-romantic, Western, itself culturally constructed notion of “love” on the Hebrew word group (esp. p. 18 n. 31). In this study I have avoided as far as possible an extensive dependence on, or engagement with, the standard dictionaries and lexica, in favour of a direct engagement with this and other word groups in context. The bh) word group is discussed more fully in Chapter 3 below, pp. 172–77, 182–83. 59. The syntax of 1 Sam. 20:17 is ambiguous. The reference may be either to Jonathan’s love for David, or, just possibly, to David’s love for Jonathan. 60. “…[die] treue Gefolgschaft der Untergebenen gegenüber dem König”: Markus Zehnder, “Exegetische Beobachtungen zu den David-Jonathan-Geschichten,” Bib 79 (1998), 157–58. 61. Zehnder, “Exegetische Beobachtungen,” 158. This sense of “love” did not occur to Christina Rossetti, but this very fact might lead us to reconsider whether Hiram’s love for David was purely political, or whether there was an emotional dimension too. The language of “love” in Hebrew, Akkadian, and Hittite has been much studied in relation to treaty loyalty. See e.g. Saul M. Olyan, “ ‘Surpassing the Love of Women’: Another Look at 2 Samuel 1:26 and the Relationship of David and Jonathan,” in Authorizing Marriage? Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing of Same-Sex Unions (ed. M. D. Jordan, M. T. Sweeney and D. M. Mellott; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 7–16 (esp. pp. 8–11). 62. See further Chapter 3 below. 63. The kjv gives “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” for these terms, but the rsv gives “homosexuals” for both, as if they denoted the same thing, or as if the two words constituted a kind of hendiadys whose two members did not need to be reproduced in translation.

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64. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (Between Men – Between Women; New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, 2nd edn), 13. See also, with respect to the variety of terms for same-sex eroticism that existed before the late nineteenth century, e.g. Crompton, Byron and Greek Love, 23, on the use of a wide range of derogatory terms by Edward Gibbon; the remarks by Richard Howard in the “Translator’s Note” to his translation of André Gide’s dialogue Corydon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), xiv: “[T]he very indecisiveness of [Gide’s] vocabulary affords us a clue which his first translator chose to overlook. Precisely when we are discovering that there is no such massive and unitary object of discourse (or experience) as homosexuality, Gide’s fluctuations in nomenclature must be rendered as an index of a mind reluctant to dignify confusion by calling it uniformity. The terms may seem to us merely quaint – ‘uranism,’ ‘pederasty,’ ‘inversion,’ ‘degeneracy,’ not to mention ‘Urnings’ and ‘The Third Sex’ – but at least they question, they even jeopardize conventions of classification which, as Michel Foucault observes, impose upon us a false unity of conceptualization”; and Anthony Heacock, Jonathan Loved David: Manly Love in the Bible and the Hermeneutics of Sex (The Bible in the Modern World, 22; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011), 71 n. 69, who cites the terms, “bugger,” “shirt-lifter,” “sod/sodomite,” “molly,” and “poofter/puff,” whose usage has peristed in colloquial English beyond the artificial uniformity of “homosexuality.” In Marc-André Raffalovich’s seminal, but as yet lamentably understudied Uranisme et Unisexualité: Études sur différentes manifestations de l’instinct sexuel (Lyon A. Storck, 1896), “uranisme,” “inversion sexuelle,” “sexualité contraire” (cf. the German moniker die konträre Sexualempfindung), “unisexualité,” and “homosexualité” all denote more or less a single thing, even though that thing is manifested in various ways (p. 18). To take another, arbitrary, example from the turn of the twentieth century, in the preface toThe Intersexes, which was drafted in 1901 then circulated in a privately printed edition of 125 copies in 1908, Xavier Mayne referred to “homosexualism, similisexualism, urningism, inverted sexuality, uranianism, as it is variously termed” (The Intersexes, ix), but this might seem to imply that there is a single thing to which each of these terms equally applies, even though Mayne further theorized that on the basis of the “sexual instinct” rather than “physique” being entirely determinative of “sex,” four sexes can be distinguished: the “perfect masculine sex, a man” at one extreme, the “perfect female sex, a woman” at the other, and two intersexes in between, the “Uranian,” or same-sex attracted man, and the “Uraniad,” or same-sex attracted woman (The Intersexes, 18–20). 65. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 3. 66. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 8–9 (cf. pp. 31, 35, 83). 67. On this aspect of the problem of terminology, see e.g. Bristow, Effeminate England, 3. 68. Cf. Zehnder, “Observations,” 131, 133–34. The inadequacy of language is a pervasive problem in the study of the history of sexuality. See, for example, Louis Crompton’s discussion of the problem of anachronism in the use of either “gay” or “homosexual” in connection with Lord Byron and attitudes to same-sex eroticism in the early nineteenth-century England (Byron and Greek Love, 10–11). 69. Zehnder, “Observations,” 131–34. 70. Cf. the helpful discussion in Nissinen, “Die Liebe von David und Jonatan,” 251– 52. That scholars now have to address these problems is an effect of the transition



Introduction 45

in the late nineteenth century from an understanding of sexual acts between men as a transgression any man could under certain circumstances commit and that should be proscribed legally, to the pathologization of persons attracted to their own sex as aberrant types of individual, which in turn came to function as an implanted, internalized form of social control. As Foucault famously remarked, “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species [Le sodomite était un relaps, l’homosexuel est maintenant une espèce]” (Introduction to the History of Sexuality, 43; cf. p. 67). See the important discussion of this oft-quoted and widely misunderstood remark in Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 26–32 (and pp. 24–47 in general), as well as other recent works that have sought to rethink the way the Introduction to Foucault’s History of Sexuality has been interpreted and used, and the place of Foucault’s History of Madness in the development of his thought on the history of homosexual subjectivity and subjectification — see esp. Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (trans. M. Lucey; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (Gender and Culture; New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Michael Carden, Review of Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault, The Bible and Critical Theory 8 (2012), 86–89. See also Richard Dellamora’s critique of the idea that there could be either a unitary “gay subject” or a unitary “gay-identified subject,” any more than there is a unitary “masculine” or “feminine” subject (Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism [Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990], 4; cf. pp. 222–23). I only discovered Eribon’s book Insult after the manuscript of the present work had been submitted, thanks to Carden’s engaging review of Huffer, Mad for Foucault. Eribon has made here a major contribution to our understanding of gay subjectivity and subjectification, and offers a significant corrective to the more wooden readings of Foucault. But Part Two of Insult (pp. 141– 243) is of particular note in connection with the present work because it revisits the place of Oxford Hellenism, and John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater in particular, in the evolution of a modern sense of the history same-sex desire, thus chiming very nicely with the discussion in Chapter 4 below. 71. In relation to the sexual ethics of the New Testament see, following Foucault, Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex, 2. 72. See e.g. Ian McCormack’s “General Introduction” to the edited volume Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–11. 73. Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years (London: Routledge, 1994, 2nd edn), xvi (from the introduction to the first edition, published in 1986); cf. p. 25 on the homoerotic in nineteenth-century art. 74. Already in 1983 Stephen Coote defended the use of the inadequate term “homosexual” in the title of The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (London: Penguin, 1983) on the grounds that “…it can be employed relatively neutrally, analytically, and has survived in acceptable liberal usage. ‘Gay,’ being closer to slang, will, I suspect, date” (p. 49). 75. In a comprehensive but as yet little-studied work, at least in English-speaking scholarship, Karin Hügel adds the acronym “LISBAT” to the mix, a German abbreviation for “‘lesbische, intersexuelle, schwule, bisexuelle, asexuelle, und Transgender- bzw. transssexuelle Personen’ und andere queere Personen” (Homoerotik und

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Hebräische Bibel [Hamburg: Diplomica Verlag, 2007], 11 n. 1), a potentially even broader acronym than LGBT/Q, encompassing all conceivable non-heteronormative sexual self-identifications. Hügel prefers “LISBAT-Personen” because it avoids the misunderstanding of “queer” as a synonym for “gay and lesbian.” 76. Frederick Roden, “Introduction: Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities,” in Jewish/Christian/Queer: Crossroads and Identities (ed. F. Roden; Queer Interventions; Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 1–18 (6–7). 77. As Roden has remarked elsewhere, appropriating Sedgwick’s earlier work, “The queer is contained within, yet residing on the margins of, heteronormative culture”: Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 1. 78. Thus Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 2: “There is more than one way of being queer… there are at least two which are not necessarily mutually exclusive: the sexual queer as a term uniting gays, lesbians, transgenders, transexuals, and bisexuals; and queers as cultural dissidents, deviant or non-standard in some way. In theory, queerness is now more associated with subversion than with homosexuality per se.” 79. Cf. Zehnder, “Exegetische Beobachtungen,” 154 n. 3; idem, “Observations,” 130. Ada Taggar-Cohen’s study of 1 Sam. 20–22 in light of Hittite treaties, for example, is intended to support the view that this biblical narrative was written close to the events described, rather than in the Persian period, and is thus more likely than not to be historically accurate. Thus the “love and special friendship between David and Jonathan” is not just “a fictional story, but…a legal means for ensuring loyalty between the two, and this later played a part in the apology of David’s claim to the throne.” See Taggar-Cohen, “Political Loyalty in the Biblical Account of 1 Samuel XX–XXII in the Light of Hittite Texts,”VT 55 (2005), 251–68 (266). 80. Which is, of course, not the same as saying that such a relationship did not exist, merely that the evidence of the biblical text cannot be corroborated. 81. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Advances in Semiotics; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1979), 35. 82. See further Chapter 2 below. 83. “Biblischen Texten, die sich – vermeintlich oder tatsächlich – auf das Thema ‘Homosexualität’ beziehen lassen, ist in den letzten Jahren erhöhte Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt worden. Ohne Zweifel hängt diese Aufmerksamkeit mit der prominenten Stellung des Themas zusammen, die ihm in der innerkirchlichen und gesamtgesellschaftlichen Diskussion zukommt. Die David-Jonathan-Geschichten stellen unter den erwähnten Texten insofern eine Besonderheit dar, als ihr Bezug zum Thema ‘Homosexualität’ durchaus umstritten ist” (Zehnder, “Exegetische Beobachtungen,” 153). In this book I generally cite only Zehnder’s later English article, unless some aspect of the earlier German one is particularly in need of notice. 84. Cf. Zehnder’s remark at the end of his 2007 article: “It may be that the sexual interpretation of the relationship of David and Jonathan that came up during the last three decades or so is related to the wider phenomenon of the sexualization of life in Western societies. The story of the deep friendship of David and Jonathan may act as a counter model by showing how emotionally rich and profound a non-sexual relation between two persons (of the same sex) may be – at times even richer and profounder than sexual relationships. Second Samuel 1:26 may well be read in this vein, and the vision of such relationships may work as a powerful remedy for some of the



Introduction 47

deformations of our present age” (“Observations,” 174). See also Philip Culbertson’s insightful discussion in New Adam: The Future of Male Spirituality (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1992), 75–90 (esp. pp. 88–90). 85. “Saul, David and Jonathan – the Story of a Triangle? A Contribution to the Issue of Homosexuality in the First Testament” (essay translated by B. and M. Rumscheidt), in Samuel and Kings (ed. A. Brenner; FCB, 2/7; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 22–36 (26). 86. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 25–26. 87. Signed into law 26 April, 2000. 88. S. Ackerman, “When the Bible Enters the Fray,” BRev 16 (October 2000): 6. 89. Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, 1955). 90. Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 257–68. 91. B. R. Burg (ed.), Gay Warriors: A Documentary History from the Ancient World to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 92. See Jonathan Shay, “Learning about Combat Stress from Homer’s Iliad,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 4 (1991), 561–79; idem, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1994); Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (New York: Scribner, 2002); Nathan Solomon, “David and Jonathan in Iraq,” in J. Harold Ellens and John T. Greene (eds), Probing the Frontiers of Biblical Studies (PTMS, 111; Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2009), 21–32. I wish to thank Maureen Hagen for drawing my attention to Solomon’s essay. 93. Foucault, Introduction to the History of Sexuality, 33. 94. See further Chapters 2–3 below. 95. Wilhelm Vischer, Das Christuszeugnis des alten Testaments (vol. 2; ZollikonZürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1946, 2nd edn), 209–17. Vischer’s commentary on this section contains much that could be of value to scholars whose concerns are not primarily confessional. It must, however, be interpreted in relation to the context in which Vischer’s work evolved. Vischer sought to reclaim the Old Testament as Christian Scripture from German Christians in particular who, odiously, preferred a Bible that was as judenrein as possible. Vischer ultimately reduced the significance of the narrative to typology, concluding that Jonathan’s position in the narrative is “full of promise” (verheißungsvoll) because it shows how the “Israel according to the flesh” can be bound to Christ in time and eternity. Following the example of Jonathan, who was persecuted by his own father Saul, Jesus endures the abuse with which the Jews assail those of their own who belong to the “son of Jesse” (i.e. Jesus). Which human does not naturally belong to the side of the rejected Saul, and does not take part in the persecution of the chosen? Yet Christ grants us the possibility of siding with him instead, exchanging our life with his in an eternal bond of friendship. Jesus accomplishes what the human David could not, taking our place as the rejected and, in great love, surrendering his life for his friends: “Die Jünger Jesu werden dem Beispiel Jonathans folgen und es ertragen, daß die Juden, ihre Väter und Brüder, sie dafür beschimpfen, daß sie dem verpönten ‘Sohne Isaïas’ (Jesus) anhängen. Und welcher Mensch gehörte nicht von Natur auf die Seite Sauls, des Verworfenen, und beteiligte sich nicht an der Verfolgung des Erwählten? Aber der Erwählte des HERRN schenkt uns die Möglichkeit, auf seine Seite zu treten und unser Leben mit seinem

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zu vertauschen im ewigen Freundschaftsbunde. Viel mehr! Er tut als ‘der Sohn Isaïas’ das, was David nicht konnte, daß er an unser Statt der Verworfene wird und in der großen Liebe sein Leben läßt für seine Freunde (Joh. 15)” (Christuszeugnis, 2:217). There is a complex typology here, in which both Jonathan and David are in different ways types of Christ, but the relationship between them is clearly a type of the eternal covenant of friendship that exists between Jesus and his disciples. Vischer at one point notes that Jonathan was “completely lost in love for David” (“…wenn er sich in der Liebe völlig an David verliert,” Christuszeugnis, 2:211), but does not elaborate on what this might have meant. 96. Stephen Schecter, David and Jonathan: A Story of Love and Power in Ancient Israel (Montréal: Robert Davies, 1996). M. Avot 5:16 is used, however, as an epigraph for this work, raising the question of how the poem and the epigraph might relate to one another. 97. On the issue of “alien hermeneutics,” see e.g. Karl P. Donfried, Who Owns the Bible? Toward the Recovery of a Christian Hermeneutic (Companions to the New Testament; New York: Herder and Herder, 2006), 1–19. 98. “Ist es eine Respektlosigkeit gegen die Bibel oder eine Notwendigkeit in unserer Zeit, zu überlegen, ob Jonatans Liebe, die David in seiner anrührenden Klage über den gefallenen Freund als ‘wunderbarer denn Frauenliebe’ rühmt, homoerotische Liebe war?”: Walter Dietrich and Thomas Naumann, Die Samuelbücher (EF 287; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 59 (italics mine). 99. Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli, “Saul, David und Jonatan – eine Dreiecksgeschichte? Ein Beitrag zum Thema ‘Homosexualität im ersten Testament,’” BK 51 (1996): 15–22. See n. 85 above for the English translation, published in 2000. 100. See n. 40 above. 101. “Wird also der Begriff Homosexualität in Beziehung auf die David-JonatanSzenen gebraucht, müßte zunächst einmal geklärt werden, was erforderlich ist, um die Beziehung dieser beiden Männer sachgerecht als homosexuell bezeichnen zu können. Welche Eigenschaften der Beziehung werden betont? Die persönliche sexuelle Orientation der Beteiligten, oder aber ihr konkretes Verhalten, oder beides? Wenn es nicht um die Ausrichtung, sondern nur um das Verhalten geht, welche Formen des gleichgeschlechtlichen Verhaltens sind denn als (homo)sexuell zu bezeichnen – alle Ausdrücke der Zärtlichkeit und Begierde, oder nur intime physische Berührung, oder ausschließlich die sexuelle Vereinigung? Kann das Wort nur auf die Beziehung zwischen den beiden Männern bezogen werden, oder spielt dabei notwendig auch die gesellschaftliche Bewertung dieser Beziehung mit; m.a.W., gibt es eine Homosexualität ohne die gesellschaftliche Auslegung des Verhaltens der Beteiligten? Wer braucht eine Antwort auf die Frage, ob die Beziehung von David und Jonatan homosexuell war? Warum wird diese Frage überhaupt gestellt? Diese Fragen sind keine Haarspalterei, wenn wir nach der Anwendbarkeit des Begriffs Homosexualität auf die Quellen der alten Welt ernstlich fragen” (Nissinen, “Die Liebe von David und Jonatan,” 252). 102. For more traditional accounts of research on David and Jonathan, see in English Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 7–55, and in German Hügel, Homoerotik und Hebräische Bibel, 342–438. Hügel’s monumental survey, which is not easy to access and of which Heacock does not take account, offers so comprehensive an overview of works published to 2007, with very few gaps, that it would be redundant to go over



Introduction 49

precisely the same ground here. One of Hügel’s key contributions is to take account not only of the history of scholarly interpretation in the academy (i.e. Auslegungsgeschichte), but of the reception of David and Jonathan in the history of literature, music, and painting (i.e. Rezeptionsgeschichte), showing that a homoerotic construal of the narrative in the history of its reception significantly predates the rise of this construal in the scholarly literature. What is less clear from Hügel’s survey is how the two traditions relate to one another, and what accounts for the emergence of this construal in the first place. This is a point at which my study should complement hers (see esp. Chapter 4 below). For a brief but excellent evaluative overview of recent research on 1 and 2 Samuel in general, see Walter Dietrich, “Tendenzen neuster Forschung an den Samuelbüchern,” in Die Samuelbücher und die Deuteronomisten (ed. C. SchäferLichtenberger; BWANT, 188; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2010), 9–17. 103. David J. A. Clines, “Metacommentating Amos,” in Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (JSOTSup, 205; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 76–93. Later in the same book Clines critiques the way modern commentators have read the David story in light of their own assumptions about masculinity, touching briefly on their treatment of David and Jonathan (“David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity,” in Interested Parties, 240–42). All the scholars critiqued in Chapter 2 below have written their works on David and Jonathan since Clines’s (nevertheless still important) essay. 104. Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes, “When H/he Speaks to her Heart: A View of (Views of ) Hosea 2,” in The Double Voice of her Desire: Texts by Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes (trans. D. Orton; ed. J. Bekkenkamp and F. Dröes; Leiden: Deo, 2004), 110–28. I have sought elsewhere to extend van Dijk-Hemmes’s critique to commentaries on Deutero-Isaiah in my “In the Name of Love: Resisting Reader and Abusive Redeemer in Deutero-Isaiah,” The Bible and Critical Theory 2.2 (2006), 14.1–14.15. 105. Deryn P. Guest, “Battling for the Bible: Academy, Church and the Gay Agenda,” T&S 15 (2001), 66–93. As its title suggests, the purpose of Chapter 2 below is to extend Guest’s work to cover scholarly discussion of the David and Jonathan narrative. 106. Gillian P. Townsley, “The Straight Mind in Corinth: Queer Readings across 1 Cor 11.2-16” (PhD dissertation, University of Otago, 2011). 107. Mirko Peisert, “David und Jonatan: ‘Verheimlichte Liebe,’” Werkstatt Schwule Theologie 4 (1997), 97: “Mir scheint diese Art des Umgangs mit den Texten ein gutes Beispiel für die immer noch starke Tabuisierung von Homosexualität im Raum der Kirche und der Theologie und für eine Ideologie der ‘natürlichen’ Heterosexualität zu sein. Ist es die Angst vor dem, was nicht sein darf?” English, regrettably, has no adequate equivalent to Tabuisierung, which aptly conjures up the dread of pollution that long hovered around English proscriptions of that which ought not to be named among Christians. 108. In his monograph Jonathan Loved David, Heacock has recently argued that the reason some modern readers have interpreted the relationship between David and Jonathan in erotic terms is because they have brought to the text presuppositions shaped by the late nineteenth-century reification of “homosexuality,” and by subsequent Western demarcations of the borderlines between masculinity, sexuality, and friendship. I am in broad agreement with this, but in this book I complicate this scenario in two ways: first, by emphasizing the decisive role of features of the text in allowing an erotic construal (see esp. Chapter 3); and second, by pointing to the

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role the David and Jonathan narrative itself has played in the emergence of modern understandings of same-sex relationships, and of the idea of homosexuality as such (esp. Chapter 4). 109. I might cite Walter Pater in this connection: “To say of an ancient literary composition that it has an antiquarian interest, often means that it has no distinct æsthetic interest for the reader of to-day. Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by putting its object in perspective and setting the reader in a certain point of view from which what gave pleasure to the past is pleasurable for him also, may often add greatly to the charm we receive from ancient literature. But the first condition of such aid must be a real, direct, æsthetic charm in the thing itself; unless it has that charm, unless some purely artistic quality went to its original making, no merely antiquarian effort can ever give it an æsthetic value or make it a proper object of æsthetic criticism. These qualities, when they exist, it is always pleasant to define, and discriminate from the sort of borrowed interest which an old play, or an old story, may very likely acquire through a true antiquarianism” (Studies in the History of the Renaissance [London: Macmillan, 1873], 9–10). 110. By which I mean that there is no single, unequivocal teaching in the Bible on matters of sex, or on anything else, because the texts the Bible contains are too varied to hold a single viewpoint. The biblical texts can be made to appear as if they do, but that is a matter of interpreters and interpretive communities, not of the Bible as such. There are certainly passages that enjoin certain kinds of sexual ethic (e.g. most obviously, Lev. 18:6-23), but I see no reason to believe they can be made to contribute to a single coherent “biblical teaching.” 111. Aware of the many terminological pitfalls accompanying any attempt to describe or define erotic relationships, especially in texts and societies far removed in time and space from whoever is doing the describing or defining, I have not tried to be over precise or absolutely consistent in describing relationships portrayed in texts whose meanings are difficult to pin down. The alternative would be to fret interminably over every description of sex, gender, desire, and relationship, and this would quickly become turgid. The language we use to engage with the past bears the imprint of the ideological forces that have shaped the discourses in which we participate, as Halperin’s critique of Bernadette Brooten’s work illustrates clearly (How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 54–79). I have merely tried to be aware of the problems, and to avoid anachronism as far as possible.

Chapter 2 Battling for David and Jonathan: Scripture, Historical Criticism, and the Gay Agenda Toiau=ta sunto/nwj metacu\ paqaino/menoj o9 Xariklh=j e0pau/sato deino/n ti kai\ qhriw~dej e0n toi=j o1mmasin u9poble/pwn. e0w&|kei de/ moi kai\ kaqarsi/w? xrh=sqai pro\j tou\j paidikou\j e1rwtaj.1 In the “human” sciences one often finds an “ideological fallacy” common to many scientific approaches, which consists in believing that one’s own approach is not ideological because it succeeds in being “objective” and “neutral.” For my own part, I share the same sceptical opinion that all enquiry is “motivated.” Theoretical research is a form of social practice. Everybody who wants to know something wants to know it in order to do something. If he claims that he wants to know it in only in order “to know” and not in order “to do” it means that he wants to know it in order to do nothing, which is in fact a surreptitious way of doing something, that is, leaving the world just as it is (or as his approach assumes that it ought to be).2

1. Exegetical factional strife There has been widespread disagreement among readers and interpreters, without and within the academy, concerning the nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan. This disagreement is rooted in more than a disinterested difference of opinion as to the correct adjudication of the available exegetical options. Without further elaboration, Jan Fokkelman lamented back in 1986 that their love “merits a better fate than falling prey to exegetical factional strife,”3 which is arguably what the scholarly disagreement amounts to. There are a number of interpretive options currently on the table.4 Some opt for a primarily erotic or even overtly sexual interpretation,5 while others see the relationship as one of extraordinary friendship and loyalty, which may be described as “male bonding”6 or a non-sexual “intimate camaraderie of two young soldiers.”7 Both the homoerotic interpretation and the male bonding interpretation have recently been dismissed by one scholar with little more than a flick of the wrist, on the grounds

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that such readings reflect “the norms of modern, western culture,” are “heavily romanticized,” and cannot escape the charge of “anachronism and ethnocentrism.”8 Others still opt for a primarily political or legal interpretation,9 though there is broad agreement that whatever the political overtones of the texts, the language used is also that of personal affection.10 It is sometimes suggested that while the relationship between David and Jonathan is best interpreted as sexual, this is not explicit in the text, either because explicit indicators could have been edited out by later redactors, leaving a text nevertheless replete with “homophilic innuendos,”11 or because there are unspecified yet nevertheless “obvious” reasons why the text does not force us to conclude this relationship was sexual.12 The text perhaps instead codes and camouflages this sexual aspect for pragmatic reasons,13 that is, to prevent the naïve reader from perceiving its true import. Were I composing a Forschungsbericht here, my task would be to summarize and critique each interpretation, trace their genesis and the lines of influence between them, assess their merits in terms of the adequacy of their methods and cogency of their conclusions, identify areas of consensus and account for areas of disagreement, and then determine what questions have not been asked that should be asked, and what issues have been dealt with inadequately and are in need of more through treatment. To do this could imply that there is a single project we are all engaged in: identifying the meaning of the text. But that is not the case, because the interpretive communities to which we belong and the various ideologies in which we are each implicated mean that our desire to interpret this text, our preference for these methods, or our concern to reach these kinds of conclusions rather than those, are to some extent already determined before we begin to interpret. To take one example, there may well be political implications to the language used in the David and Jonathan narrative – indeed, I argue later that there are. But the question remains how such a conclusion, and the evidence that leads to it, have been used, and what agendas they can be called upon to serve. David Clines, for example, has suggested that when Kyle McCarter presents this interpretation, it serves to exclude overtones to the language of the text that might compromise a construction of masculinity that has little room for emotional intensity in male-male relationships, and no room at all for the homoerotic.14 I would add to this that when such conclusions are shaped significantly by the work of earlier scholars – as McCarter is influenced by J. A. Thompson, and Robert Gagnon is influenced by Markus Zehnder – the consequence can be the emergence of an interpretive habit that, as it gains momentum, morphs into an assured result of critical scholarship rather than a hypothesis that



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needs continually to be revisited. This is particularly the case if it can be used, strategically, to bolster overriding ideological agendas such as the exclusion of the homoerotic from biblical literature, even if that were not the explicit intent of the scholar in question. Regardless of what conclusions scholars reach, most readings are more or less unequivocal: there is a single most probable construal of the text, and one interpretation has more support than the available alternatives. More rarely, there is an explicit acknowledgement that the texts in question are ambiguous, and thus genuinely open to more than one construal. At the risk of importing every possible nuance simultaneously into the text, David Damrosch, for example, regards the language of 1 Samuel 18:1-4 as “simultaneously familial, political, and erotic.”15 Similarly, after outlining the scholarly debates on the relationships between Gilgamesh and Enkidu and David and Jonathan, Susan Ackerman remarks: …so ambiguous is the erotic and potentially sexual language and imagery used in the Gilgamesh tradition and in the David story that it might seem that the scholarly argument I have just sketched in nuce is one that is doomed to continue without resolution for at least the foreseeable future, the lack of straightforward evidence in the texts of the Gilgamesh Epic and the David story regarding the nature of their heroes’ relationships precluding, for now at any rate, our ability to offer a definitive interpretation.16

While Ackerman allows here that a range of construals are possible, there remains the implication that “resolution” and a “definitive interpretation” should ultimately be taken to be the proper goals of scholarly debate. Other scholars are willing to acknowledge that the text works at different levels by using language drawn from more than one field, opening the text to a range, albeit limited, of different interpretations. Thus Thomas Römer and Loyse Bonjour remark, with reference to 1 Samuel 18:1-4, that the narrator seems to play with different registers in telling the story of the two men,17 while Thomas Naumann balances an acknowledgement that narrative texts are open to multiple construals with the recognition that even in an era of postmodern, literary-hermeneutical debates it is still legitimate to ask which readings are permitted by a text’s stock of signs.18 There are also different approaches to the locus of meaning, that is, whether the meaning of the text resides with the intention of the author, in the material form of the text, or in the engagement between the concerns of a particular reader and a range of possibilities allowed by the text.19 The breadth of exegetical opinion evident here is not especially noteworthy in itself. After all, there are relatively few biblical texts that are not the object of some form of disagreement, and in a number of cases – Amos 7:14 and Daniel 7:13-14 in the Hebrew Bible and Galatians 3:19 and

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2 Thessalonians 2:8 in the New Testament spring immediately to mind, though any number of other examples might be substituted for them – the interpretive difficulties have spawned a quite colossal outpouring of exegetical effort. What is much more noteworthy in the case of David and Jonathan is that competing interests and agendas have so evidently shaped the approaches these scholars take and the conclusions they draw. The David and Jonathan narrative is not simply open to a range of different interpretations. It is in a very real sense the object of competing claims to ownership of its meaning, or to ownership of the right to its interpretation. There has been increasing recognition in the recent scholarship on David and Jonathan that there is a significant apologetic dimension to the scholarly study of their relationship. Walter Dietrich and Thomas Naumann hint at this in an aside to their summary of Katharine Doob Sakenfeld’s study of the language of love and loyalty in the Hebrew Bible, in which Sakenfeld rejects a homosexual reading of the David and Jonathan narrative in a paragraph enclosed in square brackets:20 “One hopes this is an unsought result and not the furtive motive for the investigation!”21 In a subsequent discussion of the theme of “love” in the narratives of 1 and 2 Samuel concerning David, Naumann remarks: While on the one hand, the possibility of David’s homoerotic love is vehemently denied with the support of a centuries-old, biblically-grounded condemnation [Verteufelung] of homosexuality, on the other hand the story counts as an important piece of evidence that the Hebrew Bible can also portray homoerotic relationships between men positively. On this question hardly anyone escapes the circle of apologetic interests.22

Naumann here acknowledges the apologetic dimension to the debate, and while he does not make his own interests clear here, he does imply that even his own contribution may not escape “the circle of apologetic interests.” His conclusions could certainly be used to support the latter of the two camps to which he refers, though it is by no means clear that he writes with this intention. A rather more acerbic, and somewhat long-winded statement along the same lines is made by Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, in a detailed response to Susan Ackerman’s monograph When Heroes Love: It was my preoccupation to state facts and deduce chains of interpretation in a sternly practical manner… Hopefully I avoided the pitfalls of too much cold impartiality, which makes the subject dry before one even realizes it, and too strong personal commitment, always suspect of masking some hidden agenda of the author’s, be it gay-friendly or homophobic. I have no such political bias; but if it should happen that, unlike Ackerman, I failed to convince my reader of this and find myself enrolled with



Battling for David and Jonathan 55 those who fight the luminaries of “conversion therapy” or “transformational ministry” in the USA, Joe Dallas, James W. Holsinger (if a man wants to comprehend the variety of the universe and inspire his mind with due measure of awe, he must contemplate the human intellect not only in its height of genius but in its abysses of fatuity and ineptitude), or who oppose academics turned ayatollahs by their dislike of homosexuality, such as Robert Gagnon, whereas I would preferably side with “liberal” and politically unprejudiced Biblical interpret[er]s, I shall, however, have not one single objection to this.23

Aside from the question of whether stating facts, deductive reasoning, cold impartiality, and absence of political prejudice are necessarily to be regarded as academic virtues, Nardelli is distancing himself from the kind of apologetic interests to which Naumann refers while simultaneously allowing, possibly even implying, a desire that his work could be used in their support. In some cases, defenders of one position or the other accuse their opponents of interpreting the text in the service of a predetermined agenda. Those guilty of sullying their scholarship with apologetics necessarily belong to the opposition camp, whose views a dispassionate, objective exegesis could not possibly support. Some scholars adopting this strategy seem to be more or less blind to their own presuppositions, and others seem to be attempting to distance themselves from apologetic concerns on all sides of the debate. Yet ideology, of course, is not simply to be found in our conscious agendas, but in the unconscious processes that shape the way we approach and engage with texts. This chapter takes the form of a metacommentary, that is, an attempt to work through examples of recent scholarship on David and Jonathan not in an attempt to offer a comprehensive collation of recent contributions to the debate, but in an attempt to demonstrate the ways in which these contributions are ideologically determined. In whose interests is it to try to resolve the “meaning” of the David and Jonathan narratives, and how do those interests determine the way scholars use the critical methods of their art? 2. Academy, church, and the gay agenda In an important 2001 article, Deryn Guest addressed the use of historical-critical method by advocates of diametrically opposed positions in the church debate on homosexuality, arguing that the interpretation of historical and critical evidence is often determined by “prior commitments to deeply held theological convictions.”24 In response Guest advocated the critique of the ethics of interpretation within the academy, on

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account of the problems raised by both the controlling role of confessional commitments in contemporary academic biblical scholarship,25 and the use of supposedly “objective”26 scholarly exegesis in the interpretation of scripture in communities of faith. Guest argues that the ideological dimensions of the view that “scholarly exegesis can be trusted to extract a precise interpretation that can then be used as a reliable basis for the confessional proclamation of eternal scriptural truths” need to be explored,27 and, in relation to the Bible’s position as a site of contested discourse, she raises the crucial issue of the ownership of the Bible, and of the authority to interpret it. As Guest argues elsewhere, the issue at stake is not simply the interpretation of texts – that is, according to commonly accepted rules of interpretive praxis, however these might be defined – but the authority ascribed to them.28 Inasmuch as “[a] ‘correct’ meaning of a biblical text is nothing other than the reading that achieves dominant status within a community,”29 and insofar as the owners of the text are those who subscribe to such dominant readings, the hermeneutical status quo needs to be challenged on ethical grounds by proponents of dissenting views, which have the effect of destabilizing the authoritative text. For Guest, this means in particular the dissenting views of “translesbigay,” LGBT/Q interpreters seeking to reclaim scripture: The translesbigay work that is currently being published…makes its own bid in the interpretational stakes, rivaling the ownership of texts, exposing the heterosexist biases in the hegemonic dominant mode of reading, revealing the effects those interests have upon others and posing an ethical challenge to the dominant discourse.30

While I agree that biblical interpretation requires a robust ethical dimension, both in terms of the first order interpretation of biblical texts and in terms of the criticism of the work of other scholars working in the field, I would take issue with the idea that this is simply a matter of making a “bid in the interpretational stakes,” or of seeking to achieve a position of dominance for a particular reading in a given interpretive community. I will explore this further in Chapter 3 but for now I will take Guest’s article as a point of departure from which to critique some examples of recent scholarship on David and Jonathan, first of all by interpreters who have used the historical-critical method either to support or oppose a homoerotic construal of their relationship, and then by other scholars who have more or less by-passed the historical-critical method in favour of exploring possibilities inspired by the text without being bound by the need either to reconstruct the intention of the author(s) and redactor(s) of the text, or to be restricted by the limits of the material form of the text itself.



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Several communities of faith, which remain the primary contexts in which the biblical texts are used and their effects felt, continue to wrangle over the ownership and interpretation of texts that are taken to bear on same-sex erotic relationships, as well as the right and authority to interpret such texts. The texts pertaining to David and Jonathan have tended to play second fiddle to the customary anti-gay “hit list,”31 a somewhat disparate collection of “seemingly implacable scriptural texts that condemn same-sex behaviour,”32 which generally includes most or all of Genesis 19, Leviticus 18:22, and 20:13, Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9, 1 Timothy 1:10, Jude 7, and 2 Peter 2:10. Nevertheless, as Jobling points out in the passage quoted in the introduction,33 the David and Jonathan narrative has been appropriated by some readers as a text exhibiting a positive attitude to same-sex relationships, and thus as an antidote to the more negative views imputed to the texts just listed. Given the often damaging effect, both within and outside the communities of faith,34 of the use of these texts, academic discourse, whether confessional, non-confessional, or straddling the blurred boundary between the two, should not allow itself the luxury of claiming to be disinterested in relation to the way these “texts of terror” are appropriated.35 Furthermore, while various forms of “objective” historical criticism still largely dominate the interpretation of biblical texts in the academy, recent scholarship includes a number of important contributions from the perspective of a range of non-heteronormative, LGBT/Q subjectivities, in which the texts pertaining to David and Jonathan have been more prominent. By focusing on narratives that have often been read as reflecting same-sex erotic love, rather than on texts whose use has generally put LGBT/Q interpreters on the defensive in what Theodore Jennings has dubbed a “dreary debate,”36 and Timothy Koch has more sardonically called a “pissing contest,”37 it should be possible to explore the ideological issues involved without getting drawn directly into what has become an increasingly futile discourse. I have no intention, then, of trying to resolve to the satisfaction of one interested party or another whether or not the dominant voices of the Hebrew Bible condemn same-sex eroticism or not. I am, however, concerned with the ideological agendas reflected in the works of scholars who do their exegesis with intentions such as this. 3. A homosexual misunderstanding? (Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli) Although the view that David and Jonathan had a sexual relationship was stated clearly in Tom Horner’s 1978 book Jonathan Loved David, and had by then already a significant history outside the Biblical Studies guild,38 it

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was not really until a 1996 article by Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli,39 shortly followed by detailed articles by Markus Zehnder and Martti Nissinen,40 that this issue was intensively debated by biblical scholars. Schroer and Staubli respond to what they see as anti-homosexual “taboos” underlying interpretations of the David and Jonathan narrative in recent German-language commentaries, and use the tools of historical criticism to reconstruct what they consider to be the likeliest original meaning of the David and Jonathan narrative. They reach the following, unequivocal conclusion: David and Jonathan shared a homoerotic and, more than likely, a homosexual relationship. The books of Samuel recount the love of the two men with utter frankness. In his song mourning the death of the beloved, David explicitly ranks the love of men he experienced with Jonathan above the love of women (2 Sam. 1.26).41

Schroer and Staubli also write in terms of textual agency. The text can compel the reader. This not only reflects foundationalist assumptions about textual meaning, but implies that the text is an agent that takes an active role in the production of meaning. This begs the question of what role the reader is to take in the construal of the text. What is remarkable here is not only the decisiveness with which the authors make this statement, but the way they make it without raising the question of the distance between the material form of the text and whatever historical actuality may, or may not, lie behind it; the possibility that 2 Samuel 1:26 is a later insertion into David’s lament,42 raising the further issue of whether there may be different portrayals of the relationship between the two men on different levels of the composite text; or the serious difficulty with figuring out how the comparison in 2 Samuel 1:26 works. What is meant by “love,” and which aspect (or aspects) of Jonathan’s “love” (Ktbh)) is being compared with which aspect (or aspects) of the “love of women” (My#n tbh))?43 The unexamined presupposition Schroer and Staubli make here is that the text can only support one single construal, which every reader who pays attention to the details of the text will find. Schroer and Staubli are arguing against the silencing of the homoerotic dimension of the David and Jonathan narratives, charging that commentators such as Fritz Stolz, Georg Hentschel, and Hans-Joachim Stoebe resort to “more or less explicit mystification of language” in order to “defend themselves against the assumption which the text itself nearly compels us to make, namely, that it speaks of a homosexual relationship.”44 It is not clear what Schroer and Staubli mean here by “mystification” of language. It is certainly clear that in mentioning homosexuality, these commentators feel compelled to defend the text – as if it needed



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defending – from the scurrilous suggestion that David and Jonathan were sexually involved with one another. By justifying their critique with reference to the ideology of a “natural” heterosexuality – the ideology of heteronormativity, in other words – to which the societies out of which these commentators emerged continue to cling, Schroer and Staubli direct us to the implicit, unspoken ideologies assumed by those who engage in historical-critical modes of exegesis. There is a pastoral dimension to this critique. Schroer and Staubli are concerned with the role of exegesis in helping modern “religious homosexual persons” to find their roots in scripture.45 There can be no doubt that the positions taken by Stolz and Hentschel are deeply problematic, and Schroer and Staubli are at least partly right to disagree with them. To claim, however, that it is scholars such as Stolz, Hentschel, and Stoebe who are at fault for willfully ignoring, on ideological grounds, what is obvious, namely that David and Jonathan were homosexually involved with one another, is to risk obscuring the ideological determination of their own position. There are at least two further risks here. First, seeking one’s roots in scripture raises the problem of whether one is in fact inventing those roots in the process.46 Second, there is a danger of reifying the “homosexual person” by means of a kind of anti-heterosexist counter-ideology, weighing in on the essentialist side of the constructionist/essentialist binary that queer theory has sought to disrupt.47 In support of this counter-ideology, Schroer and Staubli have pursued a single, stable, authoritative meaning of the biblical text. Thus both the text and the “religious homosexual persons” who seek their identities in it are reified, essentialized, leaving no room for ambiguity or negotiation at the level of either personal identity or textual meaning. Schroer and Staubli place the David and Jonathan narrative in the context of, “the culture of Egypt and the Aegean of the early first millennium bce,”48 which, since the events of the narrative are set around the late eleventh or early tenth centuries bce, would seem at first sight to be a plausible approach. On further examination, however, their use of pictorial evidence from Egypt, passages referring to Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, and passages referring to Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh are superficial and open to serious question. How much can be read into the physical contact between Ne-ankhkhnum and Khnumhotep in the wall carvings in which they are depicted, and what justification is there for using such evidence to disambiguate a text written many centuries later in Israel?49 Not only do the connotations implied by different kinds of physical contact vary from context to

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context, but the interpretation of textual and pictorial data require different methods, and there is in any case a significant chronological gap between the Egyptian evidence and the books of Samuel. How far can the evidence for sexual relations between men in ancient Greece, particularly evidence derived from the works of upper-class Athenian men of the fourth century bce, be meaningfully read into the Philistine culture of the eleventh and tenth centuries bce? This would be to assume that everyone with ancestry connected with the Greek mainland and islands, at all levels of society, participated in exactly the same kinds of sexual relationships, a remarkable feat of extrapolation of the sort that the recent work of James Davidson, inter alia, has tried to overturn.50 How far can interpretation of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus in the extremely fragmentary Achilleis of Aeschylus be read back into the Iliad, and thence into the historical realia of the eleventhcentury bce Aegean? How far can the apparently homoerotic aspects of the portrayal of the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu be interpreted literally rather than metaphorically and then read back between the lines of 1 and 2 Samuel? Thus while in the English edition of their essay Schroer and Staubli criticize Zehnder for failing in his 1998 article to appreciate their attempt to, “adduce new historical insights to the discussion,”51 their methodologically loose treatment of the evidence is in no way adequate to support their case. Their case rests on a close comparison between specific words and phrases in the David and Jonathan narrative and similar words and phrases in other biblical texts, particularly the Song of Songs.52 They begin by considering whbh)yw, “and he loved him” and yny(b Nx )cm,53 “he has found favour in my eyes” in 1 Samuel 16:21-22, both referring to Saul’s love for David.54 While bh), “love” and yny(b  Nx  )cm, “find favour in the eyes of ” can both be used with reference to political alliances, they can also be used in contexts suggestive of erotic love. Thus in Deuteronomy 24:1, for example, the phrase wyn(b Nx )cmt )l, “she does not find favour in his eyes” refers to a woman’s unsuitability in the eyes of the man who took her. In 1 Samuel 18:1, where Jonathan’s soul is bound to David’s, and where Jonathan loves David as himself (w#pnk), Schroer and Staubli construe Jonathan’s love as erotic based on the use of comparable language in the Song of Songs, where the woman describes her lover in Song of Songs 1:7, 3:1, 2, 3, 4 as “the one my very self loves” (y#pn hbh)#). They highlight the erotic connotations of the phrase b  Cpx, which is used of Jonathan “delighting in” David (1 Sam. 19:1), citing Shechem’s “delight in” Dinah (bq(y tbb Cpx, Gen. 34:19), and the Israelite man’s no longer “delighting



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in” the woman he had taken in battle from an enemy (hb tcpx )l M), Deut 21:14).55 Jonathan’s command hd#h )cnw hkl, “come, let us go out into the countryside” (1 Sam. 20:11) is compared with the parallel command in Song of Songs 7:12 (hd#h  )cn  ydwd  hkl). The “countryside” or “field” (hd#) is also the place where David and Jonathan farewell one another in 1 Samuel 20:41. The purpose of David and Jonathan going out into the “countryside” in 1 Samuel 20:11 is to be away from public view, especially away from anyone who might betray them to Saul, recalling the lovers’ need for secrecy in Song of Songs 8:1. The oaths that David and Jonathan swear in 1 Samuel 20:17 ((b# hifil) and 20:42 ((b# qal) recall the adjurations ((b# hifil) of the daughters of Jerusalem in Song of Songs 2:7; 8:4. That Jonathan and David kissed one another (wh(r t) #y) wq#yw, 1 Sam. 20:41) is read homoerotically.56 Schroer and Staubli also discuss the possible homoerotic connotations of 1 Samuel 20:30.57 Where Jonathan chooses David “to the shame of your mother’s nakedness” (Km)  twr(  t#bl), they associate sexual connotations with the noun “nakedness” (hwr() by reading this verse in light of the forbidden sexual relationships mentioned in Leviticus 20. In Leviticus 20:11, for example, a man who lies with his father’s wife has “uncovered his father’s nakedness” (hlg wyb) twr(). Similarly, in Leviticus 20:20 a man who lies with his uncle’s wife has “uncovered his uncle’s nakedness” (hlg wdd twr(). Although the verb hlg does not occur in 1 Samuel 20:30, the noun hwr( normally does bear sexual connotations,58 and the sense seems to be, if Schroer and Staubli are correct, that because Jonathan has been sexually involved with David, a man formerly loved sexually by Saul who belongs now to Saul’s house as Saul’s metaphorical son, he has implicitly uncovered, and explicitly shamed, his mother’s nakedness. The converse would presumably be that if Jonathan had had sex with a woman who was under Saul’s authority and beyond socially accepted boundaries of affinity, he would have uncovered and shamed his father’s nakedness.59 Finally, Schroer and Staubli consider 2 Samuel 1:19-27.60 In 2 Samuel 1:23, David calls both Saul and Jonathan Mmy(nhw  Mybh)n, “beloved and lovely” (cf. 1:26), echoing the erotic use of M(n with reference to both male and female lovers in the Song of Songs (Song. 1:16; 7:7). Schroer and Staubli liken the connection between love and death in David’s lament to the assertion that “love is strong, like death” (hbh) twmk hz() in Song of Songs 8:6.61 They associate the description of Jonathan’s love as “more wonderful than the love of women” (My#n  tbh)m  ht)lpn) in 1:26 with Proverbs 30:19, where “the way of a man with a young woman” (hml(b  rbg  Krd) is one of the things “too wonderful for me” (ynmm  w)lpn) to understand. Lastly, David’s description of Jonathan as

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“my brother” (yx)) is to be read in light of the sibling language used by the lovers of one another in the Song of Songs, and thence in light of analogous language in Egyptian love poetry.62 Schroer and Staubli’s construal of the David and Jonathan narrative depends heavily on the cogency of associating the narrative with the other passages they cite, especially those from the Song of Songs. Their use of the available philological evidence, however, is highly selective. Their word studies are not exhaustive, and almost invite a rebuttal as thorough as the responses to their work by Zehnder. They do not explain exactly how each piece of evidence is supposed to relate to the David and Jonathan narrative: because one text – the Song of Songs, say – influenced the other, or because the two texts share common idioms that once existed in one or more of the living dialects of ancient Israel and Judah? They hint that “[w]hen the sages of Jerusalem were composing the story of the David-Saul-Jonathan triangle in its written form, they could draw upon their own, indigenous poetry of heterosexual love, and, when needed, on the Gilgamesh Epic from Mesopotamia.”63 Now it is true that the Epic of Gilgamesh was known at least at some stage in Palestine, as the evidence for this work at Megiddo attests,64 and it is true that there was love poetry written in classical Hebrew using language that at some points corresponds to that of the David and Jonathan narrative, as the Song of Songs attests, but who were these sages, and when did they write? What was the range of their literary and intertextual competence? On whose behalf, for whose sake, in whose interests were they writing? Are Schroer and Staubli referring to the Song of Songs in its own written form, or to earlier, perhaps oral antecedents? Can we be sure that the Epic of Gilgamesh was in circulation at the time and in the place the David and Jonathan narrative, or a version of it, was written, and if so in what form was the Epic known? There are some significant elements missing from their deductive reasoning here, as Zehnder rightly notes.65 An important question arises here. What is the effect of the use of this particular range of intertexts on Schroer and Staubli’s argument? The effect is that the Song of Songs, and the other texts to which Schroer and Staubli refer, function as interpretants. That is, they are intertexts that belong to Schroer and Staubli’s range of intertextual competence which, when placed alongside the David and Jonathan narrative in the context of their argument, can be used to persuade the interpreter to actualize a certain range of connotations for the words and phrases used, but not others. So when a poem that bears strongly erotic connotations is placed alongside the David and Jonathan narrative and used as an interpretant, it becomes difficult for interpreters not to see erotic connotations in the



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language of the David and Jonathan narrative as well, unless their range of intertextual competence is broad enough for them to construct a counter-argument. Furthermore, what makes this possible is the fact that the David and Jonathan narrative has been transmitted alongside these other texts in the canon of the Tanakh, and in the canons of the Christian Old Testament, which are ideologically determined, artificially constructed corpora of texts. The Tanakh preserves only splintered fragments of the forms of Hebrew that once existed in ancient Israel and Judah, making it a deeply problematic corpus for philological research. While Schroer and Staubli appeal to “context” as a basis for deciding in favour of one construal over another,66 the problem remains that because there is no other narrative precisely, or frankly even remotely like this one within the Tanakh – that is, where the warrior son of the reigning king is said to love the king’s erstwhile armour-bearer, the relationship between the two being such as further to provoke the king’s suspicions as to his former armour-bearer’s intentions with respect to the kingship – it is not at all clear that the use of bh) in relation to the lovers in the Song of Songs, or the use of b  Cpx in the narrative of the rape of Dinah, belong to contexts that are comparable to the David and Jonathan narrative. Likewise, it is not at all clear that hd#h  )cnw  hkl in 1 Samuel 20:11 appears in a context in any way analogous to that in which hd#h  hcn  ydwd  hkl appears in Song of Songs 7:12.67 The fact that Schroer and Staubli do not then discuss other uses of bh), b  Cpx, or hd# + )cy/Klh, as Zehnder does,68 strongly suggests that they have chosen to present only the evidence that supports their case. They have used the methods of historical criticism, with the connotations of interpretive authority those methods bear within the guild, to support a polemical argument that, when examined, contains fatal weaknesses. 4. The ideological use of word statistics? (Markus Zehnder) Markus Zehnder initially responded to the German original of Schroer and Staubli’s article in a detailed analysis that Schroer and Staubli subsequently attacked as “another example of ideological abuse of word statistics.”69 His 2007 English article is a lengthier and still more detailed response that reacts with bafflement to Schroer and Staubli’s charge: “What exactly is ‘ideological’ about word statistics I do not know. There is certainly the danger of misusing the results of word statistics by drawing unjustified conclusions; I hope, however, to have been as careful as possible in this respect.”70 My own response to Zehnder is lengthy, and split between this chapter and the next. I wish to deal first with Zehnder’s use

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of word statistics as a vehicle for ideology, since it is clear that Schroer and Staubli failed to make this point in a way that Zehnder could understand and to which he could meaningfully respond. In the next chapter, I will deal with Zehnder’s use of canonical intertexts to disambiguate the David and Jonathan narrative. In a sense, Zehnder takes the opposite approach to Schroer and Staubli. Rather than presenting only the evidence that supports his own views, he attempts to decide the case once and for all by critiquing alternative views and then presenting an overwhelming barrage of statistics to destroy Schroer and Staubli’s position. His work is laudably thorough, but several problems remain. The most obvious is the appeal to word statistics itself,71 but also problematic are his rather wooden approach to a richly layered, polyvalent narrative, his failure adequately to distinguish “the canonical context” (der kanonische Rahmen) as a theological construct from the ancient historical and cultural contexts that gave rise to the texts the canon now contains, and his eagerness to impose a rather one-dimensional theological interpretation on the narrative. While these points do not altogether invalidate many of Zehnder’s arguments, they do weaken his overall case. Zehnder’s is certainly an ideological use of word statistics, though to call this abuse implies that word statistics could be ideologically neutral. The problem lies with the method itself and with the nature of the corpus to which Zehnder appeals for evidence. The Tanakh as a corpus is already ideologically determined, delimiting in advance the range of interpretive options available to the reader. Furthermore, the notion that statistics can be used to disambiguate uncertain passages risks either taking too little account of the particularity of the contexts of those passages, or ignoring the possibility that the most relevant evidence might come from outside the corpus with which one is dealing. Homer’s Iliad or the Epic of Gilgamesh may be more relevant to the study of 1 and 2 Samuel in its historical context than other Hebrew texts within the Tanakh.72 Although written in Greek outside Israel, the world represented in 1 and 2 Samuel arguably has more in common with the warrior culture of the Iliad than, for example, with the Holiness Code. Zehnder does address the issue of ideology, but not entirely adequately, responding thus to advocates of a queer-identified approach to reading biblical texts: …it is more interested in using the text to define and advance the agenda of one’s own group than in trying to understand historically what the original author(s) really wanted to convey. Generally speaking, however, this does not mean that scholars outside the fourth group [viz. advocates



Battling for David and Jonathan 65 of queer-identified approaches] have no agenda regarding the ongoing debate about the acceptability of homosexual behaviour.73 One may object to such a categorization on the grounds that every exegete is in some way driven by some agenda. Such a response is, however, not quite to the point since it does make a difference whether the personal experience or the (however limited) attempt to understand an ancient text as much as possible within its own historical and cultural setting is given absolute heuristic priority.74

Several points should be made. It is not clear that the meaning of a biblical text – or indeed any ancient text – can be determined by appeal to, “what the original author(s) really intended to convey.” The problem is not that (empirical) authors do not have some role in the production of meaning, nor that, at least in the case of certain kinds of text, determining authorial intention is not prima facie a valid, perhaps even the most valid, goal. There may be legal or ethical reasons, for example, to pursue this goal, and the kind of text in question may help to determine this. This is to some extent a matter of literary competence: we would not, after all, approach a legal document or newspaper article with the same assumptions about the relationship between author, text, and reader, or about the relationship between the various functions of language, that we would bring to a short story by Kafka or Borges, for example, without getting into serious difficulties. The fact is that authors, texts, and readers do not exist in the abstract, but in the particular, and while appealing to the intention of the author of, say, an academic article, a letter, or a private journal makes some sense, appealing to the intention of the author of a composite ancient narrative whose “author” is unknown, or to a rich aesthetic work such as a poem by Keats, is a much more questionable procedure. Authors can, furthermore, shape the way texts mean without consciously intending to do so, and, especially in the case of “closed” works, even if an author’s intention could be identified with a relative degree of probability, it cannot definitively control the way a work is later read and interpreted. More troubling is the rhetorical use that can be made of the appeal to authorial intention. Because such an appeal has the appearance of providing an objective control as a bulwark against distorting subjectivity, it can be used to limit interpretation, but not simply in the service of disinterested science: it can also be used further to marginalize already ideologically underprivileged readers. This is particularly the case where confessional agendas are at stake, whether these are openly acknowledged or not.75 The insidiousness of the situation is highlighted when the grain of the texts in question and the grain of the consensus of the guild

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are more or less in accord, since while an appeal to authorial intention at this point could be persuasive, and would have the appearance of disinterested objectivity, in fact the case may be that author, text, and interpreter are all participating in an ideology that ought to be challenged on ethical grounds.76 In the case of the David and Jonathan narrative, and in general with many self-consciously literary works in which the poetic function of language predominates over the referential function (which is still nonetheless present), the nature of the text is such as to make determining authorial intention exceptionally difficult, and probably impossible. Like many other biblical narratives this one is composite and subject to a complex transmission history, each layer of which refracts and alters slightly the meaning of earlier layers of the text.77 Not only does the composite nature of this text remove the idea that there could be a single human mind behind it, but, in addition, even if we could identify an individual “author” for the narrative it is not clear what this would amount to in terms of the meaning of the text.78 We do not know whether, or to what extent an idea of “authorship” such as Zehnder’s even existed in the socio-cultural context(s) out of which 1 and 2 Samuel emerged and were first transmitted, and even if it did, such an “author” may himself (or herself ) not have been attached to one particular construal of his (or her) work. Lest this criticism appear gratuitous, three examples from more recent literary history are worth citing. In the notes to his sacred epic Davideis, first published in 1656, Abraham Cowley makes the following remark: In this, and in some like places, I would not have the Reader judge of my opinion by what I say; no more than before in divers expressions about Hell, the Devil, and Envy. It is enough that the Doctrine of the Orbs, and the Musick made by their motion had been received very anciently, and probably came from the Eastern parts; for Pythagoras (who first brought this into Greece) learnt there most of his Philosophy. And to speak according to common opinion, though it be false, is so far from being a fault in Poetry, that it is the custom even of the Scripture to do so; and that not onely in the Poetical pieces of it; as where it attributes the members and passions of mankind to Devils, Angels, and God himself; where it calls the Sun and Moon the two Great Lights, whereas the latter is in truth one of the smallest; but is spoken of, as it seems, not as it Is, and in too many other places to be collected here.79

We are here in the unusual position of being able to read Cowley’s Davideis alongside the poet’s annotations. Even then, it is not clear whether this remark represents what Cowley himself thought at the time he wrote the passage in question, or whether he is trying to create, in relation to



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this passage, a particular idea of himself as Author in the mind of his “Reader,” whom he invokes. Without Cowley’s annotations, a literal, historically-oriented exegesis of his work could well yield an interpretation at odds with what its “Author” intended its “Reader” to reconstruct, namely that the passage in question is a literal reflection of Cowley’s own thoughts and opinions and is not, as Cowley seems to claim, the fruit of the exercise of poetic license. Readers may well approach the poem differently when they read it with Cowley’s annotations than if they did not have them to hand. They may also bring different working assumptions about the relationship between author, text, and reader to Cowley’s annotations than they do to the poem itself. In the case of the David and Jonathan narrative, we have no such annotations, only a text that has proved open to a range of different construals. Given that Zehnder later claims that the author of the David and Jonathan narrative presents himself as a representative of “official Yahwism,” the following remark by André Gide in the Preface to The Immoralist, which, to be sure, reflects both Gide’s reaction to responses by readers to the earlier publication of the book, and a particular understanding of literary art, seems apposite: …I no more wanted this book to be an accusation than an apology. I refrained from passing judgment. These days the public demands an author’s moral at the end of the story. In fact, they even want him to take sides as the drama unfolds, to declare himself explicitly for Philinte, for Hamlet or for Ophelia, for Faust or for Gretchen, for Adam or for Jehovah. It is not that I wish to claim that neutrality (I was going to say indecision) is a sure indicator of a superior intelligence, but I believe that many great minds have refused to…draw conclusions – and that posing a problem is not the same as presupposing its resolution. I use the word “problem” with some reluctance. In truth, in art there are no problems, none to which the work itself is not an adequate solution.80

As with Cowley, it is not clear how far this passage accurately represents Gide’s perspective at the particular historical moment at which it was penned, nor how far Gide, for ideological reasons, is trying to construct an “author,” and a relationship between “author” and “work,” in the mind of his imagined reader. Authorial intention and readerly expectation hover along the margins of this passage, which was written in retrospect in relation to the impact of the novel, yet stands at the head of future editions, participating in the construction of a reader who is expected – by the “author” – to remove the author from being implicated morally in the lives of particular characters in the work. There is nothing obvious in the David and Jonathan narrative that would enable us to pin the “author” down in this way, still less any authorial

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preface, or running commentary. Readers might be predisposed to sympathize with David, Jonathan, Michal, Saul, Samuel, or Yhwh, depending on their prior acquaintance with this and other texts, their theological presuppositions, whether they are reading with or against the grain of the text. The quote from the Christian Institute with which this book begins, for example, seems to be predisposed to look favorably on the character David, whereas certain characters in Stefan Heym’s The King David Report clearly do not. The interpretive contexts offered by the juxtaposition of different redactional layers, the deuteronomic framework, the structure of the canon, and the history of interpretation cannot help us decisively to pin down the author’s involvement with the text. Just as the “author” of Job cannot be unproblematically associated with the voice of Yhwh in Job 38:1–41:26, nor even with that of the narrator of the work as a whole, so the “author” of the David and Jonathan narrative cannot be associated unproblematically with any of the literary-theological Yhwhs of the Tanakh, or with any of the other characters in the narrative. A little later, Gide remarks: …the true interest of a work and that which any given readership might take in it are two separate things. I don’t think it is too conceited to take the chance of not attracting immediate interest in matters which are inherently interesting rather than to enthuse a fickle and faddish public with no thought to the longer term.81

Now it is not at all clear that a “true interest” can exist for any work, especially separated from the agglomeration of “given readerships” who take it upon themselves to construe it; nor is it clear how this “true interest” relates to Gide’s interest in his own work, which he has just disavowed with one hand, while taking back the right to appeal to the work’s author with the other. The interest for our purposes of the text of Gide’s preface – rather than Gide’s putative intentions – is that it points to the longterm reception and effect of a work as a potentially more adequate arbiter of textual meaning than its earliest readers and, by implication, its author. What this entails, of course, is not only the possibility that a focus on authorial intention, earliest readership, and reconstructed historical context do not lead us to any “sure revelation of meaning,”82 but, apparently pace Gide, that every stage in the reading, reception, and effect of a text may take one further and further away from what its author might have imagined its “true” or “inherent” interest to be, or, on the other hand, may coincide with it by accident. The “true interest” of a work is, after all, no more than a fiction guiding its interpretation, a fiction produced by the work’s interpreters, one of whom, in the cases of both Cowley and Gide, may turn out to have been its author.



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More recently, Umberto Eco has made the following comment in the context of reflections on his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa, a work that on many levels throws the question of the roles of author and reader in relation to the limits of interpretation into confusion: “The author should die when he has finished writing. In order not to disturb the path of the text.”83 This is the response of an “author” to critical readings of “his” work that he had not, and could not have anticipated. If, then, even the presence of an author’s own interpretive notes on his or her work of art cannot guarantee the interpretive validity of authorial intention as an arbiter of textual meaning, how much more is this true of a composite and ambiguous ancient text written in an imperfectly understood, arbitrarily preserved, dead language. It is, in any case, not at all clear that Zehnder lives up to his own claim, since in practice it is the Tanakh that provides his corpus, a most problematic basis for historical-critical research. The texts themselves are ideologically determined, which suggests that the critical issue is how interpreters recognize and negotiate the interplay between their own ideological frameworks, and those of the text(s) with which they are working. Finally, interpreters’ attempts to distance themselves from the original historical and cultural setting of the text do not ipso facto extricate them from the fact that, as Nissinen implicitly recognized, the very posing of the question whether or not David and Jonathan were sexually involved with one another is implicated in a modern agenda. Mutatis mutandis, the attempt to resolve this question, even using the “objective” tools of historical-critical exegesis, is also so implicated. This leads on to Zehnder’s distinction between exegesis and moral evaluation, a distinction he – certainly not without justification – accuses Schroer and Staubli of failing to observe. It is important to differentiate between the exegesis of the David-Jonathan stories and other biblical texts associated with questions of same-sex relationships on the one hand, and ethical assessments of modern issues related to the phenomenon normally labeled homosexuality on the other hand. This means that a positive or negative answer to the question whether the relationship of David and Jonathan can in any way be termed “(homo)sexual” or “(homo)erotic” does not in itself determine the ethical evaluation of what is called in our cultural setting “homosexual behaviour” or even “homosexual inclination.”84

I agree with Zehnder on this point, but it seems to me that he himself does not observe this distinction clearly. In his discussion of Cpx, he notes that the connection between Yhwh’s “pleasure” in David (2 Sam. 15:26; 22:20//Ps 18:20) and Jonathan’s (1 Sam. 19:1) must exclude an

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erotic or sexual connotation from the latter, on the grounds that “there is no positive indication in the HB that Yhwh himself explicitly approves of homosexual or homoerotic relationships.”85 The first point to make about Zehnder’s claim here is that, just as Schroer and Staubli use intertexts from the Song of Songs to limit the interpretation of the David and Jonathan narrative, so Zehnder is using passages that belong to different contexts, albeit within the same narrative in the final form of 1 and 2 Samuel, to limit the interpretation of the narrative. The intertexts he cites do not allow us to suppose that the Hebrew root in question, Cpx, always excludes an erotic interpretation when used to portray inter-human relationships. There are other aspects of Zehnder’s claim that are puzzling. It is unclear exactly what he is trying to communicate. If he is making an historical judgment, he is suggesting that because other passages in the Tanakh do not portray Yhwh as explicitly condoning homoerotic or homosexual relationships, nor does this one. This approach would only be valid if all the works contained within the Tanakh spoke with a single voice, and could, in addition, be used unproblematically to reconstruct beliefs in ancient Israel and Judah about Yhwh’s views on inter-human ethics. The Tanakh is, rather, a resource for understanding the ideological positions of those responsible for its content and structure. There may well be some overlap, but determining the extent of the overlap is extremely difficult. Alternatively, Zehnder may be implying that Yhwh’s views on interhuman ethics, as represented by the Tanakh, have normative status, and as such are likely to permit only one, unequivocal attitude to same-sex relations. If so, then Zehnder is making, or at the very least facilitating, a theological-ethical judgment, using the David and Jonathan narrative to contribute to a case for the condemnation of homoeroticism and homosexuality, but on the rather subtle – not to say dubious – grounds that Yhwh never views such relationships positively in the Tanakh, rather that Yhwh always condemns them.86 A position such as this would imply a version of a divine command approach to ethics, whereby human actions are only good if God commands them, and bad if he prohibits, or even fails to commend them. Whether or not this is Zehnder’s intention, this is certainly how his conclusions can be used, as Robert Gagnon’s dependence on Zehnder makes clear.87 At various points, Zehnder’s underlying convictions do become clear. Without citing relevant sources, with the exception of Radak on 1 Samuel 20:30,88 he notes that the contention that the relationship between David and Jonathan included homoerotic or homosexual aspects, “stands in opposition to an exegetical consensus that was in force for millennia,



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on both the Jewish and Christian sides. This means that the burden of proof is more likely to be on those who opt for an erotic or sexual interpretation.”89 This is a troubling claim, and points to some of the more questionable ways in which reception history can be used. Anthony Thiselton, for example, has recently used precisely this sort of argument in his commentary on 1 and 2 Thessalonians to reject ideological criticism as a valid approach to the study of Paul.90 There may be historically contingent reasons why the majority of readers have not seen, or even not admitted to seeing, erotic or sexual elements in the David and Jonathan narrative, just as scholars of Virgil at certain points would not, or could not see the relationship between Nisus and Euryalus in explicitly homoerotic terms,91 and as Benjamin Jowett in the nineteenth century could not, or would not see the theme of love in Plato’s Socratic dialogues in such terms.92 The history of reception is not a cumulative history of disinterested and disembodied interpretations of a text, but is at each point conditioned and shaped by a range of factors, such as the influence and authority of prior interpretations, the authority and influence of conventional readings or of conventional interpretive frameworks (such as, in the Christian tradition, the four senses of scripture), and the particular contexts in and for which the text in question is being interpreted and used. There is no question here, then, of a burden of proof imposed by the history of interpretation, since it is entirely possible that the text is at odds with that history. Furthermore, if an exegetical consensus did exist, was it held consciously or unconsciously? A “consensus” surely requires active interpretive decisions, yet what Zehnder may mean is that the mainstream of Jewish and Christian tradition had simply never before noticed, acknowledged, or explicitly discussed the homoerotic potential of the David and Jonathan narrative. If so, we are not actually dealing with a consensus, but with an unexamined default position. This would seem to be implied by Zehnder’s remark that “…a reader who does not come to the text with a preconception that a homoerotic connotation lies in the text would not find it there, as long exegetical tradition shows.”93 This is a fair point as far as it goes, but needs to be demonstrated with reference to that exegetical tradition, which, apart from an allusion to Radak, Zehnder does not do. Furthermore, a “connotation” does not lie “in the text,” but is perceived by the interpreter in the process of reading: it lies between the text being studied, other (inter)texts that may help to disambiguate it, and a reader who perceives the connection between them. Connotations are perceived in front of the text, not in it or behind it.

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The question then becomes: why did some readers and not others perceive this connotation, at what point in the exegetical tradition, and in connection with which intertexts?94 To what extent was this “consensus” – or possibly default position – determined by other factors in the contexts through which the David and Jonathan narrative was transmitted, such as wider ecclesiastical or societal condemnation of sex between men? To what extent was it determined by more forceful voices in the canon? For example, does the collocation of the David and Jonathan narrative with passages such as Genesis 19:1-29, Leviticus 18:22, 20:13, and Judges 19:1-30 in the context of the Tanakh, combined with the cumulative effect of their respective reception histories, tend towards the exclusion of homoerotic possibilities? If so, then the claimed “exegetical consensus” may be no more than an effect of the canon, which modern historically-oriented exegesis should be in a position to question. Yet Zehnder uses this canonical effect, reframing it in historical-critical terms, to reinforce his case: Whether the stipulations of Lev. 18 and 20 or an earlier version of them can be regarded as being known in David’s time or in the time of the narrator(s) is not decisive with regard to the question in view; for if the story about Sodom and Gomorrah in Gen. 19, which to a certain extent deals with homosexual behavior, has to be attributed to J and if J has to be dated to the period of Solomon, then we already have a witness to a negative verdict on homosexual behavior in the view of Yahwism that is situated in close proximity to the Davidic era. But even if none of the written attestations of a rejection of homosexual behavior is dated to the period of the United Monarchy, one cannot avoid the observation that there is no witness to a positive affirmation of homosexual behavior. 95

There are several problems here. First, it is no longer clear that a unified narrative “J” can be reconstructed and attributed to the time of Solomon. Second, it is not clear that it is “homosexual behavio[u]r” rather than some combination of contravention of hospitality norms, gang rape, or humiliation through feminization that is at issue in Genesis 19 (and Judges 19).96 It is consequently not clear that the context of Genesis 19 (and Judges 19) is in any way analogous with, or relevant to the interpretation of, the David and Jonathan narrative. Third, it is not clear what constitutes the “Yahwism” to which Zehnder refers. Fourth, it is not clear what weight can be given to an argumentum e silentio, that is, that there is no positive affirmation of homosexual behaviour in the Tanakh. We simply do not know how far this reflects attitudes widely held in the world(s) that lay behind the various layers of 1 and 2 Samuel.97 Furthermore, framing the debate in terms of an “exegetical consensus” and “burden of proof” suggests that determining the nature of the relationship between David



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and Jonathan is a matter of an accepted paradigm versus what it would take to force a paradigm shift. That seems to be based on a different exegetical model than the one Zehnder claims to be using, which involves examining the text in its original cultural context, so as to follow the truth wherever it leads. The most pervasive problem with Zehnder’s discussion is his use of word statistics. But the strongest argument against the use of word statistics is not, pace Schroer and Staubli, that such an approach is “ideological” – a charge that functions as little more than an insubstantial argumentum ad hominem if it is made without further discussion – but that it fails to account for the relative inadequacy of the Tanakh as a resource for philological analysis. Zehnder’s discussion of the bh) wordgroup offers a good illustration of the problems. The problem lies not with Zehnder’s explicit claims, but rather between the lines of his argument. The noun hbh) is used eleven times in the Song of Songs,98 but only three times outside the Song to refer to intimate relationships between humans.99 On none of these occasions is the reference to a homosexual or homoerotic relationship, and where there is a reference to relationships between human beings, no erotic or sexual component is necessarily present.100 Elsewhere, on 22 occasions the reference is to the “love” shown between Yhwh and his covenant people, Israel. Thus the noun hbh) “does not by itself include a sexual (or even a homosexual) component.” Indeed, the frequency with which hbh) is used to refer to the love between Yhwh and Israel suggests that, in 1 and 2 Samuel, Jonathan’s love for David either reflects, or is an outworking of the love of Yhwh for David. Zehnder concludes: If this [theological] dimension is affirmed, the assumption that the noun hbh) includes a homosexual or homoerotic connotation is even less probable, since outside the disputed case(s) of Jonathan and David (and Naomi and Ruth) there is no explicit theological affirmation of “homosexuality” or “homoeroticism” in the HB and since the reference to the hbh) between Yhwh and his people relates to a covenant whose stipulations seem to rule out some – if not all – homosexual acts.101

This argument is methodologically confused. The spread of statistics for hbh) results from the particular contexts in which the noun appears. In an anthology of – apparently heterosexual – Hebrew love poetry it is appropriate for hbh) to be used relatively frequently in an erotic or sexual sense, while the use of this noun and its cognates in Deuteronomy in a theological sense derived from the use of such language with political overtones in ancient Near Eastern treaties, is, of course, unlikely to point directly to an erotic or sexual nuance. Words do not “include” particular

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connotations, they are perceived as suggesting such connotations in particular contexts, which means that unless the context of Deuteronomy is more similar to that of the David and Jonathan narrative than is the context of the Song of Songs, which Zehnder has not shown, the question of statistical attestation is irrelevant. The absence of uses of hbh) with a homoerotic or homosexual connotation is irrelevant. The issue is whether the erotic or sexual connotations of hbh) in the context of a male-female relationship in the Song of Songs and other passages in the Tanakh provides a plausible analogy for the use of this word group in the context of a male-male relationship in the David and Jonathan narrative. The absence of homoerotic or homosexual connotations elsewhere in the Tanakh is thus tangential:102 if there were other passages where such connotations were clear, the David and Jonathan narrative would be much less difficult to disambiguate and the Tanakh as a corpus would bear a very different character than it does. What needs to be recognized here is that the relationship between David and Jonathan is the only clear example in the Tanakh of a deep friendship between two men, though friendship between men does eventually become an important theme in Hebrew literature, particularly in Ben Sira.103 Because of this the friendship between David and Jonathan seems to represent an exception, and in dealing with exceptions what is statistically more common cannot be used without difficulty to determine meaning without reducing the exception to something else. There is a clear danger of circularity here. Indeed, given that the friendship between David and Jonathan is an anomaly in the Tanakh but is by no means an anomaly when compared with classical Greek literature and its antecedents,104 the question must seriously be posed whether the Tanakh is of any more than tangential use, from the perspective of historical criticism, in determining the meaning of the David and Jonathan narrative. The question of whether a theological dimension to hbh) exists in the David and Jonathan narrative is most interesting.105 Zehnder and Stoebe, on whom Zehnder seems to be at least partially dependent,106 can only make this suggestion with respect to the David and Jonathan narrative because of the structure of the canon. The David and Jonathan narrative is part of the narratives of Saul’s downfall and David’s rise, which are placed within the redactionally multi-layered Deuteronomistic History, which in turn is bookended at the beginning by Deuteronomy, with its distinctive language and ideology, and at the end by the closing chapters of 2 Kings, which impose a theodic interpretation on everything the work as a whole contains.107 The effect of this is that the non-deuteronomic material within the Deuteronomistic History is collo-



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cated with, and dominated by deuteronomic material. Thus hbh) and its cognates in the David and Jonathan narrative occur in a literary context dominated by layers of tradition, in which hbh) and its cognates suggest predominantly theological and covenantal connotations. The redactional history of the Deuteronomistic History and the structure of the Tanakh together contribute to the shaping of the reading process, and to the gradual closure of the meaning of their constituent parts. It is not at all clear, then, that the apparent exclusion of homosexual acts under the stipulations of the covenant – though in point of fact such an exclusion is not explicit in Deuteronomy at all – can be used to exclude a homoerotic or homosexual construal of the David and Jonathan narrative. Furthermore, to appeal to the absence of any explicit theological affirmation of homosexuality or homoeroticism in the Tanakh outside the David and Jonathan narrative as a reason for excluding such a construal of that narrative assumes that the Tanakh must be univocal, which is a profoundly ahistorical assumption. Zehnder develops this point further in reference to the notion of “official Yahwism,” at which point his argument becomes fatally circular. In a discussion of the narrator’s presentation of Yhwh as the ultimate cause of events, he notes that These remarks of the narrator(s) show that the rise of David is interpreted theologically, as the result of Yhwh’s personal intervention for David. Against this background it is hard to believe that the narrator(s) would have inserted hints at a possible homoerotic or homosexual relationship of David, for the narrator(s) presents himself as an advocate of the official Yahwism, and there is no clear ground for the assumption that this religion at any point in its history ever took a positive stance on homoeroticism or homosexuality. For the same reason, the underlining of the fact that the relationship between Jonathan and David was connected with the concept of a covenant and with oaths that were witnessed by Yhwh has to be taken as incompatible with the assumption of a homoerotic or homosexual nature of that relationship. How can one explain that it is precisely Yhwh who takes on the function of guarantor and witness to a covenant if this covenant were connected with a kind of sexual relation for which no affirming evaluation can be found within the official documents of Yahwism, but…only negative evaluations – however disputed their range may be.108

There are at least four serious weaknesses here, two exegetical, one theological, and one ethical. The first weakness is that Zehnder confuses three different, though doubtless related manifestations of Yhwh: the character Yhwh in this narrative, who is a figure of literature before he can be considered a figure of theology, the Yhwh who is the senior partner in a covenant with Israel in Deuteronomy,109 and the Yhwh who was actually

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worshipped in ancient Israel and Judah, who may not be reducible to a single figure in any case. Furthermore, the covenant between Yhwh and Israel in Deuteronomy is not the same as, or even of the same sort as, the covenant between Jonathan and David guaranteed by Yhwh in 1 Samuel.110 It can only be construed as such if the Deuteronomic covenant is taken as a hermeneutical control for limiting the interpretation of the covenant between David and Jonathan. The second exegetical problem is that there is nothing whatsoever within the narrative itself – apart from the placing of the David and Jonathan narrative within the Tanakh that is our only remaining evidence for “official Yahwism” – that the narrator presents himself as representative of such an official movement. Since Yhwh appears as a character in the narrative, and, if his treatment of Saul is anything to go by, an arguably abusive character at that, it is quite conceivable that the narrator does not submit unquestioningly to this Yhwh at all, and we could thus read this character much as one might read Apollo in Euripides. Furthermore, it is not at all clear what “official Yahwism” was, if indeed it ever existed. Is Zehnder assuming the existence of a single, identifiable “official” Yahwism, which for some reason is still somehow authoritative, in contradistinction to an “unofficial” Yahwism, a “folk,” “popular,” or “subaltern” Yahwism, or a “heterodox,” even “deviant” or “syncretistic” Yahwism, or what? Is his focus on “official” Yahwism any more than an example of “biblical scholarship’s obsession with ‘the great figures of the past,’” as Jacques Berlinerblau aptly put it?111 As an increasing body of scholarly literature has shown, the language of “official Yahwism” is exceptionally problematic,112 and the notion of such a Yahwism may be no more than an effect of a canon that gives the impression that such a thing may have existed. Zehnder’s understanding of it has all the hallmarks of a construct abstracted from the biblical texts, rather than a historically identifiable reality deduced from them. Moreover, this construct has been abstracted from the dominant voices of the Torah, including Deuteronomy and the Holiness Code,113 yet it is not at all clear that the dominant voices of the Torah ever constituted the ideology of an official Yahwism in Israel or Judah. Indeed, the fact that the Deuteronomistic History blames the destruction of Israel and Judah on the failure of their kings faithfully to sponsor an official Yahwism commensurate with the dictates of the book of Deuteronomy – or some form thereof – surely suggests that the official cults of Israel and Judah would have been significantly at odds with Zehnder’s construct,114 with the possible exceptions of the reforms of Hezekiah, Josiah, Ezra, and Nehemiah, if indeed the biblical accounts of those



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have a secure historical foundation, which itself cannot be assumed without question. Why, then, should it be possible for Zehnder to point to “official Yahwism” as a source of authority, either historically, with respect to the actualities of either the religions or sexual practices of ancient Israel and Judah, or theologically? This points to my third, theological point. Even if such an “official Yahwism” did exist in ancient Israel and Judah in Judaism and Christianity it is the biblical texts themselves and the interpretive traditions in which they are embedded that are authoritative, not the ideologies of whatever movements lie behind them. Finally, in terms of the ethics of interpretation, to submit to the dictates of a supposed ancient “official” movement raises serious questions about power and coercion.115 Whom might this movement have marginalized, disenfranchised, silenced, oppressed? Whom might the rhetorical appeal to such an ancient “official” movement contribute to marginalizing, disenfranchising, silencing, oppressing? What might be the ethical consequences of colluding in Zehnder’s manufacture of consent? Following a detailed, and in fact largely persuasive discussion of the nature of the comparison in 2 Samuel 1:26, Zehnder concludes What David expresses, then, is that on the emotional level his relationship to Jonathan was much more important to him than his relationships with women, though – in accordance with the prevalent standards of behavior in his culture – it would only be the latter that included a sexual aspect.116

Zehnder’s argument does not support his conclusion, even though the emotional dimensions of Jonathan’s love, and the combined emotional and sexual love of women may, indeed, be at work in 2 Samuel 1:26. Clearly on some level the poet is claiming that Jonathan’s relationship with David was more wonderful to him than his relationships with women, but it is by no means clear that according to the standards of behaviour in his culture only the latter included a sexual aspect. We simply do not know what the relationship is between the behavioural “norms” in the culture of the poet responsible for this verse and those of eleventh-century bce Israel, or even those of the society to which the poet belonged (which may have been, but probably was not, eleventh-century bce Israel). We cannot determine, for example, whether the poet’s expression accords with those norms or in some way, deliberately or otherwise, exceeds or transgresses them. Furthermore, if the standards of behaviour to which Zehnder refers are inferred from Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13,117 the problem remains that we do not know how far the stipulations of the Holiness Code coincide with the norms of the society represented by the various layers of 1 and 2 Samuel.

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Zehnder’s final point in connection with 2 Samuel 1:26 is this: For a male person with a predominantly or exclusively homosexual orientation, the concept of “sexual love experienced in a relationship with a woman” is void, something that lies outside the realm of personal experience. Clearly then, according to 2 Sam. 1:26, David cannot be defined as a homosexual person in the sense of being sexually oriented predominantly or exclusively towards persons of his own sex.118

This is an obvious non sequitur. It is entirely possible for a man predominantly oriented sexually towards other men to have had a sexual relationship with a woman, particularly in a society where sexual relationships between men are socially unacceptable, such as the Israel imagined by Zehnder, or the nineteenth-century England of John Addington Symonds and Oscar Wilde, both of whom were married and the fathers of children, despite the fact that both had relationships with men, and Symonds at least had an overwhelming preference for other men. Socially approved heterosexual relationships can provide, and in such contexts have provided, a necessary masque to hide more deepseated same-sex oriented desires. In any case, the issue is not whether the relationship between Jonathan and David implied their exclusive or predominant attraction to other men, but whether it was, or is portrayed as being erotic or sexual at all. This is an odd and irrelevant point for Zehnder to make.119 Also odd is Zehnder’s contradictory use of the occurrences of the bh) word group in the context of the prophetic marriage metaphor. In a 2006 essay,120 Saul Olyan compared and contrasted the comparison in 2 Samuel 1:26 with the use of comparison in ancient Near Eastern treaty/covenant contexts, where he finds two broad types: (1) either one treaty partner’s “love” under the covenant is compared with that of another treaty partner of the same class; or two different manifestations of a treaty partner’s “love” are compared; (2) covenant love is compared with another kind of love that also requires fidelity. In both cases, fidelity is a key element that makes the comparison possible. Olyan finds two examples of the latter type in the Tanakh, in Jeremiah 2:2 and Hosea 3:1. In Jeremiah 2:2 Israel is portrayed metaphorically as a married woman, the covenant faithfulness of whose youth (Kyrw(n  dsx) and whose bridal love (Kytlwlk  tbh)) stand for Israel’s former loyalty to Yhwh. In Hosea 3:1 Israel is portrayed metaphorically as an adulterous woman (tp)nmw  (r  tbh)  h#)) who, despite Yhwh’s love (l)r#y  ynb  t)  hwhy  tbh)), has loved what gods other than Yhwh provided (Mybn(  y#y#)  ybh)). Here Israel’s disloyalty under the covenant is represented metaphorically by an adulterous woman.



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Olyan’s point is that in 2 Samuel 1:26 the comparison is not based on the common element of fidelity in the two “loves” being compared. Rather, Jonathan’s love is being compared, “to the experience of sexual or sexual-emotional love with women as a class.”121 What is interesting is what Zehnder does with Olyan’s use of Jeremiah 2:2 and Hosea 3:1. For Zehnder, “neither Israel’s love of Yhwh (Jer. 2:2) nor Yhwh’s love for the adulterous Israel (Hos. 3:1) contains a sexual element.” This is meant to justify Zehnder’s point that not all elements of marital love are being actualized in the comparison, and therefore not all elements in the love of a woman for a man are being actualized in David’s comparison of Jonathan’s love with that of women: only emotional, not sexual elements are being actualized. Yet Zehnder does not carry the same logic to his discussion of bh) in connection with prophetic condemnations of Israel’s traitorous attachment to gods other than Yhwh. Thus in Isaiah 57:8 the phrase Mbk#m  tbh), “you have loved their bed,” referring to adultery with gods other than Yhwh, is taken by Zehnder to belong to the uses of bh) where a sexual component is at least possible. Similarly, in Ezekiel 16:37 Jerusalem’s “lovers” (Kybh)m) and “everyone you [Jerusalem] love” (tbh) r#) lk) belong to that category.122 There is an obvious inconsistency here: where bh) is used metaphorically in reference to covenant loyalty between Yhwh and Israel there is no sexual component, but where bh) is used metaphorically to refer to covenant disloyalty on Israel’s part with other gods there is a sexual component. This is, presumably, bound up with the fact that prophetic rhetoric associates Israel’s disloyalty to Yhwh with sexual infidelity, but this would surely imply that what Israel lacks is metaphorical sexual fidelity to Yhwh. Zehnder’s strangely inconsistent reasoning implies a qualitative distinction between the two metaphorical uses of bh), even though in all other respects they are analogous, both referring to covenant loyalty by means of the metaphor of marital, and thus sexual fidelity. A further problem is the assumption that a word in a narrative must have only one meaning. This lies behind Zehnder’s conviction that the verb bh) in 1 Samuel 18:1 and 20:17 must have a political connotation to the exclusion of the sexual. There can be no doubt that in many cases, this verb does have political connotations. This usage reflects the language of ancient Near Eastern treaties, and certainly seems to be used in this sense in Samuel and Kings.123 In addition, there are strong indications that Jonathan’s relationship with David has political consequences.124 Likewise, as Zehnder notes, the verb r#q in 1 Samuel 18:1 can certainly refer to political conspiracy, and is used thus elsewhere in 1 Samuel (22:8, 13).125 The first problem with this is that Zehnder’s treatment of r#q is inadequate

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for the same reasons he himself adduces to show that Schroer and Staubli’s treatment of the similarities between 1 Samuel 18:1, 3 and Song of Songs 1:7; 3:1, 2, 3, 4 is inadequate. That is, the syntax of 1 Samuel 18:1 does not suggest political conspiracy. In 1 Samuel 18:1 Jonathan’s #pn is bound to David’s (dwd  #pnb  hr#qn  Ntnwhy  #pn), in consequence of which Jonathan loved him as his own soul (w#pnk Ntnwhy wbh)yw). Here r#q nifal is followed by b, whereas the normal construction in reference to political conspiracy is r#q qal followed by l(. A closer analogue to 1 Samuel 18:1 would be Genesis 44:30, where Judah says that Benjamin’s “soul is bound to his [viz. Jacob’s] soul” (w#pnb  hrw#q  w#pnw). Zehnder does not deny the relevance of Genesis 44:30, but it is far from clear that in 1 Samuel 18:1 the political nuance predominates. Our knowledge of the dialects in which these texts were written is admittedly imperfect, but it is difficult to see how b r#q can be read in a purely, or even predominantly political sense.126 A further problem concerns the possibility of double entendre. The interpenetration of the personal and the political is fundamental to all the narratives of the early monarchy. Whether the language used for David’s relationship with Jonathan can be construed in a political sense is not in question. It can, but that does not necessarily lead to the exclusion of emotionally charged, even erotic or sexual connotations. Thus inasmuch as the language of personal, including erotic relationships was used metaphorically in the context of political treaties in the ancient Near East, such language in the David and Jonathan narrative may well point to the intersection of the personal and the political. This is very clear in the case of Michal’s relationship with David, which presumably has erotic connotations on at least some level. Michal’s love (bh), 1 Sam. 18:20, 28) is noteworthy for the fact that it is a rare case of a woman being said to love a man. It is clearly shot through with political consequences for her father and for David. Her attraction to David is inseparable from its political consequences. Why, then, must this be so unequivocally excluded from Jonathan’s love for David?127 Moreover, the fact that the language of “love” is used for both Michal and Jonathan in relation to David could suggest that language meant to be interpreted literally as erotic when used of Michal’s relationship with David may still be meant to be interpreted as erotic, though in a metaphorical sense, when used of Jonathan’s relationship with David. That is, language that expresses the most intimate possible bond between two people is used for the relationship between David and Jonathan, regardless of whether or not their relationship was actually understood to be erotic.128 This need not ultimately contradict Zehnder’s position, though it would mean that the language



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of the narrative is polyvalent and open to several possible construals, regardless of a given reader’s desire to find just one. For Zehnder, the fact that Jonathan’s introduction to David follows his defeat of Goliath is less likely to suggest homoeroticism than if the introduction had occurred in connection with the note in 1 Samuel 16 about David’s beautiful appearance: This creates an atmosphere probably less suggestive of homoeroticism than would be the case had the first encounter between Jonathan and David been linked to 1 Sam. 16; rather, it is the political and military sphere that is present in the description of their relationship from the very beginning.129

This begs the question: less suggestive to whom? Zehnder would have to presuppose here that military contexts necessarily preclude homoeroticism. It is difficult to see how this can be deduced from either the literary remains from ancient Israel – which otherwise makes no reference to this topic – or from comparative ancient Near Eastern literature such as Homeric epic, notwithstanding the possibility that a homoerotic reading of the latter may owe more to fifth-fourth century bce re-reading than to Homer.130 Lacking again here is scrutiny on Zehnder’s part of his own presuppositions. Intriguingly, Zehnder adduces the wealth of later messianic constructions of the figure of David in Second Temple Judaism and the New Testament to oppose the view that David was homoerotically or homosexually involvement with Jonathan: Such a high esteem of David would be hard to understand against the background of a narrative tradition that hinted at a homosexual or homoerotic relation with Jonathan. Both Second Temple Judaism and the NT show a clearly and unanimously negative evaluation of such relations.131

This is, however, a question not of what was intended by the author(s) of the narrative, which is otherwise Zehnder’s primary concern, but of how the narrative was read. This is a separate issue from whether or not the narrative “hints at” a homoerotic or homosexual dimension: readers are quite capable of suppressing, of narcotizing, possible connotations of a text that other readers, based on a different range of intertextual competence and a different spectrum of presuppositions, might actualize as they read. For a first-century bce/ce Jewish readership, the David and Jonathan narrative was already mediated through layers of Deuteronomistic redaction and the nascent process of canon formation. Such a readership was by now influenced by the ideologies of other parts of what became the Tanakh, such as Leviticus, as well as by ideologies reflected

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in other Jewish literature of the Second Temple period. Furthermore, the messianic tradition gave 2 Samuel 7 a higher de facto authority than other parts of 1 and 2 Samuel, as its use as a “messianic” proof-text in 4QFlorilegium, for example, makes plain. The emergence of messianism has little or nothing directly to do with the David and Jonathan narrative. Thus Zehnder’s point here is irrelevant to the question of what the David and Jonathan narrative may originally have meant, which is Zehnder’s main concern, but highly significant for understanding what shaped the way the narrative was subsequently read, and not read. Perhaps the most bizarre parts of Zehnder’s treatment are his discussions of  lydgh dwd d( (1 Sam. 20:30) and t#q (1 Sam. 18:4; cf. 20:20-22, 36-38). Here Zehnder warns his readers that his exegesis is “of a rather explicit nature,” and “those preferring not to read this material may skip the following points…printed in reduced size.”132 This raises serious questions about the nature of the audience of published biblical scholarship. What kind of model reader has Zehnder constructed here?133 One whose engagement with the biblical texts has to take place through a filter? Why? If Zehnder’s discussions of lydgh  dwd  d( and t#q are important to his case and advance the understanding of disputed words and phrases in 1 Samuel, surely they need to be engaged with openly, not censored. If the real or assumed sensitivities of the readers of Westminster Theological Journal have to be protected from scandal in this way, it must surely be asked to what extent such readers are in fact free to engage unhindered in scholarly research on the biblical texts. This may be a concrete example that gives credence to the increasingly heard lament that Biblical Studies continues to be unhelpfully shaped by predetermined theological agendas.134 But such a view would be too simple, and would buy too quickly into the questionable notion that there is an irresolvable dichotomy between confessing and non-confessing approaches to biblical exegesis. In fact, Zehnder seems to be perpetuating a kind of pseudo-Victorian, bourgeois prudishness,135 implying that responsible historical-critical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible must maintain a discourse of politeness and respectability, discussing at exhaustive length the non-existence of sexual connotations to a narrative while perpetuating the discourse around their possibility. In critiquing a particular scholarly position it is important to critique the strongest expression of that position, which in the case of a nonerotic construal of the David and Jonathan narrative is Zehnder’s 2007 article. This critique was also necessary not just because of Zehnder’s thoroughness, but also because of the weight and influence his work has. His earlier German article is the main authority, for example, for the



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exegeses of the narrative by Robert Gagnon and Steven McKenzie. I am not, however, simply attacking Zehnder. In my response to his work, and in my response earlier to Schroer and Staubli, I am trying to make clear some of the key methodological and ideological problems with the use of historical-critical methods to claim ownership of the David and Jonathan narrative on behalf of a particular ideological position, whether that position is made explicit by the scholar(s) in question, which is the case with Schroer and Staubli, or not, which is apparently the case with Zehnder. 5. Christian homophobia as divine order? (Robert Gagnon) At the opposite end of the interpretive and theological spectra from Schroer and Staubli is a thorough and erudite, if sadly rather nasty, book by Gagnon,136 which Walter Wink has dubbed, “something equivalent to a neutron bomb designed to wipe out the homosexual lobby without…altogether destroying the church,” whose exhaustively argued case ultimately for Winks, “sinks under its own weight.”137 Gagnon is heavily dependent on the earlier of Zehnder’s articles, and uses historicalcritical methods in the service of a confessionally-driven approach to hermeneutics that is intended to provide an incontestable framework for dealing with the issue of same-sex erotic relationships in the community of faith. Like Wold’s Out of Order, it is an example of what Dale Martin calls, “Christian textual foundationalism.”138 Gagnon’s book is not dedicated to the David and Jonathan narrative, but uses an antihomoerotic interpretation of that narrative as part of a detailed engagement with biblical texts pertinent to the issue of same-sex eroticism to help construct a comprehensive defense of the conservative position on same-sex intercourse (what Gagnon terms “homosex”).139 His exegesis of the David and Jonathan narrative is meant by him to be read in light of his conclusions about the meaning of other texts from the Hebrew Bible where the issue of same-sex eroticism is less ambiguously present.140 The reason I have included a discussion of Gagnon is not because he is a major authority on 1 and 2 Samuel and the David and Jonathan narrative, but because his work illustrates the way that other works within the biblical canon can be co-opted and made to serve as controls for the interpretation of David and Jonathan in the context of a very specific, thoroughly argued case against the validity of homosexual relationships. It is not Gagnon’s treatment of the David and Jonathan narrative itself that is significant, but the way a non-erotic construal of it can be used.

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After discussing the issue of same-sex intercourse in the broader context of the ancient Near East, Gagnon offers a detailed study of Genesis 1–3, 9:20-27, 19:4-11, Judges 19:22-25, Deuteronomy 23:17-18, 1 Kings 14:21-24, 15:12-14, 22:47 (mt), 2 Kings 23:7, Job 36:14, Leviticus 18:22, and 20:13, paying close attention to matters of philology. He concludes that the evidence amounts to a wholesale rejection of same-sex intercourse by the authors of the texts in question, chiefly because sexual intercourse between persons of the same sex violates the complementarity between male and female established by God at creation and obvious to everyone through the evidence of nature. It is in this context that Gagnon considers David and Jonathan:141 “Only after treating explicit OT references to same sex intercourse is it possible to put into proper perspective the stories about David and Jonathan in 1 Samuel 18–23 and David’s eulogy for Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1.”142 The assumption is that a “proper perspective” on the David and Jonathan narrative will be gained by reading them in the context of the Tanakh, but the following problem arises: does this mean taking the context of the Tanakh as a reliable guide for reconstructing sociohistorical context of early Iron Age Israel, or does this mean taking the context of the Tanakh, along with the further witness of the New Testament, as a framework that provides a theological norm that authoritatively defines the terms according to which the texts that pertain to David and Jonathan should be interpreted? Would Gagnon want to observe this distinction? If the former, the question is exactly how the relationship between the various traditions out of which the Tanakh is woven and their underlying socio-cultural contexts is to be construed. Gagnon is surely not ignorant of this problem, yet he nevertheless claims that, “in the case of [ancient Israelite culture], all forms of homosexual behaviour were virtually nonexistent.”143 His logic seems to be that since the texts that explicitly refer to same-sex intercourse condemn this practice, intercourse between persons of the same sex must have been virtually non-existent in ancient Israel, the broader underlying assumptions being that the social norms prevalent in “ancient Israelite culture” can be reliably reconstructed from the evidence of the biblical texts,144 and that the ethical ideals implied by texts unequivocally opposed to homosexual practice were unquestioningly observed. This ignores the fact that the biblical texts are ideological productions, created by a highly literate, almost certainly male elite, and assumes that the ideologies reflected in these texts are an accurate reflection of what ancient Israelite culture as a whole acknowledged. It assumes that the Holiness Code is a descriptive portrayal of the social



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realities of Israel, and seems to assume that the prohibitions of the Holiness Code were understood by the author(s) of the narratives of Samuel to be both operative and universally observed, despite the fact that in the case of the rape of Tamar, at least, this assumption is false.145 Regulations such as Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 – whatever they may originally have meant – may well indicate that the underlying social reality did not match the ideal envisioned by those who fashioned and promulgated them. Despite this, Gagnon accepts without further ado that the ideologies reflected in these texts are to be accepted without question or critique by the modern, Christian reader. If the latter is the case, then Gagnon’s interpretation of texts such as Genesis 1–3, 19:4-11 and Leviticus 18:22, 20:13 becomes the lens through which the possibly more ancient narratives of Samuel are to be read. They become the means by which the construal of the David and Jonathan narrative can be controlled. For Gagnon, they seem to afford access to a worldview the author(s) and redactor(s) of Samuel shared with those responsible for Genesis 1–3, 19:4-11 and Leviticus 18:22, 20:13, and thus, by extension, to the “original authorial meaning” of the Samuel texts.146 The possibility that the development and shaping of the biblical canon have helped to occlude the possibly homoerotic dimensions of the David and Jonathan narrative is not explored, though the possibility that the redactor(s) of Samuel silenced this aspect is considered and rejected.147 Thus despite acknowledging the existence of different strands in the biblical tradition, such as the hypothetical sources J, P, and H, the Deuteronomic law code, and the work of the Deuteronomistic historian, Gagnon makes them speak with one voice. To be sure, Gagnon’s is one way of construing the text in the context of the present shape of the biblical canon, in which the narratives and laws of the Pentateuch establish the framework within which the remainder might (should?) be read, but the existence of a variety of literary strands within the Tanakh, originating at various dates and from various authors, and representing a variety of ideological positions, is an important result of the development of historical criticism that would seem to resist the bias towards univocality on the part of interpreters who claim that there is such a thing as the “witness of the Old Testament.”148 An approach that takes seriously the highly composite nature of the works contained in the biblical canon would allow previously subsumed voices to surface, unless an ulterior ideological motive stands in the way of this. Paradoxically, historical criticism has, on the one hand, subverted the biblical canon by enabling the identification and reclamation of multiple traditions and voices, and, on the other, reinscribed a totalizing drive in the

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process of biblical interpretation, that is, a drive towards limiting textual meaning by appeal to the intentions of the individual authors of the biblical texts, intentions that often participate in ideologies which keep dissenting voices in submission, and which some of the various strands of critical theory have recently sought to subvert.149 For Gagnon, all traditions within the Tanakh must be shown to oppose, implicitly or explicitly, same-sex intercourse. It is not enough to argue that the David and Jonathan narrative does not have a homoerotic dimension. Rather, it cannot be allowed to have such a dimension. [N]othing in the stories raised any suspicion that David and Jonathan were homosexually involved with one another. Only in our own day, removed as we are from ancient Near Eastern conventions, are these kinds of specious connections made by people desperate to find the slightest shred of support for homosexual practice in the Bible.150

Gagnon is certainly right to stress the distance that exists between modern interpreters and ancient Near Eastern interpreters, a point already made by David Halperin in relation to David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, and Gilgamesh and Enkidu,151 and which casts into relief the disjunction between the cultural codes the earliest readers of the narrative could have used to disambiguate the narrative, and the cultural codes later readers bring. Yet Gagnon’s phrasing requires further scrutiny. First, to write that “nothing in the stories raised any suspicion…” points to the relationship between what Naumann calls “the text’s stock of signs”152 and the reader, rather than to what Gagnon elsewhere calls the “original authorial meaning,” but it is precisely in the relationship between text and reader that exactly these suspicions would eventually be aroused. While Gagnon is certain that texts do have fixed, definable meanings, as his dispute with Dale Martin makes clear,153 he is nevertheless begging the question of the locus of textual meaning. Second, Gagnon is indulging in the sort of attack on his opponents that so upsets him when other scholars respond to his own work.154 To call possible implications of homosexual practice “specious connections,” and to dub his opponents “people desperate to find any shred of support for homosexual practice in the Bible” is again to beg the question of the locus of textual meaning, at the same time as implying that all his opponents are deluded fools clinging to the vaguest hint of an unsupportable meaning in the text. Gagnon’s interpretation of the text is not in itself implausible, though I will later have cause to question his foundationalist assumptions with respect to textual meaning, albeit from a different perspective to Martin. But his rhetoric looks like an attempt to defend the text and claim ownership of its interpretation from dissenting interpreters by means of a more



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or less ad hominem attack. Third, Gagnon assumes that there is a single set of “ancient Near Eastern conventions,” and that by applying them to David and Jonathan we can achieve a fixed understanding of their relationship. But not only is it not clear whether a Hittite treaty, guest friendship in the Iliad, an Assyrian loyalty oath, a Cretan abduction ritual, or the conventions observed by the Sacred Band of Thebes provide the closest “ancient Near Eastern convention” relevant to David and Jonathan, it is not clear whether the representation of their relationship in 1 and 2 Samuel fits into a single, identifiable convention at all. Finally, it is not clear that it is modern, Western notions of homosexuality that make it possible falsely to import same-sex eroticism into the text, rather than our modern, Western, post-Christian preferences for a certain kind of opposite sex eroticism making a gay reading seem less likely. In other words, it is not clear to me why modern, Western homosexuality rather than the modern, Western heterosexuality vaunted by Gagnon should lead to greater anachronism in reading ancient Near Eastern texts. To construct his case, Gagnon draws on the scholarly view that 1 Samuel 18–23 reflects a political alliance between David and Jonathan. Thus the language of “love” is typical of ancient Near Eastern treaties between an overlord and his vassals, or between rulers with approximately equal status, and Jonathan’s handing over of his robe, armour, sword, bow, and belt to David constitutes an act of political investiture, symbolizing the transfer of the office of heir apparent (1 Sam. 18:4).155 There is no sexual dimension to the use of Cpx, q#n, or M(n in the context of Jonathan’s love for David. The narrative never mentions sexual intercourse between David and Jonathan, and never uses roots such as bk# or (dy, both of which can have sexual connotations elsewhere.156 The “heterosexual vigor” of David is not in question, and Jonathan, like David, took a woman and had children by her.157 In general, Gagnon’s construal does not obviously lack cogency. It is grounded in a careful engagement with the biblical text using the accepted tools of scholarly exegesis. Yet it is not without problems. The possible sexual connotations of the phrases “bastard of a wayward woman”158 (twdrmh  tw(n  Nb) and “the shame of your mother’s nakedness” (Km)  twr(  t#b), a shame that Jonathan incurs as a consequence of choosing David (1 Sam. 20:30), and David’s claim in 2 Samuel 1:26 that Jonathan’s love is more wonderful to him than the love of women, are not considered.159 Gagnon offers a cursory reading of both passages, but ignores the possibility of sexual connotations, the problem being not that these phrases must be sexual but that he ignores the possibility, thus failing to deal with the issue of whether an erotic construal better explains

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these phrases than a non-erotic construal. In order to interpret the text, the whole range of possible construals of potentially ambiguous words and phrases must be identified. The interpreter’s role is to determine how a word or phrase that is potentially open to more than one construal, such as the verbs bh), Cpx, and M(n, or the phrases twdrm  tw(n  Nb or Km)  twr(  t#b, might most adequately be understood, or, more precisely, what these words and phrases connote or denote in context. What would be at stake in not resolving the apparent ambiguities of the text? For Gagnon, the possibility of ambiguity, or even polyvalence cannot be allowed, as is clear from his criticism of Martti Nissinen’s suggestion that, “[t]he text thus leaves the possible homoerotic associations to the reader’s imagination.”160 Since Nissinen also suggests that the David and Jonathan narrative is unlikely to have been originally perceived as homoerotic, and that homoeroticism may be perceived more easily by a modern than an ancient reader,161 Gagnon accuses Nissinen of “double-speak,” charging that he “clouds the issue and waffles.”162 For Gagnon, there is a firm boundary between exegesis and eisegesis, which may be established by focusing single-mindedly on authorial intention and rigorously employing the tools of historical criticism, and which will enable a clear and unambiguous meaning to emerge from the text that will then contribute to constructing a clear and unambiguous policy on same-sex intercourse in the community of faith.163 Yet as George Aichele has noted, “The modernist distinction between proper exegesis and improper eisegesis is always an ideological one, never disinterested or objective, although it often presents itself as such.”164 For Gagnon, that the text itself may be ambiguous, or that ancient and modern readers may use different codes to disambiguate the text, cannot be allowed, and if a possible construal of a word or phrase might subvert an unambiguous construal, as might conceivably be the case with the phrases twdrmh  tw(n  Nb or Km) twr( t#b, it is either ignored or swept under the carpet.165 Schroer and Staubli, Zehnder, and Gagnon are playing by more or less the same rules in a contest for the ownership of the correct interpretation of the biblical texts, and a correct understanding of their authority.166 But the existence of indeterminacy at the level of interpretation suggests that the text itself may be ambiguous, and that the tools of historical-critical exegesis, together with the perceived authority of these tools, are being marshalled so as to present the evidence in a manner predetermined by the ideological commitments of the interpreters in question. More succinctly, “the critic actively manipulates his or her data for certain purposes.”167 This need not necessarily be so cynically manipulative, since interpreters can marshal evidence in line with unconsciously



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held prior ideological commitments, due to ideologies that have unconsciously shaped their reading strategies, and created blindspots that prevent aspects of textual meaning from being perceived. It is not always clear how conscious this ideological process is, though the bafflement with which Zehnder greeted the charge of the ideological abuse of word statistics might suggest that he, at least, is at the mercy of the ideological determination inherent in his method. The problem is at least partly with the historical-critical method itself. Not only the subjectivity of the interpreter but the limitations of our evidence mean that this method, even if applied dispassionately, cannot enable the interpreter to close all the gaps that vex the interpretive imagination. In consequence, overriding ideological commitments, or ideologically induced blindspots, enter play to allow the interpreter to paper over the cracks. 6. Transgressive reading? Que(e)r(y)ing David and Jonathan The works considered above are situated within the matrix of historical criticism, but in recent years, building on the irruption into Biblical Studies of various modes of interpretation that fall under the umbrella “postmodern” – especially ideological criticism and queer theory – together with the increasing visibility of non-heteronormative, LGBT/Q reading practices, and a growing dissatisfaction with traditional historical criticism on theological,168 epistemological,169 ethical,170 and political171 grounds, an increasing number of interpreters of the David and Jonathan narrative have sought to read transgressively, beyond the boundaries of what the Biblical Studies “guild” has canonized as responsible, not to say respectable exegesis. I will consider the works of David Jobling, Roland Boer, Theodore Jennings, Yaron Peleg, and Anthony Heacock here. While the likes of Horner, Schroer and Staubli, Helminiak, and Brentlinger seek to reclaim the biblical texts for a same-sex oriented readership based on what they believe the text unequivocally means, scholars such as Jobling, Boer, Jennings, Heacock, and in some sense Peleg are concerned both with troubling accepted definitions of gender and sexuality, and with troubling accepted understandings of the relationship between author, text, and reader. The range of opinions from essentialism to social constructionism in relation to the nature of human sexuality is not, of course, wholly distinct from the spectrum of opinions from author-centered to reader-centered approaches to the nature of textual meaning. The work of these scholars, then, raises the question of the extent to which the assumption of

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heteronormativity and the imposition of a normative, more or less foundationalist exegetical method are implicated in one another. In his methodologically unorthodox “commentary” on 1 Samuel,172 Jobling takes a new historicist position, eschewing the foundationalism of “old” historicist interpreters while acknowledging the urgent need for questions about the historical situatedness of both text and critic to be taken seriously.173 To some extent like The Queer Bible Commentary,174 Jobling’s commentary subverts academic conventions by eschewing the customary verse-by-verse or chapter-by-chapter analysis in favour of broader brush strokes. Strongly indebted to ideological criticism, Jobling structures his interpretation around the themes of class, race, and gender. Within the latter category he discusses the relationship between David and Jonathan, building on the earlier treatment by Fewell and Gunn and anticipating the more recent, but rather different work of Yaron Peleg. For Jobling, what makes the possibility that David and Jonathan had a “consummated gay relationship” so important is not primarily because this existed in the mind of the author, but because it chimes with the concerns of “our contemporary cultural scene.”175 In the passage cited in Chapter 1 above,176 Jobling makes partially explicit his ideological agenda, but leaves much unsaid: what exactly are these “obvious cultural reasons” why the text does not make the sexual dimension of the relationship between David and Jonathan explicit, and how do we know them? Would it be enough to appeal to texts such as Genesis 19:1-28, Leviticus 18:22, 20:13, and Judges 19:1-30 to explain what these reasons were? But surely, as I suggested in my critiques of Zehnder and Gagnon, we cannot simply read the realities of ancient Israelite and Judahite attitudes to same-sex desire off the biblical texts without acknowledging how selective a picture of those ancient societies is given in those texts. Is it ethically responsible, not to say faithful to the material form of the text, to leave interpretation so open that “any other” reading might be valid? It is precisely an anxiety over the dangerous consequences of this that drives the likes of Gagnon to affirm a single meaning of the text, as Martin has pointed out.177 Is Jobling not reifying “our contemporary cultural scene” in a manner that risks not only imposing “our” subjectivities on the text, but of marginalizing alternative subject positions? Unlike Gagnon, Jobling devotes some space to the possible sexual connotations of 1 Samuel 20:30-34. Jobling highlights the sexual connotations of Saul’s language and sees the extent of Saul’s rage in this passage as an example of “irrational homophobia,”178 whereby Saul is blaming Jonathan’s mother for his son’s sexual preference. What sets Jobling’s reading



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apart is its focus on the relationship between character and plot. This is a significant move, because it shifts the debate around this text away from sexuality alone and in the direction of narratology. While Schroer and Staubli, Zehnder, and Gagnon work with the assumption that the text functions on one level only and contains a single, identifiable meaning that the interpreter must extract, Jobling acknowledges the subtlety with which the relationship between the characters is constructed in the narrative in connection with the development of the plot. The question becomes not “Was the relationship between David and Jonathan sexual?” but rather “How are David and Jonathan characterized, and how do the details of their characterization function in the context of the plot?” For Jobling, Jonathan’s function in the plot is to facilitate the transfer of power from Saul to David, and he does this by taking a role analogous to David’s other women. Like Michal, he acts to save David from Saul, and is the passive recipient of “love.”179 Like Abigail, he foretells David’s kingdom. To be the heir, and thus in a position to abdicate, [Jonathan] must be male. To have the motivation to do so he must (within the text’s conceptual resources) be like the women who empty themselves for David. The answer: a gay relationship in which Jonathan takes a female role.180

Jobling’s reading shows that it is not simply the language of the text that holds the key to the relationship between David and Jonathan, nor the historical, literary, and canonical contexts in light of which the text is read, but the constructions of gender implied by the text, together with the exigencies of character and plot. The relationship between David and Jonathan cannot, then, be detached from the way the text functions as a richly layered work of literary art. Roland Boer takes the Bible as a literary text that has its place in and is read as an item of contemporary, mostly Western capitalist culture, positioning the Bible alongside, and in a complex relationship with various products of that culture.181 He is seduced by reading tactics made possible by queer theory, particularly “queering the text,” that is, “reading straight texts and cultural products as queer.”182 This is very much a reader-focused exercise, and relates to the idea of the resisting reader, of reading against the grain. Why, after all, should a text, still less a convention of reading, dictate how it should be read? Boer reads the David and Jonathan narrative intertextually with the ambiguously gendered constructions of action heroes in contemporary film,183 focusing not on the possibility of explicit references to a sexual relationship between David and Jonathan, but on the active/passive dynamic between them. Boer’s choice of intertexts willfully transgresses the theological limits of the

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biblical canon and the surviving cultural relics of the ancient Near East, and would, moreover, only be possible for a reader of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For Boer, there is an internal, queer “logic” to the portrayal of David that means that just like modern action heroes he, as the great king and example for other kings to follow, must have a highly ambiguous sexual presence in the narrative. He is “both an initiator of action and a passive receptor, the active hero and the penetrated sexual partner.”184 While David is active in terms of his military exploits,185 he is passive in the sphere of love and affection.186 Jonathan is the active partner in the covenant between the two men. David’s (active) military exploits and his (passive) reception of love are bound together, Jonathan’s love for David in 1 Samuel 18:1-4 being framed by references to his beloved’s military prowess.187 Yhwh himself is attracted by David’s physical beauty, despite Samuel’s claim that Yhwh does not take note of outward appearances (1 Sam. 16:7). In terms of the construal of individual words in the narrative, the nuance “be joined together” for r#q nifal may be extended to connote bondage in 1 Samuel 18:1, and the nuances “spread out,” “stretch,” and “extend” for +#p (1 Sam. 18:4) may be taken to connote achieving an erection or spreading one’s butt cheeks, thus signifying both active and passive sexual roles.188 Boer acknowledges that for many readers, his interpretations will appear “arbitrary,” examples of “chronic misreading,” or even “theoretical justification” for his “baser instincts.”189 Zehnder, and without doubt Gagnon, would surely concur. However, Boer’s reading is not an attempt to reconstruct the intentions of the ancient author, nor does Boer seem to feel bound by the need to reconstruct the ancient codes the earliest readers would have used to construe the text. He is rather intent on exploring how the texts might be construed in a modern context when brought into conversation with other cultural products within a theoretical framework informed by queer theory. While this may be an act of resistance against the hegemony of historical criticism, it does mean that Boer is part of an entirely different conversation than that to which Schroer and Staubli, Zehnder, and Gagnon, with their admittedly very different positions, belong. Because he is not playing by the same rules, his approach cannot challenge them directly: they belong to entirely different conversations. Furthermore, the confessional commitments implicit in the interpretations of Schroer and Staubli, Zehnder, and Gagnon are apparently absent for Boer, unless his interpretation is read as a deliberate avoidance, or even implicit rebuttal of confessional discourse. This again places him in a different conversation, and illustrates the fact that



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there is no longer a single interpretive community, a guild of biblical scholars made up of professional academics who share a common epistemic framework within which interpretations may be judged persuasive or not. Rather, there are several sometimes overlapping, sometimes mutually exclusive interpretive communities, who share only a pluriform material artifact in common, namely a variety of “bibles” whose ownership and interpretation are sites of contest. But this raises the ethical question of whether, given the potentially damaging effect of interpretations rooted in anti-LGBT/Q prejudices, as a consequence of their reception and use in particular communities of faith, interpreters generally sympathetic to LGBT/Q concerns can afford not to engage directly with interpreters operating within other, more “respectable” epistemic frameworks? Theodore Jennings has developed a gay-identified and counterhomophobic interpretive strategy that to a limited extent continues to operate within the epistemic framework represented by Schroer and Staubli, Zehnder, and Gagnon, though with a greater degree of openness about his ideological agenda: namely, to engage his own interest in contesting homophobia and heteronormativity. His work is transgressive not because he ignores the canons of responsible exegesis, but because he reads texts in ways that deliberately seek to sideline what he perceives as heterosexist prejudices among commentators. Jennings suggests possible construals of passages that mainstream – that is malestream,190 perhaps on some level erotophobic – historical critics have often been content to pass over.191 There is an ethical imperative guiding this approach. The lad in the hospital seemed to know he was dying of what had only recently been identified as AIDS. And to the ailments that wracked his slender body was added the terrible fear that God hated him because he was gay – a fear provoked by the way the Bible had been used as a club to batter people into submission to reigning cultural values… I determined that I would do what I could to relieve the wholly unwarranted spiritual agony that afflicted him and so many others… The Bible seemed to me to be too wonderful and important a treasure for it to be used as a weapon of mass destruction against the vulnerable and defenseless.192

For Gagnon, the approach taken by Jennings would presumably be an ethically bankrupt, willful transgression of the witness of God’s unambiguous Word, which points to the fact that the point of difference between scholars such as Gagnon and scholars such as Jennings is not found simply in their different hermeneutical assumptions, but more fundamentally in their different understandings of ethics, and of the relationship between ethics and the use of biblical texts.

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Jennings highlights the relationships between male warriors and their youthful male companions, combining a close reading of the text with cross cultural comparisons to ancient Sparta and Thebes, and to Tokugawa Japan.193 These relationships are portrayed in Samuel in a homosocial context from which women are excluded (cf. 1 Sam. 21:5-6), and depend strongly on the physical beauty of the companion. Thus Yhwh, Israel’s warrior chief, selects Saul (1 Sam. 9:2) and David (1 Sam. 16:12; 17:42) on account of their physical beauty.194 Saul takes David as his armour-bearer on account of his love for him, apparently inspired by the latter’s physical beauty, and after David flees Saul’s court, he takes another young armourbearer whose devotion to Saul leads him to commit suicide rather than outlive his master. Jennings takes the idea of heroes and their boy companions a step further by seeing the relationship between Saul, David, and Jonathan as a love triangle.195 David is first the beloved of Saul (1 Sam. 16:21-23), but Jonathan becomes Saul’s rival not only for pre-eminence as a warrior, but for the affections of David, incurring Saul’s murderous jealousy. In 1 Samuel 18:2, in divesting himself of his armour, Jonathan is making David his armour-bearer and boy companion, despite the fact Saul had already taken him for this purpose.196 A sexual dimension to both David’s relationship with Saul and David’s relationship with Jonathan then helps to explain the strange language of 1 Samuel 20:30. Jennings sees in 1 Samuel 20:30 the idea of Jonathan uncovering his mother’s nakedness. According to Jennings, in order to expose his mother’s nakedness, Jonathan must have had sex with someone who himself had either had sex with his mother, or had sex with someone who had had sex with her. Thus if Jonathan had had sex with David, and David in turn had had sex with Saul, who in turn had had sex with Jonathan’s mother, then Jonathan had indirectly uncovered and shamed his mother’s nakedness.197 Problematic here is the fact that the mt refers not to uncovering Jonathan’s mother’s nakedness, but to its shame or dishonor. Jennings arguably exceeds the semantic parameters of Km)  twr(  t#bl, which in contradistinction to the lxx (ei0 ai0sxu/nhn a)pokalu/yew mhtro/ sou) makes no clear reference to uncovering.198 Jennings’s reading is also convoluted. Did the character Saul really have this extraordinarily elaborate sequence of transgressions of sexual boundaries in mind? Jennings partially follows the logic of affinity on which the laws of Leviticus 18 and 20 operate, but there uncovering the nakedness of a woman outside the permitted limits of affinity means uncovering the nakedness of the man who controls her sexuality (esp. Lev. 18:7, 8, 16; 20:11). The difference here is that it is Jonathan’s mother’s own nakedness that is mentioned.



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In response to commentators who assume a primarily political relationship between David and Jonathan, Jennings observes that David’s constant refusal to attack Saul, despite being both terribly provoked and twice provided with the opportunity, is not suggestive of an alliance of political conspirators between David and Jonathan, and thus implies a primarily personal bond.199 In relation to 2 Samuel 1:26, Jennings highlights the issue of what it is about the love of women that makes it meaningful to compare it with the love of Jonathan. Since the love of women is the sphere of the erotic, it is in that sphere that the comparison is being made, and the love of David and Jonathan was erotic.200 Here Jennings unfortunately falls into the same trap as Schroer and Staubli, limiting the comparison between Jonathan’s love and the love of women to one sphere only, when the text could be considerably more open than that.201 Arguably Jennings’s boldest contribution is his discussion of Yhwh as e0rasth/v, that is, a (divine) male, older lover of a younger man.202 It is only bold, however, because of a reticence among scholars to consider a homoerotic dimension to Yhwh’s sexuality, akin to the heteroerotic dimension found in the prophetic pornography203 of the Latter Prophets.204 Jennings identifies a strong element of sexual jealousy on the part of Michal, when she despises David for dancing lasciviously before the Ark, “the sheathed phallus of his [divine] lover.”205 This jealousy makes most sense if she has now lost David not just to Jonathan, but to Yhwh, a male with whom she cannot compete.206 Furthermore, Yhwh’s loyalty (dsx) to David is expressed in his adoption of David’s son, which is precisely analogous to David’s adoption of Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth as an expression of his covenant dsx for his former lover Jonathan.207 This reading by Jennings is a bold and arguably idiosyncratic one, but this judgment merely begs the question: what does this reading suggest about scholarly blindspots, the things about the text that we simply do not expect to see, or the things about Yhwh that, because of the ideologically constructed nature of the Tanakh and the conventions with which we are used to reading it, we do not associate with him? Jennings points here in particular to the theme of the erotic desire of Yhwh. The prophetical books clearly reflect the fact that the erotic desire of this male god could be thought in ancient Israel and Judah, otherwise the prophetic marriage metaphor – even construed as “just” a metaphor, a dubious move at best – would be difficult to comprehend. Further, the possibility that Yhwh was, by at least some in ancient Israel and Judah, understood to have a female consort, begs the question whether Yhwh’s desire could have been thought of not only in heteroerotic, but also in homoerotic terms, akin to Greek traditions that portrayed the attraction of Zeus to

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Ganymede.208 To think the erotics of Yhwh is implicitly to engage in the projection of human thoughts, desires, and practices onto the divine, but to limit such projection to the heteroerotic, to the exclusion of the homoerotic, would seem to reflect what David Halperin has dubbed “the homophobic logic that ineluctably constructs ‘love’ in exclusively heterosexual terms.”209 Yaron Peleg’s “queer reading” of the relationship between David and Jonathan focuses on the constructions of gender in the narrative in a manner to some extent reminiscent of Jobling. Peleg’s reading is noteworthy because it shifts the focus of a “queer” approach away from the possibility that David and Jonathan were sexually involved with one another towards the socially constructed gender roles the two men are portrayed in the narrative as performing. This depends on the notion that gender is not only socially constructed, but performed, and in fact constituted through its performance.210 In the case of 1 and 2 Samuel, we are dealing, as with other narratives in the Tanakh, with a “literary text whose pseudo-historiographical nature privileges the masculine realm of religion, diplomacy, and war over the feminine domestic sphere,”211 and in which “[w]hen a woman is proven superior to a man in the arena of politics and war, as Deborah is in Judges 4, it is viewed as shameful and humiliating for the man.”212 Peleg argues that in this context, the story of David and Jonathan “justifies David’s rise to power by emphasizing his masculinity” and “disqualifies Jonathan politically by emphasizing his femininity.”213 Their relationship is sexualized in the narrative, not by portraying David and Jonathan as homosexual, but by constructing David as a man and Jonathan as a woman, and by having them perform the roles associated with masculinity and femininity respectively. The narrative utilizes accepted gender roles in its initial account of the relationship between David and Jonathan, but does this in order to subvert them later on. After David enters Saul’s household, accounts of his military exploits replace accounts of the military heroism of Jonathan, who is increasingly portrayed as passive. Jonathan’s startlingly sudden infatuation with David in 1 Samuel 18:1 may be understood as the infatuation of an older man (Jonathan) with a younger, socially inferior, and delicately beautiful man (David).214 Thus in 1 Samuel 18:1-4, Jonathan is performing the role of the man in a heterosexual union, or of the older man in a homosexual one, while his unconditional commitment to David and his eagerness to seal their covenant seem to undermine the power dynamic characteristic of such unions. Jonathan, by taking the initiative, seems initially to reinforce his apparently dominant social status: he takes the lead in befriending David, he initiates the covenant between



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them. But at the same time, his eagerness suggests a lack of control unbecoming of his dominant status. Thus the narrative is drawing on assumed and accepted notions of gender performance in order to confuse and trouble them. In 1 Samuel 18:2-3, the combination of a reference to the transfer of David from his father’s house to that of Saul with the making of a covenant between Jonathan and David is suggestive of an allusion to the language of heterosexual marriage, which then functions as a metaphor for the relationship between the two men.215 In 1 Samuel 18:4, +#ptyw, “and he stripped” suggests sexual subjugation on Jonathan’s part, a willing adoption of a passive position in relation to the otherwise socially inferior David. From then on, we no longer see Jonathan exhibiting his masculine prowess on the battlefield, but “wistfully courting David’s affection and good graces, despite his elevated social status.”216 In the encounter between David and Jonathan in 1 Samuel 20, David exploits Jonathan’s infatuation with him, subjecting him to manipulation (1 Sam. 20:1-4).217 Part of David’s manipulation of Jonathan is to act the part of the passive partner, claiming that he, David, was brought into a covenant at Jonathan’s initiative, not the other way round (1 Sam. 20:8). David is thus feinting, assuming a gender role akin to women such as Potiphar’s wife, Delilah, Abigail, and Esther who manipulate men in power, flattering them by throwing themselves on their mercy. But by manipulating Jonathan, David is himself assuming the position of power, thereby emasculating Jonathan in terms of the performance of gender. In addition to having his socially dominant position undercut by David’s manipulation, Jonathan is also emasculated and feminized by being portrayed in a similar way to his sister Michal. Thus like her brother, Michal falls for David in an instant, loving him without her love being returned (1 Sam. 18:20, 28 [mt]). Just as Saul “took” (xql) in 1 Samuel 18:2, so he plots to “give” (Ntn) Michal to David in 1 Samuel 18:21,218 likewise initiating a transfer of a “woman” from the patrilocal to the virilocal. In 1 Samuel 18:28 and 19:1 there is a strong emphasis on the common love of Michal and Jonathan for David, which is played off against their father’s desire to have him killed.219 In 1 Samuel 19 Michal takes the initiative in assisting David to escape (1 Sam. 19:11-17), performing an active and thus masculine role. Jonathan, meanwhile, plays no part in assisting David’s escape from Saul’s murderous rage (1 Sam. 19:10) – indeed, it is because of Jonathan’s love-inspired diplomacy that David has ended up back in Saul’s house in the first place (1 Sam. 19:4-6) – and Jonathan is thereby shown to be enacting a passive, and thus feminine role. It is Jonathan, furthermore, who, as David’s masculine military exploits are

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increasingly foregrounded, is relegated to a woman’s place in the royal home. In other words, Jonathan is given increasingly feminine characteristics as David is given increasingly masculine ones.220 Peleg’s reading is significant in that it is dependent on queer theory’s deconstruction of normalized gender categories. It differs from the other “queer” readings discussed above, however, because “queer” in this instance seems to refer to an ancient author’s deliberate inversion of gender roles, and is associated with a rejection of a homoerotic or homosexual reading.221 Both these points put Peleg at odds with Jobling, Boer, and Jennings, and this also makes it impossible for Peleg’s construal of “queer” to have any political teeth with respect to LGBT/Q liberation, which not only puts him at odds with Jobling and Jennings, but also with fellow textual foundationalists such as Schroer and Staubli and, perhaps unexpectedly, assigns him to a camp not too far removed from Zehnder and Gagnon.222 Moreover, Peleg’s textual foundationalism puts him at odds with those who would prefer to read against the grain, such as Boer. What Peleg’s position shows is that the signifier “queer” has become a victim of its own arbitrariness: what it is taken to signify shifts so radically from interpreter to interpreter that it can be taken in entirely contradictory ways, thus seriously undermining its analytical usefulness. This is clear when Heacock’s reading is placed alongside Peleg’s, because Heacock sets out deliberately to offer a reading of the David and Jonathan narrative that begins with the reader, “affirming a rhetoric that consciously situates biblical characters in the contemporary world of gay men and queer theory,” in order to highlight, “heteronormative assumptions that are so often read into biblical texts during the interpretative endeavor.”223 This is an important political, as much as hermeneutical, move, because it seeks to demystify how scholarly assumptions about what is normal, and indeed normative, in terms not only of gender and sex, but of textual meaning, are constructed and reiterated. This is a direct challenge to claims to ownership of the interpretation of biblical texts on the part of ideologically non-marginalized readers and interpreters. Heacock’s reading of David and Jonathan has some echoes of Noel I. Garde’s distinction between a homosexual Jonathan and a David whose orientation is unspecified.224 For Heacock, the relationship echoes modern friendships between a hegemonically masculine straight man (David) and a transgressive gay man (Jonathan). Regardless of whether or not he was actually understood to be sexually attracted to David, Jonathan strives for an emotionally intimate friendship, thus transgressing socially normative expectations of both male relationships and the priority of loyalty to kin. David, on the other hand, relates to other men in a socially



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non-transgressive way, as a modern straight man would among his mates. The way he acts does not threaten the status quo in terms of expected gender performance.225 It is David’s manly beauty and hypermasculinity that attracts Jonathan to him.226 But he can see through David’s attachment to societal norms of masculine performance to an inner alienation and loneliness, and tries to cultivate with David an intimate, “queer” friendship that holds in balance David’s personal need for intimacy and the constraints of public expectation.227 This leads to an inner conflict for David between his desire for intimacy and his fear of being seen to be homosexual. The only occasion – with the possible exception of 2 Samuel 1:26 – when David feels able to let go is his final meeting, in private, with Jonathan, when he can weep freely for what is about to lose (1 Sam. 20:41).228 Since Heacock is not trying to reconstruct an original meaning for the David and Jonathan narrative, a charge of anachronism would be irrelevant. His interpretation offers a suggestive vision of the transgressive power of male friendship and the redemptive potential of male-male intimacy. I do wonder why he needs the example of David and Jonathan to do this, but perhaps I am here looking in the wrong direction. Part of the transgressive power of his interpretation is precisely that it reconfigures the way the biblical narrative might be read in a way that, on the whole,229 does not ride roughshod over the details of the text. In the process, he calls into question both the sex and gender norms reflected in the text, and the hermeneutical privilege exercised by many scholars immersed in historical-critical modes of exegesis. 7. David and Jonathan beyond foundationalism? This chapter has identified two sites of conflict in relation to the interpretation of the David and Jonathan narrative. The first concerns whether or not the relationship between David and Jonathan is portrayed in 1 and 2 Samuel as sexual. The second concerns the location of textual meaning, and the range of construals a text can be deemed to have. There can be no doubt that ideological agendas, whether implicit or explicit, consciously or unconsciously held, govern the application of historical criticism to the David and Jonathan narrative, reflecting attempts to claim ownership of both the text and the authority to interpret it. Such applications of historical-critical method are to some extent subverted by readings influenced by such intellectual currents as ideological criticism, queer theory, and the emergence of LGBT/Q-identified reading strategies. These readings themselves reflect ideological agendas, which cannot be

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entirely avoided. All this has led to a proliferation of partially overlapping but ultimately distinct interpretive communities. Gagnon and Boer, for example, are not part of the same conversation, even though they offer interpretations of the same biblical narrative. We have, then, been able to come up with a first, partial answer to the questions with which we began. Some interpreters need an answer to the question whether or not David and Jonathan were homosexual because they either need, or need to exclude, a scriptural warrant for same-sex desire and its physical expression. To be sure, not all scholars working on this narrative seem to have such a vested interest. Importantly, regardless of their conclusions about the nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan, interpreters differ markedly on the question of the extent to which the quest for meaning should be primarily author-focused, textfocused, or reader-focused, or some more nuanced mixture of the three. The battle for David and Jonathan has not simply been fought around essentialized notions of sexuality, but over reified notions of textual meaning. The next step, then, is to engage more directly with the text to understand more clearly why it is both possible for interpreters to differ markedly on whether David and Jonathan were sexually involved with one another while sharing a foundationalist view of textual meaning, and possible for interpreters to claim that the text cannot be reduced to a single meaning at all. Rather than trying to determine once and for all the “meaning” of the David and Jonathan narrative, I wish instead to avoid the modernist assumption that a resolution is possible, and ask what it might be about the text, the material signifier, that makes possible the interpretive indeterminacy we have seen in this chapter. The next step, then, is to offer my own reading of the David and Jonathan narrative, but I intend, as far as possible, to avoid pinning down what this narrative most probably meant. Instead, I want to explore at what points, to what extent, and for what reasons the narrative is more or less “open,” and, conversely, at what points, to what extent, and for what reasons, the narrative is more or less “closed.” In other words, rather than adding another possible option for the meaning of the narrative, I am aiming to clarify what has made it possible for more than one meaning to be found in it. Notes 1. Pseudo-Lucian, Am. 29. See the discussions of Pseudo-Lucian in e.g. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 126–27, 153; Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (trans. R. Hurley; London: Penguin, 1986), 211–27; Eva Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient



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World (trans. C. Ó Cuilleanáin; Yale: Yale University Press, 2002, 2nd edn), 74–77, 206; Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 89–102. Aside from its evident playfulness and satire, this probably pseudepigraphic, late third or fourth century ce dialogue has certain points of contact with aspects of the recent scripture wars on the subject of sex, though the relationship between the body, sex, and socially constructed gender identity in the two contexts is significantly, and instructively, different, and the potentially devastating consequences of the latent or not-so-latent homophobia of the scripture wars give them a particular ethical dimension that Pseudo-Lucian does not share. 2. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Advances in Semiotics; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), 29. 3. Jan P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel: The Crossing Fates (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1986), 2:196–97. 4. Slightly different taxonomies of current opinions to that sketched here are offered in Zehnder, “Observations,” 128–30, and Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 35–55. 5. E.g. Raphael Patai, Sex and Family in the Bible and the Middle East (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 170; Eglinton, Greek Love, 53–55, 113, 159, 236–37 (comparing David and Jonathan with Achilles and Patroclus); Tom Horner, Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978), 26–39; Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993), 148–51; Daniel A. Helminiak, What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality (San Francisco: Alamo Square, 1994), 103–104; Boswell, Marriage of Likeness, 135–37; Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan”; Peisert, “David und Jonatan,” 96–111; Roland Boer, “Queer Heroes,” in Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door: The Bible and Popular Culture (Biblical Limits; London: Routledge, 1999), 13–32; Samuel Kader, Openly Gay, Openly Christian: How the Bible Really is Gay Friendly (San Francisco: Leyland Publications, 1999), 107–18; Theodore Jennings, “Yhwh as Erastes,” in Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible (JSOTSup, 334; London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 65; idem, Jacob’s Wound, 13–36; Christopher Hubble, Lord Given Lovers: The Holy Union of David and Jonathan (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2003); Samuel Terrien, Till the Heart Sings: A Biblical Theology of Manhood and Womanhood (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004, 2nd edn), 168–69; Rick Brentlinger, Gay Christian 101: Spiritual Self-Defense for Gay Christians (Pace, FL: Salient, 2007), 136–91; Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, Homosexuality and Liminality in the Gilgameš and Samuel (Classical and Byzantine Monographs, 54; Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 2007); and see the material covered in Hügel’s exhaustive survey in Homoerotik und Hebräische Bibel, 342– 415. The possibility that the relationship between David and Jonathan is sexual is raised in J. Hill and R. Cheadle, The Bible Tells Me So: Uses and Abuses of Holy Scripture (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 73–76, and placed alongside, and in contrast with, examples of the use of biblical texts “to justify discrimination, intolerance, and violence toward homosexuals” (pp. 68–72). Eva Cantarella rejects the homosexual construal of the relationship between David and Jonathan based solely on Horner’s book (Bisexuality in the Ancient World, 198), and unfortunately both treats the Tanakh as an unproblematic source for attitudes to same-sex desire and relationships in ancient

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Israel, and fails to consider the similarities between David and Jonathan and Achilles and Patroclus, the possibility of whose sexual relationship she does seriously consider (pp. 8–12). In the context of her overall argument (see esp. pp. 191–210), her reductive, and borderline essentialist, interpretation of the Judaeo-Christian tradition as univocally anti-homosexual is used to support her view – which is significantly at odds with the earlier, more complex thesis of John Boswell in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality – that it is this tradition, via Paul (Rom. 1:26-27; 1 Cor. 6:9-10; 1 Tim. 1:9-10), that introduced the innovation into ancient sexual ethics of a sharp dichotomy between a valorized, natural heterosexuality and a vilified, contranatural homosexuality (pp. 193, 221–22). Thus sexual ethics gradually came to be determined by a sharp dichotomy between same-sex and opposite-sex acts, more or less disregarding other possible taxonomies of sex and desire. If it really were the case that it is to early Christianity, particularly Paul, that we ultimately owe the centrality in sexual ethics of the gender of object choice, then the emergence of homosexuality and heterosexuality as definable categories of person in Western, post-Christendom Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century would presumably have to be regarded, at least in part, as a long-term effect of this move. The Christian tradition would thus have sown the seeds, within the very foundations of its own discourse, of the recent conflicts over same-sex eroticism, and would thus have been wrestling with a problem entirely of its own invention. It would also, ironically, have helped to make it possible for the contrast between Jonathan’s love and the love of women in 2 Sam. 1:26 to be reduced to a simple dichotomy between homosexual and heterosexual loves that might otherwise never have occurred to a reader. 6. J. Cheryl Exum, Tragedy and Biblical Narrative: Arrows of the Almighty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 73. Cf. the brief discussion of David and Jonathan in Robert Brain, Friends and Lovers, 27–54, in the context of evidence from cultural anthropology for putatively analogous male-male relationships. 7. Nissinen, Homoeroticism, 55. 8. Stansell, “David and his Friends,” 117. Though not entirely unjustified, these charges are too simple, and fail to account for why such readings are possible at all. 9. E.g. J. A. Thompson, “The Significance of the Verb Love in the David-Jonathan Narratives in 1 Samuel,” VT 24 (1974), 334–38; Peter R. Ackroyd, “The Verb Love – ’āhēb in the David-Jonathan Narratives – a Footnote,” VT 25 (1975), 213–14; McCarter, I Samuel, 305, 342; idem, II Samuel: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB, 9; New York: Doubleday, 1984), 77; Diana V. Edelman, “The Authenticity of 2 Sam 1,26 in the Lament over Saul and Jonathan,” SJOT 1 (1988), 66–75; Steven L. McKenzie, King David: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 84; Taggar-Cohen, “Political Loyalty”; Zehnder, “Observations,” 162–66. 10. E.g. Thompson, “Significance of the Verb Love,” 335–36; McCarter, I Samuel, 305, 342; II Samuel, 77; Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel (WBC, 10; Waco, TX: Word Books, 1983), 182; Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel (Interpretation; Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1990), 136; Nissinen, “Die Liebe von David und Jonatan,” 253; Naumann, “David und die Liebe,” 60; Taggar-Cohen, “Political Loyalty,” 253; Ken Stone, “1 and 2 Samuel,” in The Queer Bible Commentary (ed. P. D. Guest, R. E. Goss, M. West and T. Bohache; London: SCM Press, 2006), 206; Zehnder, “Observations,” 174.



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11. Greenberg, Construction of Homosexuality, 114. Although he is clear that the narrative does reflect a homoerotic relationship, Mirko Peisert sees already in the text a tendency towards emphasizing its political consequences. The relationship between David and Jonathan is, furthermore, a secret one (eine verheimlichte Liebe) that not only takes place in secret, but is effectively the victim of a conspiracy of secrecy in the process of transmission and interpretation, with political and theological interpretations obscuring what the text really reflects (“David und Jonatan,” 111). 12. Jobling, 1 Samuel, 161. 13. Gary D. Comstock, “Love, Power and Competition among Men in Hebrew Scripture: Jonathan as Unconventional Nurturer,” in Religion, Homosexuality and Literature (ed. M. L. Stemmeler and J. I. Cabézon; Gay Men’s Issues in Religious Studies Series, 3; Las Colinas, TX: Monument, 1992), 9–29 (esp. pp. 21–23). 14. Clines, “David the Man,” 240–42, though in fairness to McCarter he does emphasize the closeness of the emotional bond between the two men. Clines notes further – and I largely agree, though political aspects to this narrative are not to be excluded – that “the meaning of ‘love’ in a formal treaty context…will hardly be relevant for the term in this narrative of personal relationships” (“David the Man,” 241 n. 67). Indeed, the use of “love” language in treaties and loyalty oaths is surely secondary to its use in interpersonal, particularly kinship (fictive and actual) contexts. There are treaties that are closer than others to the David and Jonathan narrative (cf. Chapter 3 below, pp. 177, 251 n. 239, 256 n. 267, 260 nn. 329 and 334.), but their relevance has to be assessed on a case by case basis. The uncritical use of such analogues from the wider ancient Near Eastern context has been an unhelpfully misleading aspect of research on David and Jonathan. 15. David Damrosch, The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 203. 16. Ackerman, When Heroes Love, xiii. See also Walter Dietrich, The Early Monarchy in Israel: The Tenth Century B.C.E. (trans. J. Vette; Society of Biblical Literature: Biblical Encyclopedia; Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 335–36; Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 149. Ken Stone notes that a political reading need not preclude a “queer” reading that perceives a plurality of meanings for the language of love, and that the political and the sexual are not, and need not be mutually exclusive (“1 and 2 Samuel,” 206–207, 208–12). 17. Thomas Römer and Loyse Bonjour, L’homosexualité dans le Proche-Orient et la Bible (Essais bibliques, 37; Genève: Labor et Fides, 2005), 70. 18. Naumann, “David und die Liebe,” 54. Naumann also attributes the openness of the narrative to multiple construals to the narrator’s reticence with respect to descriptions of inner attitudes and motivations (“David und die Liebe,” 56 on 2 Sam. 11:26). 19. E.g. Jobling, 1 Samuel, 161–65; Boer, “Queer Heroes,” 16–22; Stone, “1 and 2 Samuel,” 208. 20. K. Doob Sakenfeld, “Loyalty and Love: The Language of Human Interconnections in the Hebrew Bible,” Michigan Quarterly Review 22 (1983), 201. 21. “[M]an hofft, dies sei ein ungesuchtes Ergebnis und nicht das heimliche Motiv der Untersuchung!” (Dietrich and Naumann, Die Samuelbücher, 60). 22. Naumann, “David und die Liebe,” 54: “Während auf der einen Seite die Mög­ lichkeit einer homoerotischen Liebe Davids mit einer jahrhunderte-alten biblisch

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begründeten Verteufelung der Homosexualität im Rücken vehement bestritten wird, gilt die Geschichte auf der anderen Seite als wichtiger Beleg dafür, dass die hebräische Bibel homoerotische Männerbeziehungen auch positiv darstellen kann. In dieser Frage entgeht kaum jemand dem Zirkel apologetischer Interessen.” Mirko Peisert adds a slightly different nuance, which is that theologians and exegetes in the Church bring to the David and Jonathan narrative a preconception that homosexuality is a deviation from what is “normal,” or they discuss and classify homosexuality on the assumption that it constitutes a deficiency. Preconceived ideas of this sort make it scarcely possible to approach the possible sexual dimension of the friendship of David and Jonathan from a “scientific” (wissenschaftlich) viewpoint (“David und Jonatan,” 96). 23. Nardelli, Homosexuality and Liminality, vii. 24. Guest, “Battling for the Bible,” 66. Guest is responding primarily to Donald J. Wold, Out of Order: Homosexuality in the Bible and the Ancient Near East (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998) and Kader, Openly Gay, Openly Christian. Her article anticipates Dale Martin’s incisive critique of the rhetoric and textual foundationalism of scholars who use historical criticism in discussions of Rom. 1:18-27, specifically Robert Gagnon, Richard Hays, Francis Watson, and L. William Countryman, Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006), 17–35. See also pp. 51–64 on heterosexism in scholarly commentary on Rom. 1:18-32 and pp. 157–59 on the false dichotomy between “scripture” and “experience.” Donald Wold was formerly a student of Jacob Milgrom, who, in an excursus entitled “How Not to Read the Bible” in his magisterial commentary on Leviticus, responds to a letter from Wold containing his views on homosexuality and the Hebrew Bible, apparently in anticipation of the publication of Out of Order (Leviticus 17–22 [AB, 3A; New York: Doubleday, 2000], 1788–90). 25. That this is a fundamental problem for biblical criticism has long been recognized. A thorough bibliography on this topic would be absolutely vast, but see e.g. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 18–19; Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007); Philip R. Davies, Whose Bible Is It Anyway? (London: T&T Clark International, 2004, 2nd edn). Scholars such as Davies and Jacques Berlinerblau (The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005]) have made a strong case for a secular approach to Biblical Studies. Leaving aside the question of whether “secular” is a workable term for the kind of approaches they have in mind, it is worth pointing out that the idea that the opposite is true, that the Bible needs to be reclaimed from secular modes of criticism by means of an explicitly confessing approach, has animated much of the recent renaissance of theological exegesis, including the works of Brevard Childs and Francis Watson that Davies so trenchantly criticizes. It is far from clear to me, however, that most of the biblical scholarship done in the wake of the Enlightenment has been done without a range of controlling theological agendas, whether acknowledged or not. Indeed, prior to Davies, Whose Bible Is It Anyway? it is difficult to see any real evidence of scholarly approaches to the biblical texts that could with real justification be called “secular.” Post-Enlightenment biblical scholarship has perhaps not, on the whole, been done in conversation with the great commentators of the Jewish and Christian traditions, nor in recognition



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of how scripture is best to be located dogmatically (on which question see e.g. John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch [Current Issues in Theology; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]), but it has never truly escaped from the theological frameworks that gave birth to it, and the current renaissance in confessing, selfconsciously theological approaches is an example of the kind of claims to ownership of the biblical texts, and of the right to interpret them, that I criticize here. 26. As J. Michael Clark comments, for example, “I am increasingly convinced that there is no such thing as…purely objective biblical criticism. Because all approaches to scripture entail certain presuppositions, putative objectivity is itself an ideology, a heterosexist ideology most often used to maintain the oppressive methodologies of the majority over against the oppressed”: Defying the Darkness: Gay Theology in the Shadows (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 1997), 11. Cf. Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 61. 27. Guest, “Battling for the Bible,” 75. 28. Deryn Guest, When Deborah Met Jael: Lesbian Biblical Hermeneutics (London: SCM Press, 2005), 6. 29. Guest, “Battling for the Bible,” 82. 30. Guest, “Battling for the Bible,” 84. 31. For this term see Guest, “Battling for the Bible,” 76 n. 6. 32. Guest, When Deborah Met Jael, 65. These have been scrutinized ad nauseam both within and outside the academy, and within and outside communities of faith, and I do not wish to add more ink to that already spilt on their interpretation. I do wish to point out, however, that because of the effect of the use of these texts in contexts where LGBT/Q persons are still often grievously oppressed by both political and religious forces, it is an ethical imperative that LGBT/Q interpreters continue to engage in debate as to their meaning and significance. 33. See above p. 15. 34. Guest remarks that, “[w]hen Church and state combine forces to condemn homosexuality, it is the ability to appeal to so-called texts of terror (Gen. 19; Lev. 18.22, 20.13; Rom. 1.18-32; 1 Cor. 6.9; 1 Tim. 1.9-10), together with selected verses from Genesis 1–3, that facilitates their anti-lesbian/gay discourse and practice. These texts help political and religious leaders set homosexuals apart from heterosexuals, thereby encouraging the belief that a homo-hetero binary is already established within scripture, and that the homosexual element of that binary is therein denounced as sinful and unnatural” (When Deborah Met Jael, 164; cf. Guest’s discussion of these texts, pp. 165–94). Theodore Jennings likewise notes, “the reading of the Bible has important consequences for civil society as a whole”: The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives from the New Testament (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2003), 1 n. 1. 35. See e.g. Guest, When Deborah Met Jael, esp. pp. 239–43. Guest’s use of the phrase “texts of terror” alludes to Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (OBT, 13; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984). 36. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, x. With respect to the homophobic texts of terror, Jennings remarks that, “[f ]or too long they have occupied center stage in the debate about what the Bible says about homosexuality. This is a dreary debate that is largely beside the point.” The debate is certainly dreary, and for various reasons irresolvable, but it is not beside the point, since the effects of how these texts are interpreted and used can be so potentially damaging.

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37. Timothy R. Koch, “A Homoerotic Approach to Scripture,” T&S 14 (2001), 10–22. Koch’s “Pissing Contest” is the attempt by interpreters to outdo one another in the sheer weight of evidence they bring to the table. It is one strategy LGBT/Q sympathetic interpreters have used to take the homophobic sting out of scripture, alongside the “Jesus is my Trump Card approach,” in which the witness of Jesus is cited in opposition to anti-LGBT/Q interpretive conventions, and the “I Can Fit the Glass Slipper Too” approach, in which scripture is searched for LGBT/Q role models. In this chapter, Schroer and Staubli would fit into the third category, and the authors critiqued by Guest into the first; in Chapter 4 below (pp. 302–306), Jeremy Bentham anticipates the second. Koch criticizes all these approaches for being defensive, and instead advocates an unashamedly homoerotic approach, in which one “cruises” scripture, “for pleasure and moments of delightful encounter with those characters and stories which offer moments of identification, points of connection and the possibility of transformation” (p. 10). David and Jonathan merit a brief mention (p. 21 n. 3). This seems to be a variation of the “I Can Fit the Glass Slipper Too” approach, but without the need to submit to an external, in this case biblical, authority. 38. See Chapter 4 below. 39. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David und Jonatan.” Subsequent references to this article will be to the English translation, published in 2000. Similar ground is covered by Peisert in “David und Jonatan,” but while it is a valuable sketch of the issues that takes the possibility of homoeroticism seriously, it nevertheless suffers from the same methodological problems as Schroer and Staubli. 40. Zehnder, “Exegetische Beobachtungen”; Nissinen, “Die Liebe von David und Jonatan.” 41. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 22. 42. Edelman, “Authenticity of 2 Sam 1,26.” 43. These and related questions are dealt with in Chapter 3, pp. 217–25 below. 44. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 22. Cf. Hügel, Homoerotik und Hebräische Bibel, 344 n. 2377. I discuss the problems raised by Stolz and Hentschel in Chapter 3, pp. 145–49 below, in relation to the question of how biblical texts such as Lev. 18:22 and 20:13 are used to disambiguate the David and Jonathan narrative. 45. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 26. 46. See further Chapter 5 below. 47. Roland Boer comments that “the prime polemical task now seems to involve identifying the stench of the decaying essentialist corpse hidden in the basement of one another’s writing”: “Queer Heroes,” 14. See also Boer’s criticism of Fewell and Gunn (“Queer Heroes,” 23), and the comments by Jennings in The Man Jesus Loved, 2, 20–21. 48. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 31–35. 49. Zehnder, “Observations,” 173. 50. Davidson, Greeks and Greek Love. Heacock makes a broadly similar point in Jonathan Loved David, 74. I discuss some of the relevant Greek texts in Chapters 3 and 4 below, esp. pp. 185–87, 291–98. Rick Brentlinger is also under the impression that, “Philistine overlords…regarded homosexual relationships between warriors as normal” (Gay Christian 101, 147), but offers no supporting evidence.



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51. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 36 n. 24. 52. I undertake my own analysis of these data in Chapter 3 below, and limit my response to Schroer and Staubli to matters of methodology and ideology. The comparison with the Song of Songs had been sporadically made earlier: see e.g. Eglinton, Greek Love, 54; Boswell, Marriage of Likeness, 136 n. 119. 53. See also 1 Sam. 20:3 (Jonathan’s fondness for David); Gen. 39:4 (Potiphar’s fondness for Joseph); cf. v. 21. 54. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 27. 55. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 28–29. 56. This is rightly questioned by Zehnder (“Exegetische Beobachtungen,” 163–64; “Observations,” 149), who might have added that kissing between men can only be construed erotically if cultural conventions are known to exist that exclude kissing between men outside erotic or sexual contexts, or if there is overwhelming evidence on other grounds that the relationship is erotic or sexual. Zehnder only cites Song 1:2; 8:1; Prov. 7:13 as references to q#n construed erotically, though it is worth pondering whether Gen. 29:11 (Jacob-Rachel, cf. 29:18, 20, 30) might be added. Other, apparently non-erotic references include Gen. 27:26, 27; 29:13; 31:28; 32:1; 33:4; 45:15; 48:10; 50:1; Exod. 4:27; 18:7; 1 Sam. 10:1; 2 Sam. 14:33; 15:5; 19:40; 20:9; 1 Kgs 19:20; Ruth 1:9, 14. 57. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 29–30. 58. See the more detailed discussion in Chapter 3, pp. 201–13 below. Lev. 20:11, 17 (x3), 18, 19, 20, 21. 59. Jennings offers a yet more convoluted construal in Jacob’s Wound, 17 (see pp. 93–96 above). 60. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 30. 61. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 30 n. 14. 62. See also 2 Sam. 13:11. Cf. vv. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 12, perhaps playing on the connotations for twx)) of a female sibling subordinate to her male siblings, and of courtship and erotic love (Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 144). Perh. also cf. a0delfh/ in Tob. 5:21 (AB), 22 (S); 8:4. 63. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 36. 64. The Megiddo fragment, however, is datable to the fourteenth century bce at the latest (this was the view of Goetze and Levy, pushed back tentatively to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries by Aage Westenholz), and the clay from which the tablet was made is known not to have come from the vicinity of Megiddo itself, so it cannot be assumed without further ado that this evidence for the Epic of Gilgamesh at Megiddo tells us anything about whether, and by what means, the Epic could still have been known in Palestine during Iron Age I, when the stories about David and Jonathan were most probably first written. On the Megiddo fragment, see further A. Goetze and S. Levy, “Epic from Megiddo,” ‘Atiqot 2 (1959), 121–28; B. Landsberger, “Zur vierten und siebenten Tafel des Gilgamesh-Epos,” RA 62 (1968), 119, 121, 131–33, 135; Aage Westenholz and Ulla Koch-Westenholz, “Enkidu — The Noble Savage?,” in Wisdom, Gods and Literature: Studies in Assyriology in Honour of W. G. Lambert (ed. A. R. George; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2000), 445; Andrew R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts (2 vols; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 24, 339–47, 351.

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65. Zehnder, “Observations,” 170. 66. Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 27. 67. Zehnder, “Observations,” 148–49. The two contexts share the motif of a need for secrecy, but in 1 Sam. 20 the need for secrecy is occasioned by the pressing need not to be overheard by Saul or his servants, rather than by the desire of lovers not to be spied on, as in the Song of Songs. 68. On Zehnder see further, pp. 63–83, 150–54, and for a more detailed treatment of the philological and contextual problems, see Chapter 3 below, esp. pp. 145–225. 69. Zehnder, “Exegetische Beobachtungen”; Schroer and Staubli, “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 36 n. 24. Responding to his 1998 article, Hügel does not problematize Zehnder’s use of word statistics, but does criticize his interpretation for being ideologically motivated, and also for being rooted in an unnecessary fear of evidence for homoerotic relationships in the Hebrew Bible. This fear is unnecessary, for Hügel, because a stance on homosexuality cannot be reached simply on the basis of readings of particular biblical texts. See Hügel, Homoerotik und Hebräische Bibel, 344–45. My own response to Zehnder owes much to Nissinen’s in “Die Liebe von David und Jonatan,” but in responding to Zehnder’s longer English article I am seeking to expand and deepen the critique in a way that hopefully challenges not only current scholarship on David and Jonathan, but the way historical criticism in general works. 70. Zehnder, “Observations,” 127–28 n. 1. 71. Heacock is dependent at a number of points on Zehnder’s use of word statistics (e.g. Jonathan Loved David, 8, 12; cf. p. 91), and despite claiming an intent to establish the ancient context of the David and Jonathan narrative in historical-critical terms (Jonathan Loved David, 74–99), nevertheless does not fully separate the canonical from the historical. For example, in a discussion of the destruction of Sodom (Gen. 18:16–19:29), “the Hebrew Bible is its own best commentary” (Jonathan Loved David, 93). The Holiness Code, furthermore, gives the modern reader access to “the Hebrew consciousness” as regards the link between sex between men and idolatry, and to how “[a]ncient Israelite society” viewed sex between men (Jonathan Loved David, 97). While he rightly claims that, “we do not know how ordinary citizens viewed Israel’s laws,” it is not clear what Israel should be taken to mean here, nor what heuristic value can be attributed to the fact that, “the legal texts are the only recorded biblical cultural norms we have available to consider” (Jonathan Loved David, 95). The phrase “biblical cultural norms,” for one thing, is confusing: “biblical” points to the canon, “cultural” seems to point to the ancient societies behind the texts the canon contains, and “norms” could be qualified by either adjective, but with a different meaning in each case. See further on the scholarly use of Lev. 18:22 and 20:13 Chapter 3 below, pp. 145–56. 72. David M. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals,” in his One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New Ancient World; London: Routledge, 1990), 75–87, is an excellent illustration of this. 73. Zehnder, “Observations,” 130. 74. Zehnder, “Observations,” 130 n. 7. 75. As Heacock has rightly remarked, “notions of authorial intention have been used to limit, prevent and reject interpretations that go against the grain of the consensus of the guild of biblical scholars and churches’ teachings” (Jonathan Loved David, 126).



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76. This is the essence of my criticism of Thiselton in n. 90 below. It is, of course, possible to suggest a plausible authorial intention and dissent from it, but this seems to be more difficult when confessional agendas get in the way. 77. Bruce Zuckerman has brilliantly shown how this works in the case of the book of Job in his Job the Silent: A Study in Historical Counterpoint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). I could quibble over various points in Zuckerman’s analysis, but the basic principle of the layers of composite works having the effect of altering the meaning of those that preceded is finely made. 78. Following Umberto Eco, see Johannes Klein, “1 Sam. 18 – Spiel mit den Leerstellen,” in Die Samuelbücher und die Deuteronomisten, 108 n. 2. 79. Gayle Shadduck (ed.), A Critical Edition of Abraham Cowley’s DAVIDEIS (The Renaissance Imagination, 22; London: Garland, 1987), 166; cf. pp. 22, 54. Cowley’s note is on Davideis 1.347, part of a description of heaven: Above the subtle foldings of the Sky, Above the well-set Orbs soft Harmony, Above those petty Lamps that guild the Night; There is a place o’reflown with hallowed Light; – Davideis 1.347-350; Shadduck, Abraham Cowley’s DAVIDEIS, 111. 80. André Gide, The Immoralist (trans. D. Watson; London: Penguin, 2000; 1st edn, Paris: Mercure de France, 1902), 7. 81. Gide, Immoralist, 8. 82. I cull this felicitous phrase, gratuitously, from Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Jean-Pierre Richard’s work on Mallarmé. See Derrida, Dissemination (trans. B. Johnson; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 261, cf. p. 256 n. 55. 83. Umberto Eco, “Postille a ‘Il nome della Rosa,’” in idem, Il nome della rosa (Tascabili Bompiani, 33; Milan: Bompiani, 1980), 509; repr. from Alfabeta 49 (1983): “L’autore dovrebbe morire dopo aver scritto. Per non disturbare il cammino del testo.” This novel was translated into English as The Name of the Rose (trans. W. Weaver; London: Secker & Warburg, 1983). Eco expands – in places slightly tongue-in-cheek – on this claim in his third Tanner lecture, “Between Author and Text,” in U. Eco, R.  Rorty, J. Culler, and C. Brooke-Rose, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (ed. S.  Collini; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 67–88, esp. pp. 72–84, where he makes the distinction between the intentions of the actual, empirical author (rather than the model author, whom the reader infers within a work as a textual strategy) and the intention of the work he wrote, and explores what happens when this empirical author is there to be quizzed on the relationship between them: “At this point the response of the author must not be used in order to validate the interpretations of his text, but to show the discrepancies between the author’s intention and the intention of the text” (p. 73). Roland Barthes classically overthrew criticism’s focus on the author in “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text (selected and trans. S. Heath; London: William Collins, 1977), 142–48 (repr. from Mantéia 5 [1968], 12–17), recognizing in the process just how recent literary criticism’s notion of an “author” as such actually is (pp. 142–43). 84. Zehnder, “Observations,” 130–31. 85. Zehnder, “Observations,” 148 (cf. p. 166). This kind of point helps Zehnder ultimately to construct a case that presents an emotionally, but not sexually, bonded

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David and Jonathan as a potential model for contemporary same-sex friendships and thus as a corrective to “some of the deformations of our present age,” which surely implies some sort of ethical assessment of homosexuality on Zehnder’s part. See Chapter 1 above, n. 84. 86. Zehnder’s argument differs subtly from Milgrom’s response to Wold, on the interpretation of biblical texts pertaining explicitly to homosexual acts, at the end of Milgrom’s commentary on Lev. 20. Milgrom argues thus: “That the Bible says God penalizes Israel for homosexuality does not imply that he approves of it for the rest of the world. But when God punishes Israel for it, he punishes no one else – unless they reside in the holy land” (Leviticus 17–22, 1790). While I doubt that Milgrom would have agreed with the point I am about to make, I would argue in the same way that just as Yhwh’s condemnation of homosexual acts in Israel does not entail his condemnation of them at all times and in all places by all persons, so the existence of some traditions suggesting that Yhwh does condemn homosexual acts of some sort (Lev. 18:22; 20:13) does not allow us to conclude that all traditions in ancient Israel and Judah shared the same assumptions about Yhwh’s attitude to same-sex eroticism. 87. See my criticism of Gagnon, pp. 83–89. 88. Zehnder, “Observations,” 150. 89. Zehnder, “Observations,” 138. This was originally posed directly as a question to Schroer and Staubli’s comparison between the David and Jonathan narrative and the Song of Songs: “Sind die von S. Schroer und T. Staubli gesammelten Hinweise tatsächlich stark genug, um die Vermutung, dass es sich bei der Beziehung zwischen David und Jonathan um eine homosexuelle Beziehung handelt, bestätigen zu können – eine Vermutung, die sich gegen einen jahrtausendelangen exegetischen Konsens wendet?” (“Exegetische Beobachtungen,” 154). Usually supportive of Zehnder, Heacock is mildly critical of what he calls the “it’s always been this way” attitude reflected in this remark (Jonathan Loved David, 41). 90. Thiselton is responding to the work of Antoinette Wire and Elizabeth Castelli, and appealing to the work of Hans-Robert Jauss on Rezeptionsästhetik: “Antoinette Wire and Elizabeth Castelli argue that Paul’s language about imitation imposed an authoritarian and manipulative rhetoric upon the Pauline communities. Castelli appealed to Foucault’s notion of disguised power… But this would undermine Paul’s claim that ‘our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery’ (1 Thess. 2:3), reducing it either to a cynical lie, or to gross self-deception. Jauss seeks from reception history evidence of a stable continuity of interpretation, as well as examples of provocation. The themes of co-workers, Paul’s lack of an authoritative title, the association of Christ with God the Father, the affectionate thanksgiving, and the importance of the typically Pauline themes of faith, love, and prayer all demonstrate continuity with traditional readings. By contrast, inferences from ‘imitation’ and speculation about rhetorical form present tensions between the present and the past” (1 & 2 Thessalonians through the Centuries [Blackwell Bible Commentaries; Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011], 25; cf. the more helpfully nuanced remarks by Walter Moberly, Prophecy and Discernment [Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 212–20). Yet it is hardly surprising that a predominantly Christian history of interpretation has largely taken Paul at his



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word. Thiselton seems to want to use the weight of the history of reception to reinscribe the authority of 1 Thessalonians, which leaves no room whatsoever for an ideological-critical demystification of the strategies of power that texts such as Paul’s epistles cloak (this need in no way preclude addressing the same kind of critique to the works of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida). A position such as Thiselton outlines here, which effectively seeks to render a certain set of texts immune from ideological critique, is, I suggest, ethically bankrupt. 91. Stephen Guy-Bray has studied the problem of homoeroticism in Abraham Cowley’s use of Virgil in his composition of the Davideis. On Nisus and Euryalus, he remarks that, “[w]hile there are many classical male couples whose love is clearly just friendship, the story of Nisus and Euryalus is a love story, by which I mean that it is not only susceptible to homoerotic interpretations, but that in fact it requires considerable energy and wilful blindness to what Virgil actually wrote to interpret their love in any other way. These requirements have not deterred generations of Virgilians, however, beginning in the early fifth century”: “Cowley’s Latin Lovers: Nisus and Euryalus in the Davideis,” Classical and Modern Literature 21 (2001), 32. 92. This was a point of significant disagreement between Jowett and his student, John Addington Symonds, who collaborated with Jowett on his translations of Plato. See e.g. Symonds’s letter to Jowett of 1 February, 1889, which Symonds cites in his memoirs: The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds (ed. P. Grosskurth; London: Hutchinson, 1984), 100–102. 93. Zehnder, “Observations,” 155. 94. See further Chapters 3 and 4 below. 95. See e.g. Zehnder, “Observations,” 166 n. 136. 96. Indeed, just before his discussion of David and Jonathan Jeremy Bentham used Judges 19 to show that homosexuality was known in ancient Israel. Bentham’s discussion of these texts acknowledges further that the Old Testament does not present a single view of same-sex eroticism. See further Chapter 4, pp. 303–304 below. 97. With respect to the problem raised by evidentiary silence for historical-critical research, cf. Halperin’s comments on the ancient reception of Sappho: “no extant ancient writer of the classical period found the homoeroticism of Sappho’s poetry sufficiently remarkable to mention it. So, either Sappho’s earliest readers and auditors saw nothing homoerotic in her poems, or they saw nothing remarkable in Sappho’s homoeroticism. Neither of those alternatives seems very satisfactory to us, or even very plausible, but this interpretive difficulty ought to force us to consider a new set of questions about what the ancients counted as sex and sexuality, how they understood different erotic practices and identities, and how they distinguished different sexual subjects” (How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 51). 98. Song 2:4, 7; 3:5, 10; 5:8; 7:7; 8:4, 6, 7 (2x). 99. Gen. 29:20; 2 Sam. 13:15; Prov. 5:19. 100. 2 Sam. 19:7; 1 Kgs 11:2; Ps. 109:4, 5. 101. Zehnder, “Observations,” 140. Zehnder formulated this argument slightly differently in “Exegetische Beobachtungen,” 155: “Falls diese Frage im positiven Sinne zu beantworten sein sollte, wäre die Annahme, dass hier eine Anspielung auf eine homosexuelle Beziehung vorliegt, noch zusätzlich erschwert, da eine explizite theologische

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Bejahung der Homosexualität sich im alten Testament nicht findet, sondern – im Gegenteil – die Rede von der hbh) zwischen Jhwh und dem Volk auf den Bund verweist, zu dessen Satzungen der Schutz der Ehe als des einzigen möglichen Ortes intimer Beziehungen grundlegend gehört.” 102. The same criticism applies to Zehnder’s discussions of bh) (the verb), Cpx, q#n, x), r#q (“Observations,” 144, 147, 149, 150, 152, 155–56), where a similar point is made. 103. See esp. Sir. 6:5-17; 7:18; 11:29–12:18; 22:19-26; 37:1-6. Cf. Qoh. 4:7-12. Note esp. Sir. 37:2, where #pnk (yr (MS D), “a friend like [one’s very] self ” is used to refer to the friend (cf. 1 Sam. 18:1, 3; 20:17). Note also Sir. 6:17, where wh(r Nk whwmk yk, “For as himself, so is his friend” seems clearly to echo Lev. 19:18, 34 (thus Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. DiLella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira [AB 39; New York: Doubleday, 1987], 189). 104. Cf. e.g. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals”; Otto Kaiser, “David und Jonathan: Tradition, Redaktion und Geschichte in 1 Sam. 16–20,” EThL 66 (1990), 281; Dietrich and Naumann, Die Samuelbücher, 59. 105. See also Zehnder’s treatment of  Cpx, rxb, and r#q (“Observations,” 147–48, 153, 156). 106. Zehnder, “Observations,” 140 n. 43; cf. Stoebe, Das erste Buch Samuelis (KAT, 8/1; Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1973), 348. 107. While Martin Noth’s work as a whole on the Deuteronomistic History has been the subject of a great deal of re-thinking on the part of scholars working on Deuteronomy – Kings after him, his view of the theodic character of the whole is still valid: The Deuteronomistic History (trans. J. Doull, J. Barton, M. D. Rutter and D. R. Ap-Thomas; JSOTSup, 15; Sheffield: JSOT, 1991, 2nd edn), 134–45. 108. Zehnder, “Observations,” 166. Heacock takes Zehnder’s judgment here as read (Jonathan Loved David, 16), so my criticisms of Zehnder by extension apply to Heacock’s interpretation as well. 109. Cf. my comments above on the effect of Deuteronom(ist)ic redaction on how the David and Jonathan narrative might be read. 110. I deal with the use of tyrb in the David and Jonathan narrative in Chapter 3 below, pp. 180–82, 192–201, 254–56, 260–63. 111. Jacques Berlinerblau, “The ‘Popular Religion’ Paradigm in Old Testament Research: A Sociological Critique,” JSOT 60 (1993), 4 n. 2. 112. The problem I am raising here is basically that of the biblically-determined scholarly assumption that we can meaningfully distinguish “official” from “popular” – or other forms of – religion in ancient Israel and Judah. See further e.g. Berlinerblau, “The ‘Popular Religion’ Paradigm”; idem, “Preliminary Remarks for the Sociological Study of Israelite ‘Official Religion’,” in Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine (ed. L. H. Schiffman, W. W. Hallo and R. Chazan; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 153–70; and in particular the excellent essay by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, “‘Popular’ Religion’ and ‘Official’ Religion: Practice, Perception, Portrayal,” in Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (ed. F. Stavrakopoulou and J. Barton; London: T&T Clark International, 2010), 37–58 (esp. pp. 49–50), which contains extensive references to this debate which, I suggest, has ramifications not only for how we conceive of the religions of ancient  



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Israel and Judah, but how we conceive of the constructions of gender and sexuality that were experienced and practiced there. 113. H – if indeed a separate “H” can be unravelled from the literary complex of Leviticus – is explicitly connected with “official Yahwism” in Zehnder’s discussion of Lev. 18:22; 20:13 (“Observations,” 168). 114. Cf. Berlinerblau, “Preliminary Remarks,” 165–69. 115. On which cf. Berlinerblau’s comments on the relationship between coercion, consent, and “official” religion in “Preliminary Remarks,” 159–60. 116. Zehnder, “Observations,” 143. 117. Cf. Zehnder, “Observations,” 134–37, 167–68. 118. Zehnder, “Observations,” 144. 119. The same criticism applies to Zehnder’s suggestion that the references in 1 and 2 Samuel to sexual relationships with women on the part of both Jonathan and David renders a homoerotic or homosexual interpretation of their relationship unlikely (“Observations,” 168–69). In fact, Zehnder acknowledges the weakness of this argument immediately after making it. 120. Olyan, “‘Surpassing the Love of Women’.” 121. Olyan, “‘Surpassing the Love of Women’,” 12. 122. Zehnder, “Observations,” 144 n. 58. Nissinen (“Die Liebe von David und Jonatan,” 253), followed by Hügel (Homoerotik und Hebräische Bibel, 345), responds to the discussion of bh) in Zehnder’s earlier German article, noting that the use of bh) in the context of the prophetic marriage metaphor indicates, pace Zehnder, that the political-theological and erotic-emotional aspects of love need not ipso facto be mutually exclusive. 123. E.g. 1 Sam. 18:16; 2 Sam. 19:7; 1 Kgs 5:15. 124. 1 Sam. 20:13, 31; 22:8, 13; 23:17. Perhaps 1 Sam. 18:4, if this is construed as a transmission of royal insignia rather than the transmission of armour to a warrior companion. Note also the political use of Cpx in 2 Sam. 20:11 (Zehnder, “Observations,” 147). 125. I study the ancient Hebrew use of this root more fully in Chapter 3, pp. 170–72 below. 126. Pace Zehnder, “Observations,” 156. 127. Zehnder’s logic does not support such an unequivocal exclusion, though he does offer a plausible construal of the difference between Michal’s and Jonathan’s relationships to David: “David is loved and helped not only by a woman based on (erotic) feelings, but also by a man based on feelings of friendship; David is loved and helped not only by the one person who might be the biggest means of political promotion (Michal as the king’s daughter), but even by the one person who might be the biggest obstacle to pursuing a political career leading to kingship (Jonathan as the king’s son and heir to the throne)” (“Observations,” 158). 128. The overlap of semantic domains complicates the interpretive process here. Cf. Zehnder, “Observations,” 170: “…a deep emotional, non-erotic friendship and an erotic relationship are domains that are more or less closely related to one another. Linguistic points of contact between the two domains must not be interpreted in a way that totally blurs the complex differences that exist between the two categories in real life.” This is true, but only to a point. It could equally be argued that the linguistic  

 

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points of contact imply the perception that the two categories are blurred in real life, in ways that belie the differences that may be assumed to exist between them. Moreover, when dealing with an ancient text we do not have access to “real life” beyond the expression-plane of the text. 129. Zehnder, “Observations,” 157. 130. See the discussion of Aeschylus, Plato, Xenophon, and Aeschines in Chapter 4, pp. 291–98 below. 131. Zehnder, “Observations,” 169. 132. Zehnder, “Observations,” 154. Zehnder objects here to the view, his only source for which is a personal communication, that lydgh  dwd  d( refers to David getting an erection and ejaculating (see now Brentlinger, Gay Christian 101, 157 and esp. Nardelli, Homosexuality and Liminality, 26 n. 36, who finds a sexual nuance both in the Greek e3wj suntelei/aj mega/lhj and in the underlying Hebrew). He is right that this usage is not attested anywhere else in the Tanakh, but that doesn’t solve the problem raised by how his argument is presented. Zehnder’s other objection is to the view that t#q, “bow” and Cx, “arrow” connote homoerotic innuendo, a view advanced by Susan Ackerman (When Heroes Love, 183–84) against the background of the use of these images as symbols of masculinity in ancient Near Eastern literature, on which see further Harry A. Hoffner, “Symbols for Masculinity and Femininity: Their Use in Ancient Near Eastern Sympathetic Magic,” JNES 85 (1966): 326–34 (esp. pp. 329– 31); Delbert R. Hillers, “The Bow of Aqhat: The Meaning of a Mythological Theme,” in Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (ed. H. A. Hoffner; AOAT, 22; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1973), 71–80 (building on Hoffner); Harold H. P. Dressler, “Is the Bow of Aqhat a Symbol of Virility,” UF 7 (1975): 217–20 (responding to Hillers); Neal H. Walls, The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth (SBLDS, 135; Atlanta, GA: Scholars, 1992), 189–90, 201–202. The interpretive risk is not, pace Zehnder, that of imputing to  t#q nuances it would not have had in Hebrew, but, pace Ackerman, of transferring to its use in the David and Jonathan narrative connotations it may conceivably bear in another, quite different linguistic and literary context, such as the Aqhat epic, where Walls finds “the phallic symbolism of the bow” in KTU 1.17 vi 39-41 (The Goddess Anat, 201). An additional point, which could be adduced in Zehnder’s support, is that the Aqhat epic itself may not unequivocally conflate virility with sexuality in the symbolism of the bow (thus Dressler; pace Hillers and Walls). 133. Presumably not the same kind of reader as the one implied by Roland Boer, “Too Many Dicks at the Writing Desk, or, How to Organize a Prophetic SausageFest,” T&S 16 (2010), 95–108. 134. The WTJ continues to claim that its purpose is “publishing scholarly work that defends and advances understanding the Bible’s teaching and its implications for the larger world” (http://www.wts.edu/resources/wtj.html, retrieved 4 February, 2011). It continues to affirm its original stated remit, being “founded upon the conviction that the Holy Scriptures are the word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and of practice, and that the system of belief commonly designated the Reformed Faith is the purest and the most consistent formulation and expression of the system of truth set forth in the Holy Scriptures” (loc. cit., citing the editorial “To Our Readers,” WTJ 1 [1938]: i). Its purpose is “to advance the cause of biblical and



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theological scholarship within a Reformed confessional framework” (http://www. wts.edu/resources/wtj/editorial_aims_and_procedures.html, retrieved 3 July, 2009). But equally, “[w]e regard all truth as a friend of Calvinism. Certain technical papers (for example, those dealing with the biblical languages) contribute to Reformed scholarship by uncovering new facts and by presenting valid interpretations of old facts. Contributors, therefore, need not subscribe to the Westminster Standards to have their articles included in the Journal” (loc. cit.). We must assume from this that Zehnder’s caution should have been strictly unnecessary in the context of this journal. 135. Cf. Foucault’s remark that “When they had to allude to it, the first demographers and psychiatrists of the nineteenth century thought it advisable to excuse themselves for asking their readers to dwell on matters so trivial and base” (Introduction to the History of Sexuality, 6; cf. p. 64). Even defenders of same-sex eroticism at this period felt the need to protect potential readers and, moreover, themselves, from the possible consequences of speaking and writing openly on this theme. The frontispiece of Edward Carpenter, Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society (Manchester: Labour Press Society, 1894), for example, reads: “As the present pamphlet – though a continuation of the series already published, relating to questions of Sex – deals with a somewhat difficult branch of that subject, it has been thought advisable, at any rate in the first instance, to print it for private circulation.” In contrast with the sense of the transgression of power that Foucault saw in the later explosion of discourse about sexuality (Introduction to the History of Sexuality, 6–7), Zehnder’s verbosity in the article as a whole is an attempt to shut the debate down and return the reading of the text to an appropriate level of polite respectability. Despite this, however, by going to such lengths to shut down the debate, Zehnder is merely ensuring that it will be prolonged. The modern study of the David and Jonathan narrative is, in effect, one more echo of what Foucault terms the “veritable discursive explosion” that has taken place “around and apropos of sex” since the early seventeenth century (Introduction to the History of Sexuality, 17). 136. Robert Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2001), the implicit ideology of which is briefly critiqued by Guest (When Deborah Met Jael, 178), and the rhetoric and textual foundationalism of which are critiqued by Martin (Sex and the Single Savior, 25–28). Gagnon and Martin subsequently engaged with one another further in a frustrating series of emails that Gagnon saw fit to post on his website. See http://www.robgagnon.net/ DaleMartinRobertGagnonExchange.htm, retrieved 4 March, 2011. See also now the penetrating and immensely creative critique of Gagnon’s work by Gillian Townsley in “The Straight Mind in Corinth,” 249–97. 137. Walter Wink, “To Hell with Gays? Sex and the Bible,” Christian Century 119 (2002), 32. 138. Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 2. 139. See http://www.robgagnon.net/ where Gagnon distinguishes between “homo­ sex,” which refers to homosexual acts (which a Christian must oppose at all costs), and homosexuals as people (whom a Christian must “love” without condoning their indulgence in homosexual acts). 140. Gagnon, Bible and Homosexual Practice, 43–157. 141. Gagnon, Bible and Homosexual Practice, 146–54, cf. p. 438.

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142. Gagnon, Bible and Homosexual Practice, 146. 143. Gagnon, Bible and Homosexual Practice, 414. 144. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp makes a similar point in response to Harold Washington in “Rethinking Historical Criticism,” BibInt 7 (1999), 235–71 (256 n. 68). In his queer reading of David and Jonathan, Yaron Peleg remarks that “[w]hile the exceptionally close relations between Jonathan and David certainly invite [homosexual] readings, especially in our gender-conscious age, I think that the ambivalence of this ancient story and the Bible’s fairly clear stance against such (sexual) relations, both legally and narratively, ultimately work against interpretations of this kind” (“Love at First Sight?,” 173). But Peleg falls into a similar trap to Gagnon, assuming not only that we can meaningfully refer in historical-critical discourse to “the Bible” rather than to various literary strata of particular works that later became part of our bibles, but that “the Bible,” mirror-like, reflects the social norms of a monochrome culture. The same weakness undermines Peleg’s critique of Schroer and Staubli (“Love at First Sight?,” 175 n. 13). 145. 2 Sam. 13:13b with Lev. 18:9. See Stone, “1 and 2 Samuel,” 207, 216. 146. Cf. Gagnon, Bible and Homosexual Practice, 439–40. 147. Gagnon, Bible and Homosexual Practice, 153–54. 148. The title of Gagnon, Bible and Homosexual Practice, ch. 2. 149. As Fewell and Gunn note, “[M]ost readers are driven to form interpretations that offer an encompassing, comprehensive, and coherent account of their text. Critical theory, in particular feminist and poststructuralist (particularly deconstructionist) discourse, helps us to see that this ‘totalizing’ drive is hardly inevitable or innocent. It places a premium on sameness (unity) and univocality (one meaning), and it devalues difference (diversity) and multivocality (multiple meanings). It leads to our ignoring or suppressing the very tensions and fractures in texts that may offer us enlivening insight or, indeed, an escape from the tyranny of a given interpretive tradition” (Gender, Power, and Promise, 16). 150. Gagnon, Bible and Homosexual Practice, 155 (emphasis added). A similar, though slightly less barbed, summary is offered by Robert Brain: “As a piece of mythical history…the relationship has been invested with a specially sentimental aura and a false homosexuality has been attributed to it by furtive pederasts who have taken the two biblical friends to their lonely hearts” (Friends and Lovers, 28 [emphasis added]). In addition to the misleading conflation of pederasty and homosexuality, Brain fails to critique the construction of “homosexuality” as a category, and works with a frankly depressing set of assumptions about the loneliness and shameful secrecy of Western same-sex oriented men in the 1970s who needed to mitigate their self-loathing by appealing to a pair of ancient lovers who shared their embarrassing predilection. 151. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals.” 152. See n. 18 above. 153. See n. 136 above. 154. E.g. Robert J. Gagnon, “Gays and the Bible: A Response to Walter Wink,” Christian Century 119 (2002), 40. This short piece is a response to Wink, “To Hell with Gays?” Gagnon exhibits a penchant for reductio ad absurdum worthy of Pseudo-Lucian’s Charicles in his responses to those with whom he disagrees,



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risking the serious misrepresentation of their position in the process, a point to which Wink alludes in his second response to Gagnon, “A Reply by Walter Wink,” Christian Century 119 (2002): 43, and which is evident both throughout his book, and in his responses to Dale Martin (see the URL in n. 136 above) and Martti Nissinen (n. 162 below). 155. Cf. Chapter 1, n. 8 above. 156. This is certainly true, but tells us little. As Peisert notes, “Gegenüber [(dy] stehen bei [bh)] weniger Sexualität als die Erotik und das Liebesempfinden im Vordergrund” (“David und Jonatan,” 100). It is a question of which Hebrew verb most adequately bears the connotations that are supposed to be foregrounded in the text. If the concern in the text is with the emotional bonding or loyalty of the two men, there is no reason why it should be explicit about the precise extent of the physicality of their relationship, because it is not relevant. This in no way permits us to claim that their relationship was sexual, but cannot help to determine beyond doubt that it was not. 157. While Gagnon does admit that heterosexual desires do not preclude homosexual desires, he does not acknowledge that this nullifies his point about David’s “heterosexual vigor.” Schroer and Staubli similarly respond to Hentschel’s reading of 2 Sam. 1:26 by criticizing his lack of awareness that a man with predominantly “homophile tendencies” could nevertheless have several wives for reasons of political expediency, production of progeny, and the replication of social norms (“Saul, David and Jonathan,” 23; cf. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 150; Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 34; Stone, “1 and 2 Samuel,” 207). 158. L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament: Study Edition (vol. 1; trans. M. E. J. Richardson; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001), 796b (hw( nifal). 159. Cf. Gagnon, Bible and Homosexual Practice, 150–51, 152–53. 160. Nissinen, Homoeroticism, 56: “The text thus leaves the possible homoerotic associations to the reader’s imagination…those who added to the story have augmented its intensity by making the men meet one another again and again, restating their love, and reinstating their friendship with a pledge. This was hardly considered inappropriate, and it raises the question whether a modern reader is more prone than an ancient to find a homoerotic aspect to the story… Modern readers probably see homoeroticism in the story of David and Jonathan more easily than did the ancients. In the contemporary Western world, men’s mutual expressions of feelings are more restricted than they were in the biblical world. Men’s homosociability apparently was not part of the sexual taboo in the biblical world any more than it is in today’s Christian and Islamic cultures around the Mediterranean. Physical expressions of feelings belong to homosocial contacts and seem strange to Western people, who understand the eroticism of gestures in their own way, categorizing people accordingly as homosexuals or heterosexuals.” 161. Cf. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 173; Stone, “1 and 2 Samuel,” 207–208. 162. Gagnon, Bible and Homosexual Practice, 154–55. In responding in this derogatory way to Nissinen’s cautious interpretation, Gagnon indulges his unfortunate penchant for reductio ad absurdum: “Is attributing a homoerotic dimension to the story eisegesis or not? Nissinen cannot have it both ways. Simply because the text

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does not explicitly deny that David and Jonathan are having sex is no license to imagine that they are [this is not Nissinen’s claim]. Nissinen’s reasoning is the equivalent of saying that when the Gospels depict Jesus as saying ‘Let the little children come to me’ they are leaving possible pedophilic connotations to the reader’s imagination” (Bible and Homosexual Practice, 154–55 n. 251). Gagnon’s shallow, reductive reasoning fails to reckon with the question of whether the nature of the David and Jonathan narrative as a text is analogous with the nature of the Synoptic Gospels as texts. That is, do they construct their respective model readers in comparable ways? Texts do not all communicate in the same way. The dualism between exegesis and eisegesis is also a most unsubtle way of dealing with the complexity of the relationship between texts and readers. But Gagnon seems to need to state his opposition to Nissinen in such strong, and in point of fact misrepresentative, terms in order rhetorically to reinforce the borders of his interpretive community. 163. Cf. Wold, Out of Order, 9. 164. George Aichele, Sign, Text, Scripture: Semiotics and the Bible (Interventions, 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 40, and cf. the quote from Eco at the beginning of this chapter. 165. This reflects what Martin calls the “anxiety of uncertainty,” that drives interpreters into the “more ‘secure’ arms” of textual foundationalism (Sex and the Single Savior, 14–16, 31, 32). 166. Contrast the work of J. Michael Clark, who reacts to the biblical texts Kader would subsequently dub “passages used to clobber gay people” (Kader, Openly Gay, Openly Christian, ch. 2) with “scripture-phobia,” and reformulates the debate in terms of authority, commenting that although “we do find certain possibly homoerotic images in the Bible, such as the same-sex love of David and Jonathan,” and although these images may be comforting at some level, “they nevertheless seem incidental, artifactual, and merely conveniently comforting asides for gay men and/ or lesbians, but asides with no particular message or authority” (Defying the Darkness, 12). 167. Dobbs-Allsopp, “Rethinking Historical Criticism,” 246. 168. Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 8–10, 163–65. 169. Into this category fall critiques of the foundationalism of historical criticism. See Dobbs-Allsopp, “Rethinking Historical Criticism,” which makes the case for an anti-foundationalist historical criticism in the new historicist mould, as well as Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 1–35, 94–98, 100–102. Another helpful attempt to reconsider how historical criticism – or, rather, biblical criticism – should operate is John Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007). 170. Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 16, 24–25. Dobbs-Allsopp sees an “ethical respect for the other” as an aspect of a historicist approach to biblical literature that makes it persuasive (“Rethinking Historical Criticism,” 265, 268). There is a strong ethical dimension to Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s critique of historical criticism in Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999). 171. Dobbs-Allsopp, “Rethinking Historical Criticism,” 254–59. 172. See Chapter 1 above, n. 8. Although Jobling’s work was published in 1998, Gagnon does not discuss it.



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173. Jobling, 1 Samuel, 16. Cf. Dobbs-Allsopp, “Rethinking Historical Criticism,” 241–45; Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 162–63. 174. See n. 10 above. 175. Jobling, 1 Samuel, 130. 176. See p. 15 above. 177. See n. 165 above. 178. Jobling, 1 Samuel, 161. Cf. Helminiak, What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality, 103–104; Kader, Openly Gay, Openly Christian, 114; Hubble, Lord Given Lovers, 41–48; Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 184–85; Brentlinger, Gay Christian 101, 156, 177–80; Nardelli, Homosexuality, 27 n. 36. 179. Cf. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 176. 180. Jobling, 1 Samuel, 164. 181. Boer, “Introduction,” in Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, 1–12 (9). 182. Boer, “Queer Heroes,” 15. 183. Boer, “Queer Heroes,” 16–22. 184. Boer, “Queer Heroes,” 31; cf. Peleg, “Love,” 181 n. 25. 185. See esp. 1 Sam. 17:1-54; 18:5-7, 13-16, 27, 30; 19:8. 186. He is the grammatical object of the verb bh), being “loved” by Saul (1 Sam. 16:21), Michal (18:20, 28), Jonathan (18:1, 3), and all Israel and Judah (18:16). Cf. Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise, 150. 187. 1 Sam. 17:1-58; 18:5-7. 188. Boer, “Queer Heroes,” 30. The suggestion that +#p might have these connotations is too much for Peleg, though on the basis of Song 5:3 he does not altogether exclude an erotic nuance (“Love,” 181 n. 24). 189. Boer, “Introduction,” 1. 190. For this term, see e.g. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation (New York: Continuum, 2000), 3 and n. 6. 191. See Jennings, The Man Jesus Loved, 1–11; idem, Jacob’s Wound, ix–xv. 192. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, vii. 193. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 3–12. I discuss Greek intertexts more fully in Chapter 3 below. Jennings’s reading of the David and Jonathan narrative has influenced Countryman’s in the second edition of Dirt, Greed, and Sex, 41, 229 n. 58. 194. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 177. 195. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 13–36. 196. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 25. 197. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 17, 27. 198. Several texts in the Tanakh refer to “uncovering” (hlg) someone’s nakedness, usually, though not exclusively (cf. perhaps Gen. 9:21; Exod. 20:26), in literal or metaphorical reference to sex: Lev. 18:6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19; 20:11, 17, 18, 20, 21; Ezek. 16:36; 22:10; 23:18. Occasionally it refers metaphorically to rape as divine punishment: Isa. 47:3; Ezek. 16:37; 23:10, 29. 199. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 29, 32. 200. Jenings, Jacob’s Wound, 30; Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 188 n. 33. 201. I discuss the openness of 2 Sam. 1:26 more fully in Chapter 3 below, pp. 216–25. 202. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 37–66. An earlier version of this essay, “Yhwh as Erastes,” appeared in Stone, Queer Commentary, 36–74. 203. For “pornography” as a category in relation to which might be read the texts in

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the Latter Prophets that use the metaphor of heterosexual marriage for the relationship between Yhwh and Israel, see esp. T. Drorah Setel, “Prophets and Pornography: Female Sexual Imagery in Hosea,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (ed. L. M. Russell; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 86–95; Athalya Brenner, “Pornoprophetics Revisited: Some Additional Reflections,” JSOT 70 (1996), 63–86. 204. Cf. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 37. 205. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 47. See Jennings’s discussion of the Ark and the Ephod (pp. 45–50). 206. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 38–45. 207. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 53–55. 208. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 67–70. 209. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 84. 210. There are thus strong echoes of the sort of approach taken by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2nd edn, 1999), though Peleg does not make the connection explicit. 211. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 173. 212. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 174. Peleg cites Judg. 4:9, but Judg. 9:54 would be an even more striking example. Alongside Judg. 4:9, of course, should be placed Jud. 16:5-6, the book of Judith being shaped on many levels by the influence of the book of Judges. See e.g. Sidnie Anne White, “In the Steps of Jael and Deborah: Judith as Heroine,” in “No One Spoke Ill of Her”: Essays on Judith (ed. J. C. VanderKam; SBLEJL, 2; Atlanta, GA: Scholars, 1992), 5–16. 213. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 172. 214. For David’s youthful delicacy and beauty, see 1 Sam. 16:12; 17:42, but note that Peleg assumes, without detailed justification, not only that there was a wide gap in ages between Jonathan and David, but that David came from a socially inferior family. The problems with these unquestioned assumptions have been explored by Jonathan Rowe in “Is Jonathan Really David’s ‘Wife’?: A Response to Yaron Peleg,” JSOT 34 (2009), 186–87, 192–93. 215. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 179–80. In particular, the use in Hebrew of xql to refer to taking a woman as wife or concubine (e.g. Gen. 28:6, 9; Deut. 22:13, 14; Judg. 14:2, 3; 19:1; 1 Sam. 25:39, 40), the reference to the house of a father (b) tyb), which is the phrase used when a woman is returned on account of her unsuitability to her husband or on her husband’s death (Gen. 38:11; Lev. 22:13; Judg. 19:2), and the use of tyrb for the union of a man and a woman (Ezek. 16:8; Mal. 2:14; perhaps Prov. 2:17, cf. BHS n.), suggest that this collocation in 1 Sam. 18:2-3 is not coincidental. I explore these terms in detail in Chapter 3 below. Against Peleg’s construal, see Rowe, “Is Jonathan Really David’s ‘Wife’?,” 187–89. 216. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 182. While Rowe is right to doubt that +#ptyw should be construed sexually here (“Is Jonathan Really David’s ‘Wife’?,” 189; cf. my criticism of Boer above), he clearly misreads Peleg as suggesting that Jonathan is portrayed as effeminate throughout 1 Samuel. Rowe remarks: “Peleg summarizes his interpretation by contrasting David and Saul as ‘real men’ with the latter’s effeminate son, who hides away in the palace. This proposal faces insuperable difficulties given the portrayal of Jonathan in the ‘heroic’ narrative in 1 Samuel 14.” Peleg’s point, however, is that Jonathan is increasingly portrayed as effeminate following his attachment



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to David, while David is increasingly portrayed as masculine. He nowhere hints that Jonathan is always portrayed as effeminate, and Rowe’s criticism suggests a rather wooden approach to reading both the biblical text and Peleg’s rather subtle argument. 217. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 182–83. 218. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 186. 219. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 186. I might supplement Peleg’s point here by noting that Saul wants Jonathan his son and all his servants to kill David, all of whom have already been said to “love” (1 Sam. 18:1, 3, 22) the one who had now become Saul’s by), “enemy” (1 Sam. 18:29). 220. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 187. 221. Thus Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 188 (italics mine): “Since the frequent reference, manipulation, and substitution of gender roles in this story draws attention to their very existence and carries a clear sexual meaning, it is not surprising that David and Jonathan were and still are read as lovers. But it seems to me, that for the writer or editor of the story it was not the possibility of sex between the two men that mattered as much as their confusion of gender roles.” 222. Peleg and Rowe have this in common. See Rowe, “Is Jonathan Really David’s ‘Wife’?,” 184 n. 3. 223. Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 130. 224. See Chapter 1 above, n. 6. 225. Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 144–45. 226. Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 145. 227. Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 146. 228. Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 148. 229. Some corrective points could be made. Jonathan does not declare that he loves David as he loves himself (1 Sam. 18:3; cf. 20:17; pace Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 146), it is the narrator who does this, though David does later show himself aware of Jonathan’s feelings (and Saul’s knowledge of them). This is a question of external focalization, which I touch on more fully in connection with 1 Sam. 20:30 (see Chapter 3 below, pp. 209–10). It is also not clear that 1 Sam. 23:18 is the only time a mutual covenant is made between the two men, as this could well be the import of 1 Sam. 18:3 also.

Chapter 3 How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? This letter, written by a friend of ours, Contains his death, yet bids them save his life: (Reads) Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est, Fear not to kill the king, ’tis good he die. But read it thus, and that’s another sense: Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est, Kill not the king, ’tis good to fear the worst. Unpointed as it is, thus shall it go.1 To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits; for habit is relative to a stereotyped world; meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.2

1. Introduction The previous chapter pointed to two interrelated problems in the interpretation of the David and Jonathan narrative. The first is that the questions scholars ask, the way they go about answering them, and the answers they get are influenced and shaped by deeply rooted ideological agendas, even where these are not explicitly acknowledged. But this only goes part of the way towards explaining why competing interpretations of the narrative exist. The second problem is the predominance of binary thinking on the part of interpreters. For many scholars, represented in the last chapter by Schroer and Staubli, Zehnder, Gagnon, and to an extent Peleg, the David and Jonathan narrative is more likely than not to mean this rather than that; the relationship between David and Jonathan is represented as this sort of relationship, and can under no circumstances be regarded as that sort of relationship instead. I now want to expand on this second problem and explore the possibility that the meaning of the David and Jonathan narrative cannot be pinned down definitively because at certain points it is a more “open” than “closed” work, written in such a way as to require the active cooperation of the



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reader in the construction of meaning. Even if it was not originally conceived as such a work, the nature of the text and the consequences of the way it has been transmitted give it the appearance of openness. In other words, its openness is a property of both the text and its reception.3 It is important to begin from a working understanding of the relationship between narrative texts and their readers. This is a vast area, and there is clearly a danger of getting buried under the extensive modern debates on this issue within literary theory in general and biblical criticism in particular, so for the sake of brevity and clarity limits must be set.4 My concern is with the openness of literary works and the limits of interpretation. I approach the David and Jonathan narrative steering a course between the Scylla of a foundationalism that reifies the meaning of texts by appeal to either the intention of its author or to a supposed lack of textual ambiguity on the one hand, and the Charybdis of total interpretive freedom on the other. Although the nature of human language and the process of communication entail that literary works, even those that may be regarded as more or less “closed,” are potentially open to an unlimited range of construals – by virtue of unlimited semiosis – it does not necessarily follow that such works can be taken to mean anything at all. As Umberto Eco has commented, “…the notion of unlimited semiosis does not lead to the conclusion that interpretation has no criteria.”5 These criteria are bound to texts rather than to authors who, in the case of aesthetic works in general and above all in the case of heavily redacted biblical narratives, are extraordinarily difficult to pin down.6 The David and Jonathan narrative does not, of course, come to us in an unmediated form. It has been the subject of layers of redaction, and has been transmitted alongside other works in the canons of Jewish and Christian scripture. This process of transmission has not been simply one of preserving texts either, because in both Judaism and Christianity there have been conventions of reading whose purpose has been to set limits to the meaning of sacred texts. The effect of all this has been to impose a certain appearance of closure on the meaning of the text. It is not the layers of redaction and canonization themselves that close its meaning down, but the work of interpreters whose approach to the text has, in various ways, been shaped and determined by these processes. The rise of modern biblical criticism, by contrast, began a process of freeing the interpreter from the control of the canon, and from the control of earlier norms for scriptural interpretation, such as, in the Christian tradition, the four senses of scripture. This process is still ongoing. One effect of this process of de-canonization is that the David and Jonathan narrative – and in fact all biblical texts – can now be read alongside,

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and interpreted in light of, a very different range of intertexts. Some of these have been transmitted from the ancient world alongside the canon – such as the works of Homer, Cicero, and Ovid – works that have themselves undergone a continuous process of reading, re-interpretation, and closure. In addition, the vast discoveries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Middle East have widened the interpretive possibilities yet further. Both Homer and 1 and 2 Samuel, for example, can now be interpreted in light of the re-discovered Epic of Gilgamesh,7 and vice versa, and a number of treaties or loyalty oaths – especially in Hittite, Aramaic, and Akkadian – offer further material for comparison with the biblical text. Yet despite all this the Tanakh is still frequently read as if it provides relatively unproblematic access to the worlds of ancient Israel and Judah, and a relatively unproblematic resource for philological historical-critical research in general. The canon, a confessional and theological construct, continues to haunt critical research that claims not to be bound by the ideological presuppositions on which the canon is founded and which keep it in existence. In explicit tension with this, my reading of the David and Jonathan narrative below shows first of all how the legacy of the canon has restricted the meaning of the narrative, often to the point of distortion, and second, it shows what the narrative nevertheless allows us to affirm. I am concerned, in the very broadest sense, with semiotics, with “the study of the possibility and conditions of meaningful communication,”8 though I am not going to offer a semiotic analysis of the David and Jonathan narrative: this could quickly become distressingly technical, alienating the reader through a fog of impenetrable technicalities, and doubtless an array of intimidating diagrams, all of which would risk obscuring rather than clarifying the matter at hand. There is a place for such research, but there are simpler and more approachable ways of unravelling “the possibility and conditions of meaningful communication” with respect to the David and Jonathan narrative. While semiotics has evolved as an increasingly complex and technical sub-field within the philosophy of language and contemporary literary theory, it has only relatively recently taken its place in the academic study of the Bible, and many scholars continue to take no account of it at all. Yet a concern with signs has always been implicit in the study of biblical texts: the De Doctrina Christiana of Augustine is foundational for understanding the development of the science of signs, and equally foundational in the history of biblical exegesis, for at this point the two could not be considered separately. The senses of scripture, to the development of which Origen in particular contributed so richly, must also be regarded



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as an effort to treat biblical interpretation in relation to an entire theory of signs. By this means scripture could be both theorized as a witness to the fullness of Christian truth, and prevented from spawning an uncontrollable variety of interpretations. As Eco has remarked, [B]oth Testaments spoke at the same time of their sender, their content, and their referent, and their meaning was a nebula of all possible archetypes. The scriptures were in the position of saying everything. Everything, though, was rather too much for interpreters interested in Truth. The symbolical nature of sacred scripture had therefore to be tamed. Potentially, the scriptures had every possible meaning; so the reading of them had to be governed by a code.9

The irony, of course, was that this code – which in its classical form divided scripture into “literal,” “allegorical,” “moral,” and “anagogical” senses – bought the control of scriptural meaning at the price of an extraordinary network of elaborations that took the interpreter a very long way indeed from what the “literal” sense – the sensus litteralis – would seem to permit.10 That is, the attempt to control scriptural meaning by setting limits to the canon and placing the canonical texts within the framework of a specific semiotic code had the opposite effect. The significance of this effect was not lost on the Protestant reformers, for whom the richness of the senses of scripture presented a threat to the integrity of scriptural meaning.11 Yet the Protestant notion that scripture is its own interpreter could in no way solve the problem, replacing one semiotic code whose combinations were largely at the mercy of individual interpreters and the interpretive traditions and communities in which they participated (i.e. the senses of scripture) with another (i.e. the Protestant canon). This would subsequently, through the rise of modern biblical criticism during and in the wake of the Enlightenment,12 be replaced by yet another mechanism of control whose boundaries were much less predictable, namely the reconstructed historical contexts and supposed authorial intentions behind the works the Bible contains. Despite the fact that biblical exegesis has always been a matter of grasping the nature of, and relationships among signs, it was only in the wake of the proliferation of interpretive methods and approaches within the Biblical Studies guild in the late twentieth century that modern and postmodern approaches to semiotics came to be applied intensively to biblical texts. Semiotics is not, however, a method. It is certainly to the sphere of methodology that semiotics belongs, in the sense that semiotics is concerned with the relations between signs rather than with the relations between signs and the real world, whatever that might be.13 Because semiotics is concerned with the ways in which texts participate

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in networks of signs that make possible all communication between texts and readers, its concerns necessarily underlie all approaches to biblical interpretation. Inasmuch as my concern is with the relation between texts and readers, I have no concern – or, perhaps better, I see no unproblematic access to – the “author(s)” that might have sat, stylus in hand, before the works under discussion. That such flesh-and-blood figures existed is obvious, it is just that we cannot say very much – and nothing at all for certain – about what they thought and meant. Indeed, focusing on authorial intention yields a curious paradox. While focusing on authorial intention appears superficially to be on what lies “behind” the text and makes that text possible in a particular time and place, in fact the focus can only be in front of the text, in the transaction between text and reader. As George Aichele explains [Semiotics is] deeply text-oriented – that is, requiring precise description and investigation of the physical text itself – as well as readeroriented – that is, focusing on how readers understand texts in relation to the ways that they read them. Meaning is neither “in” the text, implanted there by an author, nor is it “behind” the text in an originating socio-cultural setting. The author and the socio-cultural settings are heuristic fictions created by the reader as hypotheses or further stories in order to account for the text’s existence and its meaning – that is, to interpret the text. In this and similar ways the reader “produces” the text as a meaningful sign.14

To be sure, literary works would not be written, re-written, edited, transmitted, read, re-read, and canonized but for flesh-and-blood human beings, who leave their traces on the expression plane of the text, or even on the physical artifact in the case of ancient tablets and manuscripts. In this sense the “author” can hardly be no more than a “heuristic fiction.” Yet this author does not have “authority,” auctoritas, over the reader’s production of meaning from their work. Flesh-and-blood “authors” exist in the putative real world without which literary works could not exist, but to which those same works do not give us uninhibited access. Such works are networks of signs that now depend to a greater extent on readers than authors for their construal. 2. Texts and readers Ellen van Wolde, who offers a semiotic analysis of Genesis 2–3 based on a combination of the theoretical works of Greimas and Peirce, summarizes the interaction between texts and readers helpfully:



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 127 …biblical texts are to be studied as texts whose meaning is determined by the mutual narrative, semantic and discursive relations between the elements in the text as well as by arrangement, supplementation and interpretation by the reader. On the one hand, the reader is not free when he gives meaning to a text, because he is oriented and directed by the narrative, semantic and discursive strategies of the text.15 The restrictions imposed by the text are therefore the basic conditions for his interpretation. On the other hand, the reader has a certain latitude, because he himself uses the possibilities of the text, fills in the gaps and supplements the openness of the text.16

Van Wolde takes seriously the material given of the biblical narratives. In principle, the rules and conventions of the linguistic system – the langue, in Ferdinand de Saussure’s terminology17 – of Hebrew at the time and in the place a given biblical narrative was written determined the range of options available to the now inaccessible author in constructing the narrative. In turn, this author has, by the creative arrangement of signs drawn from pre-existing cultural codes and linguistic conventions,18 crafted a narrative, an extremely complex network of signs that is arbitrary,19 inasmuch as it could have been constructed differently, yet not random, inasmuch as it cannot be construed in any way its reader likes. Texts contain gaps, some of which may have been foreseen by the author, others not. Such gaps exist where, for example, a text assumes knowledge on the part of the reader, knowledge that the reader then has to supply. What also may or may not be foreseen is the extent to which the textual signs, the words, phrases, and narrative plot lines of which the text is composed, may appear ambiguous to a contemporary or subsequent reader. In order satisfactorily to interpret a text, a reader requires a particular range of competencies. Readers must, for example, have a high degree of competence in the use of the linguistic system on which the text in question is dependent, and in which it participates.20 This allows readers to produce meaning from a narrative – or any text, for that matter – that they have previously never seen.21 Part of the competence of readers in the use of the linguistic system is knowledge of an array of other texts that help to determine one another’s meaning. Readers establish networks of meaning by assigning meaning to the text in question by comparison with other, similar texts.22 This does not even have to be, indeed largely is not, a conscious process, because all texts always already carry the trace of an infinite network of other texts, something over which authors and readers can never have more than limited control. In Julia Kristeva’s words, echoing the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation

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of another.”23 Texts, in this sense, belong to a vast labyrinth, an “intertextual encyclopedia,” whose extent is global and can never be mapped in its entirety.24 Part of the openness of any text, then, is that an author cannot anticipate which (inter)texts a given reader will – consciously or unconsciously – draw on, nor on what basis or with what degree of conscious awareness a reader will determine that text A is similar to, or distinct from, text B. Not only does every text, whether more or less open or more or less closed, participate in an infinite intertextual encyclopedia, but each reading subject approaching a text is constituted by an infinite plurality of texts and codes that not only cannot be controlled, but cannot ultimately be traced.25 Later in the interpretive process the reader draws on relations outside the text – such as its historical context, or extratextual evidence about the writer of the text or its earliest reader(s) – to establish its meaning.26 The intertextual and extratextual elements on which a reader draws in determining the meaning of a text helps, in the language of Peircean semiotics, to create “interpretants,”27 mental associations that enable a reader to move from the language of a text to its meaning. This process is a largely unconscious one for readers who have been naturalized in the linguistic system, and literary conventions, in which the text participates, but a much more intentional and difficult one for interpreters separated temporally, geographically, and intellectually from that system and those conventions. Where van Wolde’s approach needs supplementation is with respect to the relationship between the openness of a text and the reader’s cooperation. Literary works are not equally “open” or “closed,” and different kinds of work, both literary and non-literary, require different kinds of involvement on the part of the reader. Not all texts invite the reader’s engagement in the precise way van Wolde suggests Genesis 2–3 does. The next step, then, is to clarify what an open work is, and how open and closed works – and works whose relative openness and closedness falls somewhere in between – invite different kinds of engagement on the part of their implied readers. 2.1. The open work What kinds of relationship exist between texts and readers? To a significant extent these relationships have to do with the ways in which certain kinds of work imply certain kinds of reader. In some of his theoretical works, Umberto Eco has been concerned with the nature of “open” and “closed” works, and with the cooperation of the interpreter in the production of meaning. It is worth beginning with his early essay on the



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poetics of the open work,28 because even though Eco’s interest was in the openness of modernist works of literary, visual, and musical art, it nevertheless has something of importance to contribute to the study of biblical texts that have been transmitted in manuscripts, and within a canon, whose precise contents and structures are more or less fluid. Eco distinguishes between different uses of “open” with respect to a work of art. In “The Poetics of the Open Work” he is initially concerned with modernist musical works that have been deliberately left uncompleted by their composers, each new performer being given the task of arranging a predetermined set of components to create a discrete work whose “completed” form was not finally determined, and in the case of what Eco calls “works in movement”29 perhaps not even envisaged, by the composer. In a sense, Eco is distinguishing between the degrees of openness that have been intentionally incorporated into the process of composition, deliberately inviting the performer to engage in the process of composition itself, and the element of openness that inheres in every work of art. He makes a threefold distinction: We have, therefore, seen that (1) “open” works, insofar as they are in movement, are characterized by the invitation to make the work together with the author and that (2) on a wider level (as a subgenus in the species “work in movement”) there exist works which, though organically completed, are “open” to a continuous generation of internal relations which the addressee must uncover and select in his act of perceiving the totality of incoming stimuli. (3) Every work of art, even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, or perspective, or personal performance.30

There is a certain, albeit imprecise,31 affinity between the second, and arguably the first of these possibilities and the arrangement of preexisting works into the various biblical canons, or the juxtaposition of different Psalms in the Psalter – as the differences between the mt and 11QPsalmsa, for example, make clear – or the collection and arrangement of pre-existing, oral or written pericopae into continuous narratives within biblical works such as 1 and 2 Samuel. The judgment that a work is open can, in principle, be made of any work, regardless of the period in which it was written. What is decisive is the period from which the aesthetic judgment is made. For Eco, the openness of modernist works reflect a perspective in which time-honored certainties have given way to acknowledgement of the complexity and uncertainty of the world, what he calls, “our culture’s attraction for the ‘indeterminate.’”32 This made it possible for modernist artists to incorporate increasing degrees

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of openness into the very composition of their works.33 The question this raises for the modern biblical scholar, then, is whether the judgment that a particular work within the Tanakh is “open” to a greater degree than other biblical works can be made now because we have been incubated in an intellectual environment shaped by the possibility of openness, where ambiguity is a characteristic of both works of art themselves and the world they reflect. The third of Eco’s possibilities is perhaps the most relevant to coherent, completed works within the Tanakh. He offers the following definition of such a work: Aesthetic theorists…often have recourse to the notions of “completeness” and “openness” in connection with a given work of art. These two expressions refer to a standard situation of which we are all aware in our reception of a work of art: we see it as the end product of an author’s effort to arrange a sequence of communicative effects in such a way that each individual addressee can refashion the original composition devised by the author. The addressee is bound to enter into an interplay of stimulus and response which depends on his unique capacity for sensitive reception of the piece. In this sense the author presents a finished product with the intention that this particular composition should be appreciated and received in the same form as he devised it. As he reacts to the play of stimuli and his own response to their patterning, the individual addressee is bound to supply his own existential credentials, the sense conditioning which is peculiarly his own, a defined culture, a set of tastes, personal inclinations, and prejudices. Thus, his comprehension of the original artifact is always modified by his particular and individual perspective… A work of art, therefore, is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole, while at the same time constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity. Hence, every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself.34

It is the “open work” in this sense that Eco picks up in his later, more thickly semiotic studies, but already in this early work Eco notes the paradox between the finitude of a work of art and its openness to an infinite range of possible interpretations. With reference to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, for example, Eco remarks that …the book is molded into a curve that bends back on itself, like the Einsteinian universe. The opening word of the first page is the same as the closing word of the last page of the novel. Thus, the work is finite in one sense, but in another sense it is unlimited. Each occurrence, each word stands in a series of possible relations with all the others in the text. According to the



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 131 semantic choice which we make in the case of one unit, so goes the way we interpret all the other units in the text. This does not mean that the book lacks specific sense. If Joyce does introduce some keys into the text, it is precisely because he wants the work to be read in a certain sense. But this particular “sense” has all the richness of the cosmos itself. Ambitiously, the author intends his book to imply the totality of space and time, of all spaces and all times that are possible.35

While the author – in this case Joyce – has provided the field of relations within which each interpretive possibility is to be actualized, she or he cannot, ultimately, anticipate what the resulting interpretations will actually look like. Thus the work is open – apparently in Eco’s sense (2) above – but cannot be reduced to one construal that trumps all others. There are certain problems here with the term “author.” While there is a sense in which a given work – such as Finnegans Wake, say – could not exist without a real world author, it is the work, not the author, that provides the field of relations from which readers produce their interpretations. Eco clarifies this methodological distinction slightly in his remarks on a verse from Racine’s Phaedra in the second essay of The Open Work:36 “The suggestions are intentional, provoked, and explicitly reiterated, but always within the limits fixed by the author, or, better, by the aesthetic machine that he has set in motion.”37 Openness then becomes a characteristic of the interaction between a work, as aesthetic machine, and a reader. Regardless of how referential or how univocal a particular message might have been intended to be by its author, in order to produce meaning from it the addressee of the message draws on an indefinite stock of references, largely culled from the memory of previous experiences – or readings – that make it possible to determine what that message means. Thus even ostensibly univocal messages, such as, “flight NZ7 will depart from gate G93 at 9.00pm” (a declarative sentence mediating a referential message), or “you shall not lie with a male as with a woman” (a conative, or imperative sentence),38 can potentially draw on a very wide field of suggestions supplied by the addressee – especially if expressed orally with a particular emotive edge39 – just as can arguably more plurivocal aesthetic messages, such as, “Your love was more wonderful to me than the love of women.”40 It is the use, rather than the structure of the message that determines the range of meanings that is produced, and this lies very much in the interaction between the message, or work, and its addressee, or reader.41 At this point we can begin to see how Eco’s engagement with the open work might further deepen the ideological critique offered in the previous chapter. In addition to submitting David and Jonathan to particular ideological agendas, whether consciously or not, scholars and

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other interested parties who argue that the David and Jonathan narrative must mean this rather than that are engaged in a contest over the ownership of the field of suggestions each reader brings to the interpretation of the work. They are intent on submitting the David and Jonathan narrative to a single code in order to prevent the play of possibilities the work might otherwise permit. Scholars who do not seek to limit the interpretation of the David and Jonathan narrative in this way – in the last chapter Jobling, Boer, and Heacock would fall more or less into this category – are still to some extent implicated in this by taking a position in relation to this field of suggestions. Submitting the David and Jonathan narrative to a single code also reflects a dimension of the interpreter’s desire, namely the desire for completion and closure. Yet the fact that interpreters differ so radically suggests not only that their differences have ideological roots, but also that the work that has provoked these differences is so structured as to frustrate the interpreter’s desire for completion.42 When we are dealing with the question of the originality of a work, there is a connection between its degree of openness and its relationship to the language system on which it depends. A linguistic system (langue) is an ordered system in which there are very clear chains of probability that make particular messages possible and comprehensible rather than random and chaotic.43 The originality of a work is marked by a rupture of this system of probability, which increases the openness of the work to a greater number of possible interpretations.44 It is here, above all, that statistical approaches such as that employed by Zehnder necessarily fail: they fail because, first, they assume the Tanakh and related texts provide us with an adequately representative body of linguistic and literary data that can be ordered statistically in a way that enables the texts of the Tanakh to be accurately disambiguated; and second, because they do not take enough account of the possibility that a particular narrative might be an aesthetically original work that creates a rupture of some sort in the linguistic system in which it participates. 2.2. The role of the reader The interpretation of a message is not simply a matter of a reader decoding the message based on a code shared with its sender, because in practice, apart from exceptionally unambiguous messages, a single shared code does not exist. In the case of written texts, no matter how much philological effort goes into the reconstruction of the code that made the material form of the text possible in the first place, the author and reader can never share precisely the same code. As Eco remarks



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 133 The existence of various codes and subcodes, the variety of sociocultural circumstances in which a message is emitted (where the codes of the addressee can be different from those of the sender), and the rate of initiative displayed by the addressee in making presuppositions and abductions – all result in making a message (insofar as it is received and transformed into the content of an expression) an empty form to which various possible senses can be attributed. Moreover, what one calls “message” is usually a text, that is, a network of different messages depending on different codes and working at different levels of signification.45

Texts are constructed so as to produce certain kinds of model reader. This is evident in the linguistic code, literary style, and what Eco calls “specific specialization indices” in the text, elements of the text, that is, that necessitate a very specific kind of competence on the part of the reader in order to be understood. At the same time, texts contribute to building up the intertextual competence of their readers, which in turn they bring to further texts that assume a certain intertextual competence, and so on ad infinitum. The distinction between “closed” and “open” texts is very much a matter of the kind of reader that is anticipated by the text. A closed text is a text where the possibility is not anticipated that its empirical readers might interpret it based on different codes to those according to which it was created: [Closed texts] have in mind an average addressee referred to a given social context. Nobody can say what happens when the actual reader is different from the “average” one. Those texts that obsessively aim at arousing a precise response on the part of more or less precise empirical readers…are in fact open to any possible “aberrant” decoding.46

In the Hebrew Bible, the sexual codes in Leviticus 18:6-23 and 20:9-21 would be examples of closed texts. This is clear not least from the evidence of redaction in Leviticus, since the introductory and concluding passages of Leviticus 18 (vv. 1-5, 24-30) impose a particular construal on the laws in between that they may not originally have had: they have become, in the present form of the text, evidence for the kind of abominations that caused the Land of Canaan to vomit out its pre-Israelite inhabitants, and which Israel must at all costs avoid. The earlier layer of the text is closed, but subject to a decoding that could well be – but may not be – aberrant in the later layer. An even clearer example, given its extraordinary history of reception, would be the historical apocalypse at the end of the Hebrew-Aramaic book of Daniel (Daniel 7–12). The apocalypse offers an elaborately encoded series of vaticinia ex eventu that claim to predict, in code, the

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history of Palestine in the Hellenistic period. It was probably – though of course not certainly – meant to give encouragement to Jews persecuted by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and could only do this if the text could be accurately and decisively decoded. If this is the case, then the reception history of this text is a vast catalogue of aberrant decodings. Modern examples of closed texts would include the Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins novels in the Left Behind series47 – themselves partially based on an aberrant decoding of Daniel! – and, to a significant extent, William Paul Young’s novel The Shack.48 Most detective novels would tend to fall into the same category. There is an inescapable paradox: closed texts by their very nature are open to a potentially infinite range of aberrant decodings. The inverse of this paradox obtains in the case of open texts, whose model reader is strictly delimited by the lexical and syntactical organization of the text,49 even though the organization of the text may demand intense cooperation and exceptional intertextual competence on the part of the reader. This would clearly be the case with the book of Job, which greatly taxes the competence of its readers, as Jerome acknowledged in the preface to his Latin translation. Yet even here it is possible to read Job naively as well as critically, to be, to use Eco’s terms again, a merely semantic (naive) reader rather than a semiotic (critical) one.50 In the case of both closed and open texts, the model reader is not an actual reader but a reader implied by the text who is activated by certain strategies within the text and expected to cooperate in its actualization.51 3. What makes 1 and 2 Samuel “open” and how has it been “closed”? What is necessary, then, is to examine the David and Jonathan narrative with a view to the degree to which it is more or less open, or more or less closed. Before examining the text in detail, a number of points can be made. First, the text is composite, which reflects the fact that the story of David and Jonathan could be, and was, construed differently at different points in time. Second, the text now exists in written form, which on one level closes down the indefinite range of possibilities for retelling and reconfiguration of a fluid oral text, but on the other makes one particular fixing of the text available to interact with an indefinite range of further intertexts and readers. Third, the canon has, paradoxically, both an opening and a closing effect. It limits meaning by offering only a highly selective collection of texts, representing a highly selective set of linguistic and literary fragments, with which to read the David and Jonathan narrative. The structure and content of the canon are such that texts such as



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Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 can be used to close down the meaning of the text. Yet it also opens up meaning by placing the narrative alongside texts with which it otherwise might have had nothing to do, such as Leviticus and the Song of Songs. 3.1. A composite text It seems clear on both internal and external grounds that not only 1 and 2 Samuel as a whole but the parts of this work concerned with David and Jonathan are composite. On external, text-critical grounds, comparison between the Masoretic Text and the oldest codices of the Septuagint, for example, corroborated by Pseudo-Philo and Josephus,52 suggests that there existed a Hebrew version that lacked 1 Samuel 17:55–18:5 and the first phrase of 18:6, resuming at hn)ctw (kai\ e0ch=lqon), “and they went out.” These pluses in the Masoretic Text are rendered into Greek in the later Origenic and Lucianic recensions under the influence of protoMasoretic manuscripts later than the putative Vorlage of the earliest Greek version. Furthermore, a case can be made on internal, tradition-historical grounds that 2 Samuel 1:26 is a secondary insertion into David’s dirge.53 This is not the place for a wholesale reconsideration of the precise nature, provenance, and limits of the redactional layers in 1 and 2 Samuel, or even just 1 Samuel 16–20.54 Rather, what is important here is the fact of the composite nature of the text, and, depending on what decisions we make about the redaction history of the text, what this tells us about how the text works. For example, if 2 Samuel 1:26 is secondary – which, admittedly, is not corroborated by the manuscript tradition – it means that the tradition-historically earlier references to the love of Jonathan and David (1 Sam. 20:17, but perhaps not 18:1, 3) could be interpreted as the sort of love that could be compared and contrasted with the “love of women.” Similarly, if 1 Samuel 18:1-4 is later in tradition-historical terms than 19:1-7; 20:1–21:1, it means that this earlier layer is open to being read in light of a different, later set of codes. The scribes and redactors of the various literary strata, of course, would have had different ranges of intertextual competence that would have affected how they understood, and sought to reconfigure, the traditions before them. The effect of this on the final form of the Masoretic Text – inasmuch as we can meaningfully speak of a “final form” at all – is that the narrative sequence in 1 and 2 Samuel has an internal chronology that is a peculiar echo of several layers of tradition-historical development: 2 Samuel 1:26 may be sequentially later than 1 Samuel 19:1-7, say, but also later in terms of the tradition-historical development of the text; whereas 1 Samuel 18:1-4

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may be sequentially prior to 19:1-7 in the Masoretic Text, but traditionhistorically later. What all this suggests is that 1 and 2 Samuel reflect not only different possible ways of telling the story of David and Jonathan, but the apparent non-existence of a single, unequivocal fact of the matter. While it is perfectly plausible that there were figures in Iron Age Israel named David and Jonathan that correspond to the David and Jonathan of 1 and 2 Samuel, we can learn nothing further about them that, in the current state of evidence, could be tested for its probability in historical-critical terms. More importantly, the layers of tradition history within 1 and 2 Samuel suggest that the process of telling and retelling the story of David and Jonathan, which is still continuing in Pseudo-Philo and Josephus, is already present within the biblical text itself. Indeed, it might be fairer to say that the very idea of a “biblical text itself ” reflects an arbitrary and peculiar, though historically explicable attachment to one particular moment in the evolution of the story of David and Jonathan. This has further implications for reception history, because it suggests that reception history does not begin when there is a fixed text, but is already in process. In other words, the fixing of the text is itself a particular moment within its own history of reception. In her critical edition of Abraham Cowley’s Davideis, Gayle Shadduck makes a similar, though not identical point: The Davideis hence constitutes something of an apocryph[on]; it stands as an example, too, of the time honored tradition of the continuing interpretation, through revision, of Scripture, a tradition operative even in Scripture itself, as when the Chronicler imposes his interpretation of history upon materials somewhat differently interpreted by the compilers of Kings.55

Shadduck’s point is that the process of revision of earlier texts, evident in the work of the Chronicler – which can of course be extended to all examples of so-called “rewritten Bible” from the Second Temple period – applies equally to the rewriting of part of the biblical story of David in the Davideis. My point is different, though complementary. Cowley assumes that “scripture” is a definable entity, a not unreasonable assumption in mid-seventeenth century England.56 His rewriting of the biblical material is an attempt to transpose that material into the form of a “sacred poem,” combining scriptural subject matter with the literary form of classical epic, and rewritten with a concern for decorum and plausibility.57 His vast intertextual competence encompassed Homer, Virgil, and Josephus, whose works in different ways helped Cowley to reshape the David story from 1 and 2 Samuel. But there was never a



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point at which retelling and rewriting were not taking place. There must notionally have been a point at which a story about David and Jonathan was first told, but we have no way of pinning down when, where, and under what circumstances that happened, and in any case, in order to spin a story around these figures at all, an indefinable plurality of already existing codes and intertexts would have had to be drawn upon for the emerging story to have had sense. So even the earliest redactional layer of the David and Jonathan narrative was woven out of earlier material of some sort, and the biblical text itself is at least partly constituted by the acts of its own rewriting – and rereading.58 3.2. Orality and literacy The composite nature of the David and Jonathan narrative relates to another dimension of the narrative that bears on the extent of its openness and closedness. That is, we meet this narrative in written, not oral form. We have no access to the ways in which the story of David and Jonathan could have been told in ancient Israel and Judah. Indeed, we do not even really know whether the David and Jonathan narrative existed in oral form before being committed to writing, nor how many different incarnations this oral form could have had before being reduced to the artificial, imposed fixity of writing. That there are at least two layers within the mt, alongside the further retellings we find in, for example, Pseudo-Philo and Josephus, does show that there was more than one way in which the story could be told, but it is not clear whether the Masoretic Text preserves fragments of more or less independent oral performances, nor is it clear whether the later layer within the Masoretic Text is dependent on the earlier written form alone, or whether it is dependent on both the earlier written text and a continuing oral tradition. Indeed, inasmuch as written texts are “hermeneutically incomplete,”59 and invite or even demand rewriting to render them fractionally more complete, it could be argued that the later layer, including 1 Samuel 18:1-4, itself reflects an attempt to resolve ambiguities that earlier layer(s) left unresolved. Furthermore, in the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text the David and Jonathan narrative does not exist as a separate narrative. It is part of at least two larger stories, of the downfall of King Saul and of the rise of King David. We do not know whether the David and Jonathan story was ever told, orally or in written form, separately from these more powerful narrative currents. We do know that their story was reworked as a separate, independent story in its subsequent, post-biblical reception history, but that is a different matter.

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What is the effect, then, of encountering the David and Jonathan narrative in written, rather than oral form? Most obviously, the written form of the narrative reflects the attempt to exert a form of closure on the story it represents. This is not to deny that it was an oral culture that shaped the language in which the written narrative is fixed, that speech “provides the historical-cultural context in which writing becomes possible,”60 nor that oral retellings can continue alongside the written text, and indeed can be inspired by the written text in turn. It is, however, to assert that the necessary fluidity of the oral text is abandoned once the medium of writing has replaced the medium of the living word. This is in no way, however, to claim that linguistic systems (langues) are more fluid in the absence of a written form,61 but rather that because the particular traditions of the Tanakh have been transmitted in a form fixed by writing, we no longer have direct access to the alternative ways in which they might have evolved in the absence of the medium of writing. There is an additional dimension that becomes particularly clear when the Masoretic Text is placed alongside the manuscripts from Qumran. Prior to the work of the masoretes and their precursors, ancient Hebrew was not vocalized, notwithstanding the use in certain traditions of matres lectionis to represent vowels. The consequence of this is that the consonantal texts “must be returned to a state of orality before they can mean anything.”62 They must be read aloud. The Masoretic Text is inherently more closed than the manuscripts from Qumran, because it contains a tradition, a hrwsm, in which vowel points supply the decisive, traditionally approved means of returning the written text to orality. That said, it must be admitted that the written text cannot be returned to orality in an arbitrary proliferation of different ways, since the consonants have already fixed a boundary, albeit a boundary that is at least somewhat open to negotiation, as the textual variants in the Qumran manuscripts illustrate. But the Masorah does reflect the prescription, at a particular point in the transmission of the work, of an additional limit. The extent to which the reader or interpreter accepts this limit as authoritative is another matter. The written text is also a dead letter, inasmuch as it requires a reader – that is, one who returns it to orality, or in some way seeks to resolve its inherent ambiguities – in order to be returned to life. Unlike the live interaction between speaker and audience, the author of the text is absent and cannot be engaged in dialogue about the meaning of the text, over which said author can no longer exercise control. The reader is in a position to supply additional construals that could not have been perceived at the moment of the text’s first performance.



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3.3. Fragments of ancient Hebrew in the context of the canon In my discussion of Zehnder in the previous chapter, I raised the problem of the limited access we now have to the languages and dialects spoken – and written – in Palestine in the first millennium bce. Our primary evidence for these languages and dialects is made up of the Hebrew Bible, epigraphic evidence, the extant Hebrew manuscripts of Ben Sira, the scrolls from Qumran, and the relics of earlier forms of Hebrew that survived into the rabbinic period in the Mishnah. This evidence is neither extensive nor homogeneous. In the case of the Hebrew Bible in particular, we are dealing with linguistic and literary evidence that is ossified in a collection whose limits are theologically, that is ideologically determined. We have no sure means of reconstructing the linguistic and literary evidence, whether oral or written, that could have existed in the Iron Age states of Israel and Judah, or in Persian era Yehud, but that has not survived. Likewise, we have no means of determining how far this lack of survival is accidental or itself the result of theological, that is ideological, decisions. The result is that we have a highly artificial picture of what Hebrew looked like in the periods during which the biblical texts evolved. This artificial picture obscures the distinction between the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of the language, a difficulty that historical-critical and tradition-historical approaches to the texts can only partially overcome. Thus the words and expressions used in 1 Samuel 18:1-4; 19:1-7; 20:1–21:1; 23:16-18; 2 Samuel 1:17-27 functioned in a particular way at the synchronic level, in relation to the entire linguistic system to which they originally belonged, at the point in time when they were first uttered and/or written.63 The fact that the narrative is composite entails that the different tradition-historical layers of the narrative reflect successive stages in the evolution of the ancient Hebrew linguistic system. What we now have is a narrative that reflects many different layers in the evolution of ancient Hebrew, but which does not allow us to see clearly how the living language, artificially ossified by the medium of writing, actually evolved: what changes, for example, might have taken place in how verbs such as bh) and Cpx, or the nouns t#b and hwr(, participated in the process of signification? In a 1971 address, Edward Ullendorff summarized the problem well with reference to the vocabulary of Hebrew in the periods to which the Hebrew Bible refers: It is very difficult to form a precise judgment about the substance and extent of the vocabulary of Old Testament times (in contrast to that which actually entered the canon of the Hebrew Bible). Although the coverage

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The Love of David and Jonathan of subject-matter in the OT is in many ways remarkably catholic (ranging from adultery, murder, and incest to temple-building and religious and love poetry; from war, battle, and combat to personal relationships, heroic tales, and acts of statecraft; from dietary prescriptions and personal hygiene to apocalyptic pronouncements and divine retribution), there is nevertheless a greater concentration within a number of specific areas; and many other fields are inevitably neglected in the type of literature which was admitted into the canon. This is, however, a reflection of the interests of the redactors rather than of the breadth of the Hebrew lexicon in Biblical times. The fact that words for “blessing” or “whoring” are frequent merely determines the genre of literature collected in the OT, while the apparent absence of words denoting “spoon” or “niece” does not imply that the Hebrews ate their food with their fingers and indulged in nepoticide practices.64

Ullendorff’s point here is that the fragments of the ancient Hebrew language system that the Tanakh contains do not amount to a living language.65 Nor is this simply a matter of vocabulary. The consonantal form of written Hebrew prior to the Masoretes means that the correct pronunciation of the living languages and dialects of ancient Palestine is largely – albeit not entirely – lost behind the veil of Masoretic vocalization in the case of the Tanakh,66 and can only be imperfectly inferred behind the various orthographies of the scrolls from Qumran. There are significant grammatical and syntactical gaps between the Hebrew of the biblical texts and the living languages and dialects those texts distantly reflect.67 The presence and distribution of hapax legomena in the Hebrew Bible, for example, tells us little about the actual use and distribution of such terms in the spoken language, particularly given that some words that are hapax legomena in the Hebrew Bible resurface in later Hebrew.68 The problem is that a tightly circumscribed, theologically (ideologically) determined canon of scripture provides the bulk of our primary data for philological research on the Hebrew language prior to the Hellenistic period. In spite of the fact that biblical criticism, aside from the various forms of canonical approach, no longer assumes the canon as its fundamental datum, it has frequently proved difficult to keep these two spheres, the theological-ideological and the philological, separate from one another. There are inevitably overlaps, of course, simply by virtue of the fact that philological research itself participates in and helps to perpetuate ideology in various ways. My point, however, is that judgments made about the likeliest meaning in their original, historical context of texts that subsequently became canonical often, even if unwittingly, do not escape from the ghost of the canon.69



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What we need to explore here is the role of the canon in artificially limiting – and expanding – the potential of the David and Jonathan narrative to generate meaning, and in particular the way that historical-critical judgments have been made in ways that would have been impossible without the dominant influence of the canon. In order to do this we need, first, a working definition of “canon.” Second, we need some grasp of how the biblical canon, in its various forms, has functioned as a semiotic mechanism, limiting but also expanding the potential of its constituent texts to generate meaning. Third, this needs to be brought into dialogue with the David and Jonathan narrative. What emerges is a sense of this narrative as a potentially open work that has been artificially closed as an effect of the canonical framework in which it now sits, but which is nevertheless open to a potentially limitless plurality of construals by virtue of its relationships with adjacent intertexts. 3.4. Canon What, then, can we say about the canon? Leaving aside the issues of the etymology and use of the Greek noun kanw&n and the very complex historical processes by which the various collections of writings held sacred by Jewish and Christian communities of faith came into being, we can say that the question of canon pertains to the relationship between a more or less fixed, yet ultimately arbitrary,70 collection of writings and a community whose ascription of authority to these writings makes it possible for them to be constituted as an authoritative collection. James VanderKam and Peter Flint offer a more succinct definition: “A canon is a closed list of books that was officially accepted retrospectively by a community as supremely authoritative and binding for religious practice and doctrine.”71 It would be possible to quibble about the precise nature of such “official” acceptance, whether “books” here could encompass oral/ aural as well as written works, and whether issues of “practice” and “doctrine” are strictly necessary to the existence of even a religious canon, but the essential point is the relationship between a community and a body of authoritative texts. As such, the notion of canon represents a special example of the relationship between texts and readers. This has much in common with Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s understanding of the term “scripture.”72 Against the background of the transition in the modern West from the assumption that the Christian scriptures are a means of divine revelation – a metaphysical judgment, from an emic perspective – to the acknowledgement that for certain individuals and groups at certain points in history these scriptures have been regarded as a means of divine revelation – a sociological judgment, from an etic

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perspective73 – Cantwell Smith focuses on the attribution of authoritative, scriptural status to particular texts by particular people. Thus: …“scripture” is a bilateral term. By that we mean that it inherently implies, in fact names, a relationship. It denotes something in a particular relation to something else… Fundamental, we suggest, to a new understanding of scripture is the recognition that no text is a scripture in itself and as such. People – a given community – make a text into scripture, or keep it scripture: by treating it in a certain way. I suggest: scripture is a human activity. The human involvement is central. We take it as a firm sequel to modern historical awareness that the quality of being scripture is not an attribute of texts. It is a characteristic of the attitude of persons – groups of persons – to what outsiders perceive as texts. It denotes a relation between a people and a text. Yet that too is finally inadequate…at issue is the relation between a people and the universe, in the light of their perception of a given text.74

Scripture, then, is constituted by the attitudes of readers to texts whose status as scripture, and thus ontologically distinct from other texts, is not recognized by those outside that reading community. By extension the canon, inasmuch as it is composed of texts regarded by a given community as scripture, sets limits to the permissible construal of the texts-asscriptures it contains. These limits reflect the desire of readers, in particular the desire of readers for univocity. That texts within a canon might be construed as ambiguous, producing an indeterminacy of meaning, or that these individual texts might be polyphonic, or that the canon might contain a polyphony of textual voices that resists reduction to a single construal, can be threatening possibilities. For Aichele, whose understanding of the relationship between text and reader in relation to the canon does not essentially differ from those of VanderKam and Flint or Cantwell Smith, “a canon establishes an intertextual network that provides a reading context through which any of its component texts can be understood correctly.”75 That these component texts may be understood correctly is an essential element, for this intertextual network cannot be allowed to yield unlimited semiosis.76 From the perspective of the community, the desire for a canon “is desire for a text that conveys truly an essential, authoritative message and that controls the interpretation of that message.” Such a canon has a limiting function, limiting in the sense of both the texts accepted into the collection, and the range of permissible interpretations of them. Along with this comes “a desire for identity, for power, and for meaning.”77



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These desires, however, cannot be completely satisfied. The nature of the relationship between intertextuality and textual meaning entails that the canon, in and of itself, cannot engender complete univocality. The plurality of voices within the canon, added to the plurality of readers who engage with its constituent texts, acts to subvert such a goal. It is precisely because of the fact that systems of signification exceed the attempt to control them – because, that is, of unlimited semiosis, and of the infinity of language78 – that these desires necessarily cannot be satisfied.79 The role of the reader is fundamental here: the texts of which the canon is constituted require readers in order to produce meaning. Furthermore, the canon requires interpreters who can explain the application of the texts within the canon both to one another, and to the extra-canonical world, in the process reinforcing the canon precisely as canon. As Jonathan Z. Smith remarks Where there is a canon, it is possible to predict the necessary existence of a hermeneute, of an interpreter whose task it is continually to extend the domain of the closed canon over everything that is known or everything that exists without altering the canon in the process. It is with the canon and its hermeneute that we encounter the necessary obsession with exegetical totalization.80

The material stuff of which “canonical” texts – or any texts, for that matter – are composed contains the potential for signification, but this is no more than potential prior to the encounter with a reader, and through the agency of the reader to the encounter with other texts. The reading codes that readers bring to the interpretation of texts are intertextual, participating in a network of indefinite extent made up of other texts, which themselves require intertextually constituted readers for meaning to be produced. Because through time a reader’s intertextual competence broadens and deepens, each reading of a text employs a different range of intertexts, in effect rendering each reading a “first” reading,81 regardless of how often the text has been previously encountered by the reader. It is this intersection between reader and intertexts that makes the production of meaning possible, and the ultimate closure of meaning impossible. Because no two readers have precisely the same experience of reading, the same intertextual competence, disagreement over meaning is inevitable. This disagreement, then, frequently has to do with the codes perceived to be proper to the reading of a given text:82 it is a matter of who has the right to determine, and on what grounds, the codes readers must use in producing meaning from their engagement with a text. The effect of the canon is to determine in advance, and with theological authority, the range of intertexts that may permissibly be drawn upon to

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decode each particular text of which it is composed. Those responsible for creating and sustaining the canon are responsible for the functioning of an intertextual network that gives the appearance, the simulacrum, of being self-interpreting, while concealing both the ideological nature of its own production and the coercion it exercises over the reading process.83 This last point is especially significant, because it touches on the relationship between intertextuality and ideology.84 The intertextual network delimited by the canon gives the illusion of mirroring the linguistic world behind the texts of which it is composed. Yet this intertextual network is a vehicle for transmitting the ideologies connoted by its constituent texts. For example, the structure of the canon, which is framed at the beginning by creation accounts that are often read as promoting the view that complementarity between male and female is ordained by God and thus normative for sexual relationships, and which places the various law codes of the Torah ahead of the Former Prophets, perhaps suggesting that those law codes offer the hermeneutical key to the moral status of Israel and Judah during their histories, is very much a vehicle for constituting an ideological lens that cannot be located in any single one of the texts of which the canon is composed, but which those texts nonetheless contribute to creating. Furthermore, this ideological-intertextual matrix that is created by the canon shapes its readers, whose ideological positions can then be read back into the texts within the canon, reinforcing and perpetuating both the naturalness of the relationships between the texts in the canon, and the ideologies connoted by them. It should be clear that this understanding of “canon” does not have universal applicability, but applies to a very specific situation: that of the intellectual environment shaped by the canon – especially the Protestant canon – transmitted in and through the Christian West which does not obtain in precisely the same way for Jewish scripture. It is in this intellectual environment that the modern historical-critical study of the texts contained in the Christian canon emerged. How, then, has this canon, functioning as semiotic mechanism, shaped the formulation of historical-critical judgments with respect to the David and Jonathan narrative? A particularly good example is the use made by scholars of passages from Leviticus to decode, and thus restrict the meaning of the passages in 1 and 2 Samuel dealing with the relationship between David and Jonathan. While these passages from Leviticus – principally Leviticus 18:22; 20:13 – tend to be used by scholars to reconstitute an ancient historical context in which an Israelite text dealing with a close relationship between two men could not imply a homosexual relationship, in fact it is only the persistence of the trace of their authority as canonical texts that makes



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this move possible. What is at stake is the danger of reading the David and Jonathan narrative without the corrective lens provided by texts that prohibit same-sex intercourse, because the narrative cannot be allowed to remain open to such a construal.85 The very fact that scholars feel the need to control the David and Jonathan narrative in this way is evidence of their awareness that the narrative either has been, or could be construed thus. The narrative needs to be controlled, and its readers need to be made obedient. There are two issues here, which cannot fully be separated. One is properly a semiotic issue, concerned with the conditions that make textual meaning possible. The other is the relationship between the canon and the historical contexts out of which its constituent texts emerged, which is a matter of the relationship between texts and external reality. My contention is that the broken shards of ancient Israelite literature preserved in the canon cannot but yield a distorted image of those historical contexts. In the case of the David and Jonathan narrative, fragments of Leviticus are used to create an interpretant in the reader’s mind, an idea that determines the correct link between the narrative, and what the narrative is supposed to denote, that is, a correct understanding of the nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan. Both the distorting effect of the canon and the inescapable reality of unlimited semiosis serve to prevent such decisive closure ever being reached, except in the mind of a reader determined to assert that the text is closed. The existence of other readers whose engagement with the text differs means that such assertions themselves must necessarily fail. 3.5. Using Leviticus to control David and Jonathan The assertions I have just made may look suspiciously theoretical and without clear justification at this point, so let us look at some examples. In his 1994 commentary on 2 Samuel, with reference to 2 Samuel 1:26 Georg Hentschel remarked, “But since David until an advanced age was inclined towards women, his relationship with Jonathan can hardly be misunderstood as homosexual (compare Lev. 18:22; 20:13).”86 Aside from Hentschel’s commentary helping to perpetuate, whether intentionally or not, a particular, heteronormative ideology, his remark also proves wanting as an interpretation of 2 Samuel 1:26. Hentschel first appeals to the evidence from the rest of David’s life, as portrayed in 1 and 2 Samuel, apparently up to the liaison in his dotage with Abishag the Shunammite (1 Kgs 1:1-4), that David was sexually attracted to women to the exclusion of men. This evidence itself requires an interpretant, which in this case is the idea, indeed the assumption, that homosexual and heterosexual

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relations are mutually exclusive,87 an assumption that, in turn, is dependent on the idea that all external expressions of sexual desire are determined by an innate, fixed sexual orientation which Hentschel, and those who share this assumption, ultimately owe to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century developments in the study – or invention – of the psychology of sexuality. Hentschel then appeals to Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 to delimit the meaning of 2 Samuel 1:26, constructing in the process an intended reader of his commentary, who is to compare the two verses from Leviticus with the one from 2 Samuel and come up with the same construal as Hentschel himself: that the prohibition on same-sex intercourse between men in Leviticus necessarily entails that David and Jonathan must have complied with it. This, in turn, assumes two things: first, 2 Samuel 1:26 reflects a world in which the prohibitions of the Holiness Code were both recognized by all in Israel to be in force, and obeyed in practice; second, 2 Samuel 1:26 denotes a single meaning that can be determined without remainder. This in turn reflects a presupposition about the primary function of the language of 1 Samuel 1:19-27, namely that the language of David’s elegy is primarily referential and denotative, not in principle open to an indeterminate play of signifiers. This raises the question on what grounds 2 Samuel 1:19-27 could be regarded as in any sense “poetic.”88 The same presupposition is evident in Tony Cartledge’s commentary. Despite the growth of literature on this question between Tom Horner’s Jonathan Loved David – which in any case does not offer the strongest arguments – and the publication of Cartledge’s commentary in 2001, it is to Horner alone that Cartledge refers when he writes that, “Some recent interpreters have suggested that David and Jonathan shared a homosexual relationship, but there is little evidence for such a conclusion.”89 He continues, “Poetic language, by its very nature, may imply any number of things, but the idea that David and Jonathan were homosexual lovers is unsupported by the text.”90 On the one hand, he regards 2 Samuel 1:26 as “poetic language” that may connote a range of things that he does not specify. At the same time, there is one thing the verse in question cannot denote. His wholesale rejection of a homosexual construal of the relationship between David and Jonathan is thus in tension with his apparent understanding of poetic language. To be clear, this is not to say that 2 Samuel 1:26 does denote sexual love between David and Jonathan, merely that Cartledge has not shown that it doesn’t. This is thrown further into relief by Cartledge’s comments on the reference to the anointing of Saul’s shield in 2 Samuel 1:21. In that case he is willing to accept the presence of double entendre: “The perceptive reader



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will recognize a double entendre in David’s plaint: Saul’s shield is no longer anointed with oil because Saul, the anointed one, is dead.”91 Thus as a reader Cartledge can perceive a double entendre in 2 Samuel 1:21, though this is only possible because precisely as a reader he is able to relate this verse to references to the anointing of kings elsewhere in 1 and 2 Samuel that help to create the interpretant he uses to decode the reference to anointing in 2 Samuel 1:21.92 At the same time, he finds it necessary to deny other readers the opportunity to find alternative connotations in 2 Samuel 1:26 based on different intertexts, though this might beg the question on what grounds different readers would choose different sets of intertexts, whether their choices could be justified, and on what grounds. Cartledge’s position, like Hentschel’s, implies an understanding of the reader as someone whose role is to determine the precise meaning of the text as encoded by its author and cloaked by the husk of the text. In his 1981 commentary, Fritz Stolz affirmed a position on 2 Samuel 1:26 that is quite similar to Hentschel’s, but which raises additional problems. That David places his love for Jonathan ahead of every love for his women says enough – women at the same time played a significant role in David’s life (cf. 1 Sam. 25 and esp. 2 Sam. 11). Naturally the text should not be understood in the sense of homosexuality; that sort of thing was, though, normal in Greece, but was frowned upon in Israel and threatened with death (cf. Lev. 18:22). [2 Sam. 1:26] is about the affection of friends who have experienced the first period of manhood with one another, and whose relationship has survived all the twists and turns of fate.93

Unlike Hentschel, Stolz does not explicitly connect texts dealing with David’s relationships with women with his innate sexuality.94 He does, however, use Leviticus 18:22 to delimit the meaning of 2 Samuel 1:26, but in so doing he unwittingly points to the problematic process of signification around that verse in Leviticus. To begin with, pace Stolz it is Leviticus 20:13, not 18:22, that prescribes the death penalty for lying with a male h#)  ybk#m, which suggests that the signifier “Lev 18:22” alone functions as a kind of index, connoting for this interpreter an entire complex of ideas about same-sex relations under the Law. Stolz uses Leviticus 18:22 as if it denotes attitudes to sexual relations between men as they actually existed, at all times, in ancient Israel. Since Leviticus 18:22 is a command – the conative function of language – not a description of a state of affairs – the referential function95 – this suggests that Stolz is simply misunderstanding how the language of Leviticus 18:22 functions, or at best what it implies. Moreover, he treats the sexual code in Leviticus 18:6-23 as if it referred unambiguously to a social reality at the time

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to which 1 and 2 Samuel point – that is, a society in which “homosexuality” was unknown96 – rather than a collection of prescriptions directed towards creating an ideal society as envisaged by those responsible for compiling and promulgating the code.97 This requires him to disregard a crucial aspect of  h#)  ybk#m  bk#t  )l  rkz  t)w. He takes Leviticus 18:22 to denote an actual, existing state of affairs, rather than a command that reflects the attitudes and preferences of one particular person or group, namely whoever was responsible for the Holiness Code and/or whoever was responsible for the collection of commandments in Leviticus 18:6-23. Furthermore, it is not the expression plane of Leviticus 18:22 that Stolz uses to disambiguate 2 Samuel 1:26, but what Stolz understands Leviticus 18:22 to denote. Stolz needs here an interpretant determined not only by the various connotations carried by the constituent parts of this peculiarly worded command, which themselves are determined by complex processes of signification. He needs an interpretant determined further by a set of assumptions about both the nature of human sexuality in general and the actual practices of sex in both Greece and Israel, in addition to a further set of assumptions about the incommensurable differences between Greece and Israel as societies. None of these is beyond question. Which part(s) of “Greece” and at what period(s)? Are we talking about Iron Age Crete or fourth-century bce Athens? Can the worlds of Homer and those of the various works of Plato, or Aeschylus, or Aeschines, or even the considerably later Pseudo-Lucian, be discussed under the same rubric? What are the problems with interpreting the literary, artistic, and artifactual evidence from the various parts of the Aegean in the first millennium bce?98 What sort of “homosexuality” was known there, and what does it mean to say that this was “normal”? How did it function in the wider context of the societies in which it existed, and how was it constructed culturally? What impact did the rise of the po/lij in Greece have on the way same-sex desire and its expression were understood and appraised, and how does that make the questions we ask of classical Athens different from those we ask of other parts of “Greece” at other times, and from those we ask of putatively more distant societies, such as Iron Age I Israel, or Persian era Yehud? Mutatis mutandis, what shifts might have taken place in Israel, at what times and under what circumstances, between how sex was understood in the contexts of the various tribes and how sex was understood in the urban context of Jerusalem (or Shiloh, or Gibeah, or Samaria)? Returning to Greece, does paiderasti/a as represented in the dialogues of Plato, or the speech of Aeschines against Timarchus, relate to whatever is prohibited in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13,



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and if so, to what extent? Perhaps most importantly, but opening a Pandora’s box of methodological issues that are to some extent in tension with the other points just made, is it really fair to assume without question that there is a radical divide between Greece and Israel, and if so, to what extent was this true and at what periods? How much is there, aside from the content, structure, and effective history of the canon to suggest that the world of 1 and 2 Samuel must have more in common with the world intended by the sexual codes of Leviticus than with either the world implied by Homeric epic, or the world implied by the dialogues of Plato? Some of the same inadequacies can be detected in Raphael Patai’s much earlier work, even though he draws a diametrically opposite conclusion to Stolz about homosexuality in Israel! Patai makes a strong distinction between what the Law stated – that is, in Leviticus 18:22; 20:13 – and the reality of social mores. For Patai, “male homosexuality was rampant in Biblical times…it may not have been as general as it was in ancient Greece, but the folk mores certainly did not regard it with any measure of disapproval.”99 In addition to the methodological problems raised by Patai’s use of anthropological evidence from much later sociocultural contexts in the Middle East, and the use of the stories of Sodom (19:1-29) and Gibeah (Judg. 19:1-30) to provide additional support for his case, Patai makes sweeping assumptions about ancient Greece, that there was a unitary “homosexuality” lived out there, and that “Greece” formed a single, socio-culturally uniform society. Intriguingly, the kind of position taken by Stolz is turned on its head by Patai, who compares the relationship between David and Jonathan directly with the paiderasti/a of Plato’s Symposium, without distinguishing between Athenian paiderasti/a and modern, Western “homosexuality,” or between Athenian paiderasti/a and other expressions of same-sex desire in ancient Greece, or between the various visions of love placed in dialogue in the Symposium.100 A similar range of issues is raised by Steven McKenzie’s attempt to write a biography of King David. McKenzie’s concern is with the extent to which the material concerned with David and Jonathan reflects an actual, historical relationship between the two men, and if so, what kind of relationship this was. It is sometimes suggested that David and Jonathan were more than friends, that they were homosexual lovers. This is based on David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan, which reads “your love to me was wonderful, surpassing the love of women” (2 Sam. 1:26). There are two issues involved here: the meaning of this verse and the historical relationship of David and Jonathan. As we have seen, the stress on the relationship between Jonathan

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McKenzie’s sole authority for this view is the earlier, German article by Zehnder. In this case, the object the material form of 2 Samuel 1:26 is taken to denote is what the author intended the reader to infer about the relationship between David and Jonathan. This, according to McKenzie, is not the same thing as the historical actuality of the relationship in question. There is, again, a complex interpretant, determined in part by McKenzie’s construal of Leviticus 20:13 which, as for Stolz, does not simply reflect the ideology of a particular person or group in ancient Israel, but reflects Israelite Law, by which the author of the apology for David must have felt himself bound. Another part of the interpretant is a set of assumptions about the relationship between the ancient society in which David’s apologist lived and the contemporary Middle East, about the cultural gulf that separates the contemporary “Middle East” and the contemporary “West” – see Stolz’s cultural gulf between Israel and Greece above102 – and about the relevance for the disambiguation of 2 Samuel 1:26 of the way contemporary “Middle Eastern” cultural codes determine the signification of physical gestures. The role of this complex interpretant is to determine what the material form of 2 Samuel 1:26 is least likely to denote, in defence against interpreters unnamed by McKenzie who advocate an alternative view. Markus Zehnder deals with Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 first of all separately,103 and then in relation to David and Jonathan. In order to make the connection, he must first reject the view that Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are concerned solely with sexual acts within the cult, plays only a very minor role in the David and Jonathan narrative. He also rejects interpretations that suggest the prohibitions in Leviticus are concerned with wastage of sperm, with the mixing of sperm with excrement, or with anal intercourse rather than with all homosexual acts without exception. Zehnder prefers to accept Gagnon’s view that h#) ybk#m reflects a primary concern with, “behaving toward another man as if he were a woman



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by making him the object of male sexual desires. That is an ‘abomination,’ an abhorrent violation of divinely sanctioned boundaries – in this case, gender boundaries established at creation.”104 The key terms for Zehnder are hb(wt, which for Zehnder denotes that which is “against God’s will,” and lbt, which denotes “a confusion of the created order.” These two terms, then, add to the denotation of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 the connotation of contravening God’s will and the created order, construing the moral imagination of 1 and 2 Samuel in terms of a mixture of divine command and natural law. This implies a degree of certainty about what hb(wt and lbt denote. Because lbt only occurs here in the Tanakh (Lev. 18:23; 20:12),105 this can only be determined by using occurrences of the root llb elsewhere in the Tanakh to disambiguate the cognate noun. Since the verb seems to mean something like “mix up, confuse,” Gagnon and Zehnder extrapolate from this the idea of “confusion of the created order.” This in turn requires the decisive juxtaposition of the Holiness Code with Priestly material that is understood to ground the complementarity of the sexes in the order of creation. That this is an example of readers selecting intertexts to support their already chosen view may be suggested by the fact that hb(wt and lbt do not seem to mean the same thing, and lbt is connected with bestiality and sex between a man and his daughter-inlaw, but not directly with sex between men. Zehnder goes on to compare the phrase w#pnk Ntnwhy w[h]bh)yw, “and Jonathan loved him as himself” with the command in Leviticus 19:18 that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself ” (Kwmk  K(rl  tbh)w), as a means of rejecting Schroer and Staubli’s comparison with y#pn hbh)# in Song of Songs 1:7; 3:1, 2, 3, 4. In other words, Zehnder tries to show that 1 Samuel 18:1, 3 has more in common, both syntactically and semantically, with Leviticus 19:18 than with Song of Songs 1:7; 3:1-4, so that Leviticus 19:18 rather than Song of Songs 1:7; 3:1-4 can be used to disambiguate 1 Samuel 18:1, 3; 20:17. Now there is nothing at all wrong with this approach in principle: after all, how else could we understand any text other than by consciously or unconsciously reading it in light of other texts? If the words and phrases in 1 Samuel 18:1-4 are to be understood at all by a reader, not only must the reader be immersed in the Hebrew linguistic system, but these words and phrases must also be compared with comparable words and phrases elsewhere. The question is whether Leviticus 19:18 is really more similar to 1 Samuel 18:1, 3; 20:17 than Song of Songs 1:7; 3:1-4, and if so, on what grounds.106 While Zehnder is right that the syntax of Song of Songs 1:7; 3:1-4 differs from 1 Samuel 18:1, 3; 20:17,107 it is not clear how far 1 Samuel 18:1,

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3; 20:17 are analogous with Leviticus 19:18. Zehnder argues that 1 Samuel 18:1-4 is dependent on Leviticus 19:18, and that there is only a stylistic variation between Kwmk, “as yourself ” and w#pnk, “as himself.”108 This is plausible, but not beyond doubt, and there remains a further problem with the use of bh) followed by the direct object. There are basically two related issues. The first issue is the use of bh) with the preposition l in Leviticus 19:18. In 1 Samuel 18:1, bh) is used with an object suffix indicating the direct object: “And he loved him.” In Leviticus 19:18, however, bh) is followed by the preposition l. It is possible that this should be rendered “You shall love your neighbour,” which does have the support of the Septuagint (a0gaph/seij to\n plhsi/on sou) and the Peshitta (mXr krBXL), the preposition l being the normal indicator of the direct object in Syriac. Such a construal would imply that l in K(rl  tbh)w indicates the direct object. Now it is not impossible that this preposition could indicate the direct object, as this usage is known classical Hebrew, particularly in later texts that may reflect Aramaic influence on Hebrew syntax.109 Yet this is not the only possible construal. Given that normally the Hebrew preposition l implies some sense of distanciation, why could it not have the sense “act lovingly towards?” Thus Ullendorff translates, “you shall treat kindly, lovingly, your neighbour, for he is a human being like yourself.”110 1 Samuel 18:1, where the object suffix unambiguously indicates the direct object, would not clearly be open to this sense. Thus the syntax of 1 Samuel 18:1, 3; 20:17 may be analogous with other cases of bh) followed by the direct object, but not obviously with the syntax of Leviticus 19:18, where this verb may not, in fact, be followed by the direct object at all. The second issue is the meaning of Kwmk in Leviticus 19:18, and by extension w#pnk in 1 Samuel 18:1. Does it mean “as [you would love] yourself,” as the Septuagint (w(j seauto/n), for example, might suggest? It is perhaps noteworthy at this point that the Peshitta of Leviticus 19:18 uses precisely the equivalent to the Hebrew of 1 Samuel 18:1, kY) k$PN, “as your own self,” to render Kwmk, but this may be more significant for what it says about Syriac syntax,111 than for what it might imply about the Hebrew idiom of 1 Samuel 18:1: to be sure, #pnk can, in the late Hebrew of Ben Sira and Qumran, indicate the reflexive “as oneself,”112 and may well in 1 Samuel 18:1, but would that sense be natural in Hebrew after the phrase l  bh)? I will explore later the possibility that #pnk in 1 Samuel 18:1 might reflect precisely this sense in the context of the Hebrew of the late Second Temple period, but for now let us simply note that for Ullendorff, the sense in the Hebrew of Leviticus 19:18 is that the Israelite should love his neighbour, as he should love the sojourner



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in Leviticus 19:34,113 because he is a human being just as he is.114 This is the sense of Ullendorff ’s rendering, “you shall treat kindly, lovingly, your neighbour, for he is a human being like yourself.”115 This could be transferred to w#pnk in 1 Samuel 18:1, the sense being that Jonathan loved David because he was a human being like himself, but their bond seems to be much deeper and more personal, especially given the immediately preceding idiom, where dwd #pnb hr#qn Ntnwhy #pn  seems to point to the emotional binding of the very selves of the two men. In any case, my main point is that although k followed by #pn may be no more than a dialectical variation of k followed by the pronominal suffix, if 1 Samuel 18:1 were dependent on Leviticus 19:18, we might nonetheless expect the same syntax to be employed. We turn now to Zehnder’s discussion of Leviticus 18:22; 20:13 in relation to David and Jonathan. He notes that the verb bk#, which refers unambiguously to sex in Leviticus, is absent from the David and Jonathan narrative.116 All this indicates, however, is that Leviticus 18:22; 20:13 are less ambiguous than the passages dealing with David and Jonathan. Revealingly, his main discussion is in a section entitled “The Canonical Context,” despite the fact that he frames his discussion in explicitly historical-critical terms, in relation to the question of whether or not the Holiness Code was known at the time the David and Jonathan narrative was written.117 Zehnder gives two reasons for the relevance of Leviticus 18:22; 20:13 for David and Jonathan. First, there is no evidence outside the David and Jonathan narrative that homosexual behaviour was ever regarded positively in ancient Israel,118 and the probability is that the laws concerning sexual behaviour belong to an early phase of Yahwism and an early phase of the history of Israel. Zehnder, however, cites no evidence for this, and would seem to have been influenced by the canonical construction of the biblical narrative, according to which the giving of the Torah at Sinai precedes and determines morally the history of Israel in the Land of Canaan. An additional problem here seems to be that absence of evidence is being taken by Zehnder to entail logically evidence of absence. But this does not follow logically, even though his conclusion cannot be overturned on the basis of positive historical evidence from Israel.119 Finally, Zehnder notes that David’s absence from the New Moon feast in 1 Samuel 20:24-29 is understood by Saul to be due to some form of ritual impurity on David’s part, which may point to legal categories known from Leviticus 7:20-21 and 15:16-18, and thus to the existence of some of the laws of Leviticus in some form at either the time of David himself, or the time of the composition or redaction of the story of David’s rise.120

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Here Zehnder’s use of Leviticus 7:20-21 and 15:16-18 to understand the very difficult 1 Samuel 20:26 itself makes possible the use of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 to understand the relationship between David and Jonathan. The New Moon feast that Saul hosts would need to be understood as the kind of ritual that could be profaned through the participation of someone who was not ritually clean. This would have to be analogous to the eating of sacrifices of well-being to YHWH (hwhyl  r#)  Myml#h  xbz  r#b) while in a state of unspecified ritual uncleanness in the case of Leviticus 7:20-21, and would imply that David’s ritual impurity resulted from a seminal emission ((rz  tbk#) in the case of Leviticus 15:16-18.121 There are certainly commonalities between Leviticus 7:20-21; 15:16-18 and 1 Samuel 20:24-29, but these commonalities do not extend much beyond the notion that ritual impurity necessarily limits a man’s movements. A New Moon festival (#dxh) is not mentioned in these verses in Leviticus. Aside from connotations of ritual impurity,122 then, it is not at all clear that they tell us anything much about the meaning of 1 Samuel. It is certainly by no means clear that the various law codes of Leviticus, in a form approximating that which now appears in the canon, were known, universally considered authoritative, and universally adhered to when the David and Jonathan narrative was composed.123 What is important for our purposes is how these verses in Leviticus are used. Zehnder’s construal of Leviticus 7:20-21 and 15:16-18 is used to disambiguate 1 Samuel 20:26 so that his construal of other texts from Leviticus can be used to disambiguate other texts from 1 and 2 Samuel, texts whose meaning must be strictly delimited. This process is only made possible by the content and structure of the canon. Furthermore, the fact that several scholars should appeal to the sexual codes in Leviticus (Lev. 18:6-23; 20:9-21) to disambiguate the David and Jonathan narrative in turn reflects the effect of the reception history of these laws. The reception history of the sexual codes seems to have been considerably more influential, in the Christian tradition at least, than that of other parts of Leviticus, which in turn would seem to have had a profound effect on the way they are used in interpretation. At the same time as critiquing the use of Leviticus in the exegesis of the David and Jonathan narrative, it is important not only to approach the question negatively, unravelling the weaknesses evident in the current scholarly debate, but to approach it positively, offering some suggestions as to why it might be that Leviticus and 1 and 2 Samuel fit so awkwardly together. For while both texts participate in the infinity of language and thus in unlimited semiosis, it does not follow that we are confronted with



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an entirely random play of signifiers. While it is difficult to reconstruct the historical relationship between the layers of the composite text of Leviticus and the layers of the composite text of 1 and 2 Samuel, and while it is exceptionally difficult to pin down the precise meaning of particular passages within them, some positive things may be said. Most obviously, Leviticus and 1 and 2 Samuel as texts reflect different degrees of openness and closedness, which produces a tension between them. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are open to a range of interpretations because we are historically disconnected from the codes that made them comprehensible. If historical criticism could succeed in reconstructing these socio-cultural codes in their entirety, the range of possible interpretations would diminish, though not necessarily vanish: we would know with greater certainty whether the issue in Leviticus 18:22; 20:13 is cultic sex, wastage of sperm, mixing semen and excrement, anal intercourse rather than other forms of same-sex eroticism, or the transgression of the divinely sanctioned order of the world. They are closed texts, collections of rulings that anticipate no openness to different construals. This is not the case to the same extent with the David and Jonathan narrative, which by virtue of the way it is written is open to a much wider array of construals. The contrast is between “didactic” works such as the laws of the Holiness Code, and “anti-didactic” works such as the narratives of 1 and 2 Samuel. With respect to the principles of biblical narrative, Meir Sternberg has remarked that [The biblical narrator] will leave gaps for the reader to puzzle over – non sequiturs, discontinuities, indeterminacies, multiple versions – while fully aware of their disordering effect on the shape and lessons of the past. He will conceal and distribute and process meaning to an extent seldom equaled even by storytellers who could please themselves… [Most] of these “incongruous” choices…were invented and elaborated in the Israelite tradition of narrative, so that the whole strategy cannot have been less than deliberate. Far more eloquent than the recourse to particular forms, in short, is the partiality for complex formation in the teeth of constraints that would dictate ready intelligibility. The biblical narrator is determined to operate as an artist even in the radical sense of courting danger and difficulty where he is most anxious for success as a partisan.124

There are clear tensions here. While Sternberg is willing to allow a great deal of room for the interpretive cooperation of the reader, this is dictated in advance by an exceptionally skilful narrator. This is a claim about ideology, too, since Sternberg holds on to the idea that the narrator is “anxious for success as a partisan.” Nevertheless, the narrative demands a kind of interpretive co-operation that allows greater openness than the highly prescriptive Holiness Code. In light of this, the aesthetic sophistication

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of the narrative technique perceived by Sternberg should make exegetes wary of seeking to foreclose the meaning of a narrative without due attention to its narratological richness and its potential for polyvalence. Were we to scrutinize Sternberg’s claim in light of Eco, or more radically in light of Barthes or Kristeva, the control exerted by Sternberg’s narrator would be shown to be inadequate to the task of limiting what a reader might bring to the production of meaning out of the text. Serious problems arise, then, when the openness of the David and Jonathan narrative is subjected to the closed Law of Leviticus. What can we conclude, then, about the relationship between the canon as semiotic mechanism and historical-critical readings of the David and Jonathan narrative? A frequent theme in the scholarly works just discussed is the relevance of Leviticus 18:22 and/or 20:13 to the disambiguation of 2 Samuel 1:26. It is assumed in each case that these verses from Leviticus tell us something about the norms that governed ancient Israelite society.125 It is then assumed that the norms in question delimit the range of permissible construals of the texts pertaining to the relationship between David and Jonathan. These assumptions relate to the historical criticism of the David and Jonathan narrative. Yet it seems extremely unlikely that such historical-critical judgments – which, it must be allowed, are possible – could have been made but for the juxtaposition of Leviticus with 1 and 2 Samuel in the canon. The content and structure of the canon masks the order in which these texts were written, the sources from which they were composed, and the parties responsible for their composition, redaction, and canonization. 3.6. Historical criticism beyond canonical control But what if we leave Leviticus out of the equation? The rise of modern biblical criticism, combined with the extraordinary discoveries of previously unknown texts from the ancient Near East during the nineteenth century, has opened all biblical texts, including the David and Jonathan narrative, to a much wider range of construals than would previously have been the case. At the same time, admittedly, the persistence of focus on unequivocal construals of biblical texts through the practice of various kinds of historically-oriented exegesis has continued the process of closing the meaning of the text down. The David and Jonathan narrative has always been read in light of non-Jewish and non-Christian works, chiefly because it has been passed down in traditions heavily influenced by the heritage of ancient Greece and Rome, and alongside their culturally “canonical” works. Already in Josephus we can see the stamp of the older Greek idea of heroic



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comradeship in his retelling of the David and Jonathan story,126 as well, more intriguingly, as the language of the gymnasium.127 Jonathan is also enamoured of David in part on account of his “manly virtue” (a)reth/),128 a clear elaboration of a biblical text that gives no hint as to why Jonathan loves David, leaving a gap, an opening, for unknown later readers to fill. In the Christian tradition, while Augustine read the David and Jonathan narrative alongside the Sermon on the Mount and the story of Sarah and Hagar,129 and Chrysostom read it alongside Paul’s discourse on love in 1 Corinthians 13,130 Ambrose of Milan cited David and Jonathan in a work based ultimately on the De officiis of Cicero.131 This work was later taken up by Aelred of Rievaulx in his De spiritali amicitia, which in turn is derived from the De amicitia of Cicero and shows a slight anxiety about the use of a “pagan” work by Christians.132 Aelred in this work cites the David and Jonathan narrative several times as a biblical model of Christian friendship.133 In the seventeenth century, Abraham Cowley was profoundly influenced in his construction of a sacred epic around the life of David by classical epic, especially Virgil.134 But here we are dealing with the Christianization of non-Christian models, which means that the ghost of the canon is still haunting the process of textual weaving. With the rise of modern biblical criticism, however, the reverse became possible. Biblical texts could now be read alongside extra-canonical works for the sake of historical research, not for Christian edification. This inevitably opened up the meaning of the David and Jonathan narrative, perhaps chiefly in the sense of restoring the text to the possibility of being read alongside texts that might seem to offer closer analogues to the relationship between the two men than anything otherwise found in scripture. Yet this, too, is a decision for a reader. An example of how this has worked in practice would be David Halperin’s comparison between heroic comrades in the Iliad, 1 and 2 Samuel, and The Epic of Gilgamesh. In his essay “Heroes and their Pals,” Halperin was mainly concerned with using the relationships between David and Jonathan in 1 and 2 Samuel, and Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh, to understand more fully the comradeship of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad. It is noteworthy that he was approaching 1 and 2 Samuel from the perspective of a classicist, not a biblical scholar, and was using these particular intertexts because they seemed to reflect the world of Homeric epic more than later Greek traditions135 – especially Aeschylus, Plato, and Aeschines136 – that read Achilles and Patroclus in light of the later homosocial and homoerotic, upper-class, male institution of the love of an older man for a younger man on the cusp of adulthood (paiderasti/a).

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Halperin’s intention is to read Achilles and Patroclus in light of these more or less contemporary ancient Near Eastern analogues in order to explore the symbolic dimension of the representation of friendship in the Iliad, its “role in producing and purveying the means of collective understanding that constitute social ‘labels.’”137 He finds a common set of structures in the three texts that enabled the organization of the basic elements of each friendship: [A]ll three narrative traditions feature a close friendship between two, and no more than two, persons. These two persons are always male; they form not only a pair, but a relatively isolated pair: the two of them are never joined by a third; there are no rivals, no other couples, and no relations with women that might prove to be of a “distracting” nature. The relationship…always has an outward focus, a purpose beyond itself in action, in the accomplishment of glorious deeds or the achievement of political ends. Each of the six friends…is an exceptionally valiant warrior: we are dealing not with an instance of some neutral or universal sociological category called “friendship,” then, but with a specific cultural formation, a type of heroic friendship which is better captured by terms like comradesin-arms, boon companions, and the like.138

It is not clear that this part of Halperin’s study is fully applicable to David and Jonathan: could Michal be read as in some way disrupting the comradeship of David and Jonathan? Perhaps not, given the extent to which her movements are limited in 1 Samuel 19:11-17,139 but we might also note here that David and Jonathan are not portrayed as taking part in common exploits at any point, since when they are portrayed together, they decide to work separately to achieve the goal of protecting David from Saul. Be that as it may, Halperin’s study is important for showing how David and Jonathan can be read in a context where the entire rest of the Tanakh is irrelevant to the interpretive process. The three friendships have ideological ramifications with respect to the relation between private and public: Friendship, it seems, is something that only males can have, and they can have it only in couples… The male couple constitutes a world apart from society at large, and yet it does not merely embody a “private” relation, of the sort that might be transacted appropriately in a “home.” On the contrary, friendship helps to structure – and, possibly, to privatize – the social space; it takes shape in the world that lies beyond the horizon of the domestic sphere, and it requires for its expression a military or political staging-ground. This type of friendship cannot generate its own raison d’être, evidently: it depends for its meaning on the meaningfulness of social action.140

While Halperin does not note this explicitly, his distinction between private and public space could well be read into 2 Samuel 1:26: the love of



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Jonathan, in the context of military comradeship in the social sphere, was more wonderful than the love of women, restricted to the cloying world of the home. Nor are these friendships strictly between equals: They are based alike on a structural asymmetry, consisting in an unequal distribution of precedence among the members of the relationship and a differential treatment of them in the narrative: one of the friends has greater importance than the other; the latter is subordinated – personally, socially, and narratologically – to the former.141

In each case, the weaker or less favoured friend – Enkidu, Patroclus, Jonathan – dies.142 It is the death of this friend that produces the most intense expressions of tender affection, and binds them forever in the memory of the survivor.143 In each case, the friendship is portrayed with language used elsewhere for kinship and sexual relations.144 This points to the interstitial character of friendship. Because friendship tends to stand outside more precisely codified social structures, alternative semantic resources must be used, metaphorically, to define the nature and social function of the relationship in question. This creates serious problems for the interpreter, because it is difficult to determine, when we are dealing with ancient languages whose stocks of possible metaphors are imperfectly known to modern interpreters, whether the language of kinship and sexual relations is being used metaphorically to refer to other kinds of intense personal bond (thus Halperin), or whether terms we might translate with the English signifier “brother” might in fact at the literal level encompass a broader range of relationships than merely biological siblings, or whether the language of sexual relationships in fact points to a literal, rather than metaphorical sexual union, or whether some other more complex construal most adequately reflects the process of signification. Halperin does not make this point, however, suggesting instead that the effect of the use of kinship and sexual language to represent male friendship was to turn such friendship into a “paradigm case of human sociality,” replacing the kinship and conjugal bonds whose proper signifiers had been colonized on its behalf.145 Halperin’s study is important for our purposes chiefly because it illustrates the difference it makes when the David and Jonathan narrative is read without the controls set by Genesis 1–3, or Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, or Deuteronomy. It is not so much that this different context resolves the question of whether or not the relationship between David and Jonathan is portrayed as sexual – it doesn’t. Indeed, it implies that this question is of at best marginal relevance, unless we, or some other interested

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parties, for some reason feel the need for an answer. In light of the latter point, it is perhaps significant that Halperin’s discussion belongs in the context of a specific, historically contingent academic debate on the history of sexuality, and, moreover, that it addresses the question of how the fifth-fourth century bce Athenian reception of Homer has distorted subsequent readings of the Iliad by introducing later questions connected with same-sex eroticism that might have been baffling to the ancient poet. This issue will be taken up again in the next chapter, when we will turn our attention to the way the interpretation of the David and Jonathan narrative has been influenced by the reception history of the Iliad and other Greek texts, but for now we must focus on the text of 1 and 2 Samuel. 4. D/J: an essay 4.1. Introduction Until now, the Hebrew text has been kept somewhat at arms length, and has been approached chiefly through engagement with selected commentators. We need now to engage directly with the Hebrew text: in what ways does the Hebrew text elicit the reader’s responses, and how does it resist the desire of its readers to close its meaning down? Like other scholars dedicated to close philological analysis of the text, I am bound to the existing corpus of classical Hebrew, though ancient works written and preserved in other languages can be adduced to shed light on the text. But rather than using such sources to set limits to the meaning of the text, I intend to work out the extent to which the text resists being bound by these limits. I am trying to break the text open, to delimit it,146 as it were. Equally, however, I am seeking to be aware of how the text itself appears to offer limits to its interpretation. But I am also seeking to be aware of the extent to which even the relative openness or closedness of a text cannot render it immune to the infinity of language and the endless potential for re-reading, for further putatively “aberrant” construals.147 In what follows – against all my instincts as a biblical scholar trained in historical criticism – I have not sought to account comprehensively for the extant scholarly literature on 1 and 2 Samuel, only citing scholarly works that seem to be most relevant to the clarification of particular points. The exceptions are 1 Samuel 20:30 and 2 Samuel 1:26, where I have tried to cite enough scholarly opinions to highlight the problems created for interpreters by the text. I have, however, tried to pay very close attention to the details of the Hebrew text, and its fate at the



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hands of translators. I have also begun with certain working assumptions about the genesis of the Hebrew text that I have not subjected to full scrutiny.148 I am assuming that 1 and 2 Samuel is a composite work that is part of a longer, theologically crafted, and itself tradition-historically complex historiographical work, usually termed the Deuteronomistic History on account of its ideological and linguistic proximity to the book of Deuteronomy. All the layers of tradition history attested in 1 and 2 Samuel are not, however, present in the David and Jonathan narrative, which, with the exception of 1 Samuel 18:1-4, I take to predate the earliest – late seventh or early sixth century bce? – redaction of the Deuteronomistic History as a whole. It is difficult to be any more precise about the date of the layer of the text to which the David and Jonathan narrative originally belonged; it is by no means clear to me that there existed an older version of 1 Samuel 16–2 Samuel 5 that can be dated to the period of the early monarchy as part of an attempt to defend – or even to criticize – David’s rise to the throne, but nor is it clear to me that this material can be dated any more certainly to an alternative point between the time of David and that of the Deuteronom(ist)ic Historian. It also remains most unclear whether 1 Samuel 18:1-4, which I am convinced did not exist in the Hebrew Vorlage underlying the earliest Greek translation, is part of an ancient version of the Hebrew text that reflects warrior customs in the early Iron Age Levant, or is a very late insertion that reflects not only ideas from the Hellenistic period about contemporary or earlier warrior customs, but the direct or indirect influence of older Greek traditions such as we find in Homer, or perhaps even younger Greek traditions, such as those concerned with the Sacred Band of Thebes defeated at Chaeronea by Philip of Macedon. All of this is open to question. Given how ideologically self-contained is the textual stratum of 1 and 2 Samuel in which David and Jonathan feature, it is hardly impossible, for example, that it postdates and is a late insertion into the Deuteronomistic History, especially given that there is no “David and Jonathan narrative” in 1 and 2 Chronicles. There is an interpretive openness in all this but this is, methodologically, of a different kind to the openness of all literary works, a point to which I will return in the conclusion to this chapter. In any case, a firm conclusion on these issues is unnecessary for the interpretation that follows, since what is of concern here is how the text as it stands, the result of diachronic development whose precise details cannot definitively be traced, draws the reader in to engage with it and work towards the production of meaning.149

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4.2. De-limiting the text While the narrative is open to a potentially infinite range of possible construals, its interpretation is not a random process. Doubtless some interactions between text and reader would appear puzzling to readers from different socio-historical contexts, different interpretive communities, bringing different intertexts to bear on the process of interpretation, together with different presumptions about the relationship between text, reader, and world. Many, perhaps most, would appear puzzling to the ancient author(s) of the narrative, to its earliest readers and redactors. But unless we introduce a single authority, or combination of authorities, as a control – such as a plausible reconstruction of an ancient Israelite author, itself dependent on the judgment, albeit not random, of interpreters; or a specified range of authorized intertexts, such as the canon – then it would be difficult to concede that what appears puzzling to one reader, or one interpretive community, can stand as a judgment of the validity of the readings of others. If so, then the task of interpretation may not be to close down the meaning of a text, or to show how its meaning is closed, but rather to work out what makes it possible for the text to be meaningful. This point, which suggests a rather different approach to those critiqued in the previous chapter, shares something in common with Barthes’s understanding of interpretation in S/Z: To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it… The interpretation demanded by a specific text, in its plurality, is in no way liberal: it is not a question of conceding some meanings, of magnanimously acknowledging that each one has its share of truth; it is a question, against all in-difference, of asserting the very existence of plurality, which is not that of the true, the probable, or even the possible.150

Such a claim is in deep tension with all foundationalist approaches to biblical criticism, but, ironically, is in even deeper tension with the kind of relativism that allows more or less every reading its say. Engaging in the act of interpretation on these terms is, moreover, a deeply counterintuitive process for a biblical scholar trained in historical-criticism, since there is ever the pull towards asserting that this meaning is more worthy than that, or that the text, magnanimously, allows these ranges of meanings, but is wary of those. The interpretation that follows, then, attempts to explore how the David and Jonathan narrative is resistant to limits. But there is another sense of “de-limit”:151 where does the David and Jonathan narrative begin and end? One thing is abundantly clear: there is no such thing as the David and Jonathan narrative. What we have instead is a series of blocks



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of text that belong to a much larger complex of tradition.152 These blocks of text represent a narrative programme subsidiary to a more dominant narrative programme, which in 1 and 2 Samuel is concerned with the intertwined fates of the houses of Saul and David. Equally, however, there are indications that the parts of the narrative concerned with David and Jonathan do exhibit characteristics that distinguish them from the rest of the narrative. Most obviously, with the two exceptions of Amnon’s love for Tamar and David’s for Absalom,153 this is the only part of the story of David where the language and theme of “love” – whatever this might mean – predominates.154 In 1 Samuel 18:1, Jonathan re-appears after a long absence. The reader is expected to know who Jonathan is, and must work backwards through the narrative to recall. He first appears alongside Saul in 1 Samuel 13:2, but notably with no introduction. Readers are expected simply to know who he is – from their earlier acquaintance with the narrative in its entirety? from their intertextual or extratextual knowledge of other traditions about Jonathan? – without having the benefit of some equivalent to the rich series of narratives about Saul in 1 Samuel 9:1–11:15. In other words, Jonathan alone is not the focus. He is significant only insofar as what he does, and what is done to him, impacts on the more prominent stories of Saul and David. This is immediately obvious from the fact that Jonathan’s slaying of the Philistine commander in 1 Samuel 13:3 redounds to Saul’s glory, not his own (13:3-4). This continues in 1 Samuel 14, where Jonathan’s actions reflect primarily on the knowledge and character of Saul, and on his relationships with his family, his people, and the god of Israel. When Jonathan appears alongside Merab, Michal, Ahinoam, and Abner in a list of Saul’s sons,155 daughters, wife, and army commander in 14:49-50, the reader is offered a hint that the narrative is not done with Saul’s dependents as key players in his undoing. David, like Jonathan, has been introduced earlier in the narrative. Indeed, in the Masoretic Text he is introduced at least twice,156 as a result of the use of at least two separate traditions of David’s introduction to Saul’s court.157 In 1 Samuel 16:1-13, albeit that this block of text may belong to a late stage in the tradition history of 1 and 2 Samuel,158 David is introduced and anointed as the king-to-be who is to succeed Saul (cf. 1 Sam. 15:28). When David and Jonathan meet in 1 Samuel 18:1-4, then, the reader is aware both of who they are, and that they are presently subsidiary characters in a larger narrative programme, but that one of them, David, is already on the way to becoming one of the two main subjects of this larger narrative programme. To focus on David and Jonathan separately is thus implicitly to read against the grain of the text by choosing

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to make their story the main event.159 Indeed, even to think in terms of a discrete “David and Jonathan narrative” would be to create out of the relevant parts of 1 and 2 Samuel a different kind of text – my text or your text, rather than that of the ancient author(s), redactors, earliest readers, tradents, and so on. If we are to speak of a David and Jonathan narrative at all, it must begin in 1 Samuel 18:1, where the phrase “When he had finished speaking to Saul” (lw)#  l)  rbdl  wtwlkk  yhyw) introduces a new departure. The first part of the narrative ends when “David went out” (dwd )cyw) in 18:5, and immediately we are back in a story where Saul is the main subject: Saul “sent” (wnxl#yw) David in 18:5, and “put him in charge of the warriors” (hmxlmh  y#n)  l(  lw)#  whm#yw). Jonathan does not return until 19:1, where the “David and Jonathan narrative” resumes. Initially Jonathan is the addressee of Saul’s command to him and to Saul’s servants to kill David, a command which the narrator complicates by reminding the reader of Jonathan’s intense attachment to David: “But Jonathan, Saul’s son, was deeply fond of David” (d)m  dwdb  Cpx  lw)#  Nb  Ntnwhyw). It is by specifying that Jonathan was Saul’s son that the narrator introduces a complication: the loyalty Jonathan is bound to show to David under their “covenant” (tyrb) in 18:3 is in conflict with the loyalty he is bound to show to his father, who has commanded him. In Codex Vaticanus, of course, 19:1 is the beginning of the David and Jonathan narrative. Jonathan’s attachment to David is detached from David’s victory over Goliath, and there is as yet no covenant between them, so it is Jonathan’s emotional attachment to David alone, not the covenant between the two men, that complicates the plot. This part of the narrative has ended by 19:8, where an account of two scenes that take place privately between Saul and Jonathan and between Jonathan and David is replaced by a brief notice that war continued and David fought successfully against the Philistines. The narrative resumes in 1 Samuel 20:1, when David flees from Naioth in Ramah, where he had taken refuge from Saul (19:18-24), and makes for wherever Jonathan is. What is obvious is that 20:1 does not pick up directly from 19:7, which in turn does not pick up directly from 18:4. The primary narrative connections between the discrete text units concerned with David and Jonathan are not with one another, but with the connecting portions of narrative in between. What the reader has to do is to make the connections between the individual pericopae so that their cumulative contribution to the main narrative programme can become clear. That the reader is in a position to resist this apparent narratorial expectation is clear from modern scholarship on the Michal “narrative.”



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Feminist scholarship in particular has problematized the way Michal’s story is presented only in fragments,160 and the attempt has been made to restore this character’s voice, which has been so thoroughly suppressed by a (hetero)patriarchal textual tradition. The same motives can hardly be used to justify the re-membering of the fragmented David and Jonathan narrative, since that narrative is, if anything, one that reinforces the very structures of gender and power that feminist scholarship has so justly and incisively critiqued in the story of Michal. It could be argued that, if 1 Samuel 20:30 is taken as an outburst of homophobic rage – as Jobling and Nardelli do,161 for example – then the fragmentation of the David and Jonathan narrative points to the suppression and dis-membering of a positive homosexual relationship. Even if that were the case, however, David and Jonathan are not as obviously marginal in the world of male power as Michal is, as a comparison of 1 Samuel 19:1-7 with 19:11-17 makes clear.162 Where does this section of the narrative end? While there are a number of changes of scene within the narrative, which begins with a lengthy secret conversation between David and Jonathan (20:1-23), shifts inside to Saul’s household during the New Moon festival (20:24-34), and shifts outside again to where David has been hiding (20:35-42), the entire chapter consists of a self-contained narrative. It ends with a final change of scene, in which Jonathan leaves David to return to the town (21:1). The narrative that follows begins with David on the move, as he was in 20:1. This time he seeks refuge with Ahimelech at Nob (21:2a). The similarity between 20:1 and 21:2 in this respect is enough to suggest that this marks a shift to a different section of the narrative. The David and Jonathan narrative does not pick up again until 1 Samuel 23:14. Jonathan comes to David in the wilderness of Ziph. This pericope begins in 23:14, immediately following a self-contained narrative, in which Saul attempts unsuccessfully to trap David in Keilah (23:7-13). In 23:14 the scene changes to David dwelling in the wilderness of Ziph, which is where Jonathan finds him. This section of the narrative ends with David and Jonathan parting, David to Horesh, yet another new place of hiding, and Jonathan back to his home (23:18). This, in fact, is where the David and Jonathan narrative could be said to end, since the two men never meet again. To be sure, there are further references to David and Jonathan. Saul’s reference to Jonathan’s traitorous loyalty to David in 1 Samuel 22:8 would be incomprehensible without earlier depictions of their relationship that could be interpreted in terms of political conspiracy in some form.163 In 2 Samuel 9:1-13, David’s kindness to Mephibosheth would likewise be incomprehensible without

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an earlier part of the narrative that contained David’s promise of loyalty to Jonathan’s house. Jonathan is dead, of course, when David sings his dirge over Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1:19-27. To the reader, however, for David to sing such a dirge in this narrative context would be very puzzling if, earlier in the narrative, substance had not been given to the emotional bond between the two men. All this serves to emphasize how deeply embedded the David and Jonathan narrative is within a larger narrative, in which it is subsidiary to a more dominant narrative programme: the demise of Saul and the transfer of his kingship to David. Thus the David and Jonathan narrative consists of the following textfragments in the Masoretic Text: 1 Samuel 18:1-4; 19:1-7; 20:1-21:1; 23:14-18; 2 Samuel 1:19-27. A separate story could be told – indeed, could have been told in the oral culture of ancient Israel – but to tell such a story based on the arbitrarily defined “final form” of the biblical narrative would involve a decisive contribution from the reader, who must decide to turn a subsidiary narrative programme into either the main narrative programme, or into a separate narrative programme altogether. It would be possible to envision a retelling of the story, in which Saul’s hostility complicated the plot of a narrative concerned with David and Jonathan, rather than vice versa. This, indeed, would be one way of reading Stephen Schecter’s modern epic poem David and Jonathan, though the tragedy of Saul still provides the framework. These text fragments, read together, do not yield a single, coherent narrative programme, but they are taken as the focus for this chapter because it is around the meaning of these fragments that debate has raged concerning the sex lives of David and Jonathan. Just how far, then, is the interpretive indeterminacy a symptom of an openness at the level of the text? 4.3. D/J: an essay 4.3.1.

dwd #pnb hr#qn Ntnwhy #pnw lw)# l) rbdl wtlkk yhyw

When he had finished speaking to Saul, Jonathan’s very self was bound up with David’s…

The David and Jonathan narrative in the Masoretic Text begins in 1 Samuel 18:1-4, where Jonathan is first struck with love for David, but it is immediately clear that this passage cannot be read in isolation. Certainly yhyw can stand at the beginning of a narrative and frequently does (e.g. Jon. 1:1), but here it introduces a temporal clause, “When he had finished speaking to Saul,” that refers to something that was just happening. This binds 18:1-4 to 17:55-58, or rather to the passage that begins



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 167

dwd  t)  lw)#  tw)rkw, itself referring to something that had just hap-

pened, namely David’s combat with Goliath, which Saul had witnessed. It ends with yt#lph t) twkhm part way through the first half, according to the masoretic punctuation, of 18:6.164 The relationship between the whole passage and its wider context is problematic. There is a tension between Ml#wry  wh)byw in 17:54 and wdyb yt#lph #)rw in 17:57. How could David have the Philistine’s head in his hand if he had previously taken it to Jerusalem? This tension has led readers, working on the assumption that the text must either be a consistent, coherent unity as it stands, or separated into pre-existing layers that must themselves be consistent, coherent unities, to posit not only that 17:55–18:6aα belongs to a different layer to 17:51-54, a view that Josephus and the earliest Greek manuscripts corroborate, but that 17:51-54 is anachronistic, since it implies that Jerusalem already belongs to Israel. It is not inconceivable, however, that 17:54 assumes a reader already familiar with the entire story of David’s rise to power and subsequent conquest of Jerusalem, and is pointing out that Jerusalem is the place to which David later brought Goliath’s head.165 This may seem far-fetched, particularly if the phrase that follows (wlh)b M# wylk t)w) denotes one of two things David did immediately after killing Goliath: he took Goliath’s head to Jerusalem, but put his armour in his tent (though this implies an extraordinary journey between killing Goliath and returning to his tent,166 unless these two things are not listed in chronological order). A further problem in 17:57 is who is holding Goliath’s head: David, Abner, or Saul? It can be none of them if Goliath’s head is in Jerusalem, of course, but the text assumes for the moment that it is not. It is unlikely to be Saul, for how would he have acquired Goliath’s head? We might assume David, since he is the one who did the killing, but it could be Abner. This would imply that the text has not told us that Abner took Goliath’s head from David, something readers would have to perceive as a gap in the text and imagine for themselves. This is not an inconceivable scenario, since Abner is after all leader of the – whose?167 – army, but the fact that this scenario is at least imaginable, and not excluded by the text, serves to highlight our distance from whatever ancient martial code could have governed the introduction of a victorious individual warrior to his king by the chief of the army. In the phrase lw)#  l)  rbdl  wtlkk, the reader can immediately identify a connection with a conversation that has just taken place. But is this conversation represented in the narrative or not? The 3m.s. suffix to wtlkk tells us that a single man was speaking with Saul. Among the men named in this pericope, we must choose between Abner, David,

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Jesse, and Jonathan who has, however, not appeared explicitly since ch. 14. Abner speaks to Saul in 17:55-56, but he is not the most recent person to speak to Saul. The last person we are told spoke to Saul is David, who is perhaps the likeliest choice since he is then named again in 18:1 as the object of Jonathan’s love. That there is a gap is not only suggested by a close reading of the Masoretic Text, but corroborated in the history of translation. While Targum Jonathan, Luther, Tyndale, the kjv, and Buber and Rosenzweig, for example, preserve the ambiguity, others close the text down. Thus the Lucianic recension reads kai\ e0ge/neto w(j ei0sh=lqen Daui\d pro\j Saoul kai\ sunete/lesen lalw~n au0tw|~, ei1den au0to\n ’Iwnaqan kai\ sunede/qh h9 yuxh/ au0tou= th=| yuxh=| Daui\d, “When David had come to Saul and finished speaking to him, Jonathan saw David and his soul was bound to David’s soul.”168 Were we to choose Jesse, we would have to assume that rbdl wtwlkk refers to a conversation between Saul and Jesse that the narrative does not represent.169 We would, though, surely expect Jesse to be referred to explicitly, and there is no sense that Jesse is even present. Indeed, the story of David and Goliath implies the reverse.170 We could, however, choose Jonathan. This is not impossible, since we are immediately told that Jonathan’s #pn was bound to David’s. Jonathan’s #pn is the subject of the nifal verb hr#qn, so why could Jonathan himself not be the referent of the suffix of wtwlkk and thus the subject of rbdl? We would, of course, have to imagine a conversation between Jonathan and Saul that the narrative does not represent, which, like with the possibility of Saul speaking with Jesse mentioned above, seems uneconomical. The reader’s involvement here is to pick up on gaps in the text and to reject possibilities that seem contextually less likely than others, even if they cannot be rejected with total certainty. But the reader also has to draw on imagination, transposing the scene into both a visual and an aural image of a conversation that the written text portrays in only one dimension. There is a more obvious and perplexing gap in the narrative here, that requires a degree of emotional imagination on the reader’s part. Why did Jonathan’s #pn become bound to David’s? The Masoretic Text does not say. One possibility is that Jonathan has realized that, as a warrior capable of defeating Goliath, David also posed a threat to the continuing rule of the Saulide dynasty, and took control of the situation by making a covenant with David and securing his favour and loyalty.171 This is possible, but does not account for the fact that the first thing that is said of Jonathan here is that he “loved” David. This precedes their covenant, it is not a consequence of it, which leaves the question open: why does Jonathan “love” David? Another possibility, also connected with David’s



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 169

defeat of Goliath, is that Jonathan is drawn by David’s “beserk” behaviour to devote himself to this charismatic warrior.172 The Lucianic recension, however, connects Jonathan’s attachment to David with seeing him: “Jonathan saw him and his soul was bound to David’s soul” (ei1den au0to\n ’Iwnaqan kai\ sunede/qh h9 yuxh/ au0tou= th=| yuxh=| Daui\d). This highlights the material blindness of the text. The reader has to visualize the meeting of Jonathan and David, thereby transposing the written text mentally into another medium. In this way the reader may be invited to gaze, with Jonathan, at David,173 but what does this gaze connote: desire? Will this desire be requited or not? Recognition? But recognition of what: David’s beauty, his martial prowess, his manifest potential to replace Saul as king? Are these possible connotations separate, or are they bound together under the idea of manly beauty?174 The reader is also required to work intertextually with other parts of the narrative that refer to David’s physical beauty.175 This, of course, assumes that the kai/ in the sequence ei1den kai\ sunede/qh connotes causality, but if the reader makes this move then the Lucianic recension becomes open to the possibility of a love between men based on physical attraction. The visual dimension was also clear to Abraham Cowley. In the Davideis, Cowley rewrites and expands 1 Samuel 18:1 in a rich sequence of heroic couplets that focus on both the effect on Jonathan of David’s physical appearance, and Jonathan’s concomitant perception of David’s future kingship. But more then all, more then Himself he lov’ed The man whose worth his Fathers Hatred mov’ed. For when the noble youth at Dammin stood Adorn’d with sweat, and painted gay with Blood, Jonathan pierce’d him through with greedy Eye And understood the future Majestie Then destin’ed in the glories of his look; He saw, and strait was with amazement strook, To see the strength, the feature, and the grace Of his young limbs; he saw his comely face Where Love and Rev’erence so well mingled were; And Head, already crown’d with golden haire. He saw what Mildness his bold Spi’rit did tame, Gentler than Light, yet powerful as a Flame. He saw his Valour by their Safety prov’ed; He saw all this, and as he saw, he Lov’ed.176

Cowley is responding to a dimension of the text that invites the cooperation of the reader, but is also drawing on the deep well of his own

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intertextual competence, as his note on Davideis 2.37 makes clear.177 Thus his description, focalized through the character Jonathan,178 of David’s head as “already crown’d with golden haire,” is based on the description of David given by Josephus in Ant. 6.8.1 (§164) as “a boy of fair complexion, with piercing eyes and in other ways beautiful” (pai=j canqo\j me\n th\n xro/an gorgo\j de\ ta_j o1yeij kai\ kalo\j a!llwj).179 The phrase “as he saw, he Lov’d” then becomes the linkword to a lengthy section on the nature of love (Davideis 2.42-91). When the poem returns to David and Jonathan, it is clear, apparently in contrast to the Masoretic Text, that theirs is a complete union of mutual love, a description that is presumably an elaboration of “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”180 Although Cowley did not complete his twelve projected books of the Davideis, and thus never rendered David’s dirge in 2 Samuel 1:19-27, the union between the two men is compared with the union of marriage and proclaimed to be truer.181 This, of course, seems to echo the comparison between Jonathan’s love and the love of women in 2 Samuel 1:26, and seems to anticipate Forster’s interweaving of David and Jonathan with Shakespeare’s “marriage of true minds” in The Longest Journey.182 What about dwd  #pnb  hr#qn  Ntnwhy  #pnw? What does r#q denote and connote? The nifal only occurs in the Tanakh here and in Nehemiah 3:38, where it refers to the joining up, that is the repairing, of the wall of Jerusalem. But the qal is used shortly afterwards to refer to the joining together of Sanballat, Tobiah, Arabs, Ammonites, and Ashdodites in conspiracy to prevent the Jews from continuing their work (Neh. 4:2). This sense appears in Samuel. In 1 Samuel 22:8 Saul accuses his servants of having “conspired against” him (yl( Mklk Mtr#q) because no-one told him either about the covenant Jonathan had made with David, or about Jonathan rising up against him with David. The reference to the covenant here presumably alludes to 1 Samuel 20:8, and perhaps also 18:3, though Saul is not obviously present when David and Jonathan cut their covenant, and may have imagined for himself what the motivation and intended consequences of this alliance are. His accusation leads Doeg to implicate Ahimelech, whom Saul then accuses of conspiring with David against him (y#y  Nbw  ht)  yl(  Mtr#q  hml, 22:13). In the linear narrative sequence of the Masoretic Text, Saul’s expressions of paranoia follow the binding of Jonathan and David, and appear somehow to be a consequence of that. But if 1 Samuel 18:3 belongs redactionally to a later layer of the text than 22:8, 13, the use of r#q in 18:3 might have been inspired by its use in 22:8, 13 and inserted to be read as an anticipatory commentary on Saul’s state of mind there.



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 171

There is also a syntactical difference. In 1 Samuel 22:8, 13 the phrase is l( r#q, “conspire against”183 rather than b r#qn, “be bound to,” but the use of the same root several times in the narrative could suggest the two senses may be read in light of each other.184 So, does the motivation for the binding of the souls of Jonathan and David imply a conspiring against the man to whom they both owe loyalty, or is it a consequence of it? Is Saul’s belief that his son is conspiring with his servant a faithful, or a paranoid construal of their mutual binding? Taken alone, the phrases b r#qn and l( r#q would seem relatively unambiguous, but juxtaposed within the Saul narrative, where they both pertain to the relationship between Saul’s state of mind and the nature of the bonds between those who owe loyalty to him, the connotations of the two phrases seem to bleed into each other. The resonances persist through 1 and 2 Samuel, resurfacing in the context of Absalom’s rebellion, which is described by the narrator as a “conspiracy” (r#q) in 2 Samuel 15:12. In 2 Samuel 15:31, the narrator tells us that David has been told what the reader already knows – in a moment where focalization slips between narrator, characters, and reader – that Ahitophel is among the “conspirators” (Myr#q) with Absalom. The root r#q only appears in 1 and 2 Samuel in connection with the internal collapse of the House of Saul and the internal collapse of the House of David, leaving the reader to probe the relationship between them. Is Absalom’s conspiracy against David analogous with Jonathan’s against Saul, and if so in what sense, and to what extent? They are both rebellions against fathers who occupy the position of king. Does the difference between the focalization of Absalom’s rebellion, where David grasps the nature of the rebellion in more or less the same way the narrator does, and the focalization of Saul’s paranoia, where Saul perhaps falsely perceives his son’s bond with his servant to be traitorously conspiratorial, determine the extent of the analogy? Does David perceive Absalom’s rebellion the way he does because it to some extent replays the alliance against Saul to which he was once a party? The closest analogy to the syntax of 1 Samuel 18:1 is found in Genesis 44:30, where the phrase w#pnb hrw#q w#pnw, “and his very self is bound to his very self ”185 refers to the indissoluble filial bond between Jacob and his son Benjamin. Here we are clearly in the domain of the personal, and the recognition of commonalities between this verse and 1 Samuel 18:1 has a long pedigree.186 These are the only passages in the Tanakh where this idiom is used to refer to the bond between two people, and in both cases, this bond is associated with “love.” Thus in Genesis 44:20 Jacob “loves” Benjamin (wbh)  wyb)w). The problem is that we only have two

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occurrences of this idiom in the Tanakh that refer to interpersonal relationships. To appeal to Genesis 44:30 in order to interpret 1 Samuel 18:1 would be to set up a hierarchy between them: because b r#q refers to a f(am)ilial bond in Genesis 44:30, it probably refers to a familial, perhaps fraternal (cf. 2 Sam. 1:26), at any rate non-sexual bond.187 But this does not follow. Rather, both passages could be using b  r#q to represent some form of close personal bond. On the basis of the available evidence we cannot determine whether, in 1 Samuel 18:1, Jonathan’s bond with David is being portrayed through the metaphorical use of language more commonly used for familial bonds, or not. We have no idea what the parameters, if any, of the usage of this idiom in connection with interpersonal relationships might have been, nor whether Genesis 44:30 or 1 Samuel 18:1 would have more closely approximated the most natural or most common usage in the living language whose remains have been laid out for our scrutiny. What is noteworthy is that r#q shifts between the domains of the personal and the political, depending on context.188 Rather than trying to pin the meaning of the text down by binding it to one of these domains rather than the other, what would happen if we were to allow the text to remain unbound, de-limited? One path the reader might take would be to interrogate the relationship between the personal and the political. The reader might ask what the implications of a personal bond are in political terms, when the bond between two men on a personal level brings one of the men into a royal household to which the other already belongs. The question of the relationship between David and Jonathan, then, becomes not whether the relationship is personal – perhaps erotic, perhaps sexual, perhaps both, perhaps neither, perhaps enacted differently at different times and under different circumstances – rather than political, but in what sense the literary representation of this relationship calls the boundary between these domains into question. 4.3.2.

w#pnk Ntnwhy wbh)yw

…and Jonathan loved him as his very self.

In classical Hebrew the language of “love” (verb: bh); noun: hbh)) and “lovers” (qal: Mybh); piel: Mybh)m) is, in Susan Ackerman’s words, “tinged with ambiguity and a certain fluidity of meaning.”189 It is not clear in what sense Saul (1 Sam. 16:21) and Jonathan (1 Sam. 18:1, 3; perh. 20:17; 2 Sam. 1:26) “love” David. Certainly bh) can refer to the sexual love of a man for a woman or women. In 1 Samuel and the Song of Songs it also refers to the sexual love of a woman or women for a man. Yet it is



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unclear how far these sexual uses of bh) are relevant to the love of Saul and Jonathan for David. Contextual, rather than statistical factors are what matters here: a great deal depends on which (inter)texts are invoked to disambiguate 1 Samuel 18:1, 3; 20:17; 2 Samuel 1:26, and to which contexts those (inter)texts belong. In what follows, the more detailed discussions of the meanings of words are printed in smaller type, not – pace Zehnder – for the sake of the delicate sensibilities of intended readers, but so that readers can, if necessary, skip dense sections that might lead to missing the forest for the trees. bh) is used of the feelings of one family member for another, such as a father or mother for a son.190 It is not simply that bh) denotes the love

of a parent for a child, because where the “love” of the father for one son is juxtaposed with the love of the mother for another son, as in Genesis 25:28, the implicit question is how the two loves are going to conflict, not what sort of love is being referred to. On one occasion,191 bh) is used of one woman’s love for another woman.192 bh) is certainly used with sexual connotations in portrayals of male-female relationships,193 but while bh) is used most frequently of a man’s love for a woman,194 and – more rarely – of a woman’s, or more than one woman’s love for a man,195 it is not always clear how far the sexual nuances of such love are to the fore, rather than, say, connotations of companionship,196 or of the preference for one woman over another.197 In a number of places bh) is used of a man’s feelings for a woman, but in contexts of sexual violence, suggesting that the verb can refer to physical attraction without necessarily connoting any depth of emotional sensitivity and commitment. Alternatively, bh) could connote emotional sensitivity and commitment, but through irony, a verb that normally bears these connotations being used in a context of appalling violence in order to stress their absence.198 The use of “love” to render bh) becomes problematic here. To use a word other than “love” when translating or exegeting Genesis 34 or 2 Samuel 13 risks falsely implying that something different must be in mind in those texts than in other texts that use bh).199 Danna Nolan Fewell and David Gunn illustrate this when they remark that in 2 Samuel 13, “Amnon’s protestations of love are shown to be merely lust.”200 To explain the use of bh) in 2 Samuel 13, Fewell and Gunn need two expressions in English – “love” and “merely lust” – while the reader who finds this distinction in 2 Samuel 13 must find it in the interaction between a single Hebrew verb – bh) – and its particular narrative context. It is frequently unclear whether there is an implied distinction such as we have in modern English between “love,” “be in love,” “fall in love,” and even “make love.”201 Other interpersonal relationships involve “love,” where it can be difficult to disentangle the nuances of emotional attachment and loyalty, as well as the connection between these things and social status.202

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The Love of David and Jonathan Where bh) is followed by l rather than t), the verb may indicate loving action towards someone,203 rather than simply the emotion of love, but this nevertheless begs the question of how the emotion of “love” relates to loving action towards another person. There is an echo of this where YHWH “loves” the sojourner (rg) and as a result gives him food and clothing.204 YHWH here models an attitude and an action that Israel might be expected to emulate. There are rare occasions when YHWH loves a single human being, or a group of people other than Jacob/Israel as a nation.205 bh) can be used of a thing,206 or an action,207 of which a person, or occa-

sionally an animal,208 is exceptionally fond. It is not clear, though, whether

bh), which elsewhere can connote intense emotional attachment, could

under mundane circumstances be used to indicate strong liking, much as “love” at present can in English, or whether such uses would have been understood as hyperbole. The nifal can be used to mean something like “be loved” – and the nifal participle can thus mean “beloved”209 – but without necessarily specifying either the nature of the love in question, or the agent who loves.210 An abstract noun such as “justice” (+p#m) or “loving kindness” (dsx) can be the object of love.211 A city can also be the object of love,212 as can YHWH’s temple.213 YHWH’s devotees love his “victory.”214 bh) can be used to express loyalty, with “friend” ((r) as the subject, but with no direct object,215 and it is possible for one to love one’s self.216 An extension of this is perhaps the use of the hifil in the sense of making oneself loved.217 In an intriguing passage in Ben Sira, which could well shed light on 1 Samuel 18:1, love is associated with likeness: as all creatures love their own kind, so human beings love those who are like them.218 In Qoheleth 3:8 bh) is used with neither subject nor object, but simply as the diametrical opposite of “hate” ()n#). Many occurrences of bh) that indicate Israel’s covenant loyalty to YHWH,219 or YHWH’s covenant “love” for Israel or Zion,220 are due, of course, to the dominant concerns of the redactors and collectors of the books of the Tanakh and tell us nothing necessarily about the meaning of bh) in the David and Jonathan narrative: unless the reader is of a mind to make this connection. If this usage is of any significance in this connection, it might be that Israel’s covenant loyalty for YHWH shares with political commitment between persons a common derivation from the language of kinship, which in turn ultimately lies behind the usage of the language of “love” in the context of ancient Near Eastern political treaties.221 Notably, where bh) is used of love for superiors or royal equals, it is not always clear where the boundary between political loyalty and personal affection actually lies,222 particularly since bh) can simply be used for friendship or loyal association, where the nature and degree of affinity are left unspecified.223 This slippage between personal attachment and political loyalty perhaps results from the origin of the language of love in the language of kinship,224 which could have had both personal and political ramifications.



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 175 There are places where several connotations seem to be at work at once. This implies that bh) must have had the potential to be construed in many different ways depending on context. Thus when Israel in Jeremiah 2:25 is quoted as saying “I love strangers” (Myrz  ytbh)), bh) simultaneously connotes sexual desire, religious devotion, and political loyalty: sexual desire is a metaphor for both religious devotion (to gods other than YHWH) and political loyalty (to foreign powers such as Egypt). This depends equally on the fact that bh) is used elsewhere to refer to religious devotion (to YHWH)225 and to political alliance.226 To take another example, in Hosea 11:1, YHWH seems to have loved, or perhaps fallen in love with Israel when Israel was a young man (r(n), which seems to invoke the covenant love of YHWH for the people Israel, but in light of the metaphor of human love between two persons, in this case that of an older man loving a younger man, either the love of a father for his son, or just possibly the quasi-paiderastic love of an older man for a male youth.227

In 1 and 2 Samuel, at least according to the narrator, David is the object of the love of others: Saul (appar. 1 Sam. 16:21), Jonathan (1 Sam. 18:1, 3; perh. 20:17), Michal (1 Sam. 18:20, 28),228 all Israel and Judah (1 Sam. 18:16), and all Saul’s servants (1 Sam. 18:22). On one occasion it seems that David’s voice tells us he has been the object of another’s love (2 Sam. 1:26) – though it could be his own love for the other – unless, of course, he is being disingenuous. It is not clear whether bh) is used in the same sense in each case, or whether more than one sense is in play, even in a single verse. But it is not simply what bh) implies in these instances but how “love” functions in the narrative. The reader of 1 and 2 Samuel has encountered the verb bh) already. The re-reader of 1 and 2 Samuel may read 1 Samuel 18:1 in light of the whole narrative, and perhaps in particular David’s dirge, which so honours Jonathan’s love (2 Sam. 1:26). A reader may be bringing all sorts of interpretants to 18:1, based on the sense of “love” in other Hebrew texts. The first question might concern the relationship between Jonathan’s love for David and the love of Saul for David. In 16:19-22 a transaction takes place between Saul and Jesse through the mediation of Saul’s messengers that leads to David leaving his father’s house and becoming part of Saul’s household instead. This anticipates, but is in tension with 18:2, where, perhaps in consequence of Jonathan’s love for David, Saul takes David and will not let him return to his father’s house. Saul is said to have “loved” David “very much” – though strictly speaking it is ambiguous whether it is Saul who loves David, or David who loves Saul in the phrase d)m whbh)yw229 – leading to David becoming his armour bearer. The questions that might be raised here include: how does Saul’s love for

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The Love of David and Jonathan

David relate to Jonathan’s love for David? How does Jonathan’s love for David relate to his relationship with his father, and to Saul’s relationship with his son? Given that it is the narrator’s access to the interiority of these characters that has made us aware of Saul’s and Jonathan’s love for David, can the reader infer that they are each aware of the others’ feelings, or not? Is love, in any of these cases, disinterested? Does Saul only love David because he soothes his moods with sweet music and bears his armour? Why does Jonathan love David? It is disinterested love that we find in the Mishnah (m. Avot 5:16) in connection with David and Jonathan:230 hny) rbdb hywlt hny)#w hbh) hl+b rbd l+b rbdb hywlt )yh# hbh) lk hywlt hny)#w rmtw Nwnm) tbh) wz rbdb hywlth hbh) )yh wzy) Mlw(l hl+b Ntnwhyw dwd tbh) wz rbdb

Every love that is attached to something, when that thing ceases to exist, the love ceases to exist as well. But love that is not attached to something never ceases to exist. Whose love is it, then, that is attached to something? It is the love of Amnon and Tamar. Whose love is not attached to something? It is the love of David and Jonathan.

There is a clear recognition here that the use of bh) in one part of Samuel may be read in connection with its use in other parts. It is also significant that the construct tbh) governs a compound nomen rectum: Ntnwhyw  dwd, “[of ] David-and-Jonathan.” This is significant because it obscures the direction of love that is found in the biblical text, which, the niggling ambiguities of 1 Samuel 20:17; 2 Samuel 1:26 notwithstanding, tends to portray David as the object of Jonathan’s love. The biblical text is open to the reader’s wrestling with the question of disinterested love, but makes it possible for the reader either to conclude that their relationship was disinterested (thus m. Avot 5:16), or that one or other of the pair had a greater investment in that love than the other. In David’s case, Jonathan’s love could be manipulated for material and political gain; in Jonathan’s case, David’s loyalty could be manipulated in order to protect the house of Saul from a threat to its stability. A last point on 1 Samuel 18:1 concerns the phrase w#pnk wbh)yw, “and he loved him as his very self,” a similar phrase appearing in 20:17. This is an unusual, though not unique, construction in classical Hebrew. The noun #pn is apparently a circumlocution for the subject: “he loved him as himself.” This is obscured in the Lucianic recension, which is dependent on a conventional association between #pn and the Greek noun yuxh/, “soul,” presumably under the influence of 1 Samuel 20:17 (lxx) (o3ti h0ga/phsen yuxh\n a0gapw~ntoj au0to/n), and perhaps also Deuteronomy 13:7 (lxx) (o9 fi/loj o9 i1soj th=j yuxh=j sou).231 This introduces an idea



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 177

into the text that was not present in the Hebrew until it became possible to read the idea of a “soul” into the noun #pn. An arguably closer Greek idiom is found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where parents are said to love their children “as themselves” (w(j e9autou/j) because, having been separated from them, they are in a sense “other selves” (e3teroi au0toi/).232 Common upbringing and similarity of age contribute to friendship, and people brought up together tend to be “comrades” (e9tai=roi). Comradely love is thus similar to that of brothers (h9 a0delfikh\ th?= e9tairikh?= o9moiou=ntai).233 A friend is, in a sense, “another self ” (a!lloj au0to/j), and thus a good man relates to his friend as if to himself (pro\j to\n fi/lon e1xein w#sper pro\j au9to/n).234 A closer translation of this phrase in 1 Samuel 18:1 than that of the Lucianic recension would thus have been something like kai\ ’Iwnaqan e0fi/lhsen/h0ga/phsen au0to\n w(j e9auto/n. There are broadly similar phrases in Hebrew. In the Song of Songs, the female lover refers to “the one my very self loves” (y#pn hbh)#),235 which on the surface differs from 1 Samuel 18:1,236 on account of the fact that y#pn is the subject of hbh). Yet it is not so different, because if #pn in 1 Samuel 18:1 is a circumlocution for Jonathan then in both cases one person is said to love another: it is just that the idiom is slightly different in each case, bh) with an object suffix in the one case, and bh) with y#pn as the subject and the relative pronoun standing in for the object in the other. Proverbs 19:8 says that one who acquires wisdom (bl  hnq) is one who “loves himself” (w#pn  bh)), and in Deuteronomy 13:7 the “friend who is as yourself” (K#pnk r#) K(r)237 is placed alongside a man’s wife and kinsfolk as close people who might tempt him to worship gods other than YHWH. But the precise phrase #pnk bh) is not attested again until Ben Sira,238 raising questions about the date of 1 Samuel 18:1-4: was it written in the Hellenistic period, and does it therefore reflect the idiomatic Hebrew of Palestine in the Hellenistic period? An even more intriguing question is whether both 1 Samuel 18:1-4 and Ben Sira in Hebrew are influenced by the kind of Greek Aristotle used to discuss friendship, but the evidence is too slight to be sure, especially given that a very similar phrase is known in Akkadian much earlier.239 There are no reasons to think 1 Samuel 18:1-4 is directly dependent on the seventh-century adê document confirming the succession to Esarhaddon, though the closeness of the language of line 268 to 1 Samuel 18:1, 3; 20:17 does at least suggest that a similar idiom to the Hebrew #pnk bh) was current enough in the Akkadian behind the treaty to be used in a command to show political loyalty. That is, the equivalent phrases in both 1 Samuel 18:1, 3; 20:17 and the succession treaty of Esarhaddon are secondary to the use of those phrases in other contexts in the linguistic systems to which they belong.240

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The Love of David and Jonathan 4.3.3.

wyb) tyb bw#l wntn )lw )whh Mwyh lw)# whxqyw

And Saul took him that day, and would not let him return to his father’s house.

In what sense could Saul have “taken” David, and to what purpose? A complete word study of xql would be unwieldy, since this verb occurs 1079 times in extant Hebrew texts before the Mishnah.241 We need, then, to pay attention to context, but 1 Samuel 18:1-4 is nothing if not laconic. It is not made clear why Saul takes David, particularly given that David had already entered Saul’s household (16:14-23), nor is it clear whether Saul’s taking David is dependent on, or separate from, Jonathan’s love for him. The two things are juxtaposed, but the question whether there is a causal relationship between them is one that can only be resolved by the reader. What is clear is that by the end of 18:2 (mt), David no longer belongs to the household of Jesse, but to that of Saul. Thus the result of his being taken is that he has similar status in Saul’s household to Jonathan and Michal: in terms of fictive kinship, he is Jonathan’s “brother” (cf. 2 Sam. 1:26) and Saul’s “son” (cf. 1 Sam. 24:17; 26:21, 25).242 The language that is used is akin to that for marriage. The similarity is partly due to the use of the verb xql, “take,” which is the word used for a man taking a woman for the purposes of sex and procreation,243 or as a (foster)daughter.244 It can be used of a woman giving a socially inferior woman to a man for sex and procreation,245 and of males (including YHWH) taking one or more women for another man’s use.246 Its antonym Ntn, “give” can be used in these contexts as well,247 as can )wb hifil, “bring.”248 In all these cases the linguistic evidence, geographically and chronologically diverse as it is, bears the imprint of codes connected with sex, gender, social status, and economic power: in each case, the function of women is as pawns in the socio-economic and political transactions of men. The similarity with the language of “marriage” extends to the juxtaposition within this passage of xql, “take” with tyrb, “covenant,” and to the juxtaposition in the Masoretic Text of this passage with ch. 20, where this language is brought into association with the swearing of oaths ((b#). This is exactly what we find in Ezekiel 16:8, a text that uses the metaphor of marriage for the relationship between YHWH and Jerusalem, in which YHWH “swears an oath” (Kl (b#)w) with Jerusalem and “comes into a covenant” with her (Kt) tyrbb )wb)w). Disturbingly, the imagery in that text, which is explicitly sexual, seems to be of YHWH betrothing himself to his own adoptive daughter, unless he is a jealously protective father determined to prevent her leaving his b)  tyb to have sex with other men (but cf. 16:32, 38).



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 179

Of course, it would not be entirely justified simply to lift these usages out of the context of male-female unions and plonk them into an interpretation of 1 Samuel 18:2, but the use of the same language does need to be explained. In 18:2 Saul takes a young man into his house not simply for himself, but apparently for his son. The use of xql might suggest an analogy with marriage, but by invoking this analogy there is a danger of anachronism.249 It need not be the case that language primarily belonging to the domain of opposite-sex marriage is being used metaphorically to portray David’s relationship with Jonathan, but rather that both the taking of a woman to be a man’s wife and the taking of a man into another man’s household (for whatever reason) effect the transfer of a person from one kinship context in which loyalty was owed to the man at the head of a kinship group (i.e. Jesse) to a different context in which loyalty was owed to the man at the head of a different kinship group (i.e. Saul). They are thus portrayed using similar language. It would be better to regard the modern English category “marriage” as altogether irrelevant to the analysis of 1 and 2 Samuel, even for relationships such as those David had with Michal, Abigail, Ahinoam, and his other women. While there are terms in Hebrew that are used distinctively in some contexts for relationships created by male-female unions – for example, “man’s primary woman” (h#)), which is the general word for “woman,” whether in a relationship or not, and “man’s secondary woman” (#glyp); “father-in-law” (Nt'xo), “son-in-law” (Ntfxf), and “daughter-in-law” (hlk); “take as sexual partner [of a man taking a woman]” (l(b) – the language used for David’s union with Michal and that used for his union with Jonathan do not belong to entirely separate domains, and in any case, in the cases of the terms just cited it is not obviously the case that the male-female relationship itself is socially central, but rather that the male-female relationship is a means of establishing and cementing socially central relationships between men.250 To be sure, as the narrative plays out the relationships between David and Jonathan and between David and Michal issue in different social consequences for the actors (but the same fate for Saul). Yet with the possible exception of 2 Samuel 1:26,251 the language of 1 and 2 Samuel does not point to a completely firm ontological distinction between these two relationships.252 Thus when this narrative is interpreted by someone native to a context in which different language would customarily be used to distinguish strongly between male-female bonds and male-male bonds, it is easy to see why David’s bond with Jonathan could be taken as equivalent, on some level, to a “heterosexual” marriage. Yet that is to impose anachronistic categories and distinctions on the text. By the same token,

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furthermore, the Hebrew does not make it clear whether or not it is open to being understood as denoting a sexual union between David and Jonathan. Partly this is because even when the same language is used with reference to male-female unions sexual desire as such is not necessarily the primary connotation.253 We simply do not know enough about the boundaries of the kind of “comradeship” (another etic term!) represented by David and Jonathan, or the language appropriate to represent it, in the Israel portrayed by 1 and 2 Samuel, or the Israel – or Judah, or Yehud – in which 1 and 2 Samuel were written. 4.3.4.

w#pnk wt) wtbh)b tyrb dwdw Ntnwhy trkyw

And Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his very self.

Jonathan and David make a covenant, because “he” – Jonathan?254 or David?255 – loved him as himself. But how does this relate to what precedes?256 Is Saul present when this covenant is cut, or not?257 Saul has just taken David into his own house, and prevented him – permanently? or for a limited period of time? – from returning to the house of Jesse. His status is the equivalent of other women and men in Saul’s household: he belongs to Saul, effectively as his property. For Jonathan to make a covenant with David raises the question: will Jonathan’s devotion to David – personal, political, or an interweaving of both? – disrupt the relationships both he and David have with his father, and if so with what consequences? The covenant between Jonathan and David re-appears in 1 Samuel 20:8, and again in 23:18. Unlike 18:3, in the other two passages YHWH is explicitly invoked. What is not clear is whether these are three separate moments of covenant making, whether the making of the first covenant in any way involved YHWH, whether the reference to the hwhy  tyrb in 20:8 is an allusion back to the initial covenant in 18:3, and what the implications of the first covenant are. This is complicated by the fact that 18:3 does not exist in the earliest Greek manuscripts, leaving 20:8 to refer to an earlier covenant whose ratification has not yet been described. Was 18:3, then, part of an insertion into the Hebrew text in an attempt to remedy this apparent gap in the narrative, or was 18:3 an original part of the text that for some reason dropped out before the earliest Greek translation was made, leaving 20:8 to refer to a covenant making that is not otherwise described in the lxx? The covenant made by Jonathan and David here is associated with the language of “love.” In treaty contexts, the language of “love” tends to denote loyalty to the superior party to the treaty, and is a condition



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 181

of fulfilling the treaty. But that is not obviously the case here. Later, the phrase dsx  h#( will denote covenant loyalty. Here, however, Jonathan and David make a covenant because of one man’s love for the other (w#pnk  wt)  wtbh)b). The love of one man for the other is the reason why the covenant is made,258 not a sign of honouring the covenant, which seriously compromises any attempt to see this as a political covenant pure and simple. In the Tanakh, Ben Sira, and the Qumran scrolls, tyrb is frequently associated with covenants between YHWH and Israel.259 The converse of this is represented by YHWH’s prohibition against Israel making a covenant with either the peoples of Canaan, or with their gods.260 Echoing both these uses are the few passages in the Latter Prophets where the covenant relationship between YHWH and Israel is portrayed using both the noun tyrb and the metaphor of a binding relationship between a man and a woman.261 Underlying this is the use of tyrb and related language in connection with human relationships between men and women akin to what we would term “marriage” in modern English.262 YHWH – or Elohim, El Shaddai, or El – is also associated with a covenant relationship with individual humans or groups of humans, which extends to their descendants.263 With respect to the covenant YHWH has with David and with the Levites, connotations of permanence and imperishability are brought to the fore in Jeremiah 33:20-22, 23-26 by means of a comparison between this covenant and the covenant that is supposed to exist between YHWH and the day and the night. But the relationship between YHWH and humans is only portrayed as a covenant relationship by analogy with covenants, or treaties, between humans and other humans. There are many of these in the Tanakh,264 including 1 and 2 Samuel.265 Occasionally YHWH – or Elohim – is invoked in connection with such interhuman covenants.266 In one passage, YHWH condemns Tyre for not remembering “a/the covenant of brothers” (Myx) tyrb),267 echoing the language of brotherhood in 2 Samuel 1:26. There are, finally, anomalous uses of tyrb that do not denote a relationship either between YHWH and humans, or between humans.268 These uses do, however, derive by analogy from the use of tyrb with reference to interhuman relationships.

There is nothing to suggest unequivocally that the covenant between David and Jonathan has anything to do with covenants elsewhere between YHWH and Israel. Such a connection is made possible by the shape and structure of the canon. The closest analogues are texts in which two humans make covenants with one another, a point which will be reinforced when we look at 20:8 (cf. 23:18). Yet even these texts are only analogous in relative terms, because none of them represents a situation in which two warriors in the king’s household make a covenant with one another, and none of them is sealed by one party stripping off

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certain items of his apparel and handing them to the other (18:4). None of the others is said to be motivated by the love of one party for the other. We are dealing with an anomalous text whose interpretation cannot – or cannot as yet – be decisively closed down by drawing on available intertexts from the Tanakh and the ancient Near East. The noun hbh) occurs far more rarely than the cognate verb bh). The noun appears five times in the David and Jonathan narrative in connection with Jonathan’s love for David. In 1 Samuel 18:3, it is the motivation for their covenant. In 20:17 love for David is the motivation for Jonathan continuing to “make David swear” ((b# hifil), presumably to remain loyal to Jonathan’s descendants (cf. 20:15), though the syntax of this verse is ambiguous. In 2 Samuel 1:26 David honours Jonathan’s love, though Ktbh), “your love” is most ambiguous: is this Jonathan’s love for David (subjective genitive), or David’s love for Jonathan (objective genitive), or their love for one another?269 Jonathan’s hbh) – whatever this amounts to – seems to act as a Leitwort through the narrative, and the reader is left to make the links between these verses. As in 1 Samuel 18:3; 20:17, the noun is used in collocation with the cognate verb in 2 Samuel 13, though in a slightly different syntactical structure. In 2 Samuel 13:15, the hatred with which Amnon hated Tamar (h)n# r#) h)n#h) after he had raped her exceeded the love with which he had previously loved her (hbh)  r#)  hbh)). Amnon is earlier said to have “loved” (bh)) Tamar (2 Samuel 13:1, 4), but in contrast with 1 Samuel 18:3; 20:17 Amnon is never said to love Tamar as himself (w#pnk, 18:3), or with his very own love (w#pn tbh), 20:17). Presumably it is the similarities and differences between these two narratives that lies behind the comparison suggested in m. Avot 5:16. In any case, the fact that hbh) carries sexual connotations in the context of 2 Samuel 13:1-22 does not entail that those connotations be associated with hbh) in 1 Samuel 18:3; 20:17; 2 Samuel 1:26, because the noun acquires those connotations by association with its literary context. On the other hand, 2 Samuel 13 offers very clear evidence that it is possible for hbh) to bear such connotations, and in a narrative that is linked with the David and Jonathan narrative in the literary context of 1 and 2 Samuel. hbh) is associated with the love between a man and a woman elsewhere. This sense predominates in the Song of Songs,270 and occurs in 1 Kings 11:2 in connection with Solomon’s attachment to foreign women. In Genesis 29:20 there are even similarities to the syntax of 1 Samuel 18:3. Jacob’s love for Rachel is the reason (ht)  wtbh)b) why seven years of service to Laban seemed like such a short time to him, just as Jonathan’s love for David (wt)  wtbh)b) is the reason the two men cut a covenant together. In Proverbs 5:19 the addressee is commanded to “always be drunk with her love” (dymt hg#t htbh)b),271 that is, with the love of “the woman of



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 183 your youth” (Krw(n t#), 5:18). hbh) can also denote the “love” of friends or allies.272 YHWH’s love for Israel can be denoted by hbh). Indeed, the syntax of Deuteronomy 7:8 is similar to that of 1 Samuel 18:3. There YHWH’s decision to redeem Israel is rooted in his “love” for Israel (hwhy  tbh)m Mkt)).273 This is associated with the fulfilment of his solemn promise to the patriarchs (7:8) and his “covenant” (tyrb, 7:9). It is also associated with language that is used occasionally for the love of a man for a woman (b q#x, 7:7; 10:15).274 In 1 Kings 10:9, strongly echoing Deuteronomy 7:8, YHWH’s love for Israel is his motivation (l)r#y  t)  hwhy  tbh)b),275 according to the Queen of Sheba, for placing Solomon on the throne. In Isaiah 63:9, YHWH’s love is his motivation for redeeming Israel. The only use in the Tanakh of hbh) to refer to human loyalty to the covenant with YHWH in a literal sense, without the metaphorical overlay we find in, for example, Jeremiah 2:2, is in Isaiah 56:6, which refers to the covenant loyalty of nations other than Israel. What is not entirely clear is how far the language of sexual love between humans lies behind the use of hbh) for the relationship between YHWH and Israel. Almost certainly dependent on Hosea 1–3, or closely related traditions, in Jeremiah 2:2 YHWH calls to mind the loyal kindness (dsx) of Israel’s youth and the love of her time as a newly-covenanted bride (Kytlwlk  tbh)).276 Both dsx and hbh) express the loyalty Israel had for YHWH during the wilderness period, but the use of language for Israel associated with malefemale unions means that these two nouns also denote, metaphorically, the devotion and loyalty of a lover.277 But which is primary? Is Deuteronomy using the language of marital love metaphorically for the divinehuman relationship, perhaps like Jeremiah under the direct or indirect influence of the Hosea tradition, or is the use of hbh) and dsx in connection with male-female unions itself secondary to the broader use of this language to refer generally to loyalty?

The language of love, then, is difficult to interpret in the case of David and Jonathan. It can be used erotically elsewhere, it can be used of divinehuman relations, it can be used of friendship between people, and it can be used metaphorically to refer to one kind of relationship in terms more usually found in references to another kind of relationship. It is certainly used elsewhere with similar vocabulary, including the language of “loyalty” (dsx) and “covenant” (tyrb). What is not clear is whether any of these texts, and if so which of them, can most helpfully be used to understand David and Jonathan. There are certainly connotations of loyalty in the David and Jonathan narrative, as in Deuteronomy, but that tells us nothing about whether or not there are also sexual connotations, and if so, what those connotations help to denote.

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The Love of David and Jonathan 4.3.5.

d(w wydmw dwdl whntyw wyl( r#) ly(mh t) Ntnwhy +#ptyw wrgx d(w wt#q d(w wbrx

And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe he was wearing and gave it to David, as well as his armour, including even his sword, bow, and girdle.

There are semantic, intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual issues here. First, what does +#ptyw denote? It is not really ambiguous, but a little difficult to interpret because the hitpael of this root is otherwise unattested in classical Hebrew, even though the root in other stems is not too rare.278 Given that the reflexive nuance of the hitpael stem is well known and well attested, we can reasonably deduce that “and he stripped himself ” is a not unlikely construal, even if, pace Boer, “and he spread his butt cheeks” would be a bit of a stretch. More work is needed on the part of the reader to work out how Jonathan’s act here functions in context: what does Jonathan think he is doing? This requires an engagement with other texts, but there are no comparable scenes in ancient Hebrew narrative. Since there are implications elsewhere in the immediately surrounding narrative that the transferral of kingship is at stake,279 and there are other references to armour bearers accompanying warriors,280 it is hardly surprising that Jonathan’s action has been interpreted in light of both these things, but it is by no means clear – at this stage, at least – that he is symbolically surrendering to David his right to succeed Saul as king, nor that he is investing David as his armour bearer, especially since Jonathan not only already has an armour bearer, but is never narrated as going into battle with David at all. There are texts where people, or even the deity, strip others of their clothing,281 but stripping oneself and handing over one’s clothes and armour to another is not otherwise found. This is not like priests “taking off ” (+#p qal) the garments they had worn to perform a particular ritual,282 or a lover taking off her clothes,283 at least they are not the most obvious associations that spring to the mind of this reader. It is necessary to look beyond the Tanakh and related texts to work out what might be going on. The text also assumes a certain amount of extratextual knowledge of cultural conventions, according to which Jonathan’s actions might make sense.284 These conventions, in turn, are bound up with ancient Israelite/Judahite constructions of gender and gender performance, with the semiotics of the body,285 and presumably also with social status. It is here that what could be a more or less closed text can be perpetually re-opened, because subsequent readers unanticipated by the author may be illiterate in these culturally determined connotations. These elements of the interpretive process are deeply interrelated,



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given that our only evidence for extratextual cultural conventions is necessarily going to be either intratextual (based on other parts of the same narrative) or intertextual (based on analogous texts from outside that narrative). In the Iliad, after an intense duel between Hector and Ajax, Hector proposes that they exchange noble gifts so that Achaeans and Trojans alike will be given the impression that they have parted “in friendship” (e0n filo/thti). Hector then gives Ajax a silver-studded sword with a scabbard and baldric, and Ajax gives in return a radiant purple girdle (Il. 7.299-305). A closer “parallel” to Jonathan’s action, that makes good sense of the proximity of references to his love for David and the covenant they have made with each other, appears in an earlier passage in the Iliad concerned with Glaukos and Diomedes, which has some echoes of the exchange between Hector and Ajax. The Lycian warrior Glaukos and the Achaean Diomedes have come out to fight one another in single combat. In the speech of Glaukos in response to the challenge laid down by Diomedes, Glaukos claims descent from Bellerophon, to whom Diomedes’ grandfather Oineus had once offered hospitality. They had exchanged “beautiful gifts of guest-friendship”286 (ceinh/i+a kala/, Il. 6.218), Oineus giving Bellerophon a “girdle” (zwsth/r, Il. 6.219).287 Diomedes thus feels duty bound to honour this ancestral bond of friendship. teu/xea d' a0llh/loij e0pamei/yomen, o1fra kai\ oi3de gnw~sin o3ti cei=noi patrw&i+oi eu0xo/meq' ei]nai. Let us exchange armour with each other, so that they may know that we are declaring ourselves ancestral guest friends.

As soon as Diomedes has said this, the two warriors dismount, clasp each other by the hand, and pledge fidelity (pistw&santo) to each other. Glaukos is then tricked by Diomedes, who exchanges bronze armour worth nine oxen for gold armour worth a hundred, because Zeus has taken away Glaukos’ mind.288 There are obvious differences from 1 Samuel 18:4, in that Jonathan and David do not exchange weapons, and there is no explicit sense that there is a custom of guest friendship being honored.289 What is being honored, however, is their pledge of loyalty, their “covenant” (18:3). The juxtaposition between Jonathan’s gift and the covenant suggests that the gift of armour is a symbolic, or even literal,290 means of securing David’s loyalty. Moreover, David has no armour to exchange with Jonathan, and for Jonathan alone to surrender his armour reinforces the fact that, in the narrative, Jonathan’s loyalty to David is, at least until after David becomes king and seeks to show loyalty to Jonathan through Mephibosheth, more

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prominent than David’s loyalty to Jonathan. They are also not going to fight one another, but there has not been a question that Jonathan might ever fight David: at least this is not explicit in the text. There are other, later Greek traditions that have slight echoes of 1 Samuel 18:4. In his Geographica, Strabo draws on an earlier work by the fourthcentury bce Greek historian Ephorus of Cumae, which now only exists in fragments.291 In his account of Cretan love, Ephorus describes the custom of abduction (a(rpagh/), by which a Cretan “lover” (e0rasth/j) would acquire his young “beloved” (e0rw&menoj).292 Before he can decisively “take” (a1gw)293 his beloved into his own all-male mess (a0ndrei=on), the admirer must first negotiate the abduction with the boy’s friends. If the match is deemed appropriate, the lover hands over customary gifts, which include dress for battle (stolh\ polemikh/), an ox for sacrifice, a drinking-cup, and other unspecified expensive gifts. Once the relationship is sealed, the beloved is known as “renowned” (kleino/j)294 and the older admirer as “lover” (filh/twr). There are obvious differences from 1 Samuel 18:4, in that Saul has already taken David into his house, and it is thus he, not Jonathan, who effects the transfer of David into his own domain, though it must be remembered that in 1 Samuel 16:21 it is apparently – ambiguous syntax permitting – Saul’s love for David that presses him to have Jesse’s son handed over to him as his armour bearer: is Saul here initiating his young beloved David into a higher, age-determined status in their warrior society? Another difference is that Jonathan’s gift is not limited to his armour and does not extend to a sacrificial animal or a drinkingcup, nor are any other male companions of David directly involved in the transfer of David into relationship with Jonathan. But a customary ritual such as this nevertheless raises the question of whether Jonathan is enacting a similar but independent, distinctively Israelite, version of the Cretan custom, playing the part of an Israelite equivalent to a filh/twr. Later still, Plutarch in his dialogue on love refers to a distinctive custom associated with the fourth-century bce Theban Sacred Band, in which the older lover (e0rasth/j) would, when his younger beloved (e0rw&menoj) had enrolled as a man, gift him a full kit of hoplite armour (panopli/a).295 Similarly, Jonathan presents David with a full kit of armour. This might suggest that there is, after all, something in Jennings’s suggestion that David is being enrolled as Jonathan’s armour bearer, perhaps implying that the relationship between an Israelite warrior and his Mylk )#n was a distinctively Israelite version of the warrior love attested in fourth-century bce Thebes. The problem, of course, is that the superficial similarity between each of these Greek examples and 1 Samuel 18:4, combined with the absence of any real context for this Hebrew text and an overwhelming enthusiasm



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to determine its meaning, can easily lead to a kind of parallelomania that fails to reckon with the chronological and geographical distance between the sources, and with the socio-cultural specificity of each custom. It is certainly possible that Jonathan’s relationship with David is a distinctively Israelite – or even adopted Philistine? – custom that distantly echoes warrior customs in Crete and Thebes. It is also possible that 1 Samuel 17:55–18:6aα is a late insertion into the Hebrew text that itself reflects knowledge of earlier Greek customs, and re-reads David and Jonathan in light of them. It is also possible that such connections say more about the process of reading than they do about the cultural codes in the context of which the text was written. 4.3.6.

d)m dwdb Cpx lw)# Nb Ntnwhyw

Now Jonathan, Saul’s son, was very fond of David …

In the mt, this fragment makes up the second half of 1 Samuel 19:1. It is preceded by 1 Samuel 19:1a, which reads “Saul spoke to Jonathan his son and to all his servants, that they kill David” (Ntnwy  l)  lw)#  rbdyw dwd  t)  tymhl  wydb(  lk  l)w  wnb). The w in Ntnwhyw (1 Sam. 19:1b) binds this phrase to what precedes, but the reader must decide whether it stands in an adversarial relationship to what precedes (“…but Jonathan, Saul’s son, was very fond of David. Jonathan told David…”), or in an explanatory relationship with what follows (“Now Jonathan, Saul’s son, was very fond of David, and so he told David…”), or both. The fact that the masoretic punctuation divides this phrase from what precedes by atnach and from what follows by sof passuq suggests that it be taken more closely with what precedes, but the masoretic punctuation itself is the result of an interpretive decision. If we take it with what follows, 1 Samuel 19:2 reports the consequence of Jonathan’s attachment to David. Is the text suggesting that Jonathan’s deep fondness for David threatens Saul’s command to Jonathan to kill David, or that his fondness for the king’s son explains why he told him to hide himself, or are the two emphases inseparable from one another? In the earliest manuscripts of the Septuagint, this is the first we learn of Jonathan’s feelings for David. In the Masoretic Text, the reader is reminded of Jonathan’s love for David in 18:1-4, and the covenant the two men made there. In other words, language that could be construed politically (r#q  ,tyrb, hbh)  ,bh)) lies in the background of 19:1-7 in the Masoretic Text in a way it does not in the Septuagint, and whatever the personal connotations of dwdb  Cpx  Ntnwhy, this passage is already infused with hints of political implications that Saul’s command serves further

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to emphasize. One could even argue that the relationship between David and Jonathan has already itself contributed to the situation that made Saul believe David should be killed (19:1a), though it is not clear how much Saul actually knows about their relationship. He has certainly taken David into his house (18:2), but there is no clear indication that Saul is present, or in the know, when their covenant is cut. It is Saul’s over-literal interpretation of the victory song of the dancing women in 18:7b,296 not his son’s covenant with David, that seems to have ignited his jealousy. Jonathan’s fondness for David conflicts with his father’s command in 1 Samuel 19:1a, which relates not only to Saul’s determination not to kill David himself (18:17 [mt], 25), but to the fact that all those Saul has commanded to kill David have previously been said to “love” him (18:1, 3 [mt], 22). The way 1 Samuel 18:22 is focalized is noteworthy in this connection. Saul tells his servants to tell David that all Saul’s servants, presumably including the messengers themselves, love David. What we see here is the narrator’s presentation of Saul’s point of view, and the reader is to judge them both: do Saul’s servants actually love David, or is it simply in Saul’s interests to have David believe that he does? Is the narrator presenting Saul as someone honest, or as someone cruel, calculating, and amoral? The connection between 1 Samuel 19:1-7 and 18:1-4 is more difficult to construe. If 18:1-4 belongs to a later phase in the tradition history of the narrative, it may have been written under the influence of 19:1-7 and placed so as to set the scene for the secret liaison between David and Jonathan found there. The relationship between these two pericopae depends on bh) and Cpx being similar in meaning. That they belonged to the same semantic domain at least at some points in the evolution of the Hebrew linguistic system is obvious from their use in synonymous parallelism.297 There is also one occurrence of these verbs together in our narrative.298 Close to 1 Samuel 19:1 is 18:22. Here the narrator gives the reader a portrayal of what Saul would like David to think, that “the king is fond of you [viz. David]” (Klmh Kb Cpx), and “all his servants love you [viz. David]” (Kwbh)  wydb(  lkw). The reader may ask: is the narrator’s reference to Jonathan’s fondness for David more or less trustworthy than the narrator’s portrayal of Saul’s reference to his own fondness for David? In spite of Saul’s claim, do Saul’s servants in fact love David, or is this a point on which they differ from Jonathan? The fact that it is Jonathan alone who, of all those commanded by Saul to kill David, is said by the narrator to be fond of David, seems to be highlighted in 19:1b. The two parts of 19:1 seem to be in contrast with one another: Saul commands both Jonathan and his servants to kill David, but Jonathan alone is too fond of him to oblige. Reading backwards from 19:1 to 18:22, this might



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suggest that Saul’s claim about his servants’ love for David must now be taken to be fraudulent.299 Reading forward to 22:8, Saul’s paranoia about the significance of his servants not telling him about Jonathan’s treachery is cast into relief, and shown to be, more likely than not, nothing more than Saul’s paranoid inference about his servants’ actions and motives. b Cpx is widely attested,300 and its use is similar to that of bh). It is used

to refer to a man’s desire, including sexual desire, for a woman. Superficially, this might seem to connect with the use of Cpx in the Song of Songs, but there is a significant difference, in that the three occurrences in the Song of Songs are in a stylized phrase, in which the female lover adjures ((b# hifil) the daughters of Jerusalem, “Do not arouse nor awaken love until it pleases” (Cpxt#  d(  hbh)h  t)  wrrw(t  M)w  wry(t  M)).301 There is certainly a connection between Cpx and sexual love in the Song, but it is indirect. “Love” (hbh)), not one of the lovers, is the grammatical subject of Cpxt. The sense in Genesis 34:19 certainly resonates with the sense of b  Cpx in connection with a man’s desire for a woman in Deuteronomy and Esther.302 It would seem that this sense is being used metaphorically in Sirach 51:13, where the speaker desires wisdom. The language is more erotically charged in the “parallel” to this passage in 11QPsalmsa XXI, 11-13. In other contexts, the verb Cpx seems to be used to denote loyalty to a military or political leader when the option to be disloyal is a live one (2 Sam. 20:11). Of people, it can be used for someone’s desire for something.303 Of a deity, it is used for YHWH’s pleasure in people, such as David,304 Solomon,305 an Israelite worshipper,306 the people of Israel,307 personified Zion,308 or, in the opinion of a group quoted and addressed in Malachi, those who do evil.309 This phrase can also be used to denote YHWH’s pleasure in some thing.310 The noun Cpx refers to desire or pleasure, either in the abstract,311 or denoting a specific thing desired, what a person or deity wants, or perhaps even needs.312 In the Michal narrative this includes Saul’s desire for a brideprice for his daughter in 1 Samuel 18:25.313 A unique phrase in the Tanakh is hcpx  #pn, “a desiring heart,” which in 1 Chronicles 28:9 is that with which, according to the Chronicler’s David, YHWH should be sought by Solomon.

There are very few uses analogous to d)m  dwdb  Cpx  Ntnwhy. The two passages in 1 and 2 Samuel in which YHWH himself delights in David are noteworthy, because they allow the reader to align Jonathan’s delight in David with the will of YHWH, but they neither force this connection on the reader, nor clarify what the phrase actually denotes. Furthermore, YHWH’s delight in David may itself have been erotic, provoking a similarly erotic response in Jonathan to David’s divinely bestowed,314 manly beauty. The fact that the psalms in which YHWH delights in a worshipper

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are associated, according to their superscriptions, with David, is also noteworthy, because it raises the possibility of a direct relationship between 2 Samuel 15:26; 22:20 and the superscriptions to Psalms 22 and 41, based on the common use of b Cpx. The closest analogues to 1 Samuel 19:1 are the passages in Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Esther where one person delights in another person. In each case, a man delights in a woman. Also worth considering is 2 Samuel 20:11, in which connotations of political loyalty predominate. The collocation of b Cpx and bh) within the David and Jonathan narrative, where the two verbs might bear both personal and political senses, suggests that the text is allowing, even inviting, the reader to wrestle again with the ambiguity, and live with the slippage between the different domains. The interaction between text and reader is bound up with how the juxtaposition of different segments of narrative is perceived. The placing of discrete, self-contained narrative blocks alongside one another leaves the reader to identify otherwise inexplicit links and discontinuities between them. In the narrative blocks 1 Samuel 19:1-7 and 19:11-17, both Jonathan and Michal aid David’s escape from Saul. They use their superior knowledge of Saul to subvert the king’s intentions, and in both cases their personal relationship with David issues in profoundly political consequences. But there are also significant differences. Jonathan still operates in his father’s presence (19:1, 4-6), highlighting the fact that Michal does not, having been transferred from a patrilocal to a virilocal context (19:11a; cf. 18:27). She is now David’s woman, his property (19:11b), and consequently in his power. In using her cunning to help David escape, she is subverting both the structures of power within the house, and the structures of power within the kingdom. Jonathan’s conversations with Saul and David take place in the open, but in such a way that Jonathan can manipulate who has access to his conversations with Saul (Saul, Jonathan, David, the reader), and his conversations with David (Jonathan, David, the reader, but not Saul). Notably, the “field” (hd#) is constructed here as a male domain. Michal, by contrast, does not leave David’s house. Men (Saul, Saul’s servants, David) operate both outside and inside David’s house. Michal must help David escape from within, in a space that is gendered as a domain in which men are free to move, to come and go, but women are not. What makes this possible is an entire network of socially constructed assumptions about the relationship between power, gender, and space. This resonates with later parts of the Michal narrative. In 2 Samuel 3:12-21, which alludes explicitly back to 1 Samuel 18:20-28,315 Michal is transferred from the house of Paltiel to that of David, in the open, but



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without speaking, or acting in any way as a subject. This pericope portrays a sinister game of power, in which Michal is a pawn, her movements determined by the power differentials between Paltiel and Ishbosheth, and between Ishbosheth and David, in the wake of the breach between Abner and Ishbosheth, and Abner’s subsequent treaty with David. Michal ends her days incarcerated behind closed doors.316 She only speaks inside David’s house, or on her way out of it to greet its – and her – master.317 Jonathan, by contrast, speaks openly, and in the open, and ends his days a hero slain on Mount Gilboa, a manly end to a life constructed from codes determining, and determined by, the intersections of power, gender, and space. 4.3.7.

Kyny(b Nx yt)cm yk Kyb) (dy (dy rm)yw dwd dw( (b#yw

And David swore again, “Surely your father knows I have found favour in your sight.”

Having fled from Saul,318 David finds Jonathan. The text does not say where, implying only that it is not Naioth, from where David has fled, and Saul is not there. This is a second instance of the two men meeting in the hearing of the reader, but outside the hearing of Saul. David’s reference to Saul seeking his life (y#pn t) #qbm, 20:1) repeats part of Jonathan’s words to David in 19:2 (Ktymhl  yb)  lw)#  #qbm), and his question about his perceived wrongdoing before Saul (Kyb) ynpl yt)+x hmw ynw( hm, 20:1) echoes part of Jonathan’s words to Saul in 19:4 (Kl  )+x  )wl), enabling the reader to connect the two parts of the narrative. David’s swearing in 20:3 recalls Saul’s swearing in 19:6, that David would under no circumstances die (tmwy  M)  hwhy  yx  lw)#  (b#yw), raising the question of the integrity of the ones swearing, and drawing attention to a possible play of deception and counter-deception in the narrative. Was Saul being honest in swearing before Jonathan and YHWH in 19:6, only to renege on his promise later, or was he deceiving Jonathan, perhaps in an attempt to keep Jonathan on his side? Is David being honest in swearing before Jonathan and YHWH, or is he, too, deceiving Jonathan in order to use the king’s son to his political advantage? The phrase Kyny(b Nx yt)cm invites the reader to think back through the text to earlier references to the relationship between David and Jonathan. In the Masoretic Text, this takes the reader back to 1 Samuel 18:1, 3, and Jonathan’s “love” (hbh)/bh)) for David. It also takes the reader back to 19:1, where Jonathan is said to have greatly delighted in David. 1 Samuel 18:1, 3; 19:1 are mediated by the voice of the narrator, whereas 20:3 is spoken within the text by David, and transmitted from the narrator to the

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reader. The reader has then to discern how the voices of David and the narrator relate to one another. The suffix in Kyny(b also puts the focus back on Jonathan, notwithstanding the fact that David is the grammatical subject of yt)cm. That is, the focus is again on Jonathan’s love for, delight in, and favourable perception of David. There is no explicit mutuality between the two men. But what might Kyny(b  Nx  yt)cm denote? The reader finds the same phrase again in 20:29, this time spoken by David to Jonathan in the context of an imaginary conversation reported by Jonathan to Saul, and transmitted by the narrator to the reader. There the phrase seems to denote begging leave: “Please, if I find favour in your eyes, let me go and see my brothers” (yx) t) h)r)w )n 319h+lm) Kyny(b Nx yt)cm M)). It connotes deference in that context, inasmuch as Jonathan seems to want Saul to see David as willingly subservient to Jonathan, and thus both loyal to Saul’s house, and well under control. yny(b Nx )cm is a stock phrase in classical Hebrew. It is generally used for one human finding favour in the eyes of another,320 often in situations where one party is seeking to ensure that the other will not endanger them. In such situations there are connotations of subservience or deference. It can be used of a woman finding favour – or not, as the case may be – in the eyes of her man,321 where there are also connotations of lowliness of status on the part of the woman. It can be used for a human finding favour in the sight of YHWH,322 or the messengers who represent him,323 where, once more, connotations of subservience appear. In these cases, the language of interpersonal relationships among humans is transferred by analogy to the relationships between heavenly beings and humans. There are points of continuity and discontinuity with the David and Jonathan narrative. The fact that Genesis 39:3 gives the reason why Joseph found favour in the eyes of Potiphar324 casts into relief the fact that we are not told why David found favour in the eyes of Jonathan. In other cases, such as Jacob’s deathbed speech to Joseph, finding favour in the eyes of someone entails that they should “act loyally” (dsx  h#() towards the other,325 and should “swear” ((b# nifal) to act thus,326 both of which appear also in the David and Jonathan narrative. 4.3.8.

Km( Kdb( t) t)bh hwhy tyrbb yk Kdb( l( dsx ty#(w

And you must act loyally with respect to your servant, because you brought your servant with you into a covenant guaranteed by YHWH.

There are two parts of this command that bear on the nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan: the command to “act loyally”



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(dsx ty#() towards David, and the reference to the “covenant of YHWH” (hwhy  tyrb). The command to act loyally is part of a longer command that begins in the previous verse. The verb ty#( is a perfect (qatal) form, preceded by w, part of a sequence of commands beginning with an imperative ((d).327 The first work of a reader is to draw on prior acquaintance with the Hebrew linguistic system to determine how dsx  ty#( relates to what precedes, but this is not simply a matter of working out the syntactical connection. The conjunction between Jonathan acting loyally and knowing that his father has resolved to do David harm is suggestive of profound personal, political, and religious consequences. Jonathan is bound because of an oath sworn before YHWH to be loyal to one who has found favour in his eyes.328 This will mean a breach between Jonathan and Saul. That David invokes YHWH here means that it is to this deity that Jonathan is answerable, not simply to David. What is less clear is whether David is, and has been, using Jonathan’s devotion to him to manipulate him into siding with David against his father. What does dsx  ty#( mean, and how does it relate to this “covenant of YHWH”? David specifies that if there is any genuine wrongdoing (Nw() on David’s part for which atonement needs to be made through David’s death, then Jonathan should kill David himself. Furthermore, acting loyally with respect to David is a condition of the covenant. Reading on, Jonathan elaborates on the implications of their covenant when they speak privately in “the field” (hd#) in 1 Samuel 20:12-16. On Jonathan’s part, acting loyally towards David means finding out what Saul intends to do to David, then informing David. In 20:13, Jonathan stakes his life on fulfilling the terms of this agreement by invoking YHWH as one who will requite him if he fails in his duty. As in the Rahab story – on which see further below – YHWH’s involvement in the agreement is as one who has power of life and death over those who have sworn in his name to fulfil a particular promise. There is no other obvious moral content, as this is not the covenant between YHWH himself and Israel, but rather a covenant between two men, who invoke YHWH as its guarantor.329 Having made his commitment to David, Jonathan then makes it clear that this covenant is one of mutual obligation,330 which significantly qualifies the trend in the story of David’s rise for characters to give their devotion to David without receiving anything in return. David must commit himself to act loyally towards Jonathan while Jonathan is still alive (20:14), and must continue to maintain his loyal kindness to Jonathan’s descendants in perpetuity (20:15). The covenant is made not simply between Jonathan and David, but between Jonathan and David’s (soon to be royal) house (20:16 [mt]).

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The Love of David and Jonathan In the extant corpus of classical Hebrew dsx not infrequently occurs as the object of h#(, and in three cases, including that of David and Jonathan, it is associated with one party having found favour in the eyes of (yny(b  Nx  )cm) the other, who has acted, or should act, loyally as a result.331 Again as in the David and Jonathan narrative, this idiom can be used in contexts where one party requires another to “swear” ((b# nifal) to act loyally, which can involve promising not to deal falsely with both the one to whom the promise is made, and his descendants.332 In the case of Abraham and Abimelech, this is followed by the two parties making a covenant (tyrb).333 The relationship of loyalty between David and Jonathan is also echoed elsewhere in the ancient Near East, arguably even more closely than by other passages in the Tanakh. This would seem to be the case with the mutual loyalty oath of the Hittite King Tudh}aliya IV and Kurunta of Tarh}untašša.334 Most interesting is the story of Rahab, because Rahab explicitly demands that the two Israelite spies swear by YHWH to act with loyal kindness with Rahab and her family, in return for her having acted kindly with them.335 Although the oath is not described as a covenant of YHWH, it is significant that, as with David and Jonathan, YHWH is invoked as the guarantor of an oath whose content is the loyal acts of kindness of one party with respect to the other. Also similar to the David and Jonathan narrative is the fact that Rahab demands loyalty to her family on the part of people who could otherwise be expected to kill them,336 just as Jonathan makes David swear to act loyally towards his descendants instead of wiping them out. Furthermore, Rahab helps the Israelite spies escape by lowering them out of a window, just as Michal helps David escape.337 A further aspect of the similarity between the two texts may be the way they both depend on an extratextual code in which dsx is bound up the relative social statuses of the one showing dsx and the one receiving it. Thus for Uku Masing, when David requests Jonathan to act with dsx in 1 Samuel 20:8, as the senior and stronger party to their covenant Jonathan is expected to show dsx to David, who is the junior and weaker party, and when in 20:14 Jonathan makes the same request of David, he is anticipating a time when David will be king, and thus senior. In Joshua 2:12-14, similarly, Rahab shows dsx to the Israelite spies when she is in a stronger position with respect to them, but demands that they show dsx to her father’s house when their social statuses are reversed following the imminent conquest.338 Elsewhere, dsx  h#( can be used to refer generally to the way humans should, ideally, act with one another.339 It is not always clear in such cases whether there is an implicit understanding that this is part of Israel’s commitment to live justly under the covenant, though this connotation may be present.340 Beyond this there are, alongside the David and Jonathan narrative, other narratives where the loyal acts of one person for another are



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 195 a significant element in the plot. Thus Abraham tells his wife Sarah to act loyally with him by pretending to be his sister, in order to save his life.341 Abraham’s servant asks Laban and, apparently, Laban’s father Bethuel, whether they will act with loyal kindness to Abraham by giving Rebekah to Isaac.342 Ruth and Orpah act with loyal kindness to Naomi and the deceased husbands of the three women.343 dsx h#( can be used of one person doing a kindness for another in return for a kindness previously done to him, as in the case of Joseph asking the Pharaoh’s incarcerated cup-bearer to act kindly towards him after he has been restored to his position,344 or the Israelites not acting kindly towards the household of Jerubbaal-Gideon, despite the good he had done them.345 In similar vein, Abner expects Ishbosheth to let him have his way with Saul’s concubine Rizpah, or at least not to reproach him for doing so, in return for Abner having acted with loyal kindness towards the house of Saul.346 When Joash kills Zechariah, it is in disregard of the fact that Zechariah’s father Jehoiada had acted with loyal kindness towards Joash. Notably, the dying Zechariah calls on YHWH to “look and seek redress” (#rdyw  )ry) for this wrong, as if Joash has broken a sacred obligation.347 The implied social obligation incurred when one has received acts of loyal kindness may be inherited by the next generation, as when David commands Solomon to treat the sons of Barzillai the Gileadite with loyal kindness in return for Barzillai’s loyalty to David during Absalom’s rebellion.348

David’s sworn loyalty to Jonathan is the basis of the story of Mephibosheth, which takes place after Jonathan’s death. David asks whether anyone remains of the house of Saul to whom he might act with loyal kindness for Jonathan’s sake (Ntnwhy  rwb(b  dsx  wm(  h#()w).349 The sacred dimension of his sworn loyalty to Jonathan is stressed when he asks Ziba whether there is anyone to whom he might show “the loyal kindness of God” (Myhl)  dsx  wm(  h#()w).350 Myhl)  dsx is somewhat ambiguous.351 The ambiguity is inherent in the juxtaposition of two nouns in a construct chain. It could be construed as either “[the] loyal kindness [that I swore to Jonathan before] God [that I would show to him and to his descendants],” which is perhaps the more likely construal, given the context of a narrative about David’s loyalty to Jonathan’s son.352 Alternatively, it could mean “[the kind of ] loyal kindness [that] God [is known to show to those to whom he is committed],” which would require the reader to infer here a tradition of divine action known from intertexts beyond 1 and 2 Samuel where YHWH/Elohim acts with dsx towards someone.353 The story of the conflict with Ammon that follows is sparked by the refusal of the courtiers of Hanun son of Nahash to believe that David truly intended to act loyally towards their king,354 as Hanun’s father apparently had with David.355 In this passage, the suspicion of Hanun’s courtiers with respect to David’s motives is an indicator of the extent to which acting with loyal kindness can be, or at least can be construed to be, a politically motivated smokescreen hiding underhand motives.

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The Love of David and Jonathan dsx h#( can be used of YHWH acting kindly towards persons.356 In the

case of YHWH’s loyal kindness to the patriarchs, the covenant between YHWH and Abraham may lie in the background. In the context of the giving of the commandments, YHWH promises to act with loyal kindness towards his faithful worshippers, apparently in return for their loyal love (bh)) to him.357 Acting in this way is a solemn responsibility for YHWH under the terms of his covenant with Israel. On one occasion YHWH is expected to reward a worshipper because he – Nehemiah – has himself acted with kindness towards the Temple and its attendants.358

What is meant by hwhy  tyrb? The perfect t)bh suggests a known moment in the past when Jonathan took the initiative in bringing David into a covenant with him. This act, according to David, meant that Jonathan undertook to fulfil a specific, solemn responsibility to David. But when did this take place? In the Masoretic Text the allusion is apparently to 1 Samuel 18:3a, but there are some problems. It seems from 18:3b that Jonathan’s love for David is the motivation for this covenant, but despite this, and despite the fact that the verb is singular, both men are the subject of trkyw. Are 20:8 and 18:3 at odds, then, or is David, perhaps manipulatively, trying to suggest that Jonathan had the greater responsibility under the covenant because he was responsible for making the covenant in the first place? Or is he implying that Jonathan has effectively brought David into the covenant because he, Jonathan, is the senior of the two?359 Another oddity is that 18:3 makes no mention of YHWH. How far is a reader justified in inferring that the covenant in 18:3 was made under YHWH’s patronage? What does hwhy  tyrb denote? In context, this question has been partially resolved in the discussion of dsx  h#( above:360 it is some kind of solemn agreement between two men, with a particular deity acting as witness and guarantor, that involves both Jonathan and David in acts of loyalty with respect to the other, and to the other’s descendants. In terms of the syntax of the phrase, because the second member of the construct chain – the nomen rectum – is a proper noun, and thus by definition definite,361 under normal circumstances the first member – the nomen regens – would be definite also.362 This would be the case elsewhere in passages in which “The Ark of the Covenant of YHWH” (hwhy  tyrb  Nwr)) is mentioned.363 But that does not seem to be the case here. It would just about be possible to argue that Jonathan had brought David into the covenant of YHWH, either the covenant under which Israel as a whole is bound to be loyal to YHWH – though there is nothing in the immediate context to support this, and the relationship between YHWH and Israel may not have been understood in these terms when this stratum of the text was first written



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 197

– or, alternatively, the specific covenant of YHWH we made earlier. But even though we might expect the phrase hwhyl tyrb if tyrb were indefinite,364 an indeterminate nomen regens followed by a determinate nomen rectum is not unknown,365 and should not be excluded here. The phrase hwhy  tyrb neatly illustrates why contextual factors are much more helpful than word statistics in producing meaning from a text. The reason is simple: the extant literature of classical Hebrew before Ben Sira, the Qumran scrolls, and the Mishnah has been moulded into a collection dominated by texts whose theological position is determined by the idea of a covenant between a particular deity, YHWH, and a particular people, Israel. The deuteronom(ist)ic layers in 1 and 2 Samuel, however, such as they are, which are dominated by the notion of a covenant between YHWH and Israel, seem to belong to a different stratum than those concerned with David and Jonathan. It is more likely that both the covenant between David and Jonathan and the covenant between YHWH and Israel are separately dependent on a shared, preexisting notion of what constitutes a covenant between two parties. The probability that the David and Jonathan narrative – apart from 1 Samuel 18:1-4 – is earlier than the deuteronom(ist)ic layer(s) of the narrative also highlights the secondary character of the idea of a covenant between Israel and YHWH. That is, the deuteronomic idea of a covenant between YHWH and Israel is secondary to the use of covenant language to refer to relationships between humans, and thus the kind of relationship that is portrayed between David and Jonathan is primary, in developmental terms, to that portrayed between YHWH and Israel in Deuteronomy and associated texts. This is important insofar as it shows that while the covenant between YHWH and Israel may exert a theological-ideological influence on the reader of the canon, it is unlikely to have any historical bearing on the nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan. Covenants between YHWH and Israel depend on a perceived analogy between the divine-human relationship and covenanted relationships between humans. YHWH — or Elohim — can be invoked in connection with such interhuman covenants, and such covenants can, on occasion, be referred to as “a/the covenant of the Lord,” as in the lxx of 2 Kings 11:4, where Jehoiada made with the royal bodyguard a covenant of the Lord (   ) in the Temple (the Lucianic MSS omit , “of the Lord,” making the covenant one purely between humans, without a divine guarantor). In the Masoretic Text, Jehoiada made a covenant with them (tyrb Mhl trkyw), and made them swear in the temple of YHWH (hwhy  tybb  Mt)  (b#yw). In other words, the Masoretic Text reflects a covenant between Jehoiada and the royal bodyguard in a place sacred to YHWH. In the lxx–L, Jehoiada makes with the royal bodyguard a covenant of the Lord and makes them swear before the Lord, rather than

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The Love of David and Jonathan in the house of the Lord (thus the latter version is superficially closer to the David and Jonathan narrative than the Masoretic Text). Both the covenant of David and Jonathan, and that between Jehoiada and the royal bodyguard, bear connotations of political conspiracy, but unlike the David and Jonathan narrative, the covenant of Jehoiada and the royal bodyguard is also replete with connotations of murderous Yahwistic zealotry. In any case, these covenants are not between humans and the deity but between humans with the deity as guarantor. In Proverbs 2:17 “she has forgotten the covenant of her god” (tyrb  t)w hxk#  hyhl))366 probably – though not certainly – refers to the marital

covenant between a man and woman, made in the presence of the deity. The language of “swearing” ((b# nifal), rather than the more usual “cutting” (trk qal), can be used in such contexts,367 as in the David and Jonathan narrative, and as in the case of Jacob and Laban.368

The covenant between David and Jonathan certainly involved moral obligation, but in terms of the absolute loyalty of each party to the other, not in terms of moral obligations to YHWH. Perhaps better, the only clear moral obligation to YHWH in this covenant is constituted by the sworn loyalty of the two men to one another. Given the collocation of swearing before YHWH and acting with loyal kindness in a context in which the life or death of each party is dependent on their mutual loyalty, the closest analogue would seem to be the narrative of Rahab and the Israelite spies in Joshua 2. 4.3.9.

hd#h Mhyn# w)cyw hd#h )cnw hkl dwd l) Ntnwhy rm)yw

And Jonathan said to David, “Come! Let us go out into the country.” So the two of them went out into the country.

What are the connotations of Jonathan enjoining David to “go out to the field” with him? What this phrase denotes is an uncomplicated matter to resolve: hd# denotes the countryside beyond the boundaries of urban settlements such as that to which Jonathan returns in 1 Samuel 21:1, and hd#h )cn denotes an indirect command that the two men should go out into the open. But the trickier matter is what this phrase connotes. This issue has been raised by Schroer and Staubli, who connect this passage with an equivalent phrase in the Song of Songs, with the result that this phrase acquires erotic connotations. But is the narrative open enough for this? There are a few occurrences of )cy and/or Klh in close proximity, even if not in direct syntactical contiguity, with hd#,369 indicating persons going out either into the countryside in general, or to specific fields (such as those of Moab in Ruth 1:1), in contexts such as hunting,370



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agriculture (in the broadest sense),371 warfare,372 and exile (due to natural or military causes).373 In 1 Samuel 20:11, the primary connotation seems to be secrecy: outside the town is where Saul is not, which means that Jonathan and David can meet there. Secrecy is similarly to the fore in 1 Kings 11:29, where Ahijah meets Jeroboam and announces that he will be king over the ten tribes of Israel, and in 2 Kings 7:12, where the countryside is a place of possible ambush.374 In Song of Songs 7:12, the woman implores her lover, “Come, my love, let us go into the countryside, let us spend the night among the henna bushes [or villages]” ()cn  ydwd  hkl Myrpkb  hnyln  hd#h). There seem to be connotations of secrecy again here, inasmuch as hd# and Myrpk seem to indicate a lovers’ trysting place. But the desire to make love away from prying eyes is hardly the only reason for looking for a place of secrecy. What seems to have happened for Schroer and Staubli is that the collocation of 1 and 2 Samuel with the Song of Songs in the Tanakh, combined with the collocation in the David and Jonathan narrative of several words and phrases that also occur in the Song of Songs ()cn ,hbh) ,bh) q#n  ,hd#h), has opened the David and Jonathan narrative to the possibility of an erotic construal it otherwise might not have had. In other words, rather than demonstrating that the relationship between David and Jonathan probably is erotic, the Song of Songs shows how the language it shares with the David and Jonathan narrative could conceivably be construed erotically in that narrative. This is a subtle distinction, but an important one for understanding why the David and Jonathan narrative now appears open to an erotic reading, and for grasping the degree of sensitivity necessary in reading elusive – and perhaps also illusive and allusive – ancient texts. 4.3.10.

wbh) w#pn tbh) yk wt) wtbh)b dwd t) (yb#hl Ntnwhy Pswyw

And Jonathan again made David swear by his love for him, because he loved him as his very self.

The reader here is required to wrestle with several things: is the Masoretic Text cogent in having Jonathan make David swear again ((b# hifil), or must it be emended to have Jonathan swearing to David ((b# nifal)? Does Pswyw refer back to a specific point in the text, and if so, where? To 18:3, or to this chapter, perhaps to 20:3? Does Jonathan in 1 Samuel 20:17a swear ((b# nifal) to David because he loves David and wants him to be loyal, or does he make David swear ((b# hifil) by appealing to the covenant loyalty David supposedly owes to Jonathan under the pact they have made? Does 1 Samuel 20:17a thus have Jonathan’s love – that

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is, emotional attachment? – for David as the motivating factor behind his swearing (or making David swear), or does this verse have Jonathan appealing to David’s love – that is, supposed loyalty and/or emotional attachment – as motivation? Do bh) and hbh) have only one nuance here? Does the meaning switch between emotional attachment to covenanted loyalty through the verse, or must the reader wrestle with the presence of more than one nuance of bh) at the same time? How does this verse relate to 18:1-4: does it assume the covenant mentioned there and allude back to it, or is 18:1-4 a later redactional development based on 20:17? What does (b# denote? (b# nifal can be used of a person making solemn promises to other persons to act loyally, which is sometimes explicitly said to be under a divine guarantee.375 Human beings can make solemn promises, even if it is effectively to themselves,376 either with a deity explicitly mentioned as guarantor – using the phrase b (b#n,377 or the oath formula hwhy  yx,378 or a phrase based on the pattern Pyswy  hkw  hwhy  h#(y  hk379 – or without any explicit mention of a deity.380 Good examples of people swearing solemn agreements with one another under divine patronage include Abimelech and Abraham (Gen. 21:22-34), and Rahab and the Israelite spies (Josh. 2:1-24). The similarities have been noted above.381 The deity can also be said to swear, but by himself (b (b#n)382 or by some emanation of himself,383 as guarantor, or to a person or people to whom he is making an unbreakable promise.384 Human beings can be said to swear loyalty directly to the deity.385 Corresponding to the nifal is the much less common hifil, which is used for one person making another person, or group of people, commit to a solemn promise.386 There is also a somewhat anomalous refrain in the Song of Songs where the female lover makes the daughters of Jerusalem swear “by the gazelles or the does of the field” not to arouse nor to excite love until it is willing.387 This is radically different from all the other occurrences of (b# nifal and hifil in the Tanakh outside the Song of Songs, pointing to possibilities that could have existed for the use of this verb in the oral cultures of ancient Israel and Judah that have now been irrevocably lost. Curiously, this refrain shares several lexical items with the David and Jonathan narrative (hd# ,(b# hifil ,Cpx ,hbh)), but nothing of the context. Outside the literature of ancient Israel and Judah, there is a fascinating example of swearing a sacred oath in a martial context that could, distantly, be adduced in comparison with David and Jonathan. In a passage about the Sacred Band of Thebes in his life of Pelopidas, Plutarch cites a now almost entirely lost work of Aristotle in reference to a tradition about lovers and their beloveds making sacred oaths at the tomb of the Theban hero Iolaüs. Founded by Gorgidas, the Sacred Band was entirely made up of “lovers” (e0rastai/) and their younger “beloveds” (e0rw&menoi).



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 201 In the tradition Plutarch cites, lovers and their beloveds would “make acts of faith” (katapistw&seij poiei=sqai) with one another. The Theban band was appropriately called “sacred” because in the Symposium, Plato had called the lover “divinely inspired” (e1nqeoj).388 Similarly, in his Amatorius, Plutarch, no longer referring specifically to the Sacred Band, claims that “to this day lovers do homage and worship Iolaüs, taking oaths and pledges from their beloveds at his tomb” (’Io/laon…me/xri nu=n se/bontai kai\ timw~sin oi9 e0rw~nte o#rkouj te kai\ pi/steij e0pi\ tou= ta/fou para\ tw~n e0rwme/nwn lamba/nontej).389 Now it is clear that from 20:17 on, David and Jonathan do not go into battle together. Indeed, there are no narratives of the two men engaged together in heroic action. They are, however, represented as binding one another with sacred oaths. In these passages from Plutarch the ancient beloved of Heracles takes the role of guarantor, the role taken by YHWH in 1 Samuel 20:17. A reading of this verse, together with 18:1-4, should not entirely rule out the possibility that David and Jonathan are associated with a ritual not unlike that recounted by Aristotle and Plutarch.

It seems clear that swearing in the David and Jonathan narrative is much closer to the kind of situation we find between Abimelech and Abraham, and between Rahab and the Israelite spies, than it is to the female lover’s adjurations in the Song of Songs, even though all these cases share the idea of a solemn promise that should not be broken. Yet the ways in which the various works in the Tanakh are juxtaposed, combined with the variety of possible meanings available in classical Hebrew for the words and phrases in the David and Jonathan narrative, means that a definitive closure cannot be reached as to the meaning of the narrative. What sets the David and Jonathan narrative apart, in any case, from the analogues in Genesis and Joshua is the predominance of “love” as either a motivating factor for, or as a guarantee of, David’s loyalty, which, perhaps unexpectedly, brings the David and Jonathan narrative closer to the oaths apparently made by Theban lovers at the tomb of Iolaüs. As with the similarities to the oath of friendship between Glaukos and Diomedes, it would be difficult to posit a direct relationship with traditions about David and Jonathan, but the similarities are close enough to suggest that an analogous ritual should not be ruled out of court. 4.3.11.

)wlh twdrmh tw(n Nb wl rm)yw Ntnwhyb lw)# P) rxyw Km) twr( t#blw Kt#bl y#y Nbl ht) [rbx] rxb yk yt(dy

Saul was furious with Jonathan, and said to him, “You son of a wayward, rebellious woman! Am I not aware that you have chosen [are the companion of ] the son of Jesse, to your own shame, and the shame of your mother’s genitals?”

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4.3.11.1. Scholarly bafflement at 1 Samuel 20:30. 1 Samuel 20:30 is the most difficult verse in the narrative to interpret, which has helped make it susceptible to a wide range of construals. The language Saul uses here is otherwise unattested in ancient Hebrew, creating difficulties at the level of philology, particular with regard to the phrase twdrmh tw(n Nb. Furthermore, there are variations in the text, though not exactly baffling ones, between the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint, and Qumran. Even if the philological and textual problems could be decisively solved, however, it is by no means clear how the presentation of Saul’s perspective on the relationship between David and Jonathan is to be interpreted in relation to the narrative as a whole. Does this verse portray anything more than Saul’s paranoid, and thus presumably untrustworthy, grasp of his son’s relationship with David? Is his outburst against Jonathan meant to be taken literally, or is it a stock insult, perhaps from a colloquial Hebrew we have almost entirely lost? How do the referential and emotive functions of language relate to one another in Saul’s words to Jonathan?390 Is his outburst against Jonathan alone, or against his mother also, on whom Jonathan’s shameful conduct may have been taken to reflect badly,391 given that it was she who would, presumably, have had primary responsibility for his upbringing? This verse above all has come to be regarded as a kind of smoking gun, the clearest evidence alongside 2 Samuel 1:26 that David and Jonathan must have been sexually involved with one another. Xavier Mayne, for example, seems to have entertained few doubts on this score. In his discussion of the “Uranian, or Urning,” the physically masculine man attracted to other men, Mayne appealed to 1 Samuel 20:30 in connection with the speech of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium that postulates the original existence of three sexes. In the Scriptures there is an allusion that may refer to such an Oriental theory: where in the First Book of Samuel, Chap. XX, v. 30[,] Saul throws out the scornful allusion to Jonathan (beyond doubt a homosexual young man) as being the “son of the perverse, rebellious woman,” a phrase which has a peculiar underlying sexual bearing.392 A hint that Jonathan had inherited some traces of similisexualism occours [sic] in the Hebrew of the insult of the angry Saul to his heir “Thou son of a perverse, rebellious woman, do I not know that thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thine own shame, and to the shame of thy mother’s nakednes[s.]”393

From the same period in Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld went so far as completely to re-word 1 Samuel 20:30 to clarify what he regarded as its obviously homosexual import: “This is an absolutely classic reference.



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 203

What else could it mean than: ‘Do I not know that you, born of a manobsessed mother, love men yourself, that you are in a “shameful” relationship with David’?”394 1 Samuel 20:30 has been understood to denote a sexual relationship between David and Jonathan primarily because of the reference to the shame of the “nakedness” (hwr() of Jonathan’s mother. In ancient Hebrew this noun is usually used to refer to genitalia.395 But it is not only the lexical aspects of this verse that are problematic. It is also not clear what register Saul is using. Is this formal or colloquial language? This raises particular problems for modern interpreters of an ancient text, because the distinction between formal and colloquial language is so dependent on the subtleties of oral speech and dialectical variation at the synchronic level, as well as the diachronic development of oral language. For Hans-Joachim Stoebe, Saul’s insult is an example of colloquial language (Umgangssprache), which accounts for the linguistic difficulties the text presents,396 but it is worth noting that Stoebe is referring to twdrmh tw(n  Nb  alone, not to the entire insult against Jonathan, which also includes the philologically uncomplicated Km) twr( t#b. In a similar vein to Stoebe, André Caquot and Philippe de Robert suggest that Saul’s curses probably reproduce common, everyday expressions (expressions courantes),397 which, if true, points once again to the fragmentariness of our knowledge of ancient Hebrew, because we have no other means of knowing how such language would have been used in everyday speech.398 What does twdrmh tw(n Nb mean? The first noun is uncomplicated: “son of …,” which could refer either literally to Jonathan as his mother’s son – in which case his mother could be included in the insult, unless it is a stock phrase like “son of a bitch”399 in English – or metaphorically to Jonathan as a member of a class of persons,400 in this case rebellious people who act traitorously by forsaking their proper allegiance. The rest of the phrase is more difficult, because the two words are poorly understood, because the relationship between them is difficult to construe, and because the text itself is uncertain. As it stands, tw(n is a feminine singular nifal participle in the construct state from hw(, “bend, twist.” twdrm is feminine singular noun, but the root is uncertain: it could be either drm, “rebel,” or hdr, “discipline, chastise.” If it is from drm, it means something like “rebellion,” but how would it then relate to tw(n? It could be a genitive (nomen rectum) attached to the participle as if it were attached to a descriptive adjective,401 but the problem is that twdrm does not define tw(n as such, but seems to express a similar idea by different means.402 If it is from hdr, it would mean something like “discipline, chastisement,” like Syriac )twdrM, and the phrase

204

The Love of David and Jonathan could then be rendered, “son of a woman who goes astray from discipline.”403 This could mean that Jonathan is someone who has wandered shamelessly from obedience to his father because he lacks discipline, and who has perhaps inherited this waywardness from his mother. Even before the rediscovery of 4QSamb, the oddness of this phrase, combined with the witness of the Septuagint, had prompted scholars to consider emending the text.404 In 4QSamb 6-7 4, the phrase is twr(n  Nb tdrmh, which, assuming tdrmh is a plural participle, with so-called “defective” orthography, is very close to Codex Vaticanus, which has Ui9e korasi/wn au0tomolou/ntwn,405 which means something like, “Son of young women who go astray.” The Masoretic Text may be a corruption of a text similar or identical to 4QSamb, or 4QSamb may reflect an attempt to make an incomprehensible text readable, an attempt also reflected in the Septuagint. If we follow the reading in 4QSamb, Saul is making Jonathan appear no better than an undisciplined young slave girl, impugning both his gender and his social status. This, of course, depends on extratextual codes that determine connotations linked with gender and social status, but this raises the further question of how those codes might have shifted from the time and place of the original writing and earliest hearing or reading of 1 Samuel 20, and the copying and translating of the text in the Hellenistic period.

Picking up on the possibility that twdrm derives from the root drm, “rise in revolt, rebel,” and passing over without comment the possibility that it derives from the root hdr, “chastise, rule,” Hans Wilhelm Hertzberg suggests Saul is accusing his son of rebellious conduct by using this term: “[Saul] curses his son and his son’s mother. These are not, of course reproaches against the mother herself…the revolt is in the last resort against Jonathan himself, seeing that as hereditary successor he is the person most affected.”406 It is not clear whether Saul speaks with cold, calculated intent or irrationally, in the heat of anger. If the former, Hertzberg may be right that Saul’s insult bears the precise nuance of an accusation of rebellion, but if Saul is overcome by an irrational burst of rage it would be difficult to see how Saul’s outburst could be forced to bear such a precise meaning.407 Hertzberg’s construal is possible, though the reference in 20:31 to the instability of Jonathan’s kingdom as the necessary consequence of Jonathan’s association with David suggests that Saul may be either warning Jonathan of the consequences of this association or attacking him for his political naïveté rather than actually accusing him of rebellion. But what does Km)  twr(  t#b mean? The frequent use of hwr( to refer to genitalia suggests that is its meaning here,408 begging the question why this particular insult should spring to Saul’s mind. Even commentators who acknowledge the allusion to genitalia do not always explain why



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this phrase is used. Thus Kyle McCarter notes, “‘Nakedness’…most often refers euphemistically to genitals. Jonathan, says Saul, has disgraced his mother’s genitals, whence he came forth.”409 This is nothing more than a paraphrase of the text and fails to address why this odd turn of phrase is used, what the phrase as a whole means in this context, and what extratextual codes might have determined Saul’s use of the phrase here. Tsumura takes issue with McCarter, suggesting that, “the emphasis is on the disgrace or shame which Saul thinks Jonathan has brought upon himself and his family rather than ‘His mother’s genitals, whence he came forth.’ Note that the nakedness itself is disgraceful to anyone.”410 Tsumura may have a point in suggesting that Saul is attacking Jonathan for bringing disgrace on his family, but he also fails to explain Saul’s strange and otherwise unparalleled choice of words. His comment that, “the nakedness itself is disgraceful to anyone” is actually unintelligible: what on earth does he mean? Shimon Bar-Efrat treats this passage similarly: “It is clear from Jonathan’s answer that he sides with David. This infuriates Saul and causes him to use obscene language. Both shame (besides its usual meaning) and nakedness denote the genitals. The insult is directed at the son, not the mother.”411 He suggests that t#b bears a double meaning “shame” and “sexual organ,” citing Deuteronomy 25:11 and Micah 1:11 in support.412 He is right to note that hwr( can denote genitalia, and probably right that the insult is directed at Jonathan rather than his mother, yet he is silent about why this insult is used, other than as evidence of the intensity of Saul’s anger.413 For Edelman, by contrast, “nakedness” here connotes the blood ties that Jonathan is rejecting by siding with David,414 but I am not aware of hwr( being used with the clear connotation of blood ties elsewhere in ancient Hebrew. This is not to suggest that Edelman is wrong, but that the justification for her interpretation is difficult to grasp. Occasionally interpreters assume either without further scrutiny or with only superficial examination that 1 Samuel 20:30 indicates Saul knew, or thought, the relationship between the two men was sexual. Thomas Römer and Louyse Bonjour, for example, not only note the explicitly sexual language of Saul’s insult, but point out the very odd fact that this verse has received very little serious exegesis from scholars: The bizarre insult Saul utters with respect to his son has been commented upon extremely rarely. It is nonetheless central for understanding the narrative. There is the noun ‘erwah, which denotes masculine or feminine sexual organs. Why is this the first reproach that springs to Saul’s mind, when, in a moment of violent rage, he takes it out on his son? The use of this term in an expression of abuse or malediction is unique in the entire Hebrew Bible, so it would not appear to be an everyday insult. Commentators who try to explain this insult often put forward the idea that Saul is

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The Love of David and Jonathan reproaching Jonathan for not behaving in a manner worthy of the heir to the throne. But in that case why does Saul speak of Jonathan’s mother, and not of his son? And why does he evoke his mother’s genitals? Apparently Saul’s insult can only be taken in the sense of the idea of a homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan. Saul seems to be calling his son effeminate, someone who behaves like an individual of the opposite sex, thereby dishonouring his own mother.415

We do not, of course, know how common such an insult would have been in ancient Israel, nor do we have enough linguistic data to infer how, when, for how long, in what contexts, and with what connotations particular colloquialisms were used there, nor whether the phrases attested in 1 Samuel 20:30 could have been used colloquially without any direct association with sex as such being perceived – the word “cunt” is, after all, used by native speakers of English without a direct reference to female genitalia necessarily being either intended or perceived.416 It does not follow that the rarity of a phrase in the Tanakh entails its rarity in the living language of ancient Israel. Römer and Bonjour assume further that there is a direct correlation between the language of Saul’s insult and the actuality of the relationship between David and Jonathan, when in fact what we see is Saul’s point of view, which may or may not accurately represent their relationship in the world of the text. He could be using a sexually charged insult to condemn his son for a dishonourable, but nonsexual, misdemeanour. They also assume a firm link between effeminacy and homosexuality, which is natural for Western European readers after the Wilde trials,417 but not necessarily for an ancient Israelite or Judahite reader. This passage illustrates well our distance from the world of the text: it assumes codes pertaining to gender performance, a discourse of honour and shame,418 and a language of insults that overlaps with the languages of gender and sex to a significant, though uncertain, degree. Horst Seebass has suggested that Saul believes David will become king as a result of Jonathan’s traitorous loyalty to him, after which David will take over Saul’s harem and thus expose the nakedness of Jonathan’s mother.419 This makes good sense of the connection between 20:30 and 20:31, and while Seebass does not explicitly note this, it echoes Absalom taking over David’s harem as a sign of his usurpation of the throne on the human plane (2 Sam. 16:20-23), and the fulfilment of Nathan’s prediction on the divine (2 Sam. 12:11-12). But there is no indication, prior to Ahithophel’s advice in 2 Samuel 16:21, that taking over the ousted king’s harem was a real possibility in the context of dynastic conflict in Israel. Ken Stone has further argued that, rather than constituting a claim to the throne, Absalom’s actions may be better read as an attack on David’s gender-based prestige, thus impugning his masculinity by showing how



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powerless he is to protect the sexuality of the women in his possession.420 If this is the case, and if this scenario in 2 Samuel 16:20-23 is analogous then Saul is reproaching Jonathan for acting in such a way that his mother will be sexually disgraced by David. Yet this is awkward. It is difficult to see how the threat of David having sex with Jonathan’s mother makes sense as an attack by Saul on Jonathan, since the sexuality of Jonathan’s mother is, from Saul’s perspective at this point, still very much his responsibility, not his son’s. Perhaps he is blaming Jonathan for putting Saul, and thus by extension Jonathan’s mother, in such a deeply compromised position, for Jonathan, through his traitorous association with David, has made it possible for David one day to take both Saul’s kingship and Saul’s harem, including Jonathan’s mother. Perhaps Saul is even evading his own responsibility in making it possible for David to take over the kingship, for had Saul not taken David into his house – in the Masoretic Text, at least – Jonathan would not have been so easily able to develop and cement his loyalty to David. Martti Nissinen sees a clear reference to sexual indecency in 1 Samuel 20:30, though for him this need not imply the relationship between David and Jonathan was in fact sexual: The mentioning of disgracing one’s mother’s “nakedness” conveys a negative sexual nuance and gives the impression that Saul saw something indecent in Jonathan’s and David’s relationship. What could Saul have seen as so shameful in an ordinary friendship of his son and the young man under his care?… Surely the relationship of David and Jonathan can be interpreted also from another perspective than that of homoeroticism. Saul’s reaction can be taken as an oriental outburst of rage, which commonly involved obscene language, even to the point of disgracing one’s mother.421

Nissinen rightly notes the sexual nuance of hwr(, but does not avoid an either/or in his interpretation: either Saul’s outburst points to a sexual relationship between David and Jonathan, or it does not. This, however, misses an important narratological subtlety: Saul’s outburst points only to his own point of view on the relationship and its implications. Both Seebass and Nissinen acknowledge the sexual dimension of Saul’s language without making it refer clearly to a sexual relationship between David and Jonathan. Walter Dietrich, on the other hand, suggests that Saul, “almost explicitly accuses Jonathan of sexual dependence on David (20:30).”422 Theodore Jennings, likewise, has no doubt that this passage refers to sex, and sees in 1 Samuel 20:30 the idea of Jonathan uncovering his mother’s nakedness, arguably exceeding the semantic parameters of Km)  twr(  t#bl, which in contradistinction to the Septuagint (ei0j ai0sxu/nhn a)pokalu/yewj mhtro/j sou) makes no clear reference to

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uncovering. 423 According to Jennings, in order to expose his mother’s nakedness, Jonathan must have had sex with someone who had himself either had sex with his mother, or had sex with someone who had had sex with her. If Jonathan had had sex with David, and David in turn had had sex with Saul, who in turn had had sex with Jonathan’s mother, then Jonathan had indirectly uncovered and shamed his mother’s nakedness.424 But the Masoretic Text does not refer to uncovering Jonathan’s mother’s nakedness, but to its shame or dishonour. Moreover, did the character Saul really have this elaborate sequence of transgressions of sexual boundaries in mind? Jennings partially follows the logic of affinity on which the laws of Leviticus 18 and 20 operate, but there uncovering the nakedness of a woman outside the permitted limits of affinity means uncovering the nakedness of the man who is the custodian of her sexuality (esp. Lev. 18:7, 8, 16; 20:11). The difference here is that it is Jonathan’s mother’s own nakedness that is mentioned. It is interesting, though, that Jennings should make this connection, because both he and the Septuagint seem to reflect the influence of the use of hwr( in other texts, some of which do refer to uncovering.425 This is another example of the unconscious effect on the interpretation of the David and Jonathan narrative of its wider canonical context. Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, who regards opponents of the view that David and Jonathan are represented in the text as sexually involved with one another as a “dwindling consensus,”426 links Saul’s insult with the preceding passage, in which Saul assumes David’s absence at the New Moon festival to indicate his ritual uncleanness (1 Sam. 20:26): “the physiological impurity of one member of the pair may mirror the sexual insult the other receives.”427 The impurity in question would be a seminal discharge, Saul’s subsequent insult then alluding to the sexual act David performed and implicating Jonathan in that act: “Jonathan debased his mother’s genitals by giving his loyalty to a mere stranger … Why not have this apostrophe function like a double entendre, with the mention of David’s filthiness, viz. ‘you’re a mamma’s son, and in love with this David’?”428 Nardelli correctly recognizes the importance of the wider literary context for interpreting 1 Samuel 20:30, but there is an additional connection with 20:26 that he does not note. There David’s ritual impurity is inferred (rm)) by Saul, and thus belongs to his viewpoint, not the narrator’s, and the reader remains ignorant as to whether or not David is in fact ritually impure. In 20:30 Saul’s insult to Jonathan is based on what he claims to “know” ((dy). Again, this is Saul’s point of view, not the narrator’s. It is thus possible that Saul’s initial inference (20:26) about the meaning of David’s absence is false, and that Saul’s second inference



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(20:30) about the relationship between his son and David – whatever it might mean – is likewise false.429 The issue here is what Saul believes to be the case, not the reality of his son’s relationship with David, though the relationship between the two is hardly an uncomplicated matter. What we have here is a richly focalized text that plays on the points of view of Saul, Jonathan, the narrator, and the reader. Following the initial insult, Saul directs at Jonathan a rhetorical question that begins “Have I not known?” (yt(dy  )wlh), a rhetorical question that contains the second insult, the charge that Jonathan has brought shame to his mother’s genitals. Saul presents his point of view, but within the framework provided by the narrator. To use Mieke Bal’s terms, Saul is the internal focalizor, the character within the narrative whose point of view the narrator represents, and the narrator is the external focalizor, and not imprisoned as a character within the narrative.430 The relationship between Jonathan and David is the focalized object,431 as seen and understood by the character Saul. At issue here is the fact that Saul is claiming to “know” that his son has consorted with David, that this has somehow brought a disgrace that can be described using sexual vocabulary, and that this means Jonathan’s kingdom will not be established. When Saul hurls his spear at Jonathan, echoing his earlier attempt to kill David by the same means (1 Sam. 18:11), Jonathan is said to “know” ((dy) that his father intends to kill David. Thus the issue here is not simply whether this text refers to a sexual relationship between David and Jonathan, but whether Saul believes that Jonathan is sexually involved with David. This binds the relationship between David and Jonathan to the wider theme of knowledge not only in the subsidiary David and Jonathan narrative, but in the overarching narrative of the downfall of Saul and the rise of David:432 what does Saul know, and how does his knowledge, or lack of it, contribute to his developing paranoia and subsequent downfall?433 When Saul, then, addresses Jonathan with the rhetorical question yt(dy  )wlh in 20:30, the unsought answer could conceivably be, “No, you do not know.” There is also an inversion of power between Jonathan and Saul: because the relationship between Jonathan and David is, in effect, a nonperceptible object to Saul, his attempt to exercise power over his son by trying to kill him (20:33) is futile, because his son, for whom the relationship is a perceptible object, has a degree of knowledge that gives him, and David, power over Saul. Unlike his father, Jonathan knows both the truth of his relationship with David, and the truth of his father’s designs on David’s life (20:34), and can now use this knowledge to effect David’s escape, which helps to seal Saul’s fate. By claiming a knowledge he does not have, Saul is attempting, one last time, to assert his power over

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Jonathan, but the attempt inevitably fails. The way the David and Jonathan narrative is focalized, then, helps to accentuate Saul’s tragedy. The effect of making a distinction between the perspective of the narrator and the perspective of Saul – in Bal’s terms again, between the one who sees and the one who speaks434 – is that 1 Samuel 20:30 becomes less relevant to the question of whether David and Jonathan were in a sexual relationship, because even if we could be certain what this verse means, we would only have access to what Saul says in the context of what the narrator claims to see. It could reflect, that is, no more than a figment of an untrustworthy character’s imagination. Saul could, that is, be accusing David of being sexually involved with David when in fact their relationship was politically but not erotically charged. Yet the rest of the narrative is, at certain points, ambiguous, which means that the reader can see exactly why Saul might have read the relationship between David and Jonathan in this way, and may feel ambivalent about judging Saul to be an untrustworthy character without further ado. 4.3.11.2. Revisiting the maternal genitalia. While all the other texts concerned with the relationship between David and Jonathan are ambiguous in their use of language that could be construed erotically, 1 Samuel 20:30-34 is not. In its use of the noun hwr( this passage is firmly within the orbit of the sexual. But that is still only in the realm of what the term taken out of context denotes, not what it connotes in context, and it is at the level of connotation in context that the most pressing ambiguities arise: what might the language of sexual shame connote here? The shame associated with an actual but transgressive sexual relationship, or the shame, associated metaphorically with sex, that arises from a relationship with humiliating political consequences? Furthermore, in terms of focalization, it is Saul alone who associates the consequences of Jonathan’s betrayal with sexual shame, whereas David later describes Jonathan’s love – and perhaps his love for Jonathan – as “wonderful” (ht)lpn), and the narrator offers no value judgment of a positive or negative kind.435 What remains unclear is not whether the language is sexually charged, but why Saul uses such language. There are a number of options. Saul, lacking direct access to the secret meetings between David and Jonathan, may not actually believe their relationship to be sexual, but may be using the language of sexual shame as a customary means of attacking someone whose actions are considered deplorable, regardless of whether or not they are actually sexual acts. Thus Saul may in fact not be aware of the true nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan, but may simply be using sexualized



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language (1 Sam. 20:30) as a means of insulting and shaming his son for his familial and political disloyalty (20:30-31). Thus Ralph Klein comments, “Saul accused Jonathan of being a comrade or ally of David, a friendship that should be as embarrassing to him as it was embarrassing to the nakedness, or genitals, of his mother.”436 Klein majors here on the disloyalty of Jonathan, though it still remains unclear in what sense their friendship is embarrassing to Jonathan’s mother’s genitals. The use of sexual slander was a commonplace in several ancient corpora of literature as a means of defaming an opponent,437 and the fact that Jonathan regards Saul’s insult as “putting him [David or Jonathan?] to shame”438 (wmlkh) suggests that Saul is using sexual slander in order to exert his power over a son he regards as criminally disloyal. The insult is, of course, twofold: Jonathan is twdrmh tw(n Nb and one who has shamed both his own and his mother’s nakedness. If McCarter is right that Nb here means “member of a class of” then Jonathan is being associated with wayward women, and thus his masculinity is being impugned as part of the insult.439 The accent, however, may fall not on the nuance of rebellion but on the gender coding implied by the insult: it is not that Jonathan belongs to a class of rebellious women, but that he belongs to a class of rebellious women. Given that Jonathan is made responsible by Saul for shaming his mother’s nakedness, this might imply a further slur on his masculinity, that his disloyalty can be represented by a charge that he has failed to guard the sexuality of a woman in the household over which he is one day meant to inherit control (this is not too far from Seebass’s view). Saul’s insult would then belong to the same category as the sexuallycharged prophetic defamations of the people of Israel for their politicoreligious disloyalty to their god YHWH. Indeed, given that the rhetoric of the sexual commandments in the “final form” of Leviticus 18 is as much about the avoidance of identity with Egyptians and Canaanites, defined entirely in terms of their moral turpitude, as it is about the Israelites leading a sexually pure life, it is possible that 1 Samuel 20:30, prophetic invective, and the Holiness Code, independently and in their particular contexts, are all using some kind of sexual slander to marginalize an opponent, respectively Jonathan, sinful Israel and/or Judah, and the non-Israelite Other. This would suggest that inasmuch as the invective of Ezekiel tells us nothing for certain about the sexual misdemeanours of early sixth-century bce Judah, and inasmuch as the Holiness Code tells us nothing for certain about attitudes in ancient Israel and Judah generally to sexual acts but merely points to the attitudes of the particular priestly group responsible for redacting the code to such acts and to two nations they claimed partook of them, so 1 Samuel 20:30 is irrelevant to

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the question of the relationship between David and Jonathan in itself, but crucial to understanding the narratorial representation of Saul’s attitude to his son. A second option is that given the social world implied by Samuel, a context in which sexual acts seem, from our limited evidence, to have implied relationships of power more than some possible inherent orientation, Saul’s use of sexual language may point to the reversal of power to which Jonathan’s association with David would inevitably lead. Sexual language is thus being used metaphorically in relation to power relationships. Saul’s intention is that Jonathan should succeed him as king, despite the fact that hereditary leadership has no established precedent in the historiographical narratives of Israel and Judah.440 Saul sees David as a threat to the establishment of Jonathan’s kingly rule, which, given that David is of lower status as the youngest son of Jesse than Jonathan as the son of Israel’s king, implies a reversal of power analogous to the transgression and inversion of properly constituted sexual roles. Such a reversal would be as dishonourable to Jonathan, and to his family, as being of dubious parentage (twdrmh tw(n Nb, taking Nb literally to mean “son”) or having sex with his mother (Km) twr( t#bl). A third possibility is that the text is using language that is obscure and open to more than one construal to emphasize that for one of the characters, Saul, it is the very uncertain nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan that constitutes a threat he cannot control. The language of the narrative must be ambiguous, in order to emphasize Saul’s dread of ambiguity, which culminates in his attack on it in 1 Samuel 20:30, where he desperately claims knowledge. This is bound up with what Robert Polzin has termed Saul’s “overdependence upon the certainties of ritual and the rituals of certainty.”441 Saul has attempted to control David by giving his daughter Michal to him, and while this attempt to control David failed, David’s relationship with Michal is not portrayed ambiguously. But Jonathan’s is. It is at least partly because it is not clear in what sense – from the point of view of either Saul or the reader – Jonathan “loves” David that Saul cannot control Jonathan’s involvement with him. To some extent this is irrelevant, since it is the fact of Jonathan’s greater loyalty to David than to Saul that is the problem, not the precise nature of their love. But it may nevertheless shed light on Saul’s outburst. Saul claims to “know” the nature of Jonathan’s relationship with David, and that the consequence of this relationship is Jonathan’s shame and the shame of his mother’s nakedness. Saul is attempting one last, desperate time to control his son’s strangely elusive attachment to David by naming it as sexual, and in naming it attempting to control it and thereby exert power over one part



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of his household. Thus the text is implying that Saul claims to know the nature of the relationship between Jonathan and David, in spite of the fact that the narrator has kept all the meetings between David and Jonathan away from the gaze of Saul, and only represented them to the reader using equivocal language. Lacking access to the relationship as it is perceived by the narrator and the other characters, Saul is rendered powerless in relation to Jonathan, David, YHWH, the narrator, and the reader, and in voicing his perception, he is laying his powerlessness bare before the son who holds his father’s fate in his hands. The reader is thus drawn into the text by a fascination with the interpretation of the very ambiguities that threaten Saul, and is at the same time given a narrator’s eye view of the entire situation that enables the reader to relate Saul’s point of view with the points of view of both the other characters and the narrator him- or herself. The character Saul, then, is the first person to attempt to determine the nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan by resolving the elusive hints as to its meaning. By making Saul resolve, using sexual language, the ambiguities of a relationship whose sexual dimension is never more than a possibility, the writer has set in train the process that will eventually lead to unequivocal affirmations and denials, on the part of readers, of the sexual relationship between David and Jonathan. Since this move depends on both Saul (within the text) and the reader (outside the text as a work, but within it as an essential element of its construal precisely as a text) wrestling with ambiguous evidence, it is difficult to see how any act of disambiguation can constitute a misreading, since the text itself is so constructed as to invite readers’ interpretive cooperation, the first “reader” being, in fact, a character within the text. 4.3.12.

lydgh dwd d( wh(r t) #y) wkbyw wh(r t) #y) wq#yw

They kissed each other, and wept together, until David exceeded.

There are two interpretive issues here, one connected with wq#yw, “and they kissed,” the other connected with lydgh  dwd  d(, “and David exceeded (?).” There are no philological problems with wq#yw. The difficulty is rather with what would have been connoted by two men kissing as they take their leave of each other, and how that might differ from the connotations such an act might have in the cultures in which the narrative has since been read. On account of his cultural conditioning, Magnus Hirschfeld, for example, could not imagine how David, elsewhere depicted as hardy and eager for battle, could kiss someone unless he was inflamed with (sexual) love. 442 Our principal means of addressing the

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meaning of this verb is to look at the contexts in which q#n appears elsewhere in ancient Hebrew, with all the attendant methodological problems with that procedure. The phrase lydgh dwd d(, on the other hand, is almost totally obscure. The verb q#n, “kiss,” could certainly be used erotically, for example in Proverbs 7:13 and Song of Songs 1:2. But the Song of Songs also implicitly acknowledges the ambiguity of the verb, and the different connotations the action it denotes bears in different social contexts, when in Song of Songs 8:1 the female lover wishes her beloved could be like a brother to her (yl x)k Knty ym), so that she could kiss him openly (Kq#) Cwxb), with no need for secrecy. The social import of kissing is entirely context dependent, and is bound to the way that gender, degrees of affinity, social status, the body, and space are encoded in relation to one another in particular social contexts. The situation is complicated in the Song of Songs by the fact that sibling language is apparently used metaphorically, as a term of endearment, by the male lover addressing his beloved,443 but literally by her brothers,444 and by the fact that sibling language is used frequently in Egyptian love poetry from the New Kingdom.445 The juxtaposition of 1 and 2 Samuel and the Song of Songs in the Tanakh opens up the possibility that the use of q#n (1 Sam. 20:41) and x) (2 Sam. 1:26) in the David and Jonathan narrative could be construed erotically, but in no way forces that conclusion on the reader. The verb q#n is used of Jacob kissing Rachel,446 but notably before the text tells us that he “loved” (bh)yw) her.447 In the same scene he greets and kisses (q#n piel)448 his kinsman (x))449 Laban. Elsewhere q#n is used in contexts of kin meeting and taking leave of one another: of a son kissing his father,450 of a father kissing one or more of his children,451 of a man kissing his son’s children,452 of brothers kissing,453 of a man kissing his fatherin-law,454 of a woman and her daughters-in-law kissing one another.455 It is also used of a man of God kissing a king after anointing him,456 of Absalom kissing Israelites who have come to King David for judgment,457 for a king kissing a loyal servant when they part,458 of someone kissing a god or his image.459 These kinds of contexts, all of which imply some degree of loyalty and trust, even if expressed disingenuously, make it possible to make some sense of passages such as Proverbs 24:26, where there is no context to speak of, but also raise the risk of importing more connotations from one text into another than the texts in question necessarily warrant. Based on literal uses of q#n are metaphorical uses such as we find in the Psalms, where justice (qdc) and peace (Mwl#) can kiss.460 It is difficult to see how q#y could mean “kiss” in Genesis 41:40, unless the whole phrase “to kiss on the mouth” (q#n yp l() were a circumlocution for something else, such as obedience (cf. the Septuagint).

The kissing of David and Jonathan makes reasonable sense as part of the process by which two de facto siblings in Saul’s household would



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greet and take leave of one another. The meeting of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 33:3-4 is particularly close, with Jacob bowing to the ground (hcr)  wxt#yw) seven times before Esau kisses Jacob and the two men weep together. The fact that q#n can be used elsewhere in erotic contexts does not ipso facto entail that this context is erotic,461 though of course it does not absolutely exclude it either. This leaves the problem of lydgh dwd d(. There are no obvious morphological difficulties: lydgh is a hifil form from the root ldg, which basically means, “make great” in the sense “enlarge,” or, by extension, “boast.” But the absence of strictly morphological difficulties is more than made up for by a more comprehensively philological problem: no-one knows what lydgh means here. Some interpreters, undeterred by this, have recently taken lydgh in 1 Samuel 20:41 to refer to David getting an erection.462 I find it difficult, I must admit, to visualize the resulting scene, possibly for the same reason I find it difficult to imagine Achsah indignantly farting in Judges 1:14.463 Even if that were the most probable interpretation of lydgh, why, in a text that is otherwise so ambiguous in its portrayal of the relationship between the two men, would we suddenly be confronted with such a no-holds-barred picture?464 This reading is something of a counsel of despair offered by interpreters confronted by an especially resistant piece of Hebrew, but David Toshio Tsumura has made another suggestion that would demand a particular kind of interpretive co-operation on the part of the reader. He translates the phrase “until David cried louder,” as if the text read wlwq  lydgh  dwd  d(, and comments that this expression, “is literally ‘until David made (his voice) great/magnified.’ Here ‘his voice’ is omitted as a result of brachylogy… The context requires the comparative sense: louder.”465 What Tsumura means is that a key word has been omitted because the author is using an idiom that his readers would have understood without the need to write it out fully.466 He calls this phenomenon “brachylogy,” which is a kind of ellipsis. There are certainly passages in 1 Samuel that only make sense if some kind of ellipsis is assumed: in 1 Samuel 22:8, for example, the phrase y#y  Nb  M(  ynb  trkb, “when my son cut …with the son of Jesse” only makes sense if we infer tyrb, “covenant” as the implied object of trk.467 Tsumura’s is an extremely interesting suggestion that raises the issue of linguistic competence. For Tsumura, someone linguistically competent in the Hebrew in which 1 Samuel was written would have had no more trouble inferring an object for lydgh than a competent speaker of certain dialects of modern English would if I were to describe some act as “shutting the stable door” (i.e. “…after the horse has bolted,” something that would have been useful beforehand, but which

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events have made redundant) or “re-arranging the deckchairs” (i.e. “…on the Titanic,” some purely cosmetic act that cannot forestall the inevitable demise of something). The nature of the phrase would be such as positively to require the cooperation of a competent hearer or reader. Yet Tsumura’s is no more than a thought-provoking hypothesis that cannot be tested until other ancient Hebrew texts turn up that can corroborate the suggestion that the verb lydgh can be used in such a way as to imply an object such as lwq. We would also need to explain how lwq lydgh related to another idiom in the Hebrew of 1 and 2 Samuel, “he raised his voice and wept,” which appears as Kbyw wlq )#yw in 1 Samuel 24:17. In any case, the real problems begin when the link to the linguistic system in which this kind of ellipsis made sense is lost. That is the situation all modern interpreters of 1 Samuel 20:41 are in. Given a combination of the ignorance of readers of the text, a desire to determine its meaning, and the influence of any number of more or less alien codes, there is nothing to prevent what may have been an otherwise mundane fragment of idiomatic Hebrew morphing into an ancient Israelite erection. 4.3.13.

d)m yl tm(n Ntnwhy yx) Kyl( yl rc My#n tbh)m yl Ktbh) ht)lpn

I am distraught over you, my brother Jonathan You were adorable to me More wondrous was your love to me than the love of women.

This is arguably the verse that requires the reader to engage most deeply, and despite the valiant attempts of commentators, it continues to resist their desire to determine its meaning. It is the most radically open part of the David and Jonathan narrative. This is to some extent reflected in the fact that in the transmission of the text, this verse has appeared in several guises, and the dirge of which this verse – now, at least – forms a part has inspired a number of rewritings. It is this verse above all that has prompted interpreters to find an erotic dimension to the relationship between David and Jonathan, or to defend their relationship against such a construal. In what follows, I am going to focus on the openness of the Hebrew text, though of course it is most important to note that the uniqueness of 2 Samuel 1:19-27 in the context of the extant literature of ancient Israel is misleading. The closest analogues to 2 Samuel 1:19-27 are in the dirges sung by Achilles after the death of Patroclus, and by Gilgamesh after the death of Enkidu,468 that, in the socio-cultural context out of which David’s dirge emerged, illustrate the intertextual matrix in which the latter participates far more clearly than does anything else in the Tanakh.



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In what sense was Jonathan tm(n, “lovely” to David? In the immediate context of the dirge, both Saul and Jonathan are described as Mybh)nh Mmy(nhw, “beloved and lovely,” but here a distinction is made between the two men: only Jonathan is “lovely” to me, yl. But what does this mean? The verb is rare in Hebrew. For the phrase l M(n, Koehler-Baumgartner offers two options, “be pleasant, delightful,” or “be friendly with someone,”469 but for the latter they only offer 2 Samuel 1:26 as an example. It seems rather problematic to create a category on the basis of only one reference, as there is no other evidence that l  M(n ever meant “be friendly with” in ancient Hebrew. Elsewhere, in the Masoretic Text of Proverbs 2:10 M(ny  K#pnl  t(dw seems to mean “knowledge is delightful to your soul.” Most problematic is the phrase My#n  tbh)m  yl  Ktbh)  ht)lpn, which begs a range of questions, clustering mainly around My#n  tbh). This phrase occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew of the Tanakh, though an analogous phrase does occur in Greek,470 nor are hbh) and h#) found together elsewhere in the biblical corpus. Yaron Peleg rightly notes the openness of this verse – though his implied body/spirit dualism is a highly questionable imposition – but even Peleg only touches on the extraordinary range of questions that might baffle the reader: David’s lament over Jonathan…can be read in several ways. The comparative preposition, Nm (“passing” or “more than”), can suggest that the love the two men shared differed from heterosexual love only in degree, depth, and intensity, but not in kind. But the comparison can also suggest a distinction between two kinds of love, a distinction between carnal love and spiritual love. A third way to interpret the verse is by examining its syntax, especially the use of the word yl (“to/for me”). It is one thing for David to say “for me [that is, as far as I am concerned] your love was wonderful,” and quite another to say “your love for me [that is, the way you felt for me] was wonderful.” In the first reading, David expresses his own feelings for Jonathan as well. In the second reading, he is simply paying homage to Jonathan’s great devotion to him.471

Is David in 2 Samuel 1:26 referring to the love of women in general, or to the love of specific women in his life, such as his women Merab, Michal,472 Abigail, and Ahinoam, or the women among his kin, such as mother and sisters? Is the genitive here subjective or objective, that is, is David referring to the love women had, or might have for him, or is he referring to the love he had, or might have for women, or both? Is this love being compared with Jonathan’s love for David, or with David’s love for Jonathan, or both? Part of the ambiguity here is to do with the relationship between the first three words of the line. Should yl be taken with ht)lpn (“Your

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love was wonderful to me”) or with Ktbh) (“Your love to me was wonderful”)? The kjv, for example, appears to favour the latter, implying that Ktbh) represents Jonathan’s love for David (“…thy love to me was wonderful…”), though even the kjv could just about support the former construal. Frank Moore Cross, on the other hand, renders the phrase, “To love thee was for me/Better than the love of women,”473 closing down the ambiguity in favour of David’s love for Jonathan. What kind of love of women does David have in mind? Is it women’s sexual love for men,474 including him? Cheryl Exum’s comment, “I take the most natural meaning of [2 Sam. 1:26] to be that Jonathan loved David (nothing is said of the converse) more than women love men,”475 merely begs these questions: why is this the “most natural” reading, and must “the most natural reading” preclude other possibilities? How do “women love men,” and in what sense is this love comparable with the sort of love Jonathan has for David? What exactly is the “love of women”? Does this verse refer to women’s love for their children,476 for other members of the household or clan, for other women rather than for men, for a patron deity, for YHWH? What kind of love is in mind in the word Ktbh)? What sort of “love” – fraternal, sexual, political; Jonathan’s love for other men rather than for women; his love for David; David’s love for him; his love for a patron deity477 – is meant? Even if we can decide whether this is Jonathan’s love for David, David’s love for Jonathan, or their love for each other, is this love sexual or non-sexual? Is it erotic, but without explicit sexual expression? Is Jonathan’s non-erotic love for David being compared with women’s inferior, erotic love for him?478 Could it be defined as erotic, but in a way that challenges and subverts dominant uses of the adjective “erotic” in modern English (or erotisch in German)? If Cross is right that hbh) is primarily kinship language, is it the love a man shows for siblings, parents, children, or other members of the household or clan? Is the comparison then between the love of women, who are perhaps little more than political pawns, and the love of Jonathan, which was founded on a decision to honour his covenant with David above the ties of kinship, of blood,479 that should have bound him to be loyal to his father (cf. 1 Sam. 20:30-34)? Does hbh) here bear primarily emotional or political connotations, or have these distinctions become indistinguishable? Is the comparison between a love given with no ulterior motive and a love given only for the sake of some form of advantage, as m. Avot 5:16 might imply? Does hbh) have the same connotations in the phrase My#n thb) as it does in the word Ktbh)? This is not simply a matter of which “meaning” of hbh) best fits the context, as if a lexicon entry could resolve the issues raised by the text



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and prevent the risk of further interpretation. This passage also implies a series of codes to which the reader must refer in order to disambiguate the text. What construction of masculinity is implied by Jonathan’s love, and what construction of femininity is implied by the love of women? If we read 2 Samuel 1:26 in light of Peleg’s work, for example, Jonathan himself is understood to have related to David as a woman,480 thus introducing a significant note of irony into 2 Samuel 1:26: the love of Jonathan, the man who performed a woman’s role, was more wonderful to David than the love of real women. This, however, depends on a reification of categories of masculinity and femininity that would have been socially constructed, highlighting the potential risk of writing later social constructions of gender roles between the lines of the ancient text. How does this verse relate to issues of social status? Is David comparing the quality of two expressions of love, or the social status of the lovers? In other words, is David implying that Jonathan’s love was that between equals,481 in contrast either with relationships with women that had been of culturally determined inequality,482 or with homosocial – or homosexual? – relationships in which a distinction between active and passive roles was normative? Is David comparing Jonathan’s “selfless and giving” love with women’s love that did not bear these qualities,483 or is he comparing Jonathan’s non-sexual love for him with the sexual love of women?484 Are homosocial contexts implied by David’s words here? That is, is David comparing the kind of love that might obtain among women in an all-female context with the kind of love that might obtain between men in an all-male context, such as on the field of battle? Is the comparison between the love of male comrades for one another and the love a woman might show a man in a non-martial context? Is it between a genuine, mutual affection of the two warriors and the lack of mutual affection in the context of political marriages?485 Even when we have recognized these questions, the reader still needs to make a judgment about David’s integrity. Is he being honest with those he expects to hear this dirge, or is he trying to manipulate people who might otherwise refuse to support him because of either his former opposition to Saul, or his traitorous alliance with the Philistines, or both?486 It is clear from other passages, such as his charge to Hushai the Archite (2 Sam. 15:33-36), that David is no stranger to politically motivated dissimulation. To point out that the text offers these questions to the reader by no means implies that the reader can, or should, try to reach a decisive resolution. Indeed, that these questions can be raised with respect to this verse suggests that to try to pin down the meaning of the text with greater

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exactitude in a sense does violence to the text by imposing a particular interpretive desire upon it, namely the desire for closure. This in turn reveals this interpretive desire to be stultifying, sterile, without life. In the Septuagint, the situation is relatively uncomplicated, inasmuch as the Greek is a fairly literal rendering of Hebrew that was presumably more or less identical to the Masoretic Text, and serves to transfer the ambiguities of the Hebrew into another language. In the phrase a)lgw~ e0pi\ soi/ a1delfe/ mou 'Iwna&qan: w(raiw&qhj moi sfo/dra, e0qaumastw&qh h9 a)ga&phsi/j sou e0moi\ u(pe\r a)ga&phsin gunaikw~n, “I am deeply pained over you my brother Jonathan, you were very beautiful to me; your love was more wonderful to me than the love of women,” equivalent questions confront the reader. What nuance(s) of “love” (a)ga&phsij) is/are at work here? What is connoted by “love of women” (a)ga&phsin gunaikw~n)? Would an ancient reader literate in Greek literature find more intertextual associations than would an ancient Jewish reader literate only in Hebrew, and perhaps Aramaic? That Jonathan’s physical beauty is still a factor is suggested by w(raiw&qhj as a translation equivalent for tm(n, an equivalence the Septuagint here shares with the Song of Songs. Indeed, 2 Samuel 1:26 and the Song of Songs are the only places in the Septuagint where w(raio/omai, “be beautiful” is used at all. In Song of Songs 1:10 it refers to the beauty of the female beloved’s body. On two other occasions in the Song (7:2, 7), it is used to translate forms of hpy, “be beautiful,” which is parallel with M(n in Song of Songs 7:7.487 Whether or not the references in the Song can be used appropriately to interpret 2 Samuel 1:26 cannot be resolved solely on the grounds of a difference in context between the two works, because while 2 Samuel 1:19-27 is different in genre from the Song of Songs, it still begs the question of what it was about Jonathan that made it possible for the poet to have David praise him in this particular way, and what it was about the resources of Hebrew, and subsequently Greek, that made it possible for David’s praise to be represented by these particular words and phrases. Similarly, that the Song of Songs is concerned with heteroerotic love cannot be cited as evidence against a homoerotic construal of 2 Samuel 1:26. Both the Greek and the Hebrew of 2 Samuel 1:26 can be used in an erotic context, begging the question of whether they might be construed erotically here. In the Targum and part of the manuscript tradition of the Vulgate, attempts seem to have been made to make “the love of women” a little more specific, and thus presumably make “the love of Jonathan” a little more specific too. This has three noteworthy effects. First, it brings to light a felt need to make specific an equivocal expression that, for some



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reason, should not be permitted to transgress limits. This is the interpretation offered by Stoebe, who suggests that the translation in the Targum is intended to “exclude a later felt embarrassment” (…eine später empfundene Peinlichkeit (Röm 1,[2]7) ausschließen),488 citing Paul’s visceral disgust at sex between men in his support. Second, by making this attempt at concealment, it is pointing to the problematic language that made this concealment necessary in the first place, though this might only be obvious to a reader of the Targum who also knows the Masoretic Text in Hebrew, and a reader of the Vulgate who likewise knows the Masoretic Text in Hebrew, or the Septuagint in Greek. Third, the process of translation of an ambiguous Hebrew verse into two other languages has the effect of pushing back the moment of definitive interpretation yet further, because it opens the text to a new set of intertextual possibilities with which the reader must engage. Targum Jonathan specifies the love with which Jonathan’s is compared as, literally, “the love of two women.”489 The reader of this dirge in Aramaic is enabled, at a number of points, to make connections that the Hebrew does not make obvious. For example, in 2 Samuel 1:17 David “laments” (Aram. )l)w), which is a fair rendering of the Hebrew (Nnqyw), but may also recall Judges 11:40, where in the Targum the daughters of Jerusalem “go to lament” (h)l)l  Nlz)) Jephthah’s daughter, using the same verb in Aramaic where a different one (hnt piel) is used in Hebrew.490 Thus the reader of the Targum can explore what it is about the relationship between the daughters of Jerusalem and Jephthah’s daughter on the one hand, and between David and Jonathan on the other, that could be regarded as comparable. In 2 Samuel 1:23, Saul and Jonathan are described in Hebrew as “beloved and lovely” (Mny(nhw Mybh)nh), which comes out in Aramaic as Nybybxw Nymyxr. The use of the roots Mxr and bbx together recalls 1 Samuel 18:1, enabling the reader to read the binding of Jonathan and David there with the description of Saul and Jonathan here. The same collocation appears in 1:26: Kl( yl tq( Ntnwhy yx) )dxl yl tbybx yl Ktmxr )#rpm .Ny#n Nytrt tmxrm

I am in anguish over you my brother Jonathan you were very precious to me your love was more wondrous to me than the love of two women.

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The most obvious difference from the mt is that in the Targum, the “women,” to whose love Jonathan’s is compared, are specified as “two.” For van Staalduine-Sulman, the rendering in the Targum is based on a halakhic principle that an unspecified plural (i.e. My#n in the mt of 2 Sam. 1:26) can be assumed to refer to two.491 Van Staalduine-Sulman renders Ny#n Nytrt tmxr “the love of my two wives,” specifying the women still further: they are two particular women, among David’s “wives.” Unlike van Staalduine-Sulman, I have deliberately left vague the precise referent of Ny#n Nytrt to highlight the fact that the Aramaic text does not make clear which two women are in mind. Both the Hebrew and the Aramaic can be read as implying a reader’s question: “Which (two) women?” This reader’s question, which may, indeed, be the Aramaic translator’s question, is matched in the history of interpretation by the wrestling of actual readers with this very problem: which women are being referred to? In the rabbinic literature, this is connected with the issue of proper halakhah. There have been several references earlier in 1 and 2 Samuel to David’s women, and the Targum may well reflect a reading of the passages relating to David and Jonathan in relation to the various passages concerned with David’s relationships with women. In 1 Samuel 18:17-19, David refuses to become Saul’s “son-in-law” (Ntx) by means of a political marriage to Merab, and Merab is subsequently given to Adriel the Meholathite as wife. In 1 Samuel 18:27 Saul gives Michal to David as wife, but hands her on again to Palti son of Laish in 1 Samuel 25:44, without David first obtaining a bill of divorce. Thus when in 1 Samuel 25:42-43 David takes two women, Abigail and Ahinoam as his wives, he is still, in halakhic terms, married to Michal. Thus when he eventually reclaims Michal by means of Abner in 2 Samuel 3:12-16, she has never ceased to be his wife,492 and in 2 Samuel 1:26 David is, in effect, married to three (not two) women. This is not clear in the Hebrew text of Samuel, however, where from 1  Samuel 25:44 onwards Abigail and Ahinoam are considered to be David’s two wives. On this basis, the Targum to 2 Samuel 1:26 would seem, most obviously, to be a comparison between the love of Jonathan and the love of Abigail and Ahinoam,493 in which the love of Abigail and Ahinoam – their love for David or David’s love for them? – is for some reason found wanting. In the case of the Vulgate, the Clementine text retains a fascinating medieval gloss that responds to the ambiguities of the verse: doleo super te frater mi Ionatha decore nimis et amabilis super amorem mulierum. Sicut mater unicum amat filium suum ita ego te diligebam, “I grieve over you, my brother Jonathan, exceedingly beautiful, and lovely above the



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love of women. As a mother loves her only son, so did I love you.” The ambiguous “your love” has apparently been transformed into the love of David for Jonathan. The question of what sort of love this is the Clementine text solves by comparing David’s love for Jonathan with the love of a mother for her only son.494 The Stuttgart edition prunes back what its editors seem to regard as a somewhat wayward version to doleo super te frater mi Ionathan decore nimis et amabilis super amorem mulierum.495 The otherwise unattested expansion in the Vulgate indicates, for Stoebe,496 a similar desire to that of the translator of the Targum, to exclude deliberately a possibly embarrassing distinction between Jonathan’s (homosexual) love and the (heterosexual) love of women. In light of this, it is noteworthy that the Old Latin, cited by Ambrose, renders 2 Samuel 1:26 considerably more effusively: “I grieve over you, brother Jonathan, so very beautiful to me. Your love fell on me, just like the love of women” (Doleo in te, frater Ionatha, speciosus mihi valde. Ceciderat amor tuus in me sicut amor mulierum).497 The Old Latin goes back to a Greek text that appears to have read something like e0pe/pesen h( a0ga/ph sou e0p' e0me\, w(j h( a0ga/ph tw~n gunaikw~n. This, at least, is the version of the text on which Theodoret of Cyrrhus commented in his late exegetical work on the books of Samuel, written in about 452 or 453 ce.498 Behind the Greek Vorlage of the Old Latin there was presumably a misunderstanding of the Hebrew ht)lpn as derived from the lpn qal, “fall” rather than )lp nifal, “be wonderful.”499 The Septuagint, the Targum, and the Latin versions all seek to render an authoritative Hebrew text into an authoritative version in another language. This is both a delimiting of the text – attempting, that is, to establish the boundaries of its meaning – and, paradoxically, a de-limiting – opening it up to chains of signification in another language. Marginal commentaries participate in this process. In the Geneva Bible, for example, the phrase “passing ye loue of women” is accompanied by a marginal note that reads “Ether towarde their housbandes, or their children.”500 That a marginal note appears here is evidence that a lack was felt in the text that had to be made good, lest it be allowed to play out of control. The ambiguity is closed down, by means of the assertion that the love of women for the husbands or children is what is to be compared to Jonathan’s love, and not their love for David, for other women, for God – and so on. By not connecting their love with David, the identity of these women is left open: it is women in general who are in mind, not specific women in David’s life. A code is laid on the text, and this, aside from the annotator’s intent, invites further questions from the reader. What is the nature of women’s love for their husbands, or for their children? Presumably

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in the sixteenth-century cultural context in which the Geneva Bible was written and first received, such “love” would have been construed somewhat differently to the time Samuel was first written, though this difference seems not to have been noticed or acknowledged by the annotator. The fact that the translated text and the annotation are placed together before a reader means, furthermore, that regardless of the intentions of the annotator, the reader is free to engage anew with the text of 2 Samuel 1:26 and ask: what if the annotator got it wrong? Where the relationship between later men is compared with that between David and Jonathan on the basis of 2 Samuel 1:26, there must again be an implicit understanding of what exactly is the basis of the comparison, and thus an implicit process of interpretation of the biblical verse. In the fourteenth-century ce Vita Edwardi Secundi, the narrator twice compares the devotion of Edward II for Gaveston with that of Jonathan for David. On the first occasion, Edward’s devotion for Gaveston is portrayed as immoderate, unlike the love of Jonathan for David or the love of Achilles for Patroclus.501 On the second, following his account of the murder of Gaveston, the narrator associates the degree of grief felt with the degree of grief felt by David on the death of Jonathan. Set certus sum regem ita doluisse de Petro, sicut aliquando dolet pater de filio. Nam quanto magis procedit dileccio, tanto magis dolet infortunio. In planctu Dauid super Ionatan amor ostenditur, quem dicitur super amorem mulierum dilexisse. Fatetur et sic rex noster…502 But I am certain that the king grieved for Piers just as a father at any time grieves for [his] son. For as great as the love is, so great is the sorrow. In David’s lamentation over Jonathan love is expressed that is said to have surpassed the love of women. In this way did our king also speak…

By comparing Edward’s grief with David’s it seems as though 2 Samuel 1:26 is being interpreted as a reference to David’s love for Jonathan, even though the model of Jonathan and David is used earlier in a way that suggests a comparison between Jonathan and Edward.503 The comparison is based on the quality and intensity of the emotion felt, not on other factors such as the relative social statuses of the lovers or the physical expression of the love. On this basis Edward’s love for Gaveston is comparable with a father’s love for his son,504 which in turn is analogous with the love felt by David for Jonathan (or possibly by each for the other), a love that, in some unspecified sense, surpasses that of women. David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan has also inspired a number of rewritings, some, but not all of which explicitly acknowledge the “original” text that lies at the root of the process. Each stage of this process illustrates a little more the fecundity of the originary text in creating the



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possibility for the production of an indefinite proliferation of further texts. Unlike Georg Friedrich Händel’s oratorio Saul, and in contradistinction to the biblical text, John Lockman’s 1736 poem David’s Lamentation over Saul and Jonathan focuses solely on the death of Saul and Jonathan in battle and David’s ensuing lament.505 William Boyce’s setting omits a recitative and part of a chorus dealing with David’s attachment to both Saul and Jonathan,506 but both Lockman’s text and Boyce’s setting include the following rewriting of 2 Samuel 1:26: O Jonathan! so cruel was the Dart, All Israel bled when it transfix’d thy Heart. – My Soul, young Prince, is deep distress’d for thee, For thine, too often, was deep distress’d for me, Thy pleasing Converse charm’d my Woes to Rest, And wak’d the sweetest Transports in my Breast. – Not the fond Love of Virgins when they pine For absent Youths, cou’d be compar’d to Thine.507

This amounts to quite a significant rewriting, echoing very loosely the kjv, “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan.” The love of David and Jonathan is portrayed as mutual, resolving an ambiguity in the text with respect to whose love for whom is being referred to. Most noteworthy here, however, is the reconfiguration of the love of women. This becomes specifically the love of virgins for absent young men. Thus while the Hebrew text, and some translations such as the lxx and kjv retain the ambiguity of the nature of the love referred to in 1 Samuel 1:26, Lockman’s text is quite clear that the love of women, at least, is the romantic love of young virgins for young men, not the love of women for David or David’s love for them. It does not definitively resolve the nature of Jonathan’s love, or the basis for the comparison, but it does slant David’s lamentation in the direction of a romantic – if not exactly erotic, in the modern English sense – construal. 4.4. The openness of the David and Jonathan narrative There are, then, many levels on which the David and Jonathan narrative is more or less open. This is by no means to say that the narrative should be taken as so open that readers have some kind of right to construe it as they will, but that is partly because meaning and validity in interpretation are, strictly speaking, different things. It is also not to say that some ancient author or other deliberately created an open work. There are difficulties here not only with determining authorial intention, but with identifying the possibility of deliberate openness in a work whose origins lie in ancient Israel and/or Judah (or Persian era Yehud), rather than in a time

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and place that could be influenced by modernist works such as those of Joyce. Perhaps, though, the fact that the text can now be read in the wake of modernist works, and the analysis of them by the likes of Eco, makes it is possible to see genuine dimensions of the ancient text that were previously opaque. The compositeness (1) of the narrative creates inconsistencies that readers must somehow either actively resolve, or allow to remain frustratingly unresolved. There are (2) gaps in the narrative, such as when David took Goliath’s head to Jerusalem, or why Jonathan fell in love with David, albeit that these gaps may reflect readers’ questions rather than some author’s deliberate use of gapping. The use (3) of certain words in Hebrew can be inherently ambiguous because these words can be employed to denote more than one thing, and can bear different connotations in different contexts, which means that lexical distinctions that could be made in other languages are not made in the same way in Hebrew (and vice versa). This leads (4) to the possibility of a literary text – at the level of the intention of the work, if not that of an “author” – inviting the reader to wrestle with more than one sense of a word at the same time, which requires a reader who is both attentive to the subtleties of the text and open to the possibility of ambiguity, equivocality, and double entendre. This would apply to the verb r#q, though in this case (5) it is possible for the verb to appear in two quite distinct syntactical constructions that may be perceived – again by the attentive and intertextually competent reader – to spark off one another. A major element (6) in the “openness” of the David and Jonathan narrative is the fact that it represents an anomalous situation in the Tanakh. There is no analogue to the situation portrayed in 1 Samuel 18:1-4, for example, but it is not at all clear that this is an openness that could have been perceived by an ancient reader, who may have had access to the ancient cultural codes that make sense of, say, 18:4, which does have analogues, albeit partial, in the Iliad, Plutarch, and Strabo. The apparent openness of an ancient text may thus signify little more than that there is a gulf between modern and ancient readers. The narrative can give the appearance (7) of being both closed to an erotic construal, and simultaneously but contradictorily open to such a construal, because of its artificial placing in the Tanakh, where Leviticus 18:22; 20:13 can be used to support the former option at the same time as texts such as Song of Songs 7:12 can be used to support the latter. There is (8) a kind of openness that is an effect of our distance from the linguistic system that gave birth to the narrative. In the case of 1 Samuel 20:30, this is simultaneously a matter of philology (i.e. what do



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twdrmh  tw(n  Nb and Km)  twr( t#b  denote?), of register (would such language ever be used formally or is it a relic of Umgangssprache?), and of diachronic development (would such language have made the same kind of sense at different stages in the evolution of the Hebrew linguistic system?). This kind of openness seems to exist primarily by virtue of our distance from the origins of the text. A slight variation on this (9) is represented by lydgh  dwd  d(, if Tsumura is correct to regard this as an example of brachylogy. Such a phenomenon of the Hebrew linguistic system would necessitate the hearer or reader filling in a gap that would have been unambiguous to an ancient hearer or reader, but which now appears baffling to us. Another aspect of the text that favours openness (10) is the way it is focalized. This is particularly relevant for 1 Samuel 20:30, where the reader must judge not only the meaning of the verse, but how the perspective of Saul it presents relates to the perspectives of the other characters and the narrator. The most open parts of the narrative (11) are where an entire phrase is ambiguous on many different levels, as with 2 Samuel 1:26, which reflects not only the potential of the Hebrew linguistic system for ambiguity, but the dependence of individual speech acts within that system on cultural codes that are either lost to us, or which appear opaque because of the complex tradition history of the text. A final kind of openness (12) is one that, at this distance from the origins of the narrative, is the most difficult to identify and engage with, depending as it may on an interpreter’s familiarity with later uses of specific kinds of language in particular social contexts. What if the David and Jonathan narrative is doublecoded, written in such a way as subtly to suggest same-sex desire to those in the know, but to conceal it from everyone else? This is especially problematic for this narrative because it seems itself to have been used as part of such a code in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,508 a use which, as I argue in the next chapter, has in turn helped to shape the way the narrative has since been read. It is almost impossible, I think, to argue that this level of openness can be identified in the text separately from the range of possibilities for double-coding that a given readership might think they are able to see in it. Here a judgment as to the relative openness or closedness of the text is itself inseparable from the interpretive cooperation of readers.

5. Conclusion The David and Jonathan narrative, then, is a partially open work, requiring significant cooperation on the part of the reader, even though it

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cannot be taken to mean anything at all. At any rate, the David and Jonathan narrative does not compel the reader to reject a homoerotic construal of the relationship between the two men, but it is open to such a reading, regardless of the literary-theological context of the Tanakh. It has more in common, at certain points, with Greek texts that portray comradeship between heroes or between warrior lovers, and that were later read homoerotically,509 than with anything else in the Tanakh. But the evidence of the biblical narrative is not enough to explain why scholars by the late twentieth century had come to entertain the possibility that it portrayed a same-sex erotic relationship between two men. To explain this, we need to come at the narrative from a different angle, through the evidence of reception history. In the next chapter, I want to examine how the David and Jonathan narrative was read during the nineteenth century, particularly alongside, and in light of, comparable Greek and Latin texts. It is during this period that David and Jonathan came to be read as lovers, particularly as certain authors in England towards the end of the nineteenth century began to use their story as part of a larger project to construct an ancient heritage of male same-sex desire. It is ultimately because of this, I suggest, that it became possible for later scholars to explore homoeroticism as a dimension of the narrative in 1 and 2 Samuel. Notes 1. Christopher Marlowe, Edward the Second, 5 iv 6-13. 2. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 210–11. 3. The relative openness of the David and Jonathan narrative is part of the broader openness of the stories of David in 1 and 2 Samuel. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, drawing on Frank Kermode’s ideas about the indeterminacy of “classic” literature, make the following remark in their “Introduction” to The David Myth in Western Literature (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1980), 10: “A classic story such as David’s is open, sufficiently we could say, to have no certain meaning and no ending. Each interpretation or revision of it expands the sense while joining a very old conversation. We could compare its language to a pliable dough of certain ingredients which one can tear a piece from to knead, mold, and over again – long after the reveries of the happy feast David held for his warriors when they regained the ark, and of the horrible feast Absalom held for Amnon, are silent.” What I am less certain of is the extent to which, as Frontain and Wojcik continue, “each remaking shows as much about the baker as the bread.” 4. Heacock offers his reading in light of the works of Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish (Jonathan Loved David, esp. 121–25), and leans heavily in the direction of the reader – and thus of Fish rather than Iser – as the primary determiner of textual meaning. Klein, by contrast, approaches 1 Samuel 18 primarily in light of Rezeptionsästhetik – leaning more heavily than Heacock in the direction of Iser – and



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is concerned with the role of the interpreter in creating meaning from the “empty places” (Leerstellen) left by the text (“1 Sam. 18”). While a deeper engagement with Rezeptionsästhetik might have enriched this chapter, I have decided to narrow my approach to the relationship between the role of the reader and the extent to which the work of which the David and Jonathan narrative is part is more or less open or closed. My approach is thus informed, theoretically, primarily (though not exclusively) by the work of Umberto Eco. 5. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Advances in Semiotics; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 6; cf. idem, “Interpretation and History,” in Eco et al., Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 23–24, 40–43. While it will be clear from what follows that I am in broad agreement with Eco that works set limits to interpretation, in the case of literary works such as the David and Jonathan narrative the limits putatively set by the textual surface, the material given of the text, themselves participate in chains of unlimited semiosis, and are open to questions raised by empirical readers that the work – with its implied model author (cf. Chapter 2 above, n. 83) – can neither anticipate nor control, that nevertheless illuminate the potential of the linguistic system in which the work participates to create meaning. Here I suspect I lean somewhat more in the direction of Jonathan Culler’s response to Eco, “In Defence of Overinterpretation,” in Eco et al., Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 109–123, and in the direction of Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay (trans. R. Miller; New York: Hill and Wang, 1974) (cf. nn. 24, 78, and 147 below). 6. Eco, The Limits of Interpretation, 6–7: “The limits of interpretation coincide with the rights of the text (which does not mean with the rights of its author).” Eco’s use of the language of “rights” here is awkward: it is in no way clear how a text can have rights as such, but the point is that the material form of texts sets boundaries, open to varying and perhaps shifting degrees of negotiation, beyond which interpreters cannot go without turning those texts into something they are not. The appeal to the rights of texts rather than the rights of authors (contrast Davies, Whose Bible Is It Anyway? 82–83) reinforces Eco’s point that texts, having been written, follow a path that their authors are no longer in a position to interrupt (cf. Chapter 2 above, p. 69). 7. E.g. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals,” 75–87; Ackerman, When Heroes Love; Nardelli, Homosexuality and Liminality. 8. Aichele, Sign, Text, Scripture, 9. 9. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (trans. H. Bredin; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 145; idem, “Two Models of Interpretation,” in The Limits of Interpretation, 11. Cf. idem, “Overinterpreting Texts,” in Eco et al., Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 45–66 (esp. pp. 52–53); Roland Barthes, “De l’oeuvre au texte,” Revue d’esthetique 3 (1971), 229; “From Work to Text,” in ImageMusic-Text, 160. 10. The risk was clearly understood by Aquinas (Summa Theologiæ Ia.1.10). 11. E.g. Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture (vol. 1; trans. M. Sebanc and E. M. Macierowski; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 9. A vigorous defence of the four senses of Scripture rather than the historical-critical method’s focus on authorial intention has been offered by David Steinmetz. See Steinmetz, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis,” TTod 37 (1980), 37. Steinmetz is, in part,

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responding to Benjamin Jowett’s advocacy of a focus on the intention of the author when interpreting Scripture in his famous essay “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” in Essays and Reviews (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861, 7th edn), 330–433. Jowett was a key figure in the introduction of historical criticism into English biblical interpretation, freeing it from the strictures of ecclesiastical exegesis, but is at least equally significant in the present work for his role in the revival of Greek learning in mid-nineteenth century Oxford. A combination of these two things would, as we shall see, decisively shape the modern reception of the David and Jonathan narrative, in ways Jowett could not have anticipated. 12. This turn was, ironically, made possible by Protestant intellectual culture. As Roy Harrisville and Walter Sundberg explain, “What helped to make historical criticism of the Bible acceptable, or at least debatable, was a fundamental feature of Protestant intellectual culture. From the time of the Reformation, Protestants held the conviction that Roman Catholic Christianity was a false development of primitive Christian faith that distorted the clarity of the gospel. This simple but revolutionary idea…was like the opening of Pandora’s box. Once stated it could not be forgotten or repressed. When taken to heart as a formal principle, it could easily be turned on the Protestant ecclesiastical establishment itself and used to undermine Protestantism’s own dogmatic heritage” (The Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002, 2nd edn], 49). 13. That is not to deny, of course, that there is a real world, simply that semiotics in sensu stricto has nothing to say about it. The distinction is a phenomenological one, between methodology and ontology, and is stated clearly by Eco in the preface to the English translation of his early work on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, where he critiques both structuralism and medieval scholasticism for having as an aim and ideological goal, “to demonstrate that reality could be construed as a motionless system of relations, fully intelligible and not subject to further change.” For the poststructuralist Eco, however, “every system has a contradiction in itself, so that finding contradictions is not a defeat, but rather a victory for those who believe that philosophy must constantly remake itself… A system must have a contradiction to undermine it, for a system is a structural model which arrests reality for an instant and tries to make it intelligible. But this arrest, necessary for communication, impoverishes the real instead of enriching it. The model is of value only if it stimulates an advance to a new level of understanding of reality, a level on which it then seems inadequate” (The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, x–xi; see also Eco’s discussion of “content and referent” in A Theory of Semiotics, 58–66). Eco’s distinction is particularly relevant to texts – such as many, though not all, biblical narratives – in which the poetic function of language is to the fore, since, as Roman Jakobson has commented, “by promoting the palpability of signs,” the poetic function of language, “deepens the dichotomy of signs and objects” (“Linguistics and Poetics,” in Language in Literature [ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy; Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987], 70; cf. n. 38 below). 14. Aichele, Sign, Text, Scripture, 14 (cf. pp. 31, 115), italics mine. I made a similar point, though rather less clearly than Aichele, in my “The Johannine Apocalypse and the Risk of Knowledge,” in The Way the World Ends? The Apocalypse of John in Culture and Ideology (ed. W. J. Lyons and J. Økland; The Bible in the Modern World, 19; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), 143–44. A rather different historicist option



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than focusing on authorial intention is to focus on trying to read biblical texts as their earliest, ancient Judahite readers would. This option is taken by Diana Edelman, who offers wisely cautious remarks about the merits and limits of this approach in King Saul in the Historiography of Judah, 11–25. 15. What van Wolde elsewhere calls “imperative semio-narrative strategies” (A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 50) or “imperative textual strategies” that are to be distinguished from “less imperative” and “non-imperative” strategies (p. 188). 16. van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 5. Indeed, for van Wolde it is the failure, in her judgment, on the part of Greimas to take full account of the role of the reader in interpreting literary works that led her to draw more fully on the theories of Peirce. Peirce, in turn, was a decisive influence on Eco, with whom van Wolde herself at one point studied. 17. Foundational here is Saussure’s distinction between langage, langue, and parole. Saussure seems to use langue in several different ways, sometimes using idiome to mean the same thing (Cours de linguistique générale [Paris: Payot, 1916], 261), and making distinctions, for example, between langue and dialecte (p. 278) and between langue littéraire and idiome locale (p. 267), the latter seeming to correspond to the distinction between langue commune and patois (p. 280). Saussure wishes to make a fundamental distinction between langue as a particular linguistic system, which is “a product of the collective mind of linguistic communities” (un produit de l’esprit collectif des groupes linguistiques), and “a social product of the language faculty” (un produit social de la faculté du langage) (pp. 19, 25), and parole as an individual act of speech (p. 30). A given langue has both an individual and a social aspect, and while it constitutes an established system, it is also evolving, in movement, developing through time (p. 24). Moreover, it is not spoken language (langage parlé) as such that is natural to humans, but the ability to construct a linguistic system (langue), namely “a system of distinct signs that correspond to distinct ideas” (un système de signes distincts correspondant à des idées distinctes) (p. 26). Part of the individual aspect of langue is each member of a given linguistic community’s ability to produce specific speech acts. While parole is individual, it depends on langue, which is social. Equally, langue could not be said to exist without the entire constellation of individual acts of parole. The two must, however, be distinguished methodologically (pp. 37–38). 18. van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 43–44. 19. I mean that a narrative is an arbitrary network of signs, but both Peirce and Saussure, in different ways, regarded signs themselves as arbitrary. Strictly speaking, for Peirce, a narrative is a certain kind of sign. In Saussure’s case, every sign is made up of a “signifier” (signifiant) and a “signified” (signifié), where there is no necessary link between what is signified and the word that is used to denote it (Cours de linguistique générale, 97–103). The link between the two is a convention within the particular linguistic system (langue) in question. Moreover, the signified is not an external object, in the real world as it were, but a mental image that is taken to represent such an object. This is straightforward enough, but Peirce’s work is much more difficult to grasp, not least because his use of terminology is not consistent. Peirce’s ideas about signs are more complex and subtle than Saussure’s, in that Peirce takes fuller account of how the convention is created that connects a signifier to a signified. The kinds of

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signs Peirce at one point calls “symbols” (Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel [eds], The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings [vol. 1; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992], 7) and at another calls “tokens” (Houser and Kloesel, The Essential Peirce, 1:226) have a triple rather than dual character. They are related both to something denoted, an object, and to the mind. The relation between symbol – or “representamen” – and object only exists by virtue of a mental association, which is a habit or general rule to which the user of the sign has been subjected, and is called an “interpretant.” Such “symbols” include, “all words, sentences, books, and other conventional signs” (Nathan Houser et al. [eds], The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings [vol. 2; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998], 274). There are, then, three elements: an object, a representamen, and an interpretant, which is a mental habit that brings the other two into relation (Houser et al., The Essential Peirce, 2:272–74, 290–91). The interpretant, in turn, functions as a representamen, which is mentally linked with another object by means of another interpretant, leading to an infinite series of interlocking signs, or “unlimited semiosis.” This a gross over-simplification of Peirce’s thought on signs, which makes further distinctions, for example between the “immediate” and the “dynamic” object, and between the “final” interpretant and interpretants that exist earlier in the interpretive process and are subject to subsequent modification, but to go into more detail would take us too far afield. Eco has helpfully traced the roots of the idea of unlimited semiosis to the survival in the West of Hermetic semiosis, based on a semiotics of similarity (“Overinterpreting Texts,” in Eco et al., Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 45–66). 20. van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 172. 21. van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 61 (cf. p. 123): “The reader does not only attach meaning to the linguistic signs by connecting them to the linguistic code, but also by relating these signs within the text both to each other and to his own knowledge and experience. The individuality of a text, its uniqueness and identity, arises because elements of meaning are placed in new combinations, so that relations and structures of meaning come into being which previously did not exist.” 22. van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 66: “The intertextual phase concerns the network of meaning which is created when the reader assigns meaning to the text by relating the relevant text to other texts.” 23. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader (ed. T. Moi; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 37; cf. eadem, Revolution in Poetic Language (trans. M.  Waller; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 59–60. Roland Barthes understands l’intertextuel similarly in “De l’oeuvre au texte,” 229; “From Work to Text,” 160. 24. See Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Advances in Semiotics; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 68–86, esp. pp. 80–84, and compare Roland Barthes’s “ideal,” “absolutely plural” text, which is a “galaxy of signifiers” that can never be absolutely closed down by one or other system of meaning (S/Z, 4–6). 25. Cf. Barthes, S/Z, 10. 26. van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 66: “The extratextual phase concerns the network of meaning which comes into being when the reader gives meaning to the text by referring to a certain historical context, a certain writer or reader.” This is perhaps the part of the process most open to dispute, and is not explored in



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detail in van Wolde’s study. The problem, in the case of most biblical narratives, is that as the result of the piecemeal preservation of relevant evidence, it is not always clear how much of the historical context can actually be reconstructed. Moreover, as the discussion below of the use of Lev. 18:22; 20:13 to disambiguate the David and Jonathan narrative should make clear, biblical texts themselves are sometimes our only evidence for the historical contexts of other biblical texts, and the evidence they offer can be exceptionally difficult to interpret. 27. See n. 19 above. 28. Umberto Eco, The Open Work (trans. A. Cancogni; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1–23. For a survey of the development of Eco’s thought from his early work to his “conversion” to semiotics, see David Robey’s introduction to Eco, The Open Work, vii–xxxii, but note that Eco’s semiotic works continued after the publication of The Open Work, including, for example, The Limits of Interpretation in 1990. The Open Work is not, it should be noted, simply a translation of Eco’s early work Opera Aperta (Milan: Bompiani, 1962), but includes later essays as well. 29. Eco, The Open Work, 12. 30. Eco, The Open Work, 21. 31. It is imprecise because the works Eco discusses by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Henri Pousseur and Pierre Boulez (see Eco, The Open Work, 1–2) were constructed intentionally by their composers to require the cooperation of a performer to achieve completion. In the case of “works in movement,” the “possibilities which the work’s openness makes available always work within a given field of relations,” and far from being arbitrary or indiscriminate, the invitation of the composer to the performer is “the opportunity for an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world intended by the author” (The Open Work, 19). Likewise, in his remarks on Joyce (see below), Eco explicitly invokes the author to explain the relative degrees of openness and closedness in Finnegans Wake (which is a more or less open work, but not a work in movement). To transfer this to the biblical canon(s) would be to imply the existence of a single intentional mind behind all of the works of which those canons are now composed, a move that would make the leap from the sphere of methodology to that of ontology and metaphysics without obvious justification. 32. Eco, “Openness, Information, Communication,” in The Open Work, 44–83 (here p. 44; cf. p. 83). 33. Eco, The Open Work, 22–23. 34. Eco, The Open Work, 3–4. Cf. idem, The Role of the Reader, 49. I have elsewhere touched on the relevance of this definition for the study of the reception of the book of Revelation. See Harding, “The Johannine Apocalypse,” 125–26 n. 11. 35. Eco, The Open Work, 10. For similar appeals to authorial intention, see e.g. Eco, The Open Work, 59, 61, 103. 36. Eco, “Analysis of Poetic Language,” in The Open Work, 24–43. 37. Eco, The Open Work, 35 (italics mine). 38. Roman Jakobson distinguished between declarative sentences, which correspond primarily to the referential function of language, and imperative sentences, which correspond primarily to the conative function of language, on the grounds that the former are susceptible to a truth test while the latter is not, and because the

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former can be converted into interrogative sentences, whereas the latter cannot. See Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” 67–68. In Hebrew, of course, the negative imperative requires the use of the prefixing, yiqtol form of the verb, which is used elsewhere referentially, thus complicating the relationship between the imperative, the declarative, and the interrogative. Jakobson’s essay, on the distinction between linguistics and poetics, distinguishes between referential, emotive, conative, phatic, metalingual, and poetic functions of language. The poetic function of language is oriented towards, “the message for its own sake” (“Linguistics and Poetics,” 69), which has strong echoes of Walter Pater’s notion of “the high quality of poetry,” which “aims at a purely artistic effect” (Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 9, on “Aucassin and Nicolette”), and of poetry as “all literary production which attains the power of giving joy by its form as distinct from its matter” (“Winckelmann,” Westminster Review n.s. 31 [January 1867], 110). The problem in biblical narrative, particularly in the context of discussions concerning the usefulness of biblical texts for the reconstruction of the history of ancient Israel and Judah, is the precise nature of the relationship between the referential and the poetic (on which cf. Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” 85–86), and the relationship between the referential and the world outside the text. 39. Cf. Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” 66–67. 40. 2 Sam. 1:26 is, like the first sentence cited, referential in function, but it also participates in the poetic, and arguably also the emotive, functions of language, and thus has a different truth value. It cannot, for one thing, be tested. 41. Eco, The Open Work, 35. 42. See Eco’s discussion of how “art in general depends on deliberately provoking incomplete experiences – that is, how art deliberately frustrates our expectations in order to arouse our natural craving for completion” (The Open Work, 74, and in general pp. 74–81 on “transaction and openness”; cf. p. 86 on the way the particular perspective adopted by a viewer of a sculpture by Naum Gabo “inevitably frustrates the viewer who would like to apprehend a totality”). 43. Or, to cite Eco’s more technical definition: “A language is a human event, a typical branch system in which several factors have intervened to produce a state of order and to establish precise connections. In relation to the entropy curve, language – an organization that has escaped the equiprobability of disorder – is [an] improbable event, a naturally improbable configuration that can now establish its own chain of probability (the probabilities on which the organization of a language depends) within the system that governs it” (The Open Work, 50). 44. Again, to cite Eco’s more complicated rendering, “…the originality of an aesthetic discourse involves to some extent a rupture with (or a departure from) the linguistic system of probability which serves to convey established meanings, in order to increase the signifying potential of the message” (The Open Work, 58). To prevent total incomprehensibility, however, the result cannot be too radical a rupture that leaves the reader/hearer/viewer with the impression of chaos: “This tendency towards disorder, characteristic of the poetics of openness, must be understood as a tendency toward controlled disorder, toward a circumscribed potential, toward a freedom that is constantly curtailed by the germ of formativity present in any form that wants to remain open to the free choice of the addressee” (The Open Work, 64–65; italics original).



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45. Eco, The Role of the Reader, 5. 46. Eco, The Role of the Reader, 8. 47. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind (16 vols.; Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1995–2007). 48. William Paul Young, The Shack (Newbury Park, CA: Windblown Media, 2007). That said, The Shack is closed only in a very specific sense: while this is a closed work inasmuch as it constructs a very specific implied reader, this implied reader is guided towards greater openness in her or his understanding of God. 49. Eco, The Role of the Reader, 9–10. 50. Cf. Eco, “Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading,” in On Literature (trans. M. McLaughlin; London: Vintage, 2005), 212–35. 51. More technically, “…the Model Reader is a textually established set of felicity conditions…to be met in order to have a macro-speech act (such as a text is) fully actualized” (Eco, The Role of the Reader, 11). 52. Ps.-Philo, L.A.B. 61:9 may assume 1 Sam. 17:58 (mt), and L.A.B. 62:1 may assume 1 Sam. 18:1-4 (mt), but the story of David and Jonathan is so heavily reworked in L.A.B. that the dependence of Pseudo-Philo on the proto-mt at this point cannot be assumed without question. Josephus, Ant. 6.9.5 (§192), on the other hand, has no parallel to 1 Sam. 17:55–18:5. Moreover, this passage in Josephus contradicts 1 Sam. 17:54, which is attested in the earliest Greek MSS. 53. Edelman, “The Authenticity of 2 Sam. 1,26.” 54. See e.g. Kaiser, “David und Jonathan.” What I am taking as read here is what seems to me to be the simplest explanation, that the mt represents an expanded form of the text, rather than that the lxx represents a deliberately, or even accidentally shortened version. I am not interested, for the purposes of this study, in attempting to resolve the tradition-historical problem posed by 1 and 2 Samuel. I am concerned only with how an apparently composite text affects the reading process. 55. Shadduck, A Critical Edition of Abraham Cowley’s DAVIDEIS, 49. 56. On the problem of dating the Davideis, see Shadduck, A Critical Edition of Abraham Cowley’s DAVIDEIS, 3–12. 57. On Cowley’s exegetical method, see Shadduck, A Critical Edition of Abraham Cowley’s DAVIDEIS, 42–62. 58. Cf. Barthes’s rejection of the idea that there could be a beginning to reading (S/Z, 15–16). 59. George Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning: Canon as Semiotic Mechanism (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001), 43. 60. Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, 40. 61. Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 45. 62. Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, 41. 63. Cf. Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 127: “La parole n’opère jamais que sur un état de langue, et les changements que interviennent entre les états n’y ont euxmêmes aucune place.” The problem is that while the extant remains of ancient Hebrew preserve fragmentary evidence of these chronologically distinct “states” (états), we do not have the information to reconstruct accurately more than a fragment of any one of these “states of the linguistic system” (états de langue), nor do we have enough evidence to reconstruct accurately “the changes that intervene between” (les changements que

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interviennent entre) them in the living, oral language. Saussure’s broader methodological point is that the synchronic and diachronic approaches to the study of linguistic phenomena are to be kept rigidly separate, and properly belong to different sciences, la linguistique statique and la linguistique évolutive. In the case of the Tanakh, in which the synchronic and diachronic aspects of the living Hebrew behind its constituent works are misrepresented, such a distinction is exceptionally difficult to observe and makes the use of word-statistical approaches in particular deeply suspect. 64. Edward Ullendorff, Is Biblical Hebrew a Language? Studies in Semitic Languages and Civilizations (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1977), 4–5; cf. p. 34. Ullendorff ’s final point here is not too dissimilar to Saussure’s views on “linguistic paleontology” (paléontologie linguistique). See esp. Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 308. 65. This point is comparable with Saussure’s remarks about the relationship between a literary language and the spoken word. For Saussure, a langue is connected with various kinds of institution, such as the Church, schools, salons, the court, the academies, which in turn are intimately connected with, and exercise a significant influence on its literary development. There is a gap between the literary language (la langue du livre) and the living language (la langue courante), and the former’s sphere of existence eventually becomes cut off from its natural sphere, which is that of the spoken langue: “toute langue littéraire, produit de la culture, arrive à détacher sa sphère d’existence de la sphère naturelle, celle de la langue parlée” (Cours de linguistique générale, 41). Transferred to the case of the Tanakh, the fragments of ancient Hebrew this corpus contains are cut off from the living langue(s) of ancient Israel and Judah, but are also relics of the influence of various institutional contexts on different points in the development of the language, and are thus ideologically determined at multiple points and on multiple levels. 66. Ullendorff, Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?, 7: “It is clear, therefore, that this language is the result of a good deal of subsequent doctoring, of levelling and compromise, resulting in a hybrid language rather than a proper koinh&. In any real sense of the term, BH in its Masoretic garb was scarcely a language which in that form was ever actually spoken. The subsequent process of levelling and averaging has created a structure which neither Deborah nor Daniel would be likely to have recognized.” 67. Ullendorff, Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?, 14. 68. E.g. tykwkz, “glass”; rwdk, “ball”; xbn, “to bark”; Mls, “ladder”; hnyps, “ship”; Krc, “need”; Mw#, “garlic.” Ullendorff, Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?, 15–16. 69. This relates to the paradox of historical criticism of the Hebrew Bible, which has involved the exegesis of scriptural texts in their pre-scriptural form. In the words of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “One of the conspicuous achievements of the modern West…is the mighty movement of historical-critical scholarship in its study of Biblical texts… [T]his movement has concerned itself with those texts in their original form and meaning, their ancient setting and background: with constructing a view of the historical situation out of which they arose, and with the meaning that the words had when originally uttered. There is a paradox, however, that at that historical point those texts were not yet scripture. Only later did the practice arise of treating these writings in a scriptural way, and a concept scripture emerge” (What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993], 3–4).



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70. Cf. Jonathan Z. Smith’s definition of canon as “the arbitrary fixing of a limited number of ‘texts’ as immutable and authoritative,” in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism; Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 44. To be more precise, the decision as to which texts belong in a canon and which do not is arbitrary, inasmuch as a different range of texts could have been included, but by no means random, in that a canon is not made up of just anything. 71. James C. VanderKam and Peter W. Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 156. On closure as an essential element in the notion of canon, see Smith, Imagining Religion, 48. 72. “Scripture” and “canon” are not, however, synonymous, since one can have a concept of authoritative scriptures that are not limited by the boundaries of a canon (Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, 25). 73. Cantwell Smith, What is Scripture?, 12. 74. Cantwell Smith, What is Scripture?, 17–18. 75. That is, according to the community whose attitudes constitute this canon as such (Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, 2). Aichele’s other criteria are that a canon “is a list or catalog of books that is believed to be indispensable by some group of people,” and “is understood by this group of people to be an unchanging and complete repository of truths and values” (loc. cit.). 76. Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, 132; cf. idem, Sign, Text, Scripture, 87, on the threat posed by unlimited semiosis to practitioners of modernist semiotics. 77. Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, 132. 78. On the “infinity of language” ultimately subverting the imposition of a fixed system of meaning on a plural text, see Barthes, S/Z, 6. 79. Aichele, The Control of Biblical Meaning, 17. 80. Smith, Imagining Religion, 48. Cf. Eco on the Four Senses of Scripture, p. 125 above. 81. Aichele, Sign, Text, Scripture, 100. 82. Aichele, Sign, Text, Scripture, 99. 83. As Aichele remarks, “The establishment of a canon is the attempt by some group of people to clarify the texts’ meaning and to realize narrative completeness through a metatextual and intertextual commentary; in other words, to create a text that can explain itself. The entire collection of writings restricts the reading of any one of the texts. The canon obscures and replaces the physical text itself (both texts that are included in the canon and texts that are excluded) with something else – a signified, or at least a signifying potential, that far surpasses any of the included texts. The biblical canon serves to unify and ‘translate’ the language of the various biblical texts” (The Control of Biblical Meaning, 19, italics original). 84. On which see further Aichele, Sign, Text, Scripture, 103–105. 85. My case here is somewhat analogous to Aichele’s “fantastic” reading of Mark, which, he argues, is controlled by the presence of theologically less disturbing works such as Matthew, Luke, and John: “Mark has always been the most troublesome theologically of the canonical gospels. Part of the value for Christianity of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John is that they offer acceptable ways to read Mark. They

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neutralize Mark’s troublesome ambiguities, rendering them ideologically safe for Christianity” (Sign, Text, Scripture, 115). 86. Hentschel, 2 Samuel, 8: “Da David aber bis ins hohe Alter den Frauen zugeneigt war, kann seine Beziehung zu Jonatan kaum als homosexuell mißverstanden werden (vgl. Lev. 1822 2013).” 87. Most scholars now recognize the inadequacy of this assumption, e.g. Zehnder, “Observations,” 169. Ellen T. Harris, in similar vein, notes the inadequacy of assumptions such as these made by scholars with reference to the sexuality of Georg Friedrich Händel: “Homosexual Context and Identity: Reflections on the Reception of Handel as Orpheus,” in Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700–1800, 53–56. Note also the comments of Xavier Mayne on the way heterosexual relationships, especially heterosexual marriage, can hide the true feelings men share for one another, with reference to the friendship of Damon and Pythias: “Marriage can hide the real situation of the similisexual love. But marriage can try in vain to expel it. Damon remains Damon, Pythias remains Pythias, to one another, no matter what upper currents of their emotional life help them or oblige them to keep their secret. In the majority of such really similisexual bonds, the attitude toward women ranges from the generally cordial and admiring, but never self-committing, to the cold and aloof one. The man never wholly surrenders himself: even when he appears to do so. His real self, his full, absolute Ego, surrenders only with his male friend” (The Intersexes, 37–38). This could be adopted as a counter-reading of 2 Sam. 1:26, against Hentschel. 88. Eco defines a “poetic device” as a “calculated and semantically interesting deviation from the norm” (A Theory of Semiotics, 90). See also Jakobson’s distinction between the poetic and referential functions of language, n. 38 above. 89. Cartledge, 1 & 2 Samuel, 358. 90. Loc. cit. 91. Cartledge, 1 & 2 Samuel, 357 (italics original). 92. In line with van Wolde’s approach, we might say that with respect to intertextual relations, the similar contents of 2 Sam. 1:21 and passages referring to the anointing of kings (1 Sam. 9:16; 10:1; 15:1, 17; 16:3, 12, 13; 2 Sam. 2:4, 7; 3:39; 5:3, 17; 12:7; 19:11), namely the common trope of anointing, in addition to the spatial nearness of the texts in question, namely their common situation in the narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel, suggest to the reader that these texts are to be read in light of one another (cf. van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 67). 93. Stolz, Das erste und zweite Buch Samuel, 189: “Daß David seine Liebe zu Jonathan jeder Liebe zu seinen Frauen voranstellt, sagt genug – dabei spielten Frauen in Davids Leben ein große Rolle (vgl. zu 1 Sam. 25 und bes. zu Kap. 11). Natürlich darf der Text nicht im Sinne von Homosexualität verstanden werden; dergleichen war zwar in Griechenland üblich, in Israel aber verpönt und mit dem Tode bedroht (vgl. 3. Mose 18,22). Es geht um die Zuneigung von Freunden, die das erste Mannesalter miteinander erlebt haben und deren Beziehung alle Wechselfälle des Schicksals überdauerte.” It is intriguing that Stolz chooses Zuneigung to refer to the mutual affection of friends, while Hentschel chooses the verbal equivalent, zuneigen, to refer to David’s sexual attraction to women. Stolz is also the butt of Mirko Peisert’s criticism of the use of Leviticus to remove homosexuality from consideration of the



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friendship between David and Jonathan, leaving the completely different historical and cultural contexts or theological intentions of the texts in question perhaps consciously out of the equation: “Beim Hinweis auf das Verbot von Homosexualität in Leviticus werden der ganz abweichende historische und kulturelle Kontext oder die theologischen Intentionen der Texte (bewußt?) außer Acht gelassen” (“David und Jonatan,” 97). The kind of over-simplistic reconstruction of an anti-homosexual Israel and a pro-homosexual Greece that we find in this quote from Stolz is strongly criticized by Jennings, who suggests a rather different picture (see Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 235–43). 94. Hentschel’s position reflects unambiguously essentialist assumptions about the nature of human sexuality. Stolz’s position is similar, if fractionally less extreme. 95. Cf. n. 38 above. 96. Although John Boswell’s treatment of biblical texts in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 91–117, is not unproblematic, he is right to point out that one could not justifiably infer the absence of same-sex eroticism from a society if our only surviving evidence were “laws ambiguously denigrating homosexual liaisons of some sort and a wealth of regulations safeguarding the purity of marriage” (p. 106). Boswell is here imagining what it would be legitimate for an historian to infer if this were, hypothetically, all that survived of Roman literature, but it applies mutatis mutandis to what survives of the literature of Israel. This he calls “the fallacy of selective inference.” Boswell uses this point to deny that opposition to same-sex eroticism could be regarded, on the basis of Lev. 18:22 and 20:13, as a defining characteristic of later Judaism that could have shaped Christian opposition. 97. A similar criticism is levelled against Hentschel and Stolz by Schroer and Staubli in “Saul, David and Jonathan,” 23. 98. Kenneth Dover is very clear about the difficulties presented by the literary and artistic evidence from the various places and periods collected under the name “Greece.” He remarks, for example, that, “…it is vital to remember, whenever one is tempted to generalise about the Greeks, that in the archaic [viz. before the repulsion of the Persian invasion in 479 bce] and classical [viz. from the end of the archaic period to the conquests of Alexander in the late fourth century bce] periods the term ‘the Greeks’ covers hundreds of sovereign city-states, distributed throughout Greece, the Aegean and coastal areas of (mainly) Turkey, the Black Sea, Sicily and South Italy, constituting a linguistic and cultural continuum but nevertheless admitting of striking differences in political structure and social ideals” (Greek Homosexuality, 3; cf. pp. 1–17 passim). More recently, James Davidson has taken this variety with the seriousness it deserves and explored just what range of sexual desires and expressions are attested in the various constituent parts of “Greece” (Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love). All this is further complicated by the ways in which sexual desires and behaviour were perceived and regulated in terms of indicators of social status such as age, class, and gender, and the ways such perceptions and regulations are accurately represented, or not, in the various forms and genres, and by the various authors, whose works have survived the vicissitudes of history to reach the modern reader. It is complicated yet further when textual evidence is combined with the evidence of, for example, graffiti and vase paintings. 99. Patai, Sex and Family, 169.

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100. Patai, Sex and Family, 170. 101. McKenzie, King David, 85. 102. This corresponds to the extratextual phase of interpretation in van Wolde’s approach (A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 66–68). Given that we have no evidence at all outside the text to judge whether, or to what extent the relationship between David and Jonathan in the text corresponds with the actual relationship between David and Jonathan, it would seem that McKenzie’s distinction between text and historical fact is a very shaky one. It relies on nothing more than the presumption that the ideologically determined character of the apology for David ipso facto excludes the possibility of their relationship being portrayed reliably. On the other hand, were we simply to work within the bounds of the text as a network of signs, McKenzie would be guilty of the referential fallacy (cf. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 58–66). I would not wish to push this latter point too far, however, because the only reason we cannot judge the historical veracity of the literary portrayal of the relationship between David and Jonathan is due to a lack of evidence for this relationship outside the text. Were their relationship better attested historically, we would be in a very different position. 103. Zehnder, “Observations,” 134–37. 104. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice, 136; cf. pp. 138–39, 141–42. 105. It is used in Lev. 18:23 in connection with a woman standing in front of an animal to have sex (h(brl), and in 20:12 of a man having sex with (t) bk#) his daughter-in-law. The nouns lbt and lwlbt, the Aramaic noun )lbt, and the verb lbt are attested in rabbinic literature (Jastrow 1644a-b). The noun lbt, “world” is considerably more frequent. 106. This approach is hardly wrong in principle, since it is only possible to understand any text by reading it, whether consciously or unconsciously, in relation to other texts. If 1 Sam. 18:1-4 is to be understood at all by a reader, the reader has to be immersed in the Hebrew linguistic system, but also needs to compare the words and phrases found in 1 Sam. 18:1-4 with comparable words and phrases elsewhere. The real issues are whether the Hebrew of Lev. 19:18 is more similar to 1 Sam. 18:1-4 than to Song 1:7; 3:1-4, or whether the Hebrew of Song 1:7; 3:1-4 is more similar to 1 Sam. 18:1-4 than to Lev. 19:18; and on what basis a decision on this matter could be made. It is perhaps worth noting that the connection between 1 Sam. 18:1 and Lev. 19:18 is an ancient one, being made by Theodoret of Cyrrhus. In his Quaestiones in Librum I Regnorum 45 (on 1 Sam. 18:1), Theodoret comments thus: “What does ‘He loved him as one loves his very own soul’ mean? Aquila said, ‘According to his soul.’ And the divine law hands on this: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself ’ ” (Ti/ e0stin, «'Hga/phsen au0to\n yuxh\n a0gapw~ntoj au0to/n;» 9O 'Aku/laj e1fh: «Kata\ th\n yuxh\n au0tou=.» Tou=to kai\ o9 qei=oj no/moj pareggua?~: «'Agaph/seij to\n plhsi/on sou, w((j seauto/n»). See PG 80:569-570; Frederick Field (ed.), Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt; sive Veterum Interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum Fragmenta (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875), 1:518 n. 3; cf. the Lucianic recension of 1 Sam. 18:3 and 20:17. 107. Cf. Zehnder, “Observations,” 145. The difference between  Ntnwhy  w[h]bh)yw w#pnk and y#pn hbh)# is not quite as radical as Zehnder claims, however. See further p. 177 above.  



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108. Zehnder, “Observations,” 146. Cf. DCH 1:140a. 109. Cf. e.g. GKC §117n; Joüon §125k; DCH 4.483b; Mark F. Rooker, Biblical Hebrew in Transition: The Language of the Book of Ezekiel (JSOTSup 90; Sheffield: JSOT, 1990), 97–99. Note that Rooker (Biblical Hebrew in Transition, 97 n. 112) assumes without question that l indicates the direct object in Lev 19:18 (so also GKC §117n). See further nn. 203, 217 below. 110. Edward Ullendorff, “Thought Categories in the Hebrew Bible,” in Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?, 52–67 (56). 111. Cf. Robert Payne Smith, Thesaurus Syriacus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879– 1901), 2:2431a-b (4PN [3] ipse). 112. Cf. DCH 5.733a. 113. The syntax of Lev. 19:34 (Kwmk wl thb)w) is precisely analogous to 19:18. See also 1 Kgs 5:15; 2 Chron. 19:2. 114. For a similar use of k see hkmk in reference to YHWH in Exod. 15:11. 115. See n. 110 above. 116. Zehnder, “Observations,” 157. 117. Zehnder, “Observations,” 167–68. 118. Cf. Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 100: “Given [the] clear prohibitions of male homogenital behaviour in the Bible, I believe that there is no historical evidence to support claims that a biblical author or authors would depict a sexual relationship between David and Jonathan in a positive light.” My main objection to this sort of view was anticipated two centuries ago by Jeremy Bentham (cf. Chapter 4 below, pp. 303–306): why should all biblical texts be assumed to speak with the same voice? 119. The problem is analogous to that faced by historians of homosexuality from a later period. Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda make the following remarks in connection with the significance, or not, of the relative lack of evidence for homosexuality in England after the institution of the death penalty for “sodomy”: “…the lack of direct evidence for homosexual behaviour may also be seen as unsurprising. Since ‘sodomy’ was made a capital offence in 1533, it is unlikely that those who engaged in it would leave records of their activity. In these circumstances, therefore, and from the ‘essentialist’ position, which suggests that homosexuals make up a constant percentage of the population, it might be argued that the burden of proof be lowered and minor evidence be taken as a sign of the existence of homosexuality. One might therefore read the slightest hints in poems or novels as significant. One might ignore a writer’s formal denunciations of homosexual behaviours as tricks to avoid detection. Research procedures of this type are difficult for those used to the strictures of textual scholarship, but the truism remains…that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” (“Queer People: An Introduction,” 15; cf. pp. 16–19). Of course, this creates as many problems as it solves, because absence of evidence most certainly does not entail evidence of presence. It is enough, though, to raise the question of how far either Lev. 18:22; 20:13 themselves, or the kind of heteropatriarchal ideology in which they participate, might have discouraged and silenced positive, explicit references to sexual love between men. 120. Zehnder, “Observations,” 168. Cf. S. Bar-Efrat, “1 Samuel,” in Adele Berlin, Marc Zvi Brettler and Michael Fishbane (eds), The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 601.

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121. For Jacob Milgrom, the common denominator in Lev. 18:6-23 is “the emission of semen for the purpose of copulation, resulting in either incest and illicit progeny or…lack of progeny (or its destruction in the case of Molek worship, v. 21). In a word, the theme (with Ramban) is procreation. This rationale fully complements (and presupposes) P’s laws of 15:16-18. Semen emission per se is not forbidden; it just defiles, but purificatory rites must follow. But in certain cases of sexual congress, it is strictly forbidden, and severe consequences must follow” (Leviticus 17–22, 1567). This links Lev. 18:6-23 directly with the supposedly earlier Lev. 15:16-18 (P), but this may not help Zehnder’s case since he has already rejected the idea that procreation and the wastage of sperm, rather than adherence to the created order, is the issue in Lev. 18:22. 122. To this extent, the similarities between 1 Sam. 20:24-29 and Lev. 7:20-21; 15:16-18 would seem to conflict with Countryman’s claim that the David and Jonathan narrative “nowhere raises the issue of purity” (Dirt, Greed, and Sex, 41), though it must be admitted that unless Saul himself is alluding to a code of sexual purity through the phrase Km) twr( t#blw Kt#bl in 1 Sam. 20:30, the text nowhere connects the issue of purity directly with the (physical?) relationship between David and Jonathan. 123. Cf. Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex, 41. The same applies to the use of sexual regulations from Leviticus and Deuteronomy to determine the significance of Absalom publicly having sex with David’s concubines in 2 Sam. 16:20-22. Thus when Gary Stansell suggests that, “[i]n the light of Israelite Law, which of course forbids sexual contact with the father’s wife (Deut. 23:1 [22:20]; 27:20; Lev. 18:8; 20:11), the moral outrage is obvious” (“Honor and Shame in the David Narratives,” Sem 68 [1994], 72), the logic does not follow. Aside from the fact that 2 Sam. 16:20-22 refers to sex with David’s My#glp, not his My#n, it is clear neither that Deuteronomy and the Holiness Code can be conflated into a single “Israelite Law” (even where they partially overlap), nor that the regulations in question were known, considered authoritative, and widely observed in either the Israel to which 1 and 2 Samuel refers, or the Israel/ Judah/Yehud in which 1 and 2 Samuel were written and redacted. 124. Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 42. 125. Cf. Halperin’s criticism of the comparable move made by John Boswell, Eva Cantarella, and Amy Richlin, of reading evidence for the socio-cultural realities of particular societies off the evidence of texts (How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 144). 126. When David and Jonathan part, their friendship is described as their “resented comradeship” (th\n e0fqonhme/nhn e9tairi/an) (Ant. 6.11.10 [§241]), echoing language used from Homer onwards for comrades-in-arms. 127. When Jonathan arranges his secret meeting with David, at which he will reveal what he has learned from his father about his intentions for David’s fate, he tells David to meet him at a place in the plain where he was accustomed to do his exercises (ei1j tina to/pon…tou== pedi/ou…e0n w|{ gumnazo/menoj diete/lei) (Ant. 6.11.8 [232]; cf. Ant. 6.11.10 [239]). 128. Josephus, Ant. 6.11.1 [206-207]. Diotima, in Plato’s Symposium, associates Achilles’ desire to avenge the death of Patroclus with a0reth/, though in context it is not a0reth/ that drew Achilles to Patroclus: rather, Achilles is striving to prove his



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a0reth/ through his act of revenge, thus achieving immortality through the ongoing remembrance by later generations of this manifest a0reth/. While it is by no means clear that Josephus had Diotima’s speech in mind, it is clear that he is importing into his retelling of the biblical narrative a “virtue” that is not explicit in the biblical text but is associated with the actions of warriors in “canonical” Greek literature. 129. Thus for Augustine, David’s persecution by Saul serves as an example of suffering for the sake of righteousness (cf. Mt. 5:11), whereas the persecution of Hagar by Sarah serves as an example of the persecution of the unrighteous by the righteous (Gen. 16:1-21; 21:8-21; De correctione Donatistarum [= Epistula 185] 2:9). 130. For Chrysostom, Jonathan’s response to Saul’s insult against him in 1 Sam. 20:30 illustrates the nature of love in 1 Cor. 13:4-7 (Hom. 1 Cor. 33:2). Elsewhere he cites the love of David and Jonathan as a model of exemplary friendship (Hom. 2 Tim. 7). 131. Ambrose of Milan, De officiis 1.32.167; 1.33.171; 2.7.36; 3.21.125. 132. Aelred, De spir. am. Prol. 2-5. 133. Aelred, De spir. am. 2.62-64 (cf. Cicero, De amicitia 51); 3.46-47, 92. Aelred’s use of David and Jonathan would have a profound impact in the nineteenth century on John Dobree Dalgairns, and would also contribute to the appropriation of Aelred as part of a constructed gay history. See Chapter 4 below, pp. 309–13. 134. Guy-Bray, “Cowley’s Latin Lovers.” 135. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals,” 86–87. Halperin only skims the surface of the relevant passages, which are discussed more fully in Chapter 4.2 below. It is precisely because Halperin is a classicist, and thus approaches the texts in question without the ghost of the canon lurking in the shadows, that I summarize his work rather than Heacock’s more recent survey (Jonathan Loved David, 101–13; cf. also David Clines, “David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity,” in Interested Parties, 223– 25), which is itself partly dependent on Halperin. 136. See Chapter 4 below, pp. 291–98. 137. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals,” 76. See further on “male friendship and love” Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 117–21, and cf. Brain, Friends and Lovers; Boer, “Queer Heroes.” 138. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals,” 77. 139. See further, pp. 190–91. 140. Loc. cit. 141. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals,” 77–78. 142. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals,” 78. 143. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals,” 79. 144. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals,” 81, 83, 84, 85. 145. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals,” 85–86. 146. Cf. Derrida’s work of “de-limitation” in Dissemination, 25, 33. 147. It is here that Roland Barthes’s distinction between “writerly” (scriptible) and “readerly” (lisible) texts does not correspond precisely to Eco’s distinction between “open” and “closed” works, though this is partly because “text” and “work” are not the same thing. Barthes’s writerly text may not even exist as such, except in the moment of the interpreter’s active engagement in the production of meaning, and as the actualization of a work whose material form is fixed, even though its meaning is not: “The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which

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would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world…is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages” (S/Z, 5). With a readerly, or “classic” text, by contrast, there is no writerly work to be done, and the text is fixed, assumed by the reader to be fixed, or presented to the reader as something fixed. It is noteworthy that Barthes chose a “readerly” text (Balzac’s “Sarrasine”) to illustrate the plurality of interpretation. On the distinction between “work” and “text,” see Barthes, “De l’oeuvre au texte,” where, “Le Texte ne s’éprouve que dans un travail, une production” (pp. 226–27). 148. For a succinct summary of recent research on the literary history of 1 and 2 Samuel, see Dietrich, “Tendenzen neuster Forschung,” 10–11. 149. This chimes with Dietrich’s view that, inasmuch as the observation or assertion that a text is made up of different levels has gained relatively little for the actual interpretation of the text, the synchronic approach to the text has a degree of superiority over the diachronic (“Tendenzen neuster Forschung,” 11). At the same time, however, synchronic readings lose much of their value if they simply pass over the remnants of different layers of text (cf. Dietrich, “Tendenzen neuster Forschung,” 12), because these, too, are part of the textuality of the text in the richness of its final form: a synchronic reading is neither use nor ornament if it acts without further ado as if the text were composed synchronically. 150. Barthes, S/Z, 5–6. 151. Van Wolde prefers the terminology of “demarcation.” See van Wolde, A Semiotic Analysis of Genesis 2–3, 72–74. 152. Cf. Nissinen, “Die Liebe von David und Jonatan,” 254; Hügel, Homoerotik und Hebräische Bibel, 345. 153. 2 Sam. 13:1, 4, 15; 19:7. 154. Cf. Hügel, Homoerotik und Hebräische Bibel, 342–43: “Doch ist gerade das Vexierspiel dieser Liebesbeziehungen mit 1 Sam. 16-20 auf einen recht engen Textbereich begrenzt. Darüber hinaus ist – mit Ausnahmen – von Liebe auch in der Davidüberlieferung nicht mehr die Rede.” 155. Saul’s sons Ishvi and Malchishua, and his father Kish, are listed but play no further role in the narrative. Jonathan is the son who could have inherited Saul’s kingship (1 Sam. 20:31), but gave it up for the sake of David (23:16-18). Merab (18:17-19) and Michal (18:20-28) are pawns intended by Saul to trap and thus control David, but Michal instead plays a key role in enabling David to escape from her father (19:11-17). Ahinoam daughter of Ahimaaz seems to be a different woman from Ahinoam the Jezreelite, whom David subsequently marries (25:43; 27:3; 30:5; 2 Sam. 2:2; 3:2; 1 Chron. 3:1), though the fact that they have the same name might hint that the narrator is inviting the reader to connect them. It is not impossible that, unmentioned in the text, Saul has divorced Ahinoam, and David has taken her, but this explanation lacks economy. Abner is instrumental in the process of bringing those formerly loyal to Saul under the rule of David (2 Sam. 3:6-21), a process in which Michal is, once more, a pawn in the power games of men (2 Sam. 3:12-16). 156. David is introduced into Saul’s court in 1 Sam. 16:14-23 and again in 17:55-58. In 17:12-31, which is absent from the earliest manuscripts of the Septuagint, David



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and Saul seem never to have met before, their first meeting occurring when Saul “takes” (whxqyw) David in 17:31 (cf. 18:2). 157. Unravelling the traditions about David’s entry into Saul’s court is an extremely complex process, both in terms of textual criticism (the Greek manuscripts do not present a common witness, with Codex Vaticanus, for example, omitting 1 Sam. 17:12-31, 41, 48b, 50, 55-58; 18:1-6aα), and redaction criticism (the Masoretic Text contains inconsistencies most simply explained by the hypothesis of separate earlier blocks of tradition). 158. For a detailed attempt to unravel the tradition history of 1 Samuel 16–20, which sees 1 Sam. 16:1-13 as a later block of tradition based on the fact that the anointing of David by Samuel seems to be unknown later in the text, see Kaiser, “David und Jonathan.” 159. The fragmentariness of the textual evidence for David and Jonathan is reflected in E. M. Forster’s novel The Longest Journey (1907), where Rickie Elliot reflects on the fragility of friendship: “He was thinking of the irony of friendship – so strong it is, and so fragile… Abram and Sarai were sorrowful, yet their seed became as sand of the sea, and distracts the politics of Europe at this moment. But a few verses of poetry is all that survives of David and Jonathan” (The Longest Journey [ed. E. Heine; London: Edward Arnold, 1984], 64; see Chapter 4 below, pp. 359–60). So little remains of David and Jonathan because its significance in the biblical text is entirely a result of its import for the relationship between David and Saul, and its impact on the demise of Saul and the rise of David. 160. E.g. J. Cheryl Exum, “Michal: The Whole Story,” in Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives (JSOTSup, 163; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 42–60. 161. Jobling, 1 Samuel, 161; Nardelli, Homosexuality and Liminality, 26–27 n. 36. 162. See pp. 190–91. 163. See the discussion of 1 Sam. 18:1 above, pp. 170–72. 164. The phrase yt#lph t) twkhm dwd bw#b in 1 Sam. 18:6 looks suspiciously like a repetition from 1 Sam. 17:57. 165. Bar-Efrat, for example (“1 Samuel,” 596), comments, “Since Jerusalem was not yet in Israelite hands and David did not yet have his own tent, the v. must be anticipatory.” This is a reader’s response, under the influence particularly of rabbinic tradition, wider acquaintance with 1 and 2 Samuel, and the conviction that the text cannot be contradictory, to a text that invites the interpreter either to resolve an inherent inconsistency, or to close a gap. Cf. Nosson Scherman, The Early Prophets with a Commentary Anthologized from the Rabbinic Writings: I-II Samuel (ArtScroll Series; New York: Mesorah, 2002), 117, where the phrase in 17:54 is glossed: “…and [eventually] brought it to Jerusalem.” This is based on the tradition that David – echoing 1 Sam. 31:9? – first toured all the towns of Israel with Goliath’s head, showing it to women, children, and anyone else not present at the battle, before eventually bringing it to Jerusalem (Radak) (Scherman, I–II Samuel, 116). 166. David’s or Goliath’s? Presumably the former, as David would not have taken Goliath’s armour back behind enemy lines. 167. Lest it seem obvious that it is the army of Israel that is referred to by )bch in 17:55, some manuscripts of the ancient versions felt the need to specify further: it

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is “his” army. Thus British Museum Ms. Add. 26879 of Targum Jonathan, Sperber’s MS a, reads hylyx  br. The Peshitta and Jacob of Edessa, likewise, read hLYX Br. The Lucianic recension reads to\n a!rxonta th=j duna/mewj au0tou=. See also Tyndale (“the captain of his host”), but contrast the kjv (“the captain of the host”). So the reader must decide whose army: Saul’s, Abner’s, or the army of YHWH’s people Israel? 168. Kyle McCarter replaces the unspecified pronouns with proper names in square brackets throughout this passage (McCarter, 1 Samuel, 300–301): “By the time [David] finished speaking with Saul, Jonathan found himself bound up with David. Jonathan loved him like himself! Saul took [David] at that time and would not let him return to his father’s house, and Jonathan and David made a covenant, because [Jonathan] loved him like himself.” See also the exercises in gap-filling in The Jewish Study Bible (Bar-Efrat, “1 Samuel,” 596). 169. Note that Saul’s previous connection to Jesse is via the messengers he sent to bring David to his court (1 Sam. 16:19). 170. 1 Sam. 17:13, 17-18 (mt). 171. Edelman, King Saul in the Historiography of Judah, 158. 172. Nathan Solomon raises this possibility, which is evidenced in this part of the narrative in his willingness to mutilate the corpse of Goliath (1 Sam. 17:51). Solomon connects this with the attachment sometimes shown by soldiers to comrades exhibiting exceptionally risky, even reckless behaviour in combat. To do this Solomon uses the diaries of his patients to disambiguate the David and Jonathan narrative (“David and Jonathan in Iraq,” 28, 30). The other illustrations Solomon cites of David’s “berserk” behaviour are his willingness to procure two hundred Philistine foreskins, i.e. double the number Saul asks for, as the brideprice for Saul’s daughter Michal (1 Sam. 18:25-27), and his having the messenger killed who brought news to David of the death of Saul and Jonathan (2 Sam. 1:14-16). Among the characteristics of the “berserk state” listed by Jonathan Shay (“Learning about Combat Stress,” 570–72; Achilles in Vietnam, 77–99), loss of fear, feeling of invulnerability, inattention to one’s own safety, superhuman strength and endurance, and the taking of risks amounting to inviting death would seem to be reflected in both the slaying of Goliath and the procuring of Philistine foreskins. Rage and cruelty without restraint would seem to characterize the mutilation of Goliath’s corpse and the murder of the Amalekite messenger. In his study Achilles in Vietnam, Shay makes explicit comparisons between the dehumanization of the enemy by United States combatants in Vietnam and the dehumanization of the Philistine enemy Goliath in which David engages in 1 Samuel 17, arguing that “the modern cultural habit of dehumanizing the enemy originates in biblical religion” (Achilles in Vietnam, 104; cf. pp. 111–15). This is a highly questionable claim, begging the question whether the text reflects rather than originates the custom of dehumanizing the enemy. 173. In the Tanakh the male body is almost as much an object of the narrator’s and reader’s gaze as the female, but with very different connotations: gazing at Joseph, Saul (1 Sam. 9:2), David (1 Sam. 16:12, 18; 17:42), Absalom, or the male lover in the Song of Songs does not serve directly to reinforce the heteropatriarchal objectification of women as chattels of men, as objects of their desire to be used as men see fit, as do narratives such as that of David and Bathsheba and, in Greek Daniel, that of



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Susanna. David Clines has shown how male beauty is fundamental to what it means to be “real men” in texts such as these (“David the Man,” 221–23). The homoerotic possibilities of both the relationship between Joseph and Pharaoh and the relationship between David and Jonathan seem to underlie Else Lasker-Schüler’s poems “Pharao und Joseph” and “David und Jonathan” in her collection Hebräische Balladen (Sämtliche Gedichte [Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004], 170–71, 172–73), and the erotic desiring gaze is clearly present in John Addington Symonds’s poem “The Meeting of David and Jonathan” (Many Moods: A Volume of Verse [London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1878], 151–58). Paul Hammond notes the role of the desiring gaze in homoerotic literature and visual art from the Renaissance onwards in his Love between Men in English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1996), xi–xv. Whether or not the translator of this passage intended the reader to infer the presence of the desiring gaze, the Greek text is open to this possibility, and the mt does not exclude it. It is just possible that a Hebrew text that read dwd #pnb w#pn hr#qnw Ntnwhy wh)ryw underlies the Greek here, though it would be more economical to suppose that a translator working with a protoMasoretic Vorlage has introduced an expansion (lectio brevior potior). 174. Cf. Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 145. 175. See 1 Sam. 16:12, 18; 17:42. Cf. Brentlinger, Gay Christian 101, 142. 176. Cowley, Davideis, 2.26-41. Shadduck, A Critical Edition of Abraham Cowley’s DAVIDEIS, 200–201. 177. Shadduck, A Critical Edition of Abraham Cowley’s DAVIDEIS, 251. 178. I.e. while the voice is the narrator’s, the point of view is Jonathan’s. 179. Cowley (loc. cit.) glosses pai=j canqo&j thus: “The yellow; that is, yellowhaired Boy, or rather, Youth.” LSJ 1187b gives “yellow, of various shades, freq. with a tinge of red, brown, auburn…in Ep[ic] mostly used of fair, golden hair.” That this adjective is used of Achilles in the Iliad, with explicit reference to hair, raises the question of whether there is an echo of that usage in this passage in Josephus and, indeed, whether the Iliad has itself, directly or indirectly, shaped Cowley’s – and perhaps even Josephus’s – vision of David at this point. In Il. 1.197 Athene “stood behind [Achilles] and seized the son of Peleus by [his] golden hair” (sth= d' o1piqen canqh=j de\ ko/mhj e3le Phlei+/wna). In Il. 23.141 Achilles “cut off a golden lock” (canqh/n a0pekei/rato xai/thn) of his own hair to place in the hands of Patroclus on the latter’s funeral pyre. 180. They are a pair of star-cross’d lovers, no less (cf. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1 Prologue line 6). See the praise of Jonathan in Cowley, Davideis, 2.120-27; Shadduck, A Critical Edition of Abraham Cowley’s DAVIDEIS, 206: Ah wondrous Prince: who a true Friend couldst be, When a Crown Flatter’ed, and Saul threatned Thee: Who held’st him dear, whose Stars thy birth did cross: And bought’st him nobly at a Kingdoms loss: Isra’els bright Scepter far less glory brings; There have been fewer Friends on earth then Kings. To this strange pitch their high affections flew; Till Natures self scarce look’d on them as Two.

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181. Cowley, Davideis, 2.104-107; Shadduck, A Critical Edition of Abraham Cowley’s DAVIDEIS, 205: Never did Marriage such true Union find, Or mens desires with so glad violence bind; For there is still some tincture left of Sin, And still the Sex will needs be stealing in. 182. On which see Chapter 4 below, pp. 359–60. 183. See 1 Kgs 15:27; 16:9; 2 Kgs 10:9; 14:19 (par. 2 Chron. 25:27); 15:10, 25, 30; 21:23, 24 (par. 2 Chron. 33:24, 25); Amos 7:10; 2 Chron. 24:21; without l(: 1 Kgs 16:16, 20; 2 Kgs 12:21; 15:15; r#q hitpael with l(: 2 Kgs 9:14 [mt l)]; 2 Chron. 24:25, 26. The noun r#q is used to mean something like “treasonous conspiracy” in 2 Sam. 15:12; 2 Kgs 11:14; 12:21; 14:19; 15:15, 30; 17:4; Isa. 8:12; Jer. 11:9; Ezek. 22:25 (mt); 2 Chron. 23:13; 25:27. In other places the sense of the verb is closer to that in Neh. 3:38, of physically joining things together (Job 38:31), binding them on (Gen. 38:28; Deut. 6:8; 11:18; Isa. 49:18; Jer. 51:63; Prov. 3:3; 6:21; 7:3; 22:15; appar. Job 39:10), attaching them to something (Josh. 2:18, 21), or tying them up (Job 40:29). The qal passive participle Myr#q is used in Gen. 30:42 and the pual participle Myr#qm in Gen. 30:41, apparently with the sense “strong, sturdy,” in contrast with Mypw+(, “sickly.” 184. Stansell, “David and his Friends,” 126. Barbara Green also hints obliquely at this possibility when she comments that the verb r#q, while meaning “bind” here, “will become later problematic as it picks up its connotation of ‘conspire’” (How Are the Mighty Fallen? A Dialogical Study of King Saul in 1 Samuel [JSOTSup, 365; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003], 293). 185. b r#q is also used when things are bound together, as in Josh. 2:18, 21, where Rahab binds a scarlet cord to the window of her house. This is noteworthy in connection with the David and Jonathan narrative, because both narratives use b  r#q, dsx  h#(, swearing ((b# nifal) by YHWH, and the trope of subversive actions carried out in secret. See further p. 194. 186. It may go back as far as Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, where the majority reading for this phrase is dywd )#pnb tbbxt) Ntnwhyd )@#pnw, “and Jonathan’s very self was tied together in love for David’s very self.” In Targum Onkelos to Gen. 44:30 the root bbx is also used: “his soul is beloved to him like his own soul” (hyl  )bybx  hy#pnw hy#pnk) (Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman, The Targum of Samuel [Studies in the Aramaic Interpretation of Scripture, 1; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002], 386 n. 1435). The same root is used in the Targum to 2 Sam. 1:23 to render Mmy(nh, which again establishes a link within Samuel, between 1 Sam. 18:1 and 2 Sam. 1:23, that is at best obscure in Hebrew. The use of bbx in the Targum to 1 Sam. 18:1 obscures the link that arguably exists in the mt between this verse and 1 Sam. 22:8, 13. While r#q is used in all three verses in the mt, in the Targum bbx is used in 1 Sam. 18:1 and drm, “rebel” is used in 1 Sam. 22:8, 13 (cf. )drm in 2 Sam. 15:12 and )ydwrm in 2 Sam. 15:31). 187. Since both are passive, it is difficult to discern what the difference, if any, might be between the qal passive participle (Gen. 44:30) and the nifal perfect (1 Sam. 18:1). 188. Thus Ackroyd, “The Verb Love—’āhēb in the David-Jonathan Narratives.” 189. Susan Ackerman, “The Personal is Political: Covenantal and Affectionate Love (’āhēb, ’ahăbâ) in the Hebrew Bible,” VT 52 (2002), 457.  



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190. Gen. 22:2; 25:28; 37:3, 4; 44:20; Prov. 13:24. Exod. 21:5 refers to a slave’s love for his master, which is arguably not to be distinguished from love between other members of a household, especially given that the slave’s love for his master here is akin to the love he has for his woman and his sons. On the bond between slave and master as potentially even stronger than that between a man and his sons and brothers, cf. Patai, Sex and Family, 21. On parental love, see Ackerman, “The Personal is Political,” 441. As Ackerman notes (loc. cit.), children are never, in the Tanakh, described as loving their parents. This is part of a broader trend, according to Ackerman, whereby in portrayals of male-female, parent-child, and divine-human love, “it is typically the hierarchically superior partner who is characterized as ‘loving’” (“The Personal is Political,” 447; cf. van Wolde, “Sentiments as Culturally Constructed Emotions,” 18–22). But cf. nn. 215, 216, 218, 219 below. 191. Unless My#n tbh) in 2 Sam. 1:26 refers to the love of women for one another. 192. Ruth 4:15 (Ruth’s love for Naomi). 193. Prov. 5:19; 7:18; Song 1:3, 4 (?), 7; 3:1, 2, 3; Sir. 9:8. 194. E.g. Ackerman, “The Personal is Political,” 441. See Gen. 24:67; 29:18, 30, 32; 34:3; Exod. 21:5; Deut. 21:15, 16; Judg. 14:6; 16:4, 15; 1 Sam. 1:5; 2 Sam. 13:1, 4, 15; 1 Kgs 11:1, 2; Hos. 3:1 (2×); Qoh 9:9; Esth. 2:17; 2 Chron. 11:21; Sir. 9:8. 195. 1 Sam. 18:20, 28; Song 1:3, and perh. 1:4, 7; 3:1, 2, 3, 4. 196. Gen. 24:67. Perh. cf. 2 Sam. 12:24. 197. Deut. 21:15, 16 (cf. 1 Sam. 1:5). 198. Gen. 34:3 (cf. v. 2); 2 Sam. 13:1, 4, 15. 199. See e.g. the use of the language of “lust” and “desire” in Trible, Texts of Terror, 38, 46, 47, 58. 200. Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, “Tipping the Balance: Sternberg’s Reader and the Rape of Dinah,” JBL 110 (1991), 196 n. 3. 201. The following are ambiguous: Judg. 16:4; 1 Sam. 18:20; 2 Sam. 13:1, 4; 1 Kgs 11:1; Hos. 3:1; 11:1. 202. Exod. 21:5; Deut. 15:16; Prov. 9:8; 16:13; Sir. 7:21 (C). 203. Lev. 19:18, 34. In Sir. 4:7 bh) followed by l seems to indicate the direct object. 204. Deut. 10:18, 19. Cf. Lev. 19:18, 34. 205. 2 Sam. 12:24; Isa. 48:14; Ps. 146:8; Prov. 15:9; Neh. 13:26. See also Prov. 3:12. 206. Gen. 27:4, 9, 14; Isa. 1:23; Hos. 9:1; Zech. 8:17; Ps. 34:13; 52:6; 119:17, 47, 48, 97, 113, 119, 127, 140, 159, 163, 165, 167; Prov. 21:17; Qoh. 5:9; 2 Chron. 26:10; Sir. 3:26; 31/34:5 [B]. Appar. Isa. 57:8. 207. Isa. 56:10; Jer. 5:31; 14:10 (mt); Amos 4:5; Prov. 15:12; 20:13. Appar. Hos. 12:8. 208. Perh. Hos. 10:11. 209. 1 Sam. 1:23 (describing Saul and Jonathan). 210. This would be the case with 2 Sam. 1:23, but in Sir. 3:17 (A) the reward for walking in humility is to be loved by “one who gives gifts” (twntm Ntwn; the slightly different text of MS C reads Ntm #y)), and in Sir. 7:35 (A) being loved is a consequence, or reward, for not disregarding a friend. 211. Isa. 61:8; Amos 5:15; Mic. 3:2; 6:8; Zech. 8:19; Mal. 2:11; Ps. 4:3; 11:5, 7; 33:5; 37:28; 45:8; 52:5; 99:4; Prov. 1:22; 4:6; 8:17, 21, 36; 12:1; 17:19; 21:17; 29:3; Sir. 4:12. Appar. Prov. 18:21. 212. Isa. 66:10; Ps. 122:6 (Jerusalem in both cases).

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213. Ps. 26:8. 214. Ps. 40:17; 70:5. 215. Prov. 17:17. 216. Prov. 19:8 (w#pn bh)). Perh. cf. 1 Sam. 18:1. 217. Thus in Sir. 4:7 the addressee is commanded to make himself loved by the congregation (hd(l  K#pnl  bh)h). Perhaps reflecting the syntax of Aramaic, l here makes K#pn the direct object, unless, as Moshe Zvi Segal suggests, the preposition has been added under the influence of the following word (Ml#h )rys Nb rps [Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1958, 2nd edn], 22 [Heb.]). 218. Sir. 13:14 (wl hmwdh t) Md) lkw wnym bh)y r#bh lk). 219. Exod. 20:6; Deut. 5:10; 6:5; 7:9; 10:12; 11:1, 13, 22; 13:4; 19:9; 30:6, 16, 20; Josh. 22:5; 23:11; Dan. 9:4; Neh. 1:5. In Judg. 15:31 it is not clear whether covenant loyalty as such is to the fore, or whether wybh) (or Kybh), cf. BHS n.) means simply “YHWH’s friends,” as opposed to “YHWH’s enemies” (Kybyw)). There are several occasions where individuals or groups of people “love” YHWH or YHWH’s name: 1 Kgs 3:3; Isa. 41:8 (mt); 56:6; 2 Chron. 20:7 (mt); Ps. 5:12; 31:24; 69:37; 97:10; 116:1 (thus BHS n.); 119:132; 145:20; Sir. 7:30; 47:8 (cf. 47:22). 220. Deut. 4:37; 10:15; 7:13; 23:6. Cf. Isa. 43:4; Jer. 31:3; Hos. 3:1; 9:15; 11:1; 14:5; Mal. 1:2; Ps. 47:5; 78:65; 87:2; 2 Chron. 2:10; 9:8. Perh. Hos. 10:11. It is not always clear in the Latter Prophets and Psalms just how much of the covenantal sense of “love” is to be inferred in each case (see also 1 Kgs 10:9). 221. In Exod. 20:6; Deut. 5:10, YHWH claims to be one who “acts with loyal kindness” (dsx h#() to those who “love” (bh)) him. Cf. Deut. 7:9, where YHWH “guards the covenant and the loyal kindness” (dsxhw  tyrbh  rm#) to those who love him. The roots of this theological usage of the language of “love” and “loyal kindness” are in kinship language. See Frank Moore Cross, From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 3–21, esp. pp. 5–6. 222. 1 Sam. 18:16; 18:22; 2 Sam. 19:7; 1 Kgs 5:15. 223. 1 Kgs 5:15; Isa. 41:8; Jer. 20:4, 6; Zech. 13:6; Ps. 38:12; 88:19; Job 19:19; Prov. 14:20; 18:24; 22:11; 27:6; Lam. 1:2, 19; Esth. 5:10, 14; 6:13; 2 Chron. 19:2; 20:7; Sir. 5:15; 6:4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15; 7:18, 35; 9:10; 12:8; 14:13; 30:28; 31/34:2; 33/36:6; 37:1, 4, 5; 41:22; 46:13; perh. Hos. 12:8. 224. Thus Cross, From Epic to Canon, 5. 225. The Latter Prophets contain a number of passages where several connotations could be perceived simultaneously: Jer. 8:2; 22:20, 22; 30:14; Ezek. 16:33, 36, 37; 23:5, 9, 22; Hos. 2:7, 9, 12, 14, 15; 3:1; 14:5; appar. Hos. 4:18; 8:9; 9:1, 10; perh. Lam. 1:2, 19. 226. On this slippage in prophetic texts using the marriage metaphor for the divinehuman relationship, see Ackerman, “The Personal is Political,” 447–48. 227. Israel is called both “young man” (r(n) and “my [viz. YHWH’s] son” (ynb), but it is unclear whether YHWH’s relationship with Israel is imagined in light of a father’s relationship for his son (cf. Prov. 3:12; 13:24), or whether it is imagined in light of the relationship of an older for a younger man, which in turn is portrayed using the metaphor of a father’s love for his son (cf. David as Saul’s adoptive son: see pp. 175–76, 178–80 above). 228. Though following Green, How Are the Mighty Fallen?, 314–15, 317, the truth of the assertion that Michal loved David is not to be assumed without question: we



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do not hear from her that she loves David, and must judge for ourselves the probity of the narrator’s claim. 229. Cf. Keith Bodner, 1 Samuel: A Narrative Commentary (Hebrew Bible Monographs, 19; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008), 174, though Bodner cautiously sides with Saul as the subject of whbh)yw. McCarter inserts “Saul” in square brackets to remove the ambiguity (1 Samuel, 279). 230. Cf. Peter Martyr Vermigli, Common Places (trans. A. Marten; London, 1583), 3.11 (pp. 258b–59a), who contrasts David and Jonathan with “they who are brought in to loue, either for pleasure, or for profit.” J. Z. Eglinton is presumably referring to this passage in the Mishnah when he remarks that the David and Jonathan narrative “was highly regarded by Jewish sages because the affair was ‘disinterested’ – a love arising from fullness of heart and actual concern of each for the other, not from ulterior motives of material gain, and because it sprang up between two individuals who belonged to opposite camps and who by all normal standards and circumstances should have been enemies” (Greek Love, 54). John Boswell unfortunately reduces the comparison in m. Avot 5:16 to the love of David and Jonathan as “the archetype of lasting love” versus the love of Amnon for Tamar as “heterosexual passion” (The Marriage of Likeness, 136). It is by no means clear that the contrast is with heterosexual passion per se. 231. Perh. cf. the use of yuxh/ by Protogenes in Plutarch’s Amatorius, where “love, having grasped a young and naturally well-suited soul, through friendship brings it to virtue” (e1rwj ga\r eu0fuou=j kai\ ne/aj yuxh=j a9ya/menoj ei0j a0reth\n dia\ fili/aj teleuta=?, 750d). This is a love for younger men, which Protogenes contrasts sharply with the love of women. Or cf. Amat. 759c, where Plutarch attributes to Cato the Elder the view that “the soul of the lover lives in that of the beloved” (…th\n yuxh\n tou= e0rw~ntoj e0ndiaita=sqai th?= tou= e0rwme/nou). 232. Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 8.12.3. 233. Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 8.12.4. 234. Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 9.4.5. 235. Song 1:7; 3:1, 2, 3, 4. 236. Cf. above, pp. 151–53. 237. This could be read as another example of brachylogy, (on which see on 1 Sam. 20:41 above, pp. 215–16), implying the phrase  K#pnk tbh)  r#)  K(r, but it does make sense as it stands. 238. Sir. 7:21 (C): #pnk  bwh)  l[…]#m  db(, “love a w[is]e slave as yourself,” using the same idiom as 1 Sam. 18:1, not that of Lev. 19:18 (MSS A and B both have bbx instead of bh)); 34:2 (B): #pnk  bhw)  dws  rytsmw  hprx  dynt  Nm)n  (r, “a faithful friend banishes reproach, and one who loves another as (him)self keeps counsel.” In Sir. 4:7 hd(l K#pnl bh)h means something like, “endear yourself to the congregation.” Cf. also the phrase y#pnk bb[wx] in 4Q498 1 I, 1. 239. See the seventh-century bce succession “treaty” (adê) of Esarhaddon, line 268 (Simo Parpola and Kazuko Watanabe [eds], Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths [State Archives of Assyria, 2; Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1988], 39). The similarity of this passage to 1 Sam. 18:1, 3; 20:17 has long been noted: see William L. Moran, “The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy,” CBQ 25 (1963), 82 n. 33; McCarter, I Samuel, 342; Zehnder, “Observations,” 146 n. 67.

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240. The use of the various extant ancient Near Eastern treaties to illuminate apparently analogous biblical texts has led to serious methodological problems, one of which – the assumption that ancient Near Eastern, and especially neo-Assyrian, treaties could be treated “as a constant, an Archimedian point, upon which the biblical evidence rests or around which it sometimes moves in orbit” – was challenged in an important, carefully nuanced article by Hayim Tadmor, “Treaty and Oath in the Ancient Near East: A Historian’s Approach,” in Humanizing America’s Iconic Book (ed. G. M. Tucker and D. A. Knight; Biblical Scholarship in North America, 6; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), 127–52. Tadmor emphasizes the influence of Western models, especially the loyalty oath, on the evolution of the neo-Assyrian adê, the term itself being borrowed from Aramaic yd(, probably in the second half of the eighth century bce (“The Aramaization of Assyria: Aspects of Western Impact,” in Mesopotamien und seine Nachbarn: Politische und kulturelle Wechselbeziehungen im alten Vorderasien vom 4. bis 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. [Berliner Beiträge zum vorderen Orient 1; Berlin: D. Reimer, 1982], 455–58; idem, “Treaty and Oath,” 143; cf. Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973], 267; idem, From Epic to Canon, 16–19). For the Aramaic noun, see e.g. the mid-eighth century bce Sefire stelae (Sf I A 1-2, 3, 4, 7, 13; B 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 23, 24, 28, 33, 38; Sf II B 2, 18; C 13; Sf III 4, 9, 14, 17, 20, 23, 27), in which Joseph Fitzmyer notes the influence of the Assyrian political order, while following Tadmor in seeing Akkadian adê as, in turn, a loanword from Aramaic (The Aramaic Inscriptions of Sefire [rev. edn; BO, 19A; Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1995], 57–59). It would be inadvisable simply to read 1 Sam. 18:1-4 against the “background” of neo-Assyrian models, since the origins of, and interrelationship between, ancient Near Eastern loyalty oaths and treaty documents are too complex to be reduced without further ado to such a one-dimensional scenario of influence, and in any case, while we can fix these Aramean and Assyrian texts in the eighth and seventh centuries, we cannot be so certain when the various layers of the David and Jonathan narrative were written. 241. DCH 4:564b. 242. Central to Green’s reading is the theme of Saul making repeated attempts to acquire a son in David, and thus kinship is a key element in her exegesis of the covenant between David and Jonathan. On this passage, see Green, How Are the Mighty Fallen?, 291–95. In an important and largely persuasive recent article, Gary Stansell has offered an interpretation of the friendship between David and Jonathan in light of crosscultural anthropological research on friendship, kinship (especially fictive kinship), and the patron-client bond. For Stansell, the relationship between David and Jonathan is one of “ritualized friendship” (“David and his Friends,” 123–24, 129). A particularly helpful aspect of Stansell’s treatment that bears on the openness and polyvalence of the language of the narrative is his recognition that there exists an “interpersonal continuum” of relationships along which kinship, patronage, and friendship stand in parallel, that these kinds of relationship overlap, and that the language of one kind of relationship can be used to represent another (“David and his Friends,” 118, 126). 243. For these kinds of “taking,” see e.g. Gen. 6:2; 24:67; 34:16, 17, 21; Deut. 7:3; 21:11 (=11QTemplea LXIII, 11); 22:13, 14 (=11QTemplea LXV, 7, 8); Judg. 3:6; 21:22; Jer. 29:6; Esth. 2:8, 16.



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244. Esth. 2:7, 15. Cf. Exod. 2:10 (Moses adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter). 245. E.g. Gen. 16:3; 30:9. 246. E.g. Gen. 12:15; 24:37, 38, 40; 29:23; 34:9; Judg. 15:6; 2 Sam. 3:15; 12:11; Jer. 29:6; Neh. 10:31. 247. E.g. Gen. 16:3; 24:41; 29:19, 26, 27, 28; 30:4, 9; 34:8, 9, 12, 14, 16, 21; 38:26; 41:45; Exod. 2:21; 21:4; 22:16; Deut. 7:3; 22:16 (=11QTemplea LXV, 11); Josh. 15:16, 17 (=Judg. 1:12, 13); Judg. 3:6; 15:2, 6; 21:1, 18, 22; 1 Sam. 17:25; 18:17, 19, 21, 27; 25:44; 2 Sam. 3:14; 12:11; 1 Kgs 2:17; 11:19; 14:9 (=2 Chron. 25:18); Jer. 29:6; Ezra 9:12; Neh. 10:31; 13:25; 1 Chron. 2:35; 4QTNaph 1-3 2, 10; 4QDf 3 9. 248. E.g. Gen. 2:22; 24:67; 29:23; Deut. 21:12 (=11QTemplea LXIII, 12); Judg. 12:9; 19:3; 21:12; 2 Sam. 3:13; 1 Kgs 1:3. 249. A similar point is made by Holt Parker in relation to the differences between different socio-cultural contexts with respect to the language used for kinship systems (“The Myth of the Heterosexual,” 322, esp. n. 27). 250. Michal, in Green’s words, is referenced in this narrative “as an exchangeable possession between powerful men, as a token for servants to barter between those men” (How Are the Mighty Fallen? 314), and is thus an example of the “traffic in women” so incisively explored by Gayle Rubin in “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review, 1975), 157–210. In this highly influential essay, Rubin is elaborating on, and critiquing, the earlier work of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1969), who claimed that with respect to marriage it amounts to a cultural universal that, “it is men who exchange women, and not vice versa…the relationship of reciprocity which is the basis of marriage is not established between men and women, but between men by means of women, who are merely the occasion for this relationship” (pp. 115–16; the title of Sedgwick’s monograph Between Men seems to be an allusion to this passage). For Rubin, if the purpose of the sexual division of labour is nothing other than to institute a state of reciprocal dependency between the sexes, then part of the logic of this is to enforce a taboo on any form of alliance that does not embody the ideological centrality of heterosexual marriage: “The division of labor by sex can therefore be seen as a ‘taboo’: a taboo against the sameness of men and women, a taboo dividing the sexes into two mutually exclsuive categories, a taboo which exacerbates the biological differences between the sexes and thereby creates gender. The division of labor can also be seen as a taboo against sexual arrangements other than those containing at least one man and one woman, thereby enjoining heterosexual marriage… At the most general level, the social organization of sex rests upon gender, obligatory heterosexuality, and the constraint of female sexuality” (“The Traffic in Women,” 178–79). David and Jonathan, in this case, threaten the socio-economic order Saul is trying to control by making a male-male bond that negatively affects the Saulide control of the future of the monarchy stronger than a male-female bond that is meant to cement it. In this sense a homosocial – whether or not also homosexual – bond is what threatens the integrity of the patriarchal socio-economic order. This also highlights further why Gagnon in particular needs David and Jonathan to be heterosexual: because a Bible that contains any cracks in its heterosexual sameness cannot be used to lend theological sanction to the modern evangelical defence of the nuclear family.

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251. And even here the phrase My#n  tbh) implies no ontological, or in any sense socially significant, distinction between “women” and “wives.” 252. On emic categories as implying ontology, see Parker, “The Myth of the Heterosexual,” 323. It remains to be seen how the gradual equalization of legal relationship status for same-sex and opposite-sex partners in modern societies will contribute to the evolution of emic categories, and their linguistic representation, in those societies. 253. A similar point is made by Eva Cantarella as part of her denial that the formalized, initiatory nature of either opposite sex marriage or pederasty in tribal contexts in the ancient world, especially Greece, necessarily excluded sexual desire: “In premodern societies marriage is not the central arena for love and passion in a society. It is rather a social and economic institution whose aim is procreation, though procreation clearly requires a minimum of sexual desire” (Bisexuality in the Ancient World, ix; cf. pp. xii–xiii). My point is partially complementary to this, but is concerned more with a linguistic problem, namely the difficulty of reconstructing either social realities or experiences of sexual desire from the linguistic evidence of texts (cf. n. 102 above). 254. Cf. 1 Sam. 18:1; perh. 20:17. 255. Perh. cf. 1 Sam. 20:17. 256. The reader is the one who has to make the links between the separate statements made by the narrator, but for J. A. Thompson, their juxtaposition means that while each individual statement in 1 Sam. 18:1 and 3 may be understood in personal terms when taken in isolation, by placing them in collocation the narrator is trying to guide the reader to notice their political overtones: “The Significance of the Verb Love,” 336. Thompson acknowledges the ambiguity of bh), but uses it to make a more or less unequivocal claim about the narrator (by which he seems to mean author), who exploited the ambiguity to infuse personal language with political overtones in the context of the narrative. 257. Cf. Green, How Are the Mighty Fallen?, 293 n. 45: “There is no narrative or subjective suggestion that Saul sees the bond between David and Jonathan. It is simply the narrator’s toggling arrangement that forces Saul to have witnessed the external sign of it.” Green recognizes clearly here that the presence of Saul can be inferred by a reader because of the way the narrative has been constructed, but there is nothing in 1 Sam. 18:1-4 itself to force the reader to find Saul there. 258. It is “an initiating action that determines or sets the stage for what is to follow” (Ackerman, “The Personal is Political,” 443). More than this, though, it is what determines that a covenant will be made, rather than the emotion or attitude of loyalty that the covenant compels. 259. Exod. 19:5; 24:7-8; 31:16; 34:10, 27-28; Lev. 2:13; 24:8; 26:9, 15, 25, 42 (3×), 44, 45; Num. 10:33; 14:44; 18:19; Deut. 4:13, 23, 31; 5:2-3; 7:9, 12; 8:18; 9:9, 11, 15; 10:8; 17:2; 28:69 (2×); 29:8, 11, 13, 20, 24; 31:9, 16, 20; 33:9; Josh. 3:3, 6 (2×), 8, 11, 14, 17; 4:7, 9, 18; 6:6, 8; 7:11, 15; 8:33; 23:16; 24:25; Judg. 2:1, 20; 20:27; 1 Sam. 4:3, 4 (2×), 5 (L); 2 Sam. 15:24; 1 Kgs 3:15; 6:19; 8:1, 6 (mt), 21, 23; 11:11 (mt); 19:10 (mt); 2 Kgs 11:17; 17:15, 35, 38; 18:12; 23:2, 3 (2×), 21; Isa. 42:6; 49:8; 54:10; 55:3; 56:4, 6; 59:21; 61:8; Jer. 3:16; 11:2, 3, 6, 8, 10; 14:21; 22:9; 31:31, 32 (2×), 33; 32:40; 34:13, 18; 50:5; Ezek. 16:8, 59, 60 (2×), 61, 62; Ezek. 17:16 (lxx; Syr.), 19; 20:37 (mt); 30:5 (lxx- L 967);



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34:25; 37:26 (2×); 44:7; Hos. 2:20; 6:7; 8:1; Zech. 9:11; Mal. 2:10; 3:1; Ps. 25:10, 14; 44:18; 50:5, 16; 74:20; 78:10, 37; 103:18; 106:45; 111:5, 9; 132:12; Dan. 9:4; 11:22, 28, 30 (2×), 32; Ezra 10:3; Neh. 1:5; 9:32; 1 Chron. 15:25, 26, 28, 29; 16:6, 37; 17:1; 22:19; 28:2, 18; 2 Chron. 5:2, 7; 6:11, 14; 15:12; 23:16; 29:10; 34:30, 31 (2×), 32; Sir. 44:12; perh. Isa. 24:5. In Dan. 11:22, “prince of the covenant” (tyrb  dygn) seems to denote the High Priest Onias III. tyrb is parallel with dsx in Deut. 7:9, 12; 1 Kgs 8:23; Isa. 54:10; 55:3 (dwd  ydsx); Ps. 89:29; 106:45; Dan. 9:4; Neh. 1:5; 9:32; 2 Chron. 6:14; Sir. 50:24; and perh. also in Isa. 28:15, if hzx is to be emended to dsx (see Ludwig Koehler, “Mitteilungen: Zu Jes 2815a und 18b,” ZAW 48 [1930], 227–28), but cf. Isa. 28:18, where tyrb is parallel with twzx. 260. Exod. 23:32; 34:12, 15; Deut. 7:2; Judg. 2:2. The noun tyrb is part of the name of a god the Israelites are said to have adopted in Canaan: tyrb l(b (Judg. 8:33; 9:4); tyrb l) (Judg. 9:46 [mt]). In Isa. 28:15, 18 the covenant with death (twm t) tyrb) denotes a political covenant with an unidentified foreign power, but with the religious connotation of disloyalty to the word of YHWH. Perh. cf. Isa. 33:8. 261. Ezek. 16:8, 59, 60, 61, 62. Cf. Jer. 31:32. 262. Mal. 2:14; appar. Prov. 2:17. 263. Gen. 6:18; 9:9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17 (perh. cf. Isa. 24:5; Zech. 11:10); 15:18; 17:2, 4, 7 (2×), 9, 10, 11, 13 (2×), 14, 19 (2×), 21; Exod. 2:24; 6:4-5; Lev. 26:42; Num. 25:12-13; 2 Sam. 23:5 (cf. Isa. 55:3); 2 Kgs 13:23; Jer. 33:21; Mal. 2:4, 5, 8; Ps. 89:4, 29, 35, 40; 105:8, 10; Neh. 9:8; 13:29; 1 Chron. 16:15, 17; 2 Chron. 13:5; 21:7; Sir. 44:17, 20, 22; 45:15, 24, 25; 50:24. ytyrb in the context of divine speech implies a “covenant of YHWH,” which can be taken to denote “my covenant [which I, YHWH, will establish/have established]” (Gen. 6:18; 9:9, 11, 15; 17:2, 4, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 19, 21; Exod. 6:4-5; 19:5; Lev. 26:9, 15, 42 [3×], 44; Num. 25:12 [mt]; Deut. 31:16, 20; Josh. 7:11; Judg. 2:1, 20; 1 Kgs 11:11 [mt]; Isa. 56:4, 6; 59:21; Jer. 11:10; 31:32; 33:20 (2×), 21, 25 [unless emended to yt)rb, cf. BHS n.]; 34:18; Ezek. 16:59 [Cairo Genizah; lxxL 967], 60, 62; 17:16 [lxx; Syr.], 19; 30:5 [lxx- L 967]; 44:7; Hos. 8:1; Zech. 11:10 [mt]; Mal. 2:4, 5; Ps. 50:5 [mt], 16; 89:29, 35; 132:12; the same obtains where tyrb takes other suffixes referring to Israel’s god, or where it is followed by a divine epithet as nomen rectum: cf. Exod. 2:24; Lev. 2:13; Num. 10:33; 14:44; Deut. 4:13, 23; 8:18; 17:2; 29:11, 24; 31:9, 25-26; 33:9; Josh. 3:3, 17; 4:7, 18; 6:8; 7:15; 8:33; 23:16; Judg. 20:27; 1 Sam. 4:3, 4, 5 [L]; 2 Sam. 15:24; 1 Kgs 3:15; 6:19; 8:1, 6 [mt], 21; 19:10 [mt], 14 [mt]; 2 Kgs 13:23; 17:15; 18:12; Jer. 3:16; 14:21; 22:9; Ps. 25:10, 14; 44:18; 74:20 [lxx; Syr.], 37; 103:18; 105:8; 106:45; 111:5, 9; 1 Chron. 15:25, 26, 28, 29; 16:15, 37; 17:1; 22:19; 28:2, 18; 2 Chron. 5:2, 7; 6:11; Sir. 11:34 [A; unless emend to Kytybm]; 45:25). This is not, however, necessarily analogous with hwhy tyrb in 1 Sam. 20:8, which could just as easily be taken to denote “the covenant [into which you, Jonathan, have brought me, David, as witnessed and guaranteed by] YHWH.” Hebrew syntax has ways of overcoming such ambiguities, as Deut. 9:9 makes clear: “the covenant that YHWH made with you” (Mkm(  hwhy  trk  r#)  tyrbh) could have been expressed more tersely – and ambiguously – as hwhy tyrb (as in, e.g., Deut. 4:23; 29:11, 24). 264. Gen. 14:13; 21:27, 32; 26:28; 31:44; Josh. 9:6-7, 11, 15-16; 1 Kgs 5:26; 1 Kgs 15:19 (2×) (par. 2 Chron. 16:3); 20:34 (2×); 2 Kgs 11:4 (mt) (par. 2 Chron. 23:1); Jer. 34:8, 10, 15, 18; Ezek. 17:13, 14, 15, 16 (mt), 18; 30:5 (mt); Hos. 10:4; 12:2; Obad 7; Ps. 55:21; 83:6; Dan. 9:27; 2 Chron. 23:3; Sir. 41:19.

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265. 1 Sam. 11:1; 2 Sam. 3:12, 21; 5:3 (par. 1 Chron. 11:3). 266. Gen. 26:29; 31:49-50, 53; Josh. 9:18-19; 2 Sam. 5:3 (par. 1 Chron. 11:3); Jer. 34:15; Ps 89:4; appar. 2 Chron. 23:3. 267. Amos 1:9. It may be possible to relate this covenant to that between Israel’s king and the king of Tyre in 1 Kgs 5:26, if Myx) is not to be emended to Mr)l (cf. BHS n.). Cf. 1 Kgs 9:13. On the language of brotherhood in Akkadian treaties of the second millenium bce, see Tadmor, “Treaty and Oath,” 131. 268. Job 5:23; 31:1; 40:28; Sir. 11:34 (A). 269. See further pp. 216–25 above. 270. Song 2:4, 5, 7; 3:5; 5:8; 8:4, 6, 7 (2×); perh. Song 3:10 (unless = II hbh), “leather,” cf. Hos. 11:4; or em. to Mynbh, “ebony”). 271. As with Ktbh) in 2 Sam. 1:26, the semantic connection between noun and suffix is unclear here. Is it “the love she has for you” (subjective genitive), “the love you have for her” (objective genitive), or “the love you have for each other”? 272. Ps. 109:4 (unless del., cf. BHS n.), 5; Prov. 17:9; appar. Prov. 10:12; 15:17; 27:5 (unless emended to hby), cf. BHS n.); Qoh. 9:1, 6. 273. Apart from the use of Nm rather than b, the syntactical structure is identical to Gen. 29:20; 1 Sam. 18:3. Cf. also Deut. 10:15. 274. Gen. 34:8; Deut. 21:11. 275. Par. 2 Chron. 9:8. Cf. 2 Chron. 2:10. 276. hbh) is also found in collocation with dsx in Jer. 31:3, another passage dependent on a form of the wilderness traditions, in which Mlw(  tbh) denotes YHWH’s devotion to Israel (as in Deut. 7:9; 10:15; Hos. 11:4 [unless = II hbh), “leather”]; Zeph. 3:17), rather than Israel’s devotion to YHWH (as appar. in Jer. 2:2). 277. Cf. Jer. 2:33, where Israel seeks out hbh), denoting both traitorous loyalty to gods other than YHWH and adulterous sexual love. 278. Qal, “take off ” (clothes): Lev. 6:4; 1 Sam. 19:24; Isa. 32:11; Ezek. 26:16; 44:19; Song 5:3; Neh. 4:17; “flay” (skin): appar. Nah. 3:16; “go forward” (e.g. against an enemy): Judg. 9:33, 44 (2×); 20:37; 1 Sam. 23:27; 27:8, 10; 30:1, 14; 1 Chron. 14:9, 13; 2 Chron. 25:13; 28:18; Hos. 7:1; Job 1:17; piel, “strip” (e.g. corpses of war dead): 1 Sam. 31:8 (par. 1 Chron. 10:8); 2 Sam. 23:10; hifil, “strip” (clothes, armour): Gen. 37:23; Num. 20:26, 28; 1 Sam. 31:9 (par. 1 Chron. 10:9); Ezek. 16:39; 23:26; Hos. 2:5; Mic. 2:8; Job 19:9; 22:6; “flay” (skin): Lev. 1:6; Mic. 3:3; 2 Chron. 29:34; 35:11. The hitpael and nitpael are attested in rabbinic Hebrew with the senses “be straightened,” “become even,” “flatten” (Jastrow 1246a). 279. 1 Sam. 20:31; 23:17. 280. 1 Sam. 14:1, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 17; 16:21; 31:5, 6; 2 Sam. 18:15. 281. Gen. 37:23; Num. 20:26, 28; 1 Sam. 31:8, 9; 2 Sam. 23:10; Ezek. 16:39; 23:26. 282. Lev. 6:4; 16:23; Ezek. 44:19. 283. Song 5:3. 284. Thompson seems to think Jonathan is giving his apparel as some kind of tribute to David, as a conquered king might to his suzerain (“The Significance of the Verb Love,” 335), but this seems tendentious, given that the texts he cites have virtually nothing in common with 1 Sam. 18:4, and refer to giving weapons that are to be used in combat (2 Kgs 11:10), to the taking of weapons as booty (2 Sam. 8:7, 11, 12), or to the giving of goods in tribute to a more powerful conquering king (ANET, 276, 281).



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285. In terms of the semiotics of the body, see Mark George’s discussion of the representation of the bodies of Goliath and David in 1 Sam. 17 in “Constructing Identity in 1 Samuel 17,” BibInt 7 (1999), 394–97, 402–407. With respect to 1 Sam. 18:4, Christopher Hubble has gone so far as to suggest that Jonathan figuratively emasculated himself here by in a sense yielding to David which, according to Hubble, was feminine behaviour in its original cultural context (Lord Given Lovers, 27). Hubble does not explain where he got this idea from, and if the comparison with Glaukos and Diomedes below has anything to commend it, there is nothing necessarily culturally unmasculine about what Jonathan does. 286. On guest friendship, see M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (London: Chatto & Windus, 2nd edn, 1977), 99–103. 287. Cf. 1 Sam. 18:4, where the Lucianic recension gives zw&nh for rgx, “girdle.” It is entirely possible that the Hebrew text of 1 Sam. 18:1-4 is shaped by earlier Greek traditions, so that Jonathan’s gift of a rgx echoes the giving of a zwsth/r (cf. Il. 7.305). It is also possible that both texts independently reflect similar older customs. 288. On this strange turn of events, see William M. Calder, “Gold for Bronze: Iliad 6.232-36,” in Studies Presented to Sterling Dow on his Eightieth Birthday (Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Monographs, 10; Durham, NC: Duke University, 1984), 31–35; Geoffrey S. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary (vol. 2; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 189–91. 289. For the honouring of an ancestral covenant, see Gen. 26:23-33 (cf. 21:22-34), between the Philistine Abimelech and Isaac. 290. I.e., he could be trying to buy David’s loyalty, possibly realizing, after David’s unlikely victory over Goliath, that if it ever came to a contest for rule in Israel he would be no match for the son of Jesse, and it would be much safer to be in a covenant with him (this would correspond to J. D. Craig’s reading of Il. 6.236, in which Glaukos is conscious of his inferiority to Diomedes and submits: “XRUSEA XALKEIWN,” Classical Review 17 [1967], 244). Alternatively, and in sharp contrast with this, if read as a gift, Jonathan’s surrender to David of armour and apparel that David could never repay could be a way for Jonathan to establish his superior position in the pact, and, in turn, by accepting such a gift David would be either acquiescing in his subordinate position (this corresponds to Calder’s “potlatch” interpretation of Diomedes accepting something of greater worth from Glaukos than Diomedes could ever repay: “Gold for Bronze,” 34), or manipulating the appearance of subordination to keep Jonathan on his side. These options are complicated on Jonathan’s side by the added motivation of love. 291. See Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (vol. 2/1; Berlin: Weidmann, 1926), 37–109 (§70). 292. Strabo Geogr. 10.4.21; FGrHist §70 F 149. On this custom see further Kenneth J. Dover, “Greek Homosexuality and Initiation,” in The Greeks and their Legacy: Collected Papers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), II, 117–18, 122–23; Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World, 6–7 (discussed in relation to rites of initiation of male youths from one age category to the next); Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love, 300–15. It is through the careful sifting of traditions such as this that a historical link could, in theory, be traced from the text of 1 and 2 Samuel back through the reconstruction of Israelite and Philistine society at the turn of the Iron Age, and back further behind the

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Philistine migration to the parallel evolution of the various related societies of the eastern Mediterranean. This would be more cogent than the approach taken by Schroer and Staubli, who extrapolate from Plato evidence for Philistine sexuality, but it would still involve the negotiation of a plethora of methodological complexities. 293. Cf. Saul “taking” David into his house, to become the companion of Jonathan, in 1 Sam. 18:2? 294. In LSJ 957a, citing this passage from Ephorus, the term kleino/j is taken as the Cretan equivalent to Attic paidika/. 295. Plutarch, Amat. 761b. On the Sacred Band, see further pp. 200–201 below. 296. In 1 Sam. 18:7b, the reader is placed in a different position to that of Saul in relation to the dancing women. The phrase wytbbrb dwdw wpl)b lw)# hkh could just be a conventional example of step parallelism, where the second stich presents a multiplication of the first, the formula here being x, x10. The interpretation depends on the force the reader gives to the multiplication in the second stich. The phrase could simply be taken to denote “Saul and David killed lots of Philistines,” but Saul, as a “reader” of this phrase within the text, emphasizes the fact that the stich containing the signifier “David” contains the multiplication. He thereby infers that this connotes the superiority of David over Saul. The text leaves open the question of whether Saul is right or not, but in any case the reader is to (a) interpret the phrase, which requires a degree of both linguistic (in relation to the Hebrew linguistic system) and literary (in relation to the conventions of Hebrew poetry) competence; and (b) interpret Saul’s response, in relation to the phrase itself, and in relation to the developing characterization of Saul within the narrative. 297. Ps. 34:13; 109:17. In Isa. 48:14 bh) is not parallel with the verb Cpx but in collocation with the cognate noun, and wcpx refers to the will of YHWH that either YHWH himself, or the one YHWH loves (perhaps Cyrus, cf. 44:28; 45:1), “will enact” (h#(y). 298. In addition to 1 Sam. 18:22, the noun hbh) appears in collocation with the verb Cpx in 1 Kgs 10:9 (par. 2 Chron. 9:8). Here, according to the Queen of Sheba, YHWH’s delight in, and choice of Solomon (Kb  Cpx…hwhy) is part of his love for Israel (l)r#y t) hwhy tbh)b). 299. Edelman makes the broadly similar point that Jonathan’s “‘delight’ in David… mirrors Yahweh’s purpose and plan for the young man and contrasts with his father’s prior facetious use of the same verb to describe his stance toward David in 18.22” (King Saul in the Historiography of Judah, 144). 300. l  Cpx followed by the infinitive construct seems to mean “to want to,” as in Deut. 25:7, 8; Judg. 13:23; 1 Sam. 2:25; 1 Kgs 9:1 (mt); Jer. 42:22; Ps. 40:9; Job 9:3; Ruth 3:13; Esth. 6:6; Neh. 1:11; Sir. 6:35; 7:13. The same idea can be expressed with the infinitive construct without l, as in Isa. 53:10; Job 13:3; 21:14 (if t(d is construed as infinitive construct); 33:32. The idea of being willing can be expressed by Cpx followed by neither a preposition nor an explicitly stated object (Sir. 6:32; 15:15). The verb Cpx can take a direct object without the preposition b: Isa. 1:11; 42:21; 55:11; 58:2 (2×); Ezek. 18:23 (L); Hos. 6:6; Mal 3:1; Ps. 5:5; 34:13; 35:27 (2×); 40:7; 51:8, 18, 21; 68:31; 115:3; 135:6; Job 21:14 (if t(d is construed as a noun); Prov. 21:1; Qoh 8:3; Sir. 15:17. Cf. Jonah 1:14. The participle can appear in the construct plural, as in the phrase yt(r  ycpx, “those who desire my harm” (Ps. 40:15; 70:3). In Ps. 73:25, the  



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phrase Cr)b ytcpx )l Km(w means either “and with you, I do not desire the earth” (viz. because I have YHWH I have no earthly desire), or “and with you, I do not desire [anyone/anything] on earth.” The verb Cpx in Job 40:17 seems to be a homograph. 301. Song 2:7; 3:5; 8:4. Song 8:4 replaces M) with hm. 302. Gen. 34:19 (cf. 34:3); Deut. 21:14; Esth. 2:14 (mt). It is not always clear to what extent the connotation of specifically sexual desire is present when a man is said to “desire” (b  Cpx) a woman, though the narrative contexts of Gen. 34:19; Esth. 2:14 (mt), for example, show that such a connotation can, at least occasionally, be more probable than not. 303. 2 Sam. 24:3; Isa. 13:17; 66:3; Jer. 6:10; Ps. 109:17; 112:1; 119:35; Prov. 18:2; Esth. 6:6, 7, 9 (2×), 11; Sir. 15:16. 304. 2 Sam. 15:26; 22:20 (par. Ps. 18:20). 305. 1 Kgs 10:9 (par. 2 Chron. 9:8). 306. Ps. 22:9; 41:12. 307. Num. 14:8. 308. Isa. 62:4. 309. Mal. 2:17. Contrast Qoh. 5:3. 310. Isa. 56:4; 65:12; 66:4; Jer. 9:23; Ezek. 18:23 (following BHS n., against L), 32; 33:11; Ps 147:10. 311. Prov. 31:13. 312. 2 Sam. 23:5; 1 Kgs 5:22, 23, 24; 9:11; 10:13; Isa. 44:28; 46:10; 48:14; 58:3; Job 31:16; Prov. 3:15; 8:11; 2 Chron. 9:12; Sir. 35:14. 313. To have a wish for something is represented by l  Cpx followed by the person who has the wish (1 Sam. 15:22; Job 22:3; Sir. 15:12 [B]). This also seems to be the sense of Cpx, without l, in 1 Kgs 13:33. Also without l, Cpx can denote a desire or preference for something (1 Kgs 21:6). The noun Cpx can be followed by b, denoting “pleasure in” something (Jer. 22:28; 48:38; Hos. 8:8; Mal. 1:10; Ps. 1:2; appar. 16:3; Job 21:21; Qoh. 5:3; 12:1; Sir. 15:12 [B]) Other references to Cpx are: Isa. 54:12; Mal. 3:12; Ps. 107:30; 111:2; Qoh. 3:1, 17; 5:7; 8:3, 6; 12:10; Sir. 10:26; 11:23; 45:11; 50:9 appar. 43:7 [B]. 314. In Il. 6.156-157 the gods bestow “beauty and manly loveliness” on Bellerophon (tw?~ de\ qeoi\ ka/lloj te kai\ h0nore/hn e0rateinh\n w!pasan). Cf. 2 Sam. 1:23? 315. 2 Sam. 3:14 alludes to 1 Sam. 18:25, 27. 316. 2 Sam. 6:23. 317. 1 Sam. 19:11, 14, 17; 2 Sam. 6:20. 318. 1 Sam. 19:12, 18; 20:1. 319. There may be a double entendre here, directed at the reader, but which Saul may not be expected, by Jonathan, to pick up. That is, when +lm nifal is used elsewhere in this narrative, it denotes not simply slipping away to somewhere, but escaping from danger (1 Sam. 19:10, 11, 12, 17, 18; 22:1, 20; 23:13; 27:1; 30:17; 2 Sam. 1:3; 4:6; cf. 2 Sam. 19:6, 10 [piel]). 320. Gen. 30:27; 32:6; 33:8, 10, 15; 34:11; 39:4; 47:25; 47:29; 50:4; Num. 32:5; 1 Sam. 16:22; 25:8; 27:5; 2 Sam. 14:22; 16:4; 1 Kgs 11:19; Prov. 3:4; Ruth 2:2, 10, 13; Esth. 5:8; 7:3; Sir. 44:23. See also Prov. 28:23; Esth. 8:5. 321. Deut. 24:1. 322. Gen. 6:8; 18:3; Exod. 33:12, 13 (2×), 16, 17; 34:9; Num. 11:11, 15; Exod. 33:16; 2 Sam. 15:25; Prov. 3:4; appar. Jer. 31:2.

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323. Gen. 19:19; Judg. 6:17. In Gen. 19:19, as in 1 Sam. 20, the one(s) in whose eyes the human has found favour act(s) kindly (dsx h#() towards him. 324. I.e. because he saw that YHWH was with Joseph (cf. David in 1 Sam. 18:14) and YHWH caused everything he did to prosper (xlc hifil, cf. lk# qal and hifil in relation to David in 1 Sam. 18:5, 14, 15, 30). 325. Gen. 19:19; 47:29. Presumably it is this kind of connection in the context of human relationships that lies behind the link between finding favour in YHWH’s sight and being the recipient of his love (hbh)) and loyal kindness (dsx) (Jer. 31:2). 326. Gen. 47:31 (2×); 50:5. 327. The syntactical structure is w-qatalti continuing a volitive mood, where the second action – “act loyally” – is a result of the first: “Know that [Saul] is resolved to do me harm, and [in light of the fact that you know this] prove your loyalty to me, because you have taken me into a covenant of YHWH with you.” See Joüon §§116i and l. 328. Perh. cf. 1 Sam. 18:3, though this verse makes no mention of YHWH. 329. Cf. 1 Sam. 20:23. A much closer analogy than the covenant between YHWH and Israel is offered by passages in ancient Near Eastern treaties in which divine witnesses are invoked to guarantee a treaty, as in the Treaty of Tudh}aliya IV and Kurunta of Tarh}untašša §25 (COS 2:105). Yet even this is presumably a secondary elaboration of an underlying convention of guaranteeing binding agreements by invoking a deity. 330. On dsx in this narrative as reflecting, “the obligatory, unaffective nature of David and Jonathan’s alliance” and a friendship that is founded, “more on theologically sanctioned obligations than amity,” see Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 9–11. But it is not clear to me how far amity and obligation can be separated in this narrative, particularly in light of 1 Sam. 18:1 (mt) and 19:1. 331. Cf. Gen. 19:19; 47:29. On the relationship finding favour (Nx) in the eyes of someone and being shown loyal kindness (dsx), cf. Nelson Glueck, H9esed in the Bible (trans. A. Gottschalk; Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1967), 39 n. 13. 332. Gen. 21:23-24, 31. 333. Gen. 21:27, 32. 334. Cf. the Treaty of Tudh}aliya IV and Kurunta of Tarh}untašša §13, whose close similarity with the oaths of loyalty between David and Jonathan has been noted by Harry Hoffner (COS 2:102 n. 19, cf. p. 103) and Ada Taggar-Cohen (“Political Loyalty,” 254–60). One important difference is that, in §14, Tudh}aliya’s father, King Hattušili III, subsequently made Tudh}aliya and Kurunta swear a further oath of loyalty to each other. Unless a similar situation can be read between the lines in 1 Sam. 18:2, Saul does not condone the relationship of loyalty between Jonathan and David. 335. Josh. 2:12, 14. 336. Cf. the commitment made by the Josephite spies to the man they find leaving Bethel in Judg. 1:22-26, though YHWH is not mentioned here. 337. Josh. 2:15; 1 Sam. 19:12. 338. Uku Masing, “Der Begriff H9esed im alttestamentlichen Sprachgebrauch,” in Charisteria Iohanni Kopp: Octogenario Oblata (Papers of the Estonian Theological Society in Exile, 7; Stockholm: Estonian Theological Society in Exile, 1954), 49. Glueck makes a slight distinction between the dsx between David and Jonathan on the one hand, and that between Rahab and the spies, and between Abimelech and



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Abraham on the other, the former being between allies and their friends, the latter two between host and guest (H9esed, 36, 43–50). It is difficult, however, to see these as distinct usages of dsx h#(. Glueck is right, however, that dsx “is received or shown only by those among whom a definite [ethically binding] relationship exists” (H9esed, 37; cf. p. 38). His understanding of the dsx David showed to Jonathan’s house is as “brotherliness required by covenant loyalty” (H9esed, 49). 339. Zech. 7:9; Ps. 109:16. 340. E.g. Zech. 7:9. 341. Gen. 20:13. 342. Gen. 24:49. 343. Ruth 1:8. 344. Gen. 40:14. Cf. Gen. 21:23. 345. Judg. 8:35. See also 1 Sam. 15:6; 2 Sam. 2:5-6; 10:2. 346. 2 Sam. 3:8. 347. 2 Chron. 24:22. 348. 1 Kgs 2:7. Cf. 2 Sam. 19:32-39. 349. 2 Sam. 9:1. Cf. 9:7. 350. 2 Sam. 9:3. 351. On this ambiguity, see Glueck, H9esed, 49. 352. Cf. 1 Sam. 20:8, 14; Josh. 2:12, 14. 353. Cf. Gen. 24:12, 14, 27; 32:11; 2 Sam. 2:6; 22:51 [par. Ps. 18:51]; 1 Kgs 3:6; Jer. 9:23. 354. 2 Sam. 10:2 (par. 1 Chron. 19:2). 355. The reader is again left hanging here. How, exactly, had Nahash acted with loyal kindness towards David? The text does not say. Would the ancient reader have been able to draw on an intertextual encyclopedia that incorporated oral or written texts about David and Nahash that we have lost? Was the dsx Nahash showed politically motivated, somehow connected with his defeat by Saul (1 Sam. 11:1-15; cf. 12:12), who would thus have been an enemy of both Nahash and David? 356. Gen. 24:12, 14 (cf. v. 27); 32:11 (Mydsx); 2 Sam. 2:6; 22:51 (par. Ps. 18:51); 1 Kgs 3:6; Ps. 109:21 (cf. lxx); Job 10:21; Ruth 1:8; 2 Chron. 1:8. Appar. Jer. 9:22-23. In 1 Kgs 3:6 – but not 2 Chron. 1:8 – the dsx YHWH has done for David was a divine response to David’s faithfulness to YHWH, as if the social obligation incurred when one human acts with loyal kindness with another obtains also between humans and YHWH. The result of YHWH’s dsx is the divine gift of a son to rule Israel in David’s stead (3:6-7). The human-divine do ut des relationship is evident also in Ps. 119:124; Ruth 1:8. In Hos. 6:4 the transitoriness of Ephraim’s dsx towards YHWH renders YHWH perplexed as to how he should act towards (l h#() his people. 357. Exod. 20:6; Deut. 5:10. Cf. Deut. 7:9, 12; Jer. 32:18. 358. Neh. 13:14. 359. The different social statuses of the two men is an essential element in Masing’s reading. See n. 338 above. 360. Glueck, H9esed, is a classic defence of the view that dsx is fundamentally related to the idea of covenant. 361. Joüon §137b. 362. Joüon §139a.

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363. Num. 10:33; 14:44; Deut. 10:8; 31:9, 25-26; Josh. 3:3, 17; 4:7, 18; 6:8; 8:33; Judg. 20:27 (mt Myhl)h  tyrb); 1 Sam. 4:3 (mt), 4, 5 (L); 2 Sam. 15:24 (Myhl)h  tyrb); 1 Kgs 3:15 (L ynd)  tyrb); 6:19; 8:1 (par. 2 Chron. 5:2), 6 (mt; par. 2 Chron. 5:7); Jer. 3:16; 1 Chron. 15:25, 26, 28, 29; 16:6 (Myhl)h tyrb), 37; 17:1; 22:19; 28:2, 18. 364. Cf. Joüon §130b. 365. Joüon §139b. Cf. appar. 2 Sam. 23:11; Jer. 13:4; Song 1:11; 4:3; 7:5. 366. Assuming that hyhl) is not to be emended to hlh), “her [bridal] tent” (cf. BHS n.). 367. Such language can also be used of the covenant between YHWH and Israel, as in Deut. 4:31; 7:12; 8:18; 29:12; 31:7, 20, 21, 23; Judg. 2:1; Ezek. 16:8. In Ps. 105:8-9; 1 Chron. 16:15-16 tyrb and h(wb# are used synonymously in references to YHWH’s promise to the patriarchs. 368. Gen. 31:53. See also Josh. 9:15, 18-20; 2 Kgs 11:4. 369. In addition to the other passages cited here, see Gen. 24:63, 65; 30:16; Num. 20:17; 21:22; 22:23; 1 Sam. 19:3; 20:35; 25:15; 2 Kgs 2:26; Isa. 7:3; 55:12. Cf. more distantly Gen. 3:14; Judg. 5:4; 1 Sam. 17:44; Jer. 12:9. 370. Gen. 27:3, 5. 371. Gen. 30:14; Judg. 9:27, 42, 43; 2 Kgs 4:39; Ruth 2:2, 3, 8, 9, 22. 372. 2 Sam. 10:8 (par. 1 Chron. 19:9); 11:23; 18:6. 373. Mic. 4:10; Ruth 1:1. 374. Perh. cf. Jer. 6:25; 14:18. 375. Gen. 21:23, 24, 31; Josh. 2:12; 6:22; 1 Sam. 20:42; 24:22, 23; 28:10; 30:15. 376. Gen. 24:3; Lev. 5:4; Ps. 119:106. 377. Gen. 31:53; Lev. 19:12; Deut. 6:13; 10:20; Josh. 9:18, 19 (cf. 9:15, 20); 23:7; Judg. 21:7 (cf. 21:1, 18); 2 Sam. 19:8; 1 Kgs 1:17 (cf. 1:13), 29, 30; 2:8, 23, 42; Isa. 48:1; 65:16; Jer. 5:7; 12:16; Amos 8:14; Zeph. 1:5; Zech. 5:4 (cf. 5:3); Ps. 63:12; Dan. 12:7. 378. 1 Sam. 19:6; 20:3; Jer. 4:2; 5:2; 12:16; 38:16; Hos. 4:15. Cf. 1 Sam. 20:21; 28:10; 1 Kgs 2:23-24; Jer. 44:26. 379. 1 Sam. 20:13; 2 Sam. 3:9, 35. Cf. 1 Sam. 3:17; 14:44; 25:22; 2 Sam. 19:14; 1 Kgs 2:23; 19:2. 380. Gen. 24:9; 25:33; 26:31; 47:31; Lev. 5:22, 24; Num. 30:3; Josh. 9:15, 20 (cf. 9:18, 19); 14:9; Judg. 15:12; 21:1, 18 (cf. 21:7); 2 Sam. 19:24; 21:2, 17; 1 Kgs 1:13 (cf. 1:17), 51; 2 Kgs 25:24; Jer. 7:9; 40:9; Zech. 5:3 (cf. 5:4); Mal. 3:5; Ps. 15:4; 24:4; 102:9; 119:106; Qoh. 9:2; Ezra 10:5. 381. See above, p. 194. 382. Gen. 22:16; Exod. 32:13; Isa. 45:23; Jer. 22:5; 49:13. Cf. Num. 32:10; Deut. 1:34. 383. Isa. 62:8; Jer. 44:26; 51:14; Amos 4:2; 6:8; Ps. 89:36, 50. 384. Gen. 24:7; 26:3; 50:24; Exod. 13:5, 11; 32:13; 33:1; Num. 11:12; 14:16, 23; 32:11; Deut. 1:8, 35; 2:14; 4:21, 31; 6:10, 18, 23; 7:8, 12, 13; 8:1, 18; 9:5; 10:11; 11:9, 21; 13:18; 19:8; 26:3, 15; 28:9, 11; 29:12; 30:20; 31:7, 20, 21, 23; 34:4; Josh. 1:6; 5:6; 21:43, 44; Judg. 2:1, 15; 1 Sam. 3:14; 2 Sam. 3:9; Isa. 14:24; 54:9; Jer. 11:5; 32:22; Ezek. 16:8; Mic. 7:20; Ps. 89:4; 95:11; 110:4; 132:11. Appar. Amos 8:7. 385. Isa. 19:18; 45:23; Zeph. 1:5; Ps. 132:2; 2 Chron. 15:14, 15. 386. Gen. 24:37; 50:5, 6, 25; Exod. 13:19; Num. 5:19, 21; Josh. 2:17, 20; 6:26; 1 Sam. 14:27, 28; 20:17 (mt); 1 Kgs 18:10; 22:16 (par. 2 Chron. 18:15); 2 Kgs 11:4; Ezra 10:5; Neh. 5:12; 13:25; 2 Chron. 36:13.



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 263 387. Song 2:7; 3:5 read: Ml#wry twnb Mkt) yt(b#h hd#h twly)b w) tw)bcb Cpxt# d( hbh)h t) wrrw(t M)w wry(t M)

I am making you solemnly swear, daughters of Jerusalem, By gazelles, or by the does of the field, Not to arouse nor excite love until it is willing. Song 8:4 (L) reads hm in place of M).

388. Plutarch, Pel. 18.4-5, cf. Amat. 759a. Plutarch is referring here to the speech of Phaedrus (Symp. 179B). 389. Plutarch, Amat. 761d-e. 390. Cf. n. 38 above on Jakobson’s understanding of the relationship between the various functions of language. 391. See further Gary Stansell, “Honor and Shame,” 60. To interpret 1 Sam. 20:30-34 thus requires the reader to infer, based on extratextual knowledge, several things about the society reflected in the text, particularly about how the actions of a mother would be taken to reflect on her children, or how a person’s degree of honour or shame reflects on their mother. In his 1764 commentary, lamentably rarely cited by modern scholars, John Gill notes that the phrase Km)  twr(  t#b “expresses a concern for his mother’s honour and credit” (An Exposition of the Old Testament [vol. 2; London, printed for the author, 1764], 485b). 392. Mayne, The Intersexes, 73 (italics mine). It is not clear why twdrmh  tw(n  Nb must connote something sexual. On this phrase see further below, pp. 203–13. 393. Mayne, The Intersexes, 188–89. Mayne seems to assume that Jonathan’s samesex oriented desire was inherited from his mother (cf. The Intersexes, 153). He also assumes that in 1 Sam. 20:30 we read of the actuality of Jonathan’s orientation, not simply Saul’s apprehension of it. 394. Magnus Hirschfeld, “David und der heilige Augustin, zwei Bisexuelle,” Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 2 (1900), 289: “Das ist eine ganz klassische Stelle. Was soll das anders heissen als: ‘Weiss ich nicht, dass Du, von einer männertollen Mutter geboren, selbst Männer liebst, dass Du mit David in einem “schandlichen” Verhältnis stehst’?” 395. Gen. 9:22, 23; Exod. 20:26; 28:42; Lev. 18:6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19; 20:11, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21; Isa. 47:3; Ezek. 16:8, 36, 37; 22:10; 23:10, 18, 29; Hos. 2:11; Lam. 1:8. The obscure phrase rbd  twr( in Deut. 23:15; 24:1 seems vaguely to indicate something obnoxious. In Gen. 9:22, 23 (cf. Lev. 20:17) “seeing” (h)r) Noah’s nakedness is shameful and thus incurs a curse. This idea is arguably used metaphorically in Gen. 42:9, 12, where Joseph’s brothers are said to have come to “see” (h)r) the land in its “nakedness” (hwr(), indicating that for a famine-ravaged land to be seen in this parlous state is as shameful as having one’s genitalia exposed in the wrong context. According to what Joseph says, his brothers are at fault for ogling at the nakedness of the land. In Isa. 20:4 Myrcm twr( seems to mean “the disgrace of Egypt,” and in Ezra 4:14 the Aramaic )klm twr( seems to mean “the king’s disgrace.” 396. Hans-Joachim Stoebe, Das erste Buch Samuelis (KAT, 8/1; Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1973), 378.

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397. André Caquot and Philippe de Robert, Les livres de Samuel (CAT, 6; Génève: Labor et Fides, 1994), 251. 398. Caquot and Robert, Les livres de Samuel, 251. 399. One of my students once rendered this phrase in Hebrew class as, “You motherfucking son of a bitch,” which totally fails as a literal rendering, but may well succeed perfectly as a functionally equivalent one. 400. Cf. McCarter, 1 Samuel, 343; David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 520; Nardelli, Homosexuality, 27 n. 36; Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 27. 401. Cf. e.g. Mypk yqn, “pure of hands” and bbl rb, “pure of heart” in Ps. 24:4. 402. Thus Samuel R. Driver, Notes on the Hebrew Text and the Topography of the Books of Samuel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913, 2nd edn), 170. 403. The Peshitta here reads ) twdrM trYSX, which Payne Smith (Thesaurus Syriacus, 2:3822b) rendered “mulier…disciplina carens, effrenata” (“woman…lacking instruction, unrestrained”). This sense of twdrm is attested in Hebrew in Sir. 33:25 (E), where it refers to the discipline one should give to a slave to keep him under control, in Sir. 42:8 (Bmarg), where it is understood as a synonym for rswm, and in m. Naz. 4:3, where twdrm twkm means “punishment for disobedience.” 404. E.g. Driver, Notes, 171. 405. Cf. Jdt. 16:12. There is no article in the Greek, prompting the editors of 4QSamb to suggest that the original reading would have been tdrm tr(n, “a rebelling (slave) girl” (singular). See Frank M. Cross, Donald W. Parry, Richard J. Saley and Eugene Ulrich, Qumran Cave 4.XII: 1–2 Samuel (DJD, 17; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 233. 406. Hans Wilhelm Hertzberg, I and II Samuel: Old Testament Library (trans. J. S. Bowden; OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964), 175–76. 407. Thus for Stoebe, the phrase twdrmh  tw(n  Nb “darf…nicht als Anspielung auf einen wenigstens subjektiv berechtigten Verdacht Sauls gegen Usurpationsabsichten Davids verstanden werden. Gewiß sind die hier wirksamen Kräfte zu komplex, als daß ein eindeutiges Urteil möglich wäre” (Das erste Buch Samuelis, 388). The nuance of rebellion for twdrm as such need not entail, for the character Saul, an actual suspicion of rebellion on David’s part, though the narrator may be inviting the reader, whose knowledge is greater than Saul’s, to make that connection. 408. See n. 395 above. 409. McCarter, 1 Samuel, 343. 410. Tsumura, First Book of Samuel, 520. 411. Bar-Efrat, “I Samuel,” 601; cf. idem, Das erste Buch Samuel (BWANT, 176; trans. J. Klein; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007), 280. 412. Bar-Efrat, Das erste Buch Samuel, 281. 413. Loc. cit.: “Die obszönen Ausdrücke geben Aufschluss über die Intensität des Zorns Sauls und unterstreichen den Bericht des Erzählers am Anfang des Verses.” 414. Edelman, King Saul in the Historiography of Judah, 159. 415. Römer and Bonjour, L’homosexualité, 76: “L’insulte bizarre que Saül profère à l’égard de son fils a été extrêmement peu commentée. Pourtant, elle est centrale pour la compréhension du récit. On y trouve le terme ‘erwah qui désigne les organes sexuels masculins ou féminins. Pourquoi est-ce le premier reproche qui vient



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à l’esprit de Saül, lorsque, dans un moment de violente colère, il s’en prend à son fils? L’utilisation de ce terme dans une formule d’injure ou de malédiction et unique dans toute le Bible hébraïque, il ne s’agit donc pas d’insulte courante. Les commentateurs qui tentent d’expliquer cette insulte avancent souvent l’idée que Saül reprocherait à Jonathan de ne pas se comporter en digne héritier du trône. Mais dans ce cas-là pourquoi Saül parle-t-il de la mère de Jonathan et non de son fils? Et pourquoi évoque-t-il les parties génitales de sa mère? Apparemment l’insulte de Saül ne prend de sens que dans l’idée d’une relation homosexuelle entre David et Jonathan. Saül semble traiter sons fils d’efféminé, comme quelqu’un qui se comporte à la manière d’individu du sexe opposé, déshonorant par là même sa propre mère.” Cf. e.g. Greenberg, Construction of Homosexuality, 114; Jobling, 1 Samuel, 130; Kader, Openly Gay, Openly Christian, 114; Hubble, Lord Given Lovers, 41–48; Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 184–85; Nardelli, Homosexuality, 27 n. 36; Terrien, Till the Heart Sings, 169. 416. Notably in the case of “cunt” the contexts in which the insult is used, by whom it is used, and who is offended by it (regardless of whether they are themselves the target), are determined by a whole range of codes connected with gender and social status that apply differently both to other sexually charged insults within the same linguistic system and to arguably etymologically cognate terms of abuse in other, related linguistic systems. These codes would, moreover, be exceptionally difficult to trace behind a written work being read by a non-native speaker between two and a half and three millennia after the work in question was written. 417. Cf. Chapter 1 above, n. 52. 418. On honour and shame in 1 and 2 Samuel, see further Gary Stansell, “Honor and Shame”; George, “Constructing Identity,” 398–99. 419. Horst Seebass, “bôsh,” TDOT 2:53: “Saul reproves his son not only because he ‘chose’ David’s interests above those of his father, thus committing a grave injustice against the reigning king (and especially against his own mother), but also because by turning away from the king Jonathan ran the risk that David would become king instead of him and that he would take over Jonathan’s mother as his wife with the royal harem. Thus according to Saul’s words the worst thing about Jonathan’s action was not the injustice he had done the king, but that he had not thought things through carefully and thus had made a fool of himself.” 420. Ken Stone, Sex, Honor and Power in the Deuteronomistic History (JSOTSup, 234; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 119–27. 421. Nissinen, Homoeroticism, 55. Nissinen gives no evidence here for disgracing one’s mother as a stock insult. Hertzberg had earlier noted that “[t]he usual way of giving vent to one’s feelings today in the Arabian East is to curse one’s father” (I and II Samuel, 175 n. a). 422. Dietrich, The Early Monarchy, 49 (cf. p. 282). 423. Several texts in the Tanakh refer to “uncovering” (hlg) someone’s nakedness, usually, though not exclusively (cf. perh. Gen. 9:21; Exod. 20:26), in literal or metaphorical reference to sex: Lev. 18:6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19; 20:11, 17, 18, 20, 21; Ezek. 16:36; 22:10; 23:18. Occasionally it refers metaphorically to rape as divine punishment: Isa. 47:3; Ezek. 16:37; 23:10, 29. 424. Jennings, Jacob’s Wound, 17, 27.

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425. See nn. 395 and 423 above. 426. Nardelli, Homosexuality, 2. 427. Nardelli, Homosexuality, 26 n. 36. 428. Nardelli, Homosexuality, 27 n. 36. 429. Pace Helminiak, What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality, 103, who assumes that the nature of the relationship between Jonathan and David is, “a matter about which Saul and his whole court would have easily known.” 430. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009, 3rd edn), 151. Failing to grasp the way this narrative is focalized, Brentlinger takes the “testimonies” of David, Saul, Jonathan, Abigail, and the narrator (namely Samuel, mediating the Holy Spirit) as, in effect, independent witnesses to the nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan, which can be taken together as corroborating one another (Gay Christian 101, 136–91). 431. Cf. Bal, Narratology, 153–60. 432. On the importance of knowledge in the narrative, and its part in Saul’s downfall, see e.g. Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative, 20–21, 25 n. 18; Robert Alter, The David Story: A Translation and Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (London: W. W. Norton, 1999), xix-xx, 47, 56, 83, 111, 137, 172–74. As Alter remarks, “Saul’s entire story…is a story about the futile quest for knowledge of an inveterately ignorant man” (The David Story, 47). Peisert, then, is a little too optimistic when he opines that, “Saul scheint sehr gut das sexuelle Verhältnis von David mit seinem Sohn begriffen zu haben (vgl. I.Sam 20,3), besser als die meisten modernen Exegeten zumindest” (“David und Jonatan,” 103). 433. Brueggemann makes a similar point in connection with hr#qn in 1 Sam. 18:1, that connects the polyvalence of the root r#q in 18:1 with the narrator’s construction of Saul’s point of view in 1 Sam. 20:30-31: “Even if the new friendship of David and Jonathan is not intentionally conspiratorial, Saul will soon perceive it as such (20:30-31)” (First and Second Samuel, 136; cf. p. 151). Taggar-Cohen is a rare example of a scholar who recognizes that, in 1 Sam. 20:30-31, we see Saul’s point of view, and it is wrong (“Political Loyalty,” 261). For Taggar-Cohen, Saul misunderstands the loyalty between David and Jonathan as implying that David was the senior partner in the relationship and thus in a position to take over the kingdom whereas, for TaggarCohen, it was always Jonathan who was the senior partner in the covenant. This does not, however, fully account for 1 Sam. 23:17. 434. Bal, Narratology, 146. 435. Thus for Nissinen the physical expressions of the love of David and Jonathan, “[o]ffenbar gehörten…zum Bereich eines gesellschaftlich tolerierten Verhaltens” (“Die Liebe von David und Jonatan,” 258). This social toleration is implicit in the narrative because the narrator does not condemn it. This, of course, tells us nothing much, maybe even nothing at all, about the world outside the text. 436. Klein, 1 Samuel, 209. 437. See e.g. Jennifer Wright Knust, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (Gender, Theory, and Religion; New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 1–50. 438. On the ambiguity of the referent that points to the conflation of David and Jonathan, see Green, How Are the Mighty Fallen?, 344; eadem, “Experiential Learning:



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The Construction of Jonathan in the Narrative of Saul and David,” The Bible and Critical Theory 3.2 (2007), 19.10, 19.12 n. 10. 439. On the insult in 2 Sam. 20:30 as an attack on David’s manliness, see further Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 147. 440. This is essential to Julian Morgenstern’s argument that Jonathan gives his allegiance to David as rightful successor to Saul because he is both a manifestly mighty warrior and the son-in-law, not the son, of the king (“David and Jonathan”). 441. Robert Polzin, Samuel and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomistic History (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 145. 442. Hirschfeld, “David und der heilige Augustin,” 289. 443. Song 4:9, 10, 12; 5:1, 2. The female lover never addresses her beloved as yx). 444. Song 8:8. 445. See Alfred Hermann, Altägyptische Liebesdichtung (Wiesbaden: Otto Harassowitz, 1959), 75–78. With reference to texts mainly from the second half of the New Kingdom (c. 1360–1160 bce, see p. 3), Hermann’s main concern is to dispense with the idea that such language refers literally to brother-sister marriage. Rather, it is a metaphor of endearment (Zärtlichkeitsmetapher) that has come into the literary language of love poetry from an original context in the private language (Sondersprache) used in everyday speech by lovers. 446. Gen. 29:11. 447. Gen. 29:18. 448. Gen. 29:13. 449. Gen. 29:12. 450. Gen. 27:26, 27; 50:1. 451. Gen. 31:28; 2 Sam. 14:33. 452. Gen. 48:10. 453. Gen. 33:4; 45:15; Exod. 4:27. Cf. 2 Sam. 20:9. 454. Exod. 18:7. 455. Ruth 1:9, 14. 456. 1 Sam. 10:1. 457. 2 Sam. 15:5. 458. 2 Sam. 19:40. 459. 1 Kgs 19:18; Hos. 13:2. Cf. Job 31:27; perh. cf. Ps. 2:12. 460. Ps. 85:11. 461. Thus Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 8, who regards 1 Sam. 20:41 as irrelevant to the issue of same-sex desire. 462. See Chapter 2 above, p. 114 n. 132. 463. See Josh. 15:18; Judg. 1:14 (neb), based on the idiosyncratic interpretation of Godfrey Driver. See Driver, “Problems of Interpretation in the Heptateuch,” in Mélanges bibliques rédigés en l’honneur de André Robert (Travaux de l’Institut Catholique de Paris, 4; Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1957), 74–75. 464. James Davidson’s engaging discussion of how classical scholars, particularly Kenneth Dover, have “sexed up the Greeks,” leading to a pandemic of academic “sodomania,” is well worth reading in this connection (The Greeks and Greek Love, 101– 21). An over-enthusiasm for finding sexual explicitness in ancient texts can lead to

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some very colourful, but philologically unsound, results. Despite my criticisms of him in Chapter 2 above, I am entirely on Zehnder’s side here. 465. Tsumura, First Book of Samuel, 524. 466. Tsumura, First Book of Samuel, 64–65. 467. See also 1 Sam. 11:2; 20:16; 1 Kgs 8:9 (par. 2 Chron. 5:10). In 1 Sam. 12:6, there seems to be an implied object for h#(, “he made,” which would be some office or function performed on the deity’s behalf (cf. Driver, Notes, 92; McCarter, 1 Samuel, 215). lrwg, “lot” seems to be the implied object of wlyph, “cast” in 1 Sam. 14:42. There is apparently a verb implied in 1 Sam. 18:11a, for which ryqb indicates the object. 468. Homer, Iliad 19.315-337; 23:19-23, 179-183; Epic of Gilgamesh 8.3-56, 71-91. Mirko Peisert goes so far as to wonder whether the traditions that influenced the representation of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad also provided a foil for the author of 1 and 2 Samuel (“David und Jonatan,” 108), and whether the Epic of Gilgamesh was actually known at the Jerusalem court, serving as a kind of template for the narrative of David and Jonathan (“David und Jonatan,” 109). This suggestion should not be dismissed lightly, given that fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh were found at Megiddo and certainly known in Palestine (but cf. p. 107 n. 64 above). Were this study an exercise in historical criticism, I would wish to examine these suggestions in more detail, exploring the possibility that the stories of Saul and David in 1 and 2 Samuel were meant to serve as Israel’s, or more likely Judah’s (or post-exilic Yehud’s) equivalent to either the Iliad or the Epic of Gilgamesh, indeed may even have been intended to mirror one or other of these works, creating a narrative of Israelite identity. As this study is focused instead on reception, I will have to leave such an examination aside. 469. HALOT 2:705b. 470. Cf. Plutarch, Amat. 751b. 471. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 188. See also Brentlinger, Gay Christian 101, 169– 70, who puts forward seven possible interpretations of 2 Sam. 1:26, but concludes that only the view that, “David was comparing the intimate friendship and sexual love of his wives with the intimate friendship and sexual love he shared with Jonathan… best fits the text of scripture.” 472. Thus Edelman, King Saul in the Historiography of Judah, 312: “That Jonathan’s love was more extraordinary than the love of women perhaps can be seen in the larger associative context to be a sidelong reference to David’s aborted marriage to Jonathan’s sister Merab and his actual marriage to Jonathan’s sister Michal. Michal is said to have loved David also (18.20), but did not seem to put her life on the line on his behalf as many times as her brother. In the narrative, Merab did not prove her love for him at all.” 473. Cross, From Epic to Canon, 9 (italics mine). 474. As Cross, for example, assumes (loc. cit.). 475. Exum, Tragedy and Biblical Narrative, 73. 476. Thus A. A. Anderson, 2 Samuel (WBC, 11; Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1989), 19; Nupanga Weanzana, “1 and 2 Samuel,” in T. Adeyemo (ed.), Africa Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 380: “[David] may have been thinking here of the love of a woman for her husband or of a mother for her child.” 477. Odd though it may seem to see a theological dimension to David’s words here (though cf. Damrosch, The Narrative Covenant, 202 n. 14 on 1 Sam. 20:8), such a



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reading is not unknown. Thus Tsumura remarks, “Unless a friendship is seasoned by a taste of trust in the One who is beyond the two of them, that friendship cannot be ‘wonderful’ (2 Sam. 1:26) as Jonathan’s friendship with David was” (First Book of Samuel, 500 on 20:1-24a). 478. Cf. Clines, “David the Man,” 226: “We have to conclude that David does not actually like women very much, and certainly has no fun with them. If he can say that Jonathan’s love has been ‘wonderful,’ better than the love of women, and he has (as far as I can judge) never been to bed with Jonathan, it doesn’t say a lot for his love life.” 479. Thus Edelman, King Saul in the Historiography of Judah, 311–12. 480. Peleg, “Love at First Sight?,” 187. 481. On the relationship as one between equals, see e.g. Brain, Friends and Lovers, 28–29; Fokkelman, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, 2:195, 197; Nissinen, “Die Liebe von David und Jonatan,” 259 and n. 36. In 1 Sam. 20:7-8, however, David speaks as Jonathan’s “servant” (db(), perhaps implying he is subordinate to Jonathan (Olyan, “‘Surpassing the Love of Women,’” 8). 482. Cf. Nissinen, Homoeroticism, 55. 483. Steven Greenberg, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004, 2nd edn), 104. 484. Halperin, “Heroes and their Pals,” 83. 485. Thus Naumann contrasts the “tränenreich” farewell of Jonathan and David with the emotionally blank description of the parting of Michal and David, after which Michal is no more than a “Spielball im Machtkampf der Männer” (“David und die Liebe,” 59). 486. Cf. the Earl of Lancaster’s response to the Earl of Kent’s apparently treasonous disloyalty to his brother Edward in offering to side with Lancaster and his noble allies against the king in Marlowe’s Edward the Second: “I fear you are sent of policy, To undermine us with a show of love” (2 iii 5-6). 487. Here the Hebrew tm(n is rendered h(du/nqhj, “you were delightful.” 488. Stoebe, Das zweite Buch Samuelis, 93. Presumably the embarrassment would be excluded by reducing the possibility of interpreting the Hebrew My#n  tbh) as heterosexual love as such, rather than the love of specific other persons, like Abigail and Ahinoam. It is regrettable that none of the Aramaic or Latin variants for 2 Samuel 1:26 made their way into the apparatus criticus of BHS: while they hardly suggest options for the reconstruction of the earliest Hebrew version of the book of Samuel, they do highlight the ambiguity of the text and its potential to be reworked. More importantly, they point to how later readers came into contact with the representation of David’s feelings for Jonathan. What BHS thus leaves us with is a silence, but hardly an innocent one. 489. In general on the rendering of 2 Sam. 1:17-27 in the Targum, see van Staalduine-Sulman, The Targum of Samuel, 480–88. 490. The lxx uses qrhnei=n in both. 491. See further Leivy Smolar and Moses Aberbach, Studies in Targum Jonathan to the Prophets (Library of Biblical Studies; New York: KTAV, 1983), 44. 492. The initial problem is with Michal’s apparently adulterous marriage to Palti(el). In the Bavli, R. Johanan is recorded as solving the problem by denying that Michal and Palti(el) had consummated their marriage (b. Sanh. 19b). Thus neither Palti(el)’s

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“marriage” to Michal nor David’s remarriage to her could be considered halakhically unsatisfactory. Note, however, the view attributed to R. Nahman b. Samuel b. Nahman that Doeg the Edomite had declared David an outlaw (syww+y+yz) and both David’s blood and his wife Michal released or permitted (trtwm  wt#)w  rtwm  wmd). This is supposed to illustrate Doeg’s culpability as one, like Ahitophel, who permitted incest and the shedding of blood (Mymd  twkyp#w  twyr(  ywlyg  rytyh). See further the glosses on Ps. 5:7 in Gen. Rab. 32:1; 38:1. On this and on Doeg in general, see Midr. Teh. on Psalm 52. Under these circumstances Michal would no longer have been David’s wife in 2 Sam. 1:26. 493. Thus Gill, An Exposition of the Old Testament, 532b, who offers exactly this interpretation of the Targum, suggesting further that David had hitherto been “more strongly and affectionately loved by Jonathan than by them.” In 1 Sam. 27:3; 30:5, 18 and 2 Sam. 2:2, Abigail and Ahinoam are mentioned explicitly as David’s two women, who went with him into the protective custody of King Achish of Gath, were captured in the raid on Ziklag, recaptured by David, and subsequently went up with him to Hebron. Note that in both Hebrew and Aramaic there is a direct verbal correspondence between 1 Sam. 30:6, where “David was greatly distressed” (Heb. d)m  dwdl  rctw; Aram. )dxl  dywdl  tq(w)), apparently on account of the capture of his and his soldiers’ women, and 1 Sam. 1:26, where he is “distressed” (Heb. yl  rc; Aram. yl  tq() on account of Jonathan. This verbal correspondence may well have enabled a reading of David’s relationship with Jonathan in comparison with his relationships with his women. 494. John Boswell typically sees the reason as a desire to cloak the intensity of a male-male relationship: “The Vulgate version, perhaps recoiling from the intensity of the relationship between two males, inserts the wholly inauthentic line: Sicut mater unicum amat filium suum, Ita ego te diligebam…” (The Marriage of Likeness, 137 n. 125). This interpretation is possible, but unfortunately Boswell does not make clear that this as an inner-Vulgate medieval expansion that is not attested in all manuscripts (cf. n. 495 below). 495. The apparatus criticus traces the wayward gloss. Three manuscripts (Amiatinus, Legionensis2, and Lyon, Bibl. de la Ville 401 [327]) read mulierum sicut mater unicum amat filium, with the eighth-century Lyon manuscript adding suum. In two medieval Spanish manuscripts (Cavensis, Toletanus) the verse is expanded to mulierum sicut mater unicum amat filium ita ego te diligebam. In the manuscripts of recension F (Alcuin), which also reflect this expanded text, filium is qualified by suum and ego is omitted. The sixteenth-century Clementine text takes the most expansive possible option, while the Stuttgart edition works on the reasonable principle that the shorter version is more likely to be original (lectio brevior potior). 496. Stoebe, Das zweite Buch Samuelis, 93. 497. See Ambrose, De officiis 3.61. In his commentary, Ivor Davidson notes the biblical source of this section, but does not discuss the peculiarities of the Old Latin cited by Ambrose (Ambrose/De Officiis, 852). 498. Theodoret, Quaestiones in Librum II Regnorum 7, on 2 Sam. 1:26 (PG 80:599602). Theodoret is responding tartly to some who deride what is said of Jonathan in 2 Sam. 1:26. He understands the comparison to be between the affection that men have for their wives – here he cites Gen. 2:24 and 1 Sam. 1:8 – and the affection that unites



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those (men) who love souls purely: “Some people ridicule what is said about Jonathan: ‘Your love fell upon me, like the love of women.’ They are like fools who think this. For it was necessary to make them understand what, wishing to make manifest what is intense and genuine about tender love, has led the image astray. For the affection of the man for the woman is of this kind, as the law concerning marriage says: ‘Because of this a man will leave his father and his mother, and will cling to his wife, and the two of them will become one flesh.’ And Elkanah had showed this when he persuaded Anna: ‘Am I not more to you,’ he said, ‘than ten children?’ So just as the union makes those who come together by the law of marriage one flesh, so affection unites those who love souls purely” (Tine\j kwmw?dou=si to\ peri\ Iwnaqan ei0rhme/non, «'Epe/pesen h9 a0ga/ph sou e0p' e0me\ w~j h9 a0ga/ph tw~n gunaikw~n.» W 9 j h0li/qioi tou=to pa/sxousin. E 1 dei ga\r au0tou\j sunidei=n, w(j dei=cai boulhqei\j th=j filostorgi/aj to\ qermo/n te kai\ gnh/sion, th\n ei0ko/na parh/gage. Tosau/th ga/r e0sti tou= a0ndro\j h9 peri\ th\n gunai=ka dia/qesij, w(j to\n peri\ tou= ga/mou no/mon ei0pei=n: «'Anti\ tou/tou katalei/yei a11nqrwpoj to\n pate/ra au0tou= kai\ th\n mhte/ra au0tou=, kai\ proskollhqh/setai pro\j th\n gunai=ka au0tou=, kai\ e1sontai oi9 du/o ei0j sa/rka mi/an.» Tou=to kai\ o9 'Elkana\ dedh/lwke th\n 1Annan yuxagwgw~n: «Ou0k a0gaqo/j soi ga\r e0gw_, e1fh, u9pe\r de/ka te/kna;» 3Wsper toi/nun tou/j no/mw? ga/mou sunelqo/ntaj h9 suna/feia sa/rka mi/an a0potelei=, ou!tw tw~n ei0likrinw~j a0gapw&ntwn e0noi= ta\j yuxa\j h9 dia/qesij). The pure love of the “soul” here is noteworthy, partly because of its strong echoes of Plato, but also because Theodoret was clearly well acquainted with 1 Sam. 18:1-4 in Greek (see n. 106 above), which passage is presumably in the background of his thinking here. 499. This seems to be the judgment adopted in Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt, 1:549a. It is also not impossible that behind the Greek Vorlage of the Old Latin there lay a different Hebrew text: ht)lpn in the mt is unusual in that the 3 f.s. affix follows the analogy of h~l verbs rather than the norm for )~l verbs, and is attached externally to the root. We would expect h)lpn, not ht)lpn (Driver, Notes, 238–39). It is not difficult to imagine a translator mistaking h)lpn, “it was wonderful” for hlpn, “it fell,” or even to imagine a scribe accidentally omitting the alef and misspelling h)lpn as hlpn, thus generating a misunderstanding in Greek that was passed on into Latin. To stretch the imagination a little further, perhaps the mt was deliberately inscribed with the peculiar affix in an attempt to forestall such misunderstandings in future. 500. 2 Sam. 1:26-27 are rendered together: “Wo is me for thee, my brother Ionathán: very kinde hast thou bene vnto me: thy loue to me was wonderful, passing the loue of women: how are the mighty ouerthrowen, and the weapons of warre destroyed?” A similar interpretation is offered by Gill, who glosses the phrases “passing the love of women” with “either that with which they are loved with by men, or that with which they love their husbands and children; which is generally the strongest and most affectionate” (An Exposition of the Old Testament, 532b). 501. Childs, Vita Edwardi Secundi, 28. 502. Childs, Vita Edwardi Secundi, 52; cf. Pierre Chaplais, Piers Gaveston: Edward II’s Adoptive Brother (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 8. It is noteworthy that in the Iliad, Apollo contrasts the immoderate grief Achilles expresses by dragging Hector’s corpse around the tomb of Patroclus with the more restrained grief a man might express on the death of a brother or son (Il. 24.44-54). This passage and 2 Sam. 1:26

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are cited by Nathan Solomon as evidence for the use of kinship language to express friendships that are of such intensity that everyday language otherwise has inadequate resources to represent them (Solomon, “David and Jonathan in Iraq,” 24; cf. Shay, Achilles in Vietnam, 40–41, 214), and by Jonathan Shay as an example of the collapse of Achilles’ character as a result of “berserking” (Achilles in Vietnam, 97–98). Although Solomon’s point is meant to apply chiefly to friendship forged in the trauma of combat, it could be extended to this passage in the Vita Edwardi Secundi also. What is further noteworthy is that the uses of both Achilles and Patroclus and David and Jonathan in the Vita and in Solomon’s work on combat trauma themselves constitute an implicit acknowledgement that everyday language is inadequate to express the intensity and particularity of certain bonds of friendship. That is, models from antiquity of intense friendships that bear the connotation of exemplarity are used as metaphors to clarify the nature of putatively comparable friendships in the present because everyday language otherwise has inadequate resources. 503. When the narrator notes (Childs, Vita Edwardi Secundi, 28) that “Jonathan loved David” (Ionathas dilexit Dauid), the comparison is with the modus dileccio to which Edward was incapable of limiting himself with respect to Gaveston. On this charge against Edward in the extant chronicles of Edward’s reign, see Chaplais, Piers Gaveston, 7. 504. Cf. Childs, Vita Edwardi Secundi, 52, where Gaveston is a described as a great earl “whom the king adopted as a brother, whom the king loved as a son, whom the king considered a comrade and friend” (quem rex adoptuerat in fratrem, quem rex dilexit ut filium, quem rex habuit in socium et amicum). This passage is essential to the case put forward by Pierre Chaplais that Gaveston was taken into a formal compact of adoptive brotherhood with Edward II, at least partly echoing the biblical precedent of Jonathan and David (Piers Gaveston, 6–22). 505. John Lockman, David’s Lamentation over Saul and Jonathan: A Lyric Poem (London, 1736). This poem was set to music in two versions (London, 1736 and Dublin, 1744) by William Boyce. I wish to thank Bill Countryman for drawing Boyce to my attention. 506. The recitative reads (Lockman, David’s Lamentation over Saul and Jonathan, 7): The Bow which Jonathan so strongly drew Discharg’d sure Death, which swift as Lightning flew: Where’er the Splendors of his Faulchion play’d, Rank fell on Rank, and all were breathless laid. His Bow, his Sword, immortal Dangers sought, And conquer’d ‘em, ‘cause they for Israel fought.— Father and Son possess’d each other’s Mind, So sweet a Harmony their Souls combin’d: This in the strongest Friendships had been try’d, So strong, Death’s iron Hand, cou’d ne’er divide.— In manly Exercises both excell’d, And with the Force a Combatant repell’d Swifter than Eagles when they dart their Way; Than Lions stronger, when they fight for Prey.



How Open is the David and Jonathan Narrative? 273 The second half of the following chorus reads (loc. cit.): Weep o’er his Urn, whose dearest Care Was to improve the op’ning Mind To make You virtuous as you’re fair, And be the Wonder of your Kind.

507. Lockman, David’s Lamentation over Saul and Jonathan, 8. 508. See Chapter 4 below. On this kind of double-coding with respect to same-sex desire, especially in the late ninetenth and early twentieth centuries, see e.g. Bartlett, Who Was That Man? 48–57; Timothy D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 31, 180–91; Sinfield, Wilde Century, 90, 104. 509. See further Chapter 4 below, pp. 291–98.

Chapter 4 David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis? quid academiae et ecclesiae? quid haereticis et christianis?1 With this [letter] will travel (by book-post) the volume of my Plato which includes the glorious Apology, Crito, and Phaedo: I hope they will give you at any rate half the pleasure they have given me. But lest you should take to reading aloud let me warn you not to experiment on the Phaedrus; this, if readable at all throughout, is certainly only readable to oneself.2 “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” said the stern Hebrew prophet: “The beginning of wisdom is Love,” was the gracious message of the Greek.3

1. David and Jonathan/the invention of gay history In Alan Bennett’s 2004 play The History Boys, Hector, a rather unorthodox teacher in a Sheffield grammar school, is confronted by the school’s headmaster after the latter’s wife has seen Hector fondling a schoolboy he was taking home on his motorbike: Hector: Nothing happened. Headmaster: A hand on a boy’s genitals at fifty miles an hour, and you call it nothing? Hector: The transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic act. In the Renaissance… Headmaster: Fuck the Renaissance. And fuck literature and Plato and Michaelangelo [sic] and Oscar Wilde and all the other shrunken violets you people line up. This is a school and it isn’t normal.4

It may seem that a play that makes no reference to David and Jonathan is not even tangential to our theme. Yet the absence of references to David and Jonathan are as significant as the presence of the same, and both Hector’s appeal to the Renaissance and the headmaster’s incensed response point to an important channel through which the story of David and Jonathan has been mediated.



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The headmaster’s expression of disgust makes reference to the way Plato, Michelangelo, Oscar Wilde, and other “shrunken violets” have been appealed to in order to construct what amounts to a gay “canon,” implying the existence of a gay history that has been suppressed in the service of the ideology of heteronormativity and of a certain, ideologically determined, construction of masculinity. The headmaster makes no suggestion that the figures he refers to could be seen as examples of positive same-sex eroticism, only that they are worthy of nothing but contempt. They fail to live up to the headmaster’s understanding of normality, and are inadequate in the performance of their roles as men (though this begs the intriguing question: how did he know about them in the first place?). This differs from Robert Gagnon’s reference to the “specious connections” made by “people desperate to find the slightest shred of support for homosexual practices in the Bible”;5 the headmaster has no doubt that those to whom he refers were indeed “shrunken violets” lined up by moderns intent on reconstructing a heritage for their abnormal sexual proclivities. The intent, however, is the same: to defuse the power of a tradition of reading to validate and provide roots for people who desire sexual relationships with members of their own sex. While David and Jonathan are not explicitly mentioned, it is entirely possible for the reader whose intertextual competence encompasses a substantial part of this reconstituted history to infer their presence from the words “all the other shrunken violets,” because both the biblical texts in which they appear and a number of later rewritings of those texts have been used to (re)create a heritage of positive portrayals of male samesex desire. With reference to fin de siècle Anglo- and Roman Catholicisms, Frederick Roden has associated this move with the absence of a safe space in religious life even for what he terms the “queer virgin,” following the rise of Victorian sexology and the consequent pathologization of the homosexual. He writes: …the queer space of religious life as it had been constructed in prior decades (if not centuries) was simply gone after late Victorian sexology, the public trials of Oscar Wilde, and Christianity’s acceptance of the pathologization of (rather than religious prohibition against) homosexuality. As modern homosexuals looked back at a more innocent time, they also strove – like [Marc-André] Raffalovich – to find a history of their desires. Queerness had been identified and essentialized, as had their longings and their very bodies. It became more crucial than ever to develop a continuum of – and apologia for – the kind of deviant identity that had so recently been defined.6

This history of desire drew deeply on both Greek, and to a lesser extent Roman sources, and but also on resources drawn from the Jewish and

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Christian traditions. The interrelationship between these strands is a rather complex matter. Roden continues: When histories of homosexuality are written, ancient Greece immediately comes to mind, certainly for the British in the nineteenth century. Pop cultural shorthand more quickly identifies “the Greeks” than Catholics with homosexuality… Beginning with the Oxford Movement, the use of biblical stories of David and Jonathan and Jesus and John the Beloved indicate male-male desire in writers as diverse as [John Dobrie] Dalgairns and [John Addington] Symonds, [Christina] Rossetti and the authors of Teleny. Aelred [of Rievaulx] – as he was described by Dalgairns and appropriated by Aelred Carlyle, historian Peter Anson, and other men – served as a historical type for the expression of male friendship. For women like Rossetti, intellectual virgins like Thecla or Catherine of Alexandria were more meaningful than mothers such as Mary… The sensuous martyr Ursula offered Michael Field (like Hildegard of Bingen more than seven centuries earlier) a female devotional type comparable to [Frederick Rolfe, Baron] Corvo’s use of Sebastian.7

This points to a process by which all of these various sources came to be read intertextually with one another, and were made to contribute to the emerging discourse of sexuality in its historical, rather than its medical or psychological, manifestations. In the previous chapter, the relationships between texts, that is, the way the meaning of a text emerges through its interpretation in light of other texts, was sketched in connection with the tension between the relative openness of the David and Jonathan narrative and the forces that have worked to close the narrative down. In this chapter we will explore one fairly long moment in the history of interpretation, a moment that illustrates the opening of the David and Jonathan narrative through the outworking of intertextuality, and explains, to a significant extent, the emergence of the modern reading of the relationship between David and Jonathan as homoerotic. More simply, this chapter explains what had made the idea that David and Jonathan were in a same-sex erotic relationship thinkable by the end of the nineteenth century. Roden is referring to the beginning of the construction, or reconstitution, of the history of same-sex desire. This process would gain renewed momentum in the latter half of the twentieth century, in connection with, and in the wake of, LGBT/Q liberation in parts of the West. The foundations, however, were laid in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when establishing a positive heritage for contemporary expressions of same-sex desire between men, which amounted to a kind of hermeneutics of recuperation, was an integral part of the process of re-imagining the nature and moral status of same-sex desire. Ultimately, though, the



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roots lie deeper still, in the use of traditions about biblical and classical paria amicorum with reference to intense friendships between men during the Renaissance, which themselves are part of a continuously evolving tradition that goes back to the origins of those traditions in ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome. Consider the following passage from Xavier Mayne’s The Intersexes, written in 1901 but published privately in Rome only in 1908: The types of great “friendships,” of passionate intimacy, between two men of sensitive mutuality through life, or long periods of life, have multiplied through the world’s social history. Such male pairs have become household names; beloved ideals forever. We go back to the very nursery, to school-forms and our earliest personal interests in humanity to meet them. Legend, myth, history and religion blend in their circle. They are so frequent that they almost make it needless to mention here more than a few typical instances. Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Nisus and Euryalus, Alexander the Great and Hephaestion, Julian the Apostate and Sallustius, stand forth out of Grecian and Roman classics. David and Jonathan, Christ and John, the beloved young Disciple,8 are familiar Biblical “friendships” of exceeding beauty and sentimental tenderness. Coming down into the light of common day the list shines brightly. All tempers, all races, all professions add to it, be its colouring now of one tinge, now of another. Michael Angelo Buonarroti [sic] and Tommaso Cavalieri, Cinq-Mars (Henri d’Effiat) and François de Thou, Shakespeare and the young Earl of Southampton. Sir Philip Sydney and his three beloved friends Greville, Dyer and Languet; Monta[i]gne and Étienne de la Boetie, Erasmus of Rotterdam and “that one companion of my innermost life”; the learned Beza and his “other self,” young Audebert: Edward II of England and Piers Gaveston: James I of England and those intimacies, so strangely passional which James maintained with Robert Carr, Villiers, (Buckingham) and others: Frederick the Great with Baron Trenck, Lieutenant Kette, Graf von Görz, and others: the dauntless Charles XII of Sweden with brother-soldiers sometimes far inferior in rank: the philanthropic Bishop Jocelyn of Clogher and the ill-fortuned soldier Henry Moverly: Lord Byron with Lord Clare, Nicolo Girand and Eddleston: Horace Walpole in the one – perhaps deep sentiment of Walpole’s life, Sir Henry Conway: Grillparzer and Georg Altmütter: the masterly historian Johannes Müller and Bonstetten; the unhappy Ludwig II of Bavaria with many men whose kingdoms were only of art or letters, including Richard Wagner, and the gifted and erratic actor Joseph Kainz: the fiery General Skobeleff and his mysterious “Vassilieff ” not to mention two or three others: General Gordon brave, yet tender, with Lord Arthur Hamilton – but no need to cite further the record of typically profound “friendships.” Worth noting is the fact that many of them refer us not only to aesthetic life, but to military profession and temperament, to the most genuine and even stalwart masculinity of physiques and occupations, with

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The Love of David and Jonathan no trace or possible shade of effeminacy, or of a degeneracy of mind or body in such men-types. Nor are impressive and fine homosexual and similisexual “friendships” the property of cultivated natures only. The humblest circles of a country village, the rudest regiment of foot-soldiery, the ship, the factory, the shop, the prison-pen and the chain-gang, tell the same tale of one man’s heart meeting another’s heart, with a regard that the Scriptural words long ago ranked truthfully as “passing the love of women.”9 And in natures otherwise immature we find striking examples of a ripened and profound sentiment. Between mere lads, youths in schools and colleges, are evolved sex-dramas of tragical force; the child the father of the man in this, as in other things.10

This lengthy passage provides a list of pairs of male friends who were understood by Mayne to embody a particular form of friendship. Mayne implies not only that these pairs are already well known to his reader(s), but also that each can be read in light of the others. He continues with an intriguing anticipation of how an imagined, typical, reader from Mayne’s world might react to the suggestion that there could be a sexual element to any of these “friendships,” unwittingly and proleptically offering a commentary on the preconceptions of the likes of Fritz Stolz, Georg Hentschel, Markus Zehnder, Robert Gagnon and others with respect to David and Jonathan: …let us observe that merely to suggest the presence of sexual passion on the part of either friend, the workings of a conscious or sub-conscious sexual nature, “the desire of beauty,” is to meet a shocked, a disgusted [incredulity]. “Surely we know better than [that]!” [“]No, no! In such a friendship as So-and So with So-So, no such abominable perversion exists.” So cries, perhaps, the reader of these lines, as he reflects on examples of close and tender masculine intimacies that he feels sure he “knows inside-out,” either historic ones or as mere instances about him that are pertinent; or as he recalls his own friendships. The suggestion of physical impulses in them sets the average observer vis-à-vis with what he calls vile, monstrous and unnatural. In fact, the idea of a physical passion between man and man, as between women and women, he cannot “understand,” can not conceive its concrete satisfaction. It seems to him to outrage all sexualism, the logic of virility and femininity: especially virility.11

Like John Addington Symonds a few decades earlier, Mayne is determined to expunge from these friendships any hint of “effeminacy.”12 Notably, the sources we have for some of these friendships sometimes refer to the others. Byron, for example, mentioned above in the long citation from Mayne’s The Intersexes, refers to David and Jonathan, and Nisus and Euryalus, as metaphors for the love he shared with John Edleston.13 Likewise, Oscar Wilde at his trial attempted to justify his own love for a



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younger man by appeal to David and Jonathan, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare.14 It is important to note, though, that the relationships to which Mayne – and others – refer appear in the light they do because of how they are being read, and they are cited together in this sort of context because they serve a particular kind of rhetorical aim. A historical critical study of these relationships between men would necessarily need to explore the differences between them as much as their similarities, and to grasp how they functioned in their particular socio-cultural contexts, but that would not be to Mayne’s purpose. In his discussion of the various possible gradations of same-sex and opposite-sex attraction on the part of men, Mayne places David and Jonathan in an even longer, chronologically jumbled list. The complete Uranian, the Dionian-Uranian and the (similar) UranianDionian cover all essential grades between intersex and entire masculinity. They take in all the degrees of similisexual love and its physical expression, in hundreds of instances of complete or partial uranism. Such types are Alexander the Great, Martial, Beethoven, Rafaello, Oscar Wilde, Robespierre, William Rufus, Nero, Lord Byron, Sir Isaac Newton, Gilles de Rais, David, Jonathan, Pope Alexander VI, General Tilly, Prince Eugene of Savoy, Henri III, Shakespeare, Platen, Cellini, Heliogabalus, Jérome Duquesnoy, St. Augustine, Molière, Frederick the Great, MichelAngelo, Charles XII of Sweden, Peter the Great, Montaigne, Pausanias, Beza, Tschaikovsky, Grillparzer, Erasmus, Bishop Atherton of Waterford, Win[c]kelmann, Servetus, Gonsalvo de Cordova, Socrates, Hölderlin, Abu Nuwas, Hadrian, the Caesars, Alexander I of Russia: innumerable other indisputable instances of the emotion among, especially, notable minds and men: met under all environments, in all professions and social standings. Some have been Uranians in toto. Others are but partially uranistic: with the admixtures of Dionism, of normal masculinity, in a firmer or weaker balance, as the countercheck.15

David and Jonathan reappear in Mayne’s discussion of same-sex desire in military contexts, and we see here the biblical narrative placed alongside comparable examples from ancient Greece, a conjunction that has been decisive in determining the modern reading of the David and Jonathan narrative. Mayne treats David and Jonathan under the heading “Historic Examples of Soldier Uranians” alongside “Classic Greek and Roman Warriors.” The Biblical warrior meets us early with his uranistic personality. We find his type in the swift, passionate love, not to be construed as mere friendship, (if any one knows the Oriental) between David the beautiful boy-warrior – a mere shepherd-lad – and Jonathan: whose mutual attraction and tie is distinctly uranistic. One may surmise from the respective ages of the two, and from the accentuation of Jonathan’s share, that it was

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The Love of David and Jonathan pederastic on the part of Jonathan, who seems to have fallen in love at sight with the humble peasant-boy. The story is highly suggestive sexually, as we read it in the First and Second Books of Samuel, with its development of a sudden passion which… “knit the soul of Jonathan with the soul of David: and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” The lament of David after the tragedy of Mount Gilboa is in no common strain of even oriental bereavements, with its cry for the love “passing the love of women,” a phrase which also suggests the character of Jonathan’s sentiment. The story might be a page from Firdausi or from “Antar.” Its dionian-uranian colouring is strong.16 We have cited earlier some examples of classic homosexuality among soldiers. Going back to the more shadowy epochs and types begin the numerous instances. Achilles and Patroclus, and the legendary Nisus and Euryalus will be remembered. In mythology we have the boy-ravishing Jove, with his rape of the beautiful young Ganymede; Apollo as the lover of Hyacinth; Hercules loving the lad Hylas,17 and undertaking the famous Twelve Labours because of a passion for Eurystheus.18

In a later discussion of same-sex oriented men who seek an escape through heterosexual marriage, Mayne uses both the biblical David and Jonathan and the Greek Damon and Pythias as models of contemporary deep friendships between men that may be sexual in nature, even if to outsiders the question of a sexual relationship would not have occurred: Society often smiles at the reluctance, and even resentment, with which a young bachelor surrenders to marriage some special friend; his Jonathan – his David. Much deeper can be his regret than their circle guesses. Often a lively girl, either in a touch of real sympathy or of merry irony, says to the “bereaved” friend “— Yes, yes, of course we all know that X—s engagement, his marriage must be hard for you. You will be a regular widower after it!” Damon smiles, and caps the jest. But there is no jest when he and his Pythias are alone. This situation occurs, as the reader can suppose, chiefly when Pythias has been a Dionian-Uranian from the outset: or has become more and more dionistic, until a decisive sexual passion for some woman has conquered his heart.19

There is more to this fascinating passage than first meets the eye. The two ancient friendships are taken to be so familiar as a code for a particular kind of relationship between men that the names of the friends can be substituted metaphorically for the imaginary men about to be separated by marriage without further explanation. The language of marriage is used, likewise metaphorically, by Mayne’s imaginary “lively girl” to describe the bond between the men, despite her ignorance of the true extent of the appropriateness of such language: “You will be a regular widower for sure!” There remains, however, a degree of ambiguity,



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albeit conceivably unintentional, in the way Mayne has expressed himself here. For it is possible that the metaphor of David and Jonathan could be invoked equally by those in the know to specify a sexual bond between the two men in question, and by those not in the know to specify a nonsexual, but, nevertheless, deep emotional bond between them. “David and Jonathan” is a reversible figure, which makes the interpretation of its reception a complex and ultimately indeterminate matter. Direct, explicit connections between David and Jonathan and comparable Greek friendships – especially Achilles and Patroclus – had, by Mayne’s time, long been made. In the fourteenth-century ce Vita Edwardi Secundi, the love of Edward II for Piers Gaveston is compared unfavourably with the love of Achilles for Patroclus and that of Jonathan for David. Sane non memini me audisse unum alterum ita dilexisse. Ionathas dilexit Dauid, Achilles Patroclum amauit; set illi modum excessisse non leguntur (ed. Childs, p. 28; cf. p. 178).20 Certainly I do not recall having heard that one man loved [diligere] another like this. Jonathan loved [diligere] David, Achilles loved [amare] Patroclus, but we do not read that they exceeded the bounds of moderation.

In his play Edward the Second (c. 1592), Christopher Marlowe has the Elder Mortimer advise his nephew to bide his time in opposing Edward, whose devotion to Gaveston they both resent, with reference to a series of well-known classical male friendships (1 iv 389-403): Leave now to oppose thyself against the king. Thou seest by nature he is mild and calm; And, seeing his mind so dotes on Gaveston, Let him without controlment have his will. The mightiest kings have had their minions; Great Alexander lov’d Hephaestion, The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept, And for Patroclus stern Achilles droop’d. And not kings only, but the wisest men; The Roman Tully lov’d Octavius, Grave Socrates wild Alcibiades. Then let his grace, whose youth is flexible, And promiseth as much as we can wish, Freely enjoy that vain light-headed earl, For riper years will wean him from such toys.21

The tradition of David and Jonathan was transmitted, from the Renaissance onwards, in the context of precisely such catalogues as this. Also dating to the 1590s is Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, in which

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the knight Scudamour, having come, during his quest for Amoret, to the island where the great Venus temple is, tells of a beautiful place where pairs of lovers walk; not male and female lovers only, but chaste, virtuous male lovers: All these together by themselves did sport Their spotlesse pleasures, and sweet loues content. But farre away from these, another sort Of louers lincked in true harts consent; Which loued not as these, for like intent, But on chast vertue grounded their desire, Far from all fraud, or fayned blandishment; Which in their spirits kindling zealous fire, Braue thoughts and noble deedes did euermore aspire. Such were great Hercules, and Hylas deare; Trew Ionathan, and Dauid trustie tryde; Stout Theseus, and Pirithous his feare; Pylades and Orestes by his syde; Myld Titus and Gesippus without pryde; Damon and Pythias whom death could not seuer: All these and all that euer had bene tyde In bands of friendship, there did liue for euer, Whose liues although decay’d, yet loues decayed neuer. Which when as I, that neuer tasted blis, Nor happie howre, beheld with gazefull eye, I thought there was none other heauen then this; And gan their endlesse happinesse enuye, That being free from feare and gealosye, Might frankely there their loues desire possesse; Whilest I through paines and perlous ieopardie, Was forst to seeke my lifes deare patronesse: Much dearer be the things, which come through hard distresse.22

David and Jonathan are here drawn into both the profound reflection during the Renaissance on the nature of friendship, and the rediscovery during the Renaissance of the Greek and Roman heritage of Western European culture. But, inasmuch as The Faerie Queene bears a distinctly Arthurian stamp, they are also drawn into the evolving reception history of medieval chivalry, which will again shape the way the David and Jonathan narrative was read in England during the nineteenth century. In the Loci communes collected under the name of Reformed Italian theologian Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) we find David and Jonathan compared with classical paria amicorum and read in light of the ideas on the theme of friendship of both Aristotle and Cicero.



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 283 And Aristotle in his Ethiks saith of [friendship], that It is more conuenient than iustice. For if we were all trulie friends betweene our selues, there should be no need of iustice, for no man would hurt one an other: but if we were all iust, we shuld yet still need friendship; for that it is a thing of his owne nature, and of it selfe good. Among the Greeks there were reckoned two paires of friends; Orestes and Pilades, Damon and Pithias. Also the Romans had their Scipio and Laelius: unto whom some ioine Cicero and Atticus. But among all friends Dauid and Ionathas were famous: for in both of them was a perfect likenesse of age, of religion, of godlinesse, and of care towards the common weale; both of them also put their life in danger, to deliuer the common weale from the Philistines. This likenesse procured betweene them a most neere friendship. But more and more neerelie did the secret spirit of GOD ioine them: for when GOD sawe the hatred of Saule against Dauid, he would procure unto him some aid with Ionathas. This friendship was stedfast and firme: for it was founded upon loue towards their countrie, and pietie towards God.23

David and Jonathan are here read in light of Aristotle and Cicero (and subsequently Seneca), and alongside classical paria amicorum, but in this work of Reformed theology David and Jonathan have to be shown to be more emblematic of true friendship than pagan friends such as Orestes and Pylades or Damon and Pythias, because theirs was a friendship secretly joined by God, and cemented by their piety. A similar contrast between David and Jonathan and classical paria amicorum is made by Abraham Cowley in the preface to the 1656 edition of his poems where, in the context of a defence of writing avowedly Christian sacred epic on the model of Homer and Virgil, he questions, “[W]hy will not…the friendship of David and Jonathan [afford] more worthy celebration, then that of Theseus and Peirithous?”24 Although his sacred epic remained unfinished, it appears Cowley’s original intention was to write twelve books, based on the twelve books of the Aeneid, and to end the whole work with a version of David’s elegy for Jonathan.25 There seems, then, to be a strand within the reception of David and Jonathan that reclaims the classical tradition of male friendship but reconfigures it in explicitly Christian terms. This would account for Vermigli and Cowley, though the implicit anti-pagan polemic would make sense of neither the quote from Spenser above, nor the quotes from Byron and Bentham below, suggesting that alongside this Christian reconfiguration of a pagan tradition, David and Jonathan are also being adopted as part of the pagan tradition of paria amicorum. They constitute, as it were, a reversible figure on the border between Christian and pagan traditions, which can be adopted equally by those whose allegiances lie on either side of the fence. Thus while Vermigli and Cowley (to be followed by

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Ellwood, Gill, Kingsley, and Farrar) sit clearly on the former side, Byron, Bentham, and later Symonds sit more clearly on the latter side. In the eighteenth century, the Davideis (1712) of Thomas Ellwood (1639–1713) takes up the comparison made by Vermigli and Cowley, again exalting David and Jonathan above classical paria amicorum. In his reworking of the biblical material, the passage corresponding to David’s lament for Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1:19-27 reads thus: For Jonathan, as for an only brother, Or as a virgin for her constant lover, So mourned he; for ‘twixt them two had past, A friendship that beyond the grave must last; Immortal friendship! Never two were twin’d More close; they had two bodies, but one mind. Patroclus to Achilles was less dear; Hylas to Hercules not half so near; Not Pylades did more Orestes love; Nor Damon to his Pythias truer prove; To Pirithous more close not Theseus Did cleave; nor Nisus to Euryalus; Than did to David princely Jonathan…26

Later in the eighteenth century, Baptist commentator John Gill (1697– 1771), in his commentary on 1 Samuel 18:1, read David and Jonathan in light of Aristotle and Plutarch, and in particular in light of references in the latter’s work to exemplary paria amicorum. In answer to [Saul’s] questions about his descent and family, and doubtless more things were talked of than are recorded: that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David; he won his heart, made a conquest of his affections, these went out towards him and cleaved unto him; such were the comeliness of his person, his graceful mein and deportment, his freedom and fluency of expression, his courage and undauntedness, joined with prudence, modesty and integrity, that they strongly attached him to him: and Jonathan loved him as his own soul; not only according to the excellency of David’s soul, and the greatness of it, as that deserved respect and love, as Abarbinel suggests, but he loved him as he loved himself. There was a similarity in their persons, in their age, in the dispositions of their minds, in their wisdom, courage, modesty, faithfulness and openness of soul, and attracted them to each other, that they became as another self; as one soul, as Aristotle speaks of true friends: instances of very cordial friendship are given by Plutarch, as in Theseus and Pirithous, Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades, Pythias and Damon, Epaminondas and Pelopidas; but none equal to this.27

Gill’s interpretation exhibits an implicit awareness of the gaps in the text, particularly the question of why Jonathan was so drawn to David,



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importing an extraordinary range of motivations. The list of Greek friends is there to provide a context for the friendship of David and Jonathan, which is of the same kind as theirs – Gill expecting his readers to know of them already – yet is nevertheless greater. Most noteworthy is the extreme unlikelihood that Gill could have thought of any of these relationships as, in our early twenty-first century terms, homosexual. This is not simply because Gill, as a staunch Calvinist, would presumably not have dreamt of two male biblical heroes having sex, but because the particular confluence of intense male friendship and explicit eroticism that helps to form the modern category of male “homosexuality” simply did not exist in a way we might readily recognize. Within a few decades, however, it would be possible for Jeremy Bentham to understand the relationship between David and Jonathan in sexual terms, and little more than a century later John Addington Symonds would be able to list classical paria amicorum together in a way that could be construed, by those in the know, as signifiers of erotic desire between men. The process of recovering a history of male friendships and male samesex desire has taken many forms, including historical analyses such as we find in the works of John Boswell, literary analyses such as we find in Roden’s work, theological apologiae, literary rewritings of ancient sources that had come to be read in terms of same-sex desire such as The Meeting of David and Jonathan by John Addington Symonds and – much more recently – Stephen Schecter’s David and Jonathan, and anthologies of source material, which in different ways reflect these other currents. Such anthologies reconfigure the intertextual matrix so that texts originally unconnected with one another are brought into conversation, and can be used to interpret one another. The problem is that the individual texts are decontextualized.28 Yet by the same token, in the case of the David and Jonathan narrative, as the previous chapter should have made clear, the biblical canon has itself exerted a decontextualizing, and artificially recontextualizing, force on the narrative. A good modern example of a recuperative anthology would be The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, edited by Byrne Fone.29 Fone’s work, like other comparable works of LGBT/Q ressourcement, is an example of a “minority gay canon,” the creation of which, alongside the critical analysis of the culturally hegemonic male canon in relation to its simultaneous inscription of both homoeroticism and homophobia, is essential to the antihomophobic project envisioned by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: The invaluable forms of critique and dismantlement within the official tradition, the naming as what it is of a hegemonic, homoerotic/homophobic male canon of cultural mastery and coercive erotic double-binding, can be

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The Love of David and Jonathan only part of the strategy of an antihomophobic project. It must work in the kind of pincers movement I have already described with the re-creation of minority gay canons from currently non-canonical material.30

In Fone’s collection, 1 Samuel 17:55-58; 18:1-4; 2 Samuel 1:17-27 (kjv) are placed alongside readings from the Epic of Gilgamesh as the chronologically earliest, and thus in a sense foundational texts of the gay literary heritage.31 Fone does not suggest that either 1 and 2 Samuel or the Epic of Gilgamesh, or indeed the Iliad, whose portrayal of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus he cites in the introduction to “The Earliest Texts,” refer to sexual relationships. These texts, are, nevertheless, portrayed as the fountainhead of a literary tradition that would, in due course, represent explicitly sexual relationships between men: These early texts in general do not specifically imply any sexual connection between their male couples. However, love and intimate friendship is clearly celebrated as an emotion appropriate to relations between men. These stories are the earliest known in literature to reflect such emotions, and they foretell a tradition that would be central to Greek texts and that would be retold in all literary constructions of erotic male relationships.32

What is significant here is the particular range of (inter)texts alongside which Fone places the David and Jonathan narrative. 1 Samuel 17:55– 18:4 and 2 Samuel 1:17-27 are excerpted from the Tanakh and thus taken out of relationship with biblical texts such as Genesis 19:1-28, Leviticus 18:22, 20:13, and Judges 19:1-30 that might be used to limit their meaning through the exclusion of homoerotic connotations. Prohibitions of sex between men, and narratives that portray a certain, hideously violent form of sex between men negatively can no longer be used in Fone’s corpus to control the meaning of the David and Jonathan narrative, nor can layers of deuteronom(ist)ic redaction. The Sodom narrative and extracts from the Holiness Code are certainly cited in Fone’s anthology,33 but as source material for the later invention of the crime of sodomy. They are not placed so as to exercise control over David and Jonathan. Instead, the David and Jonathan narrative is made to belong to a corpus of texts representing positive, erotic intimacy between men. Furthermore, it is not the putative original meaning of the David and Jonathan narrative that is significant, but the role of the narrative in inspiring later literary explorations of the theme of male-male love. The story has served as a subject for numerous literary texts celebrating male-male love, such as Peter Abelard’s medieval interpretation of the story in the “Lament for Jonathan,”34 Abraham Cowley’s epic Davideis (1656), John Addington Symonds’s poem The Meeting of David and Jonathan (1878), and Wallace Hamilton’s novel David at Olivet (1979).35



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These later texts transform the biblical exemplar through the process of rewriting.36 In turn, the meaning of the biblical exemplar itself can now be transformed and reconfigured by being (re)read in light of these later (re)writings. At each stage of this process what is significant is not what each text “means,” but how each text is read, what shapes the reading process, how reading determines how these texts are used, how this use yields particular effects, and how the various texts relating to the biblical exemplar can be understood to relate to other texts. Fone is ambivalent about his anthology being termed a “canon,” though in fact it is difficult to deny that regardless of Fone’s own views on the matter, that is exactly how such anthologies can be made to function. Indeed, the following remark suggests exactly that: This anthology collects a literary heritage, until even recent times a hidden heritage, to which gay people – lesbians and gay men and all variety of queers – are indubitably heirs and of which they are the legitimate interpreters. In the sense that this book is a modern recovery, re-possession, and re-reading of the past, it is an anthology of gay literature.37

The David and Jonathan narrative thus contributes to the formation of a literary heritage that reflects, and in turn shapes perceptions of, samesex male desire. Contemporary “queers” are, furthermore, given control of the interpretation of this counter-canon. It is a “canon” of sorts because it implies “legitimate” interpreters, and thus a norm of interpretation. It is a “counter-canon” because it disrupts the control of the meaning of the biblical texts cited within it that the Jewish and Christian canons otherwise exert. The term “canon” is owned a little more decidedly by Robert Drake, who has explicitly constructed a “gay canon,” not in contradistinction to the ideological hegemony of the Jewish and Christian religious canons – though in practice Drake’s construction could doubtless be used thus – but in complementarity with the Western literary canon, particularly as Harold Bloom has envisioned it.38 Drake’s “gay canon” is to exist outside of, perhaps even between the lines of, the Western canon, “touching upon it only where writers and works are in agreement.” It seeks “to isolate the qualities that made these gay authors canonical – that is, authoritative – in gay culture.”39 This is a more subtle approach than it might seem at first sight, because Drake is not claiming that texts such as 1 and 2 Samuel portray gay relationships as such, nor that their authors were gay.40 Rather, the texts are open to suggestion when read by particular, receptive readers and communities of readers, such that they have eventually come to be understood as relevant to the theme of same-sex desire between men. This leads to a reciprocal and unpredictable interchange

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between text, tradition, reader, and the wider community of readers with whom each individual reader interacts. It is into this mix that the David and Jonathan narrative is placed, alongside Homer, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato, Virgil, Petronius, Plutarch, the Fourth Gospel, Michelangelo, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, André Gide, E. M. Forster, and a host of others, including works that themselves seem to have been directly shaped by the David and Jonathan narrative without making the source explicit, such as James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room.41 Indeed, Drake makes explicit use of Plato’s Symposium in interpreting 1 Samuel 18:1-4,42 which would have been impossible but for a tradition of juxtaposing biblical and ancient Greek works alongside one another, and of interpreting them in connection with same-sex desire. What, then, shall we say of the Renaissance, Plato, Michelangelo, Oscar Wilde, and all those other shrunken violets? In Fone’s anthology, a subsection is devoted to the Symposium of Plato,43 and chapters are devoted to the Italian Renaissance,44 in which the sonnets of Michelangelo feature significantly,45 and Oscar Wilde.46 Oscar Wilde is particularly significant since he explicitly alluded to David and Jonathan at his second trial.47 Fone’s deliberate juxtaposition of these texts is not the result of a random editorial decision on his part, but rather reflects a long-standing recognition that intertextual relationships can be perceived between them, and that all these texts, read together, belong to a heritage of positive representations of same-sex eroticism. But how did this come about? The period from about the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth was formative. During this period, the David and Jonathan narrative came to be read as a positive example of same-sex love, but in at least two traditions of reading that were both intertwined and in awkward tension with one another. One tradition read the David and Jonathan narrative in its broader context in the Christian Bible, as an example of passionate, spiritual friendship between persons of the same sex. This tradition of reading goes back at least to Aelred of Rievaulx (c. 1110–1167), whose own life and work has been appropriated in different ways by those supporting or denying the validity of same-sex eroticism, but its roots can be traced much further into the Patristic period, at least to Ambrose of Milan, on whose work Aelred himself was dependent.48 This Christian tradition bifurcated, with readers in the Catholic – Anglo and Roman – tradition appropriating David and Jonathan, to some extent in light of Aelred, as a scriptural model for deep spiritual friendships between men, and readers in the Protestant, muscular Christian tradition appropriating David and Jonathan, to some extent in light of medieval chivalry, as models of Christian manliness and



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manly friendship. The other tradition, which has, I think, been the more influential in the long term, read the David and Jonathan narrative in connection with ancient Greek and Roman texts, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Walt Whitman, all of whose writings – suggestive rather than explicit as they admittedly are – were drawn upon as support for a positive, ennobling same-sex eroticism. Within this second tradition there is a significant development towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the dialogues of Plato, especially the Symposium and the Phaedrus, were read as representations of explicit same-sex eroticism between older and younger men, largely replacing an earlier reading that saw Platonic e1rwj in spiritual or metaphorical rather than physical terms. At this point, echoing ancient re-readings of Homer by Aeschylus, Aeschines, and apparently Plato himself, Platonic paiderasti/a became a lens through which to read the friendships of classical paria amicorum and thus also to read David and Jonathan. This development distinguishes the use of David and Jonathan by, say, Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster, from the use of David and Jonathan by Jeremy Bentham, Lord Byron, Charles Kingsley, Frederic William Farrar, or John Addington Symonds. Both traditions, the way of Jerusalem and that of Athens, are related in complex ways with the emergence and long-term effect of the romantic movement, by virtue of the different influences of romanticism both on the Oxford Movement and, later in the nineteenth century but also, notably, centred in Oxford, on Aestheticism. This points further to the complex tensions between the “Hebraism” and “Hellenism,” between the influence of the biblical and Christian traditions on the one hand, and that of the heritage of ancient Greece and Rome on the other. The key figures during this period – if it can be called a period – are Anna Seward and the Ladies of Llangollen, Lord Byron, Jeremy Bentham, John Henry Newman, John Dobree Dalgairns, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes, Frederic William Farrar, John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde, Marc-André Raffalovich, Edward Carpenter, and E. M. Forster. It will immediately be obvious that I have chosen to focus on England. This is not because other contexts would not have yielded important material: the use of David and Jonathan in André Gide’s Saül, Else Lasker-Schüler’s poems on David and Jonathan, or Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Klage um Jonathan,”49 and Magnus Hirschfeld’s knowledge of the homoerotic reading of David and Jonathan,50 show that France and Germany at least would certainly have enriched my treatment further. Rather, I have chosen to focus on nineteenth-century England because fairly clear trajectories can be traced in England from the Romantic to the Edwardian periods, encompassing Romanticism, Tractarianism and the revival of medieval

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monasticism, the evolution of the English public school, the development of muscular Christianity, the emergence of Oxford Hellenism and Aestheticism, and finally the emergence, in the wake of all these things, of a strong advocacy for same-sex erotic relationships on the part of the likes of Symonds and Carpenter. These English developments had repercussions on the continent, as Oscar Wilde’s influence on André Gide, for example, makes clear. During this period, David and Jonathan were subtly re-signified with each re-use of the narrative in which they appear, and there is an important point to note in connection with the modern debate among biblical scholars on David and Jonathan. If we are seeking to understand what made it possible to pose the question whether the relationship between David and Jonathan was sexual, two interrelated aspects of the nineteenth-century channel of transmission need to be taken into account. First, the various elements of the modern discourse of human sexuality, together with the modern constructions of (homo)sexuality, were decisively shaped towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the questions modern scholars direct towards the biblical texts in relation to sexuality are, ultimately, an effect of that process. Second, the fact that Symonds, Wilde, Gide, and Carpenter in particular were both key figures in connection with modern understandings of same-sex desire and of the history of its expression, and noteworthy readers and users of the David and Jonathan narrative, strongly suggests that, far from questions of sexuality being an alien imposition on the biblical text, the David and Jonathan narrative was itself an integral part of the process by which the modern discourse of same-sex eroticism and the history of its expression emerged. Outside the Biblical Studies guild, among scholars who do not obviously have a vested interest in controlling how the David and Jonathan narrative is read, this has been not infrequently recognized. Lene ØstermarkJohansen, for example, has commented that “in the Victorian homosexual underground movement David and Jonathan became a popular couple.”51 Likewise, in response to an essay by Østermark-Johansen on Lord Frederic Leighton’s 1868 painting “Jonathan’s Token to David,” Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn note that, “this friendship ‘surpassing the love of women’ was a favourite narrative of the Victorian homosexual underground movement.”52 And in his notes to E. M. Forster’s 1913–1914 novel Maurice, David Leavitt remarks that, “[i]n the late nineteenth century, ‘David and Jonathan’ became a shorthand for homosexuality, especially among the Uranian poets.”53 Leavitt does not cite a source for this judgment, but Timothy D’Arch Smith, in a fundamental and widely cited study



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of the so-called Uranian poets, had earlier noted the importance of David and Jonathan alongside classical models as sources for the poetic portrayal of same-sex desire, going so far as to dub 2 Samuel 1:26, “well-nigh a fiat for paederasty.”54 Smith briefly discusses John Addington Symonds’s poem “The Meeting of David and Jonathan,”55 which he reads as an example of a poem whose use of the biblical model made it possible to speak to those sympathetic to same-sex desire, while at the same time not “shocking the reading public.”56 David and Jonathan here become a code for illicit samesex desire, arousing no suspicions except among those who know the language. In an appendix dealing with the work of Ralph Chubb (1892– 1960), Smith cites the penultimate paragraph of a note Chubb wrote on some of his watercolours, exhibited in 1929 at the Goupil Gallery in London, in which he cites David and Jonathan in support of his predilection for paiderasty.57 Finally, in an article partially inspired by D’Arch Smith’s study, Brian Taylor dubs the phrase “passing the love of women” an “everuseful biblical quotation,” referring to a poem by J. H. Hallard for which 2 Samuel 1:26 had provided the title.58 Nor is the homoerotic appropriation of David and Jonathan confined to literary texts, as Simeon Solomon (1840–1905), a painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelites whose career was wrecked after being arrested in a public urinal and charged with attempting to commit sodomy in 1873, had produced in 1856 a pencil drawing entitled “Eight Scenes from the Story of David and Jonathan,” in which the two men are depicted passionately embracing after David’s victory over Goliath. Two earlier but undated drawings depict Jonathan, clothed in the armour of a medieval knight, protectively embracing an effeminate-looking David.59 All this has important implications for the practice of biblical exegesis. If the hypothesis I have just stated can be substantiated, it illustrates just how much the questions we ask as biblical scholars are shaped and determined by factors that have nothing directly to do with the inner workings of the scholarly guild. They are, if this one particular case is anything to go by, shaped and determined by a range of intricately interconnected factors that are significantly beyond the control of biblical scholars huddled over their ancient texts at their desks in the ivory tower. We need to be far more critically aware of these factors, for there is nothing obvious, or obviously necessary, about the questions we ask. 2. The ancient reception of Achilles and Patroclus Before we immerse ourselves in the long nineteenth century, we need first to take a detour to fifth-fourth century bce Athens. This may, at

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first sight, seem odd. But a significant part of my case is that in the nineteenth century the David and Jonathan narrative came to be read homoerotically under the influence of Greek and Latin texts that were already proving to be open to this kind of reading. Among these are the ancient traditions about Achilles and Patroclus, alongside whom David Halperin has read David and Jonathan, in historical-critical terms, in his essay “Heroes and their Pals.”60 Unlike David and Jonathan – their curious, enigmatic treatment by Josephus notwithstanding61 – we have unequivocal evidence, despite their ironically “Platonic” reception history, that Achilles and Patroclus were understood by at least some in the ancient world to have been lovers. Their relationship was read homoerotically, or, to be more historically precise, paiderastically. The modern reception of biblical and classical – especially Greek – accounts of male friendships is, to a certain extent, a reprise of the ancient reception of Achilles and Patroclus, inasmuch as by the fourth century bce in Athens the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus had come to be re-read back through the lens of contemporary understandings of same-sex love. In the case of Aeschylus, Plato, and Aeschines, the Homeric portrayal of their relationship was reconfigured in relation to paiderasti/a: it became a relationship between an older man and his younger male beloved. Thus regardless of how the poet or poets who stand behind the Iliad intended their relationship to be construed – a matter that is still very much open to debate – it was understood by some in fifth and fourth century Athens in light of a particular contemporary social institution. The texts in question not only anticipate the way yet later readers would interpret ancient friendships in light of contemporary concerns, but also themselves contributed to subsequent re-interpretations of Homer. A key point of disagreement in fourth-century Athens was not whether or not the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus was sexual, but rather which role the two men took in a paiderastic relationship. Thus in his speech against Timarchus, Aeschines appeals to what he and his audience have been told about Achilles and Patroclus, and refers to them alongside Harmodius and Aristogeiton, a pair of friends whose sexual relationship was a somewhat less contested aspect of the tradition to which they belonged.62 …parafe/rwn prw~ton me\n tou\j eu0erge/taj tou\j u9mete/rouj, Armo/  dion kai\ 'Aristogei/tona, kai\ th\n pro\j a0llh&louj pi/stin kai\ to\ pra~gma w(j sunh&negke th|= po/lei dieciw&n: ou0k a)fe/cetai de/, w#j fa&sin, ou0de\  mh&rou poihma&twn ou0de\ tw~n o0noma&twn tw~n h(rwikw~n, a)lla_ tw~n O kai\ th_n legome/nhn gene/sqai fili/an di0 e1rwta Patro/klou kai\ 'Axille/wj u9mnh&sei…



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 293 [one of the generals] will first cite your benefactors, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, going in detail through their faithfulness to one another and how their deed conferred benefit on the city. As they say, he will leave aside neither the poems of Homer nor the names of the heroes, but will sing the praises of the friendship of Patroclus and Achilles which, it is said, had its root in sexual love… (Aeschines, Tim. 132-33).

Aeschines is attempting to forestall an accusation by Timarchus that Aeschines has committed treason through his diplomatic relationship with Philip of Macedon. He thus brings an accusation against Timarchus, charging that he is disqualified from participating in the public, political life of Athens because he has prostituted himself.63 In this passage, Aeschines is referring to the defence he expects will be offered on behalf of Timarchus. What is significant is that he assumes a sexual component to the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus without question, and does not regard this as open to serious debate. Despite the fact that the Iliad itself never explicitly portrays Achilles and Patroclus as sexually involved with each other, a customary interpretation of Homer in the fourth century, an interpretive habit or convention, if you will, that Aeschines could assume was familiar not only to him but to his audience, understood their relationship in light of contemporary notions of sexual love between an older, free male, the “lover” (e0rasth/j) and his younger, subordinate partner, the “beloved” (e0rw&menoj). In order to appeal to Homer in this way, Aeschines must read a particular construal of male-male love back into his text of the Iliad, then impute to the poet the intention to leave an aspect of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus unstated and open for the hearer to fill in the gap. This is a fascinating move. Aeschines appeals to the intention of the “author,” precisely as the authority for his interpretation. At the same time, he suggests that the poet has a particular kind of intended reader in mind: one who assumes his hearer(s)/reader(s) will have the intertextual and extratextual competence to infer a paiderastic relationship between the lines of his epic. He provides a gap, and intends his hearer(s)/reader(s) to fill it in a specific way. But it is not Homer himself – or perhaps better, given the difficulty of reconstructing the “author” of the Iliad, the implied author himself – but Homer as reconstituted by Aeschines who does this. Aeschines, then, constructs both an implied author for the Iliad and an intended reader. e0kei=noj ga_r pollaxou= memnhme/noj peri/ Patro/klou kai\ 'Axille/wj, to\n me\n e1rwta kai\ th\n e0pwnumi/an au0tw~n th=j fili/aj a0pokru/ptetai, h9gou/menoj ta\j th=j eu00noi/aj u9perbola\j katafanei=j ei]nai toi=j pepaideume/noij tw~n a)kroatw~n. le/gei ga/r pou 'Axilleu_j o0duro/menoj to\n tou= Patro/klou qa&naton, w(j e3n ti tou=to tw~n luphrota&twn a)namimnh|s-

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The Love of David and Jonathan ko/menoj, o#ti th\n u9po/sxesin th\n pro\j to\n pate/ra to\n Patro/klou Menoi/tion a1kwn e0yeu/sato: e0paggei/lasqai ga_r ei0j 'Opou=nta sw~n a) pa&cein, ei0 sumpe/myeien au0to\n ei0j th\n Troi/an kai\ parakataqei=to au9tw|. w|{ katafanh/j e0stin, w(j di ) e1rwta th\n e0pime/leian au0tou= pare/laben. Although [Homer] makes mention in many places of Patroclus and Achilles, he keeps hidden their love [e1rwj] and the name of their friendship [fili/a], in the belief that the [meaning of the] extravagances of the[ir] goodwill [for one another] should be obvious to those among his hearers who are educated. For somewhere when he bewails the death of Patroclus, as recalling one of the most painful sorrows, he says that he involuntarily broke the promise [he had made] to Menoetius, the father of Patroclus. For he promised to bring him to Opus safe and sound, if he would send him along with him to Troy and entrust him to his care. By this it is clear that he undertook to care for him on account of love [e1rwj] (Aeschines, Tim. 142-43).64

Aeschines is using Achilles and Patroclus here to justify his own honourable erotic relationships with free boys in contrast with Timarchus dishonourably selling his body. He is, at the same time, writing a particular kind of e1rwj between the lines of the Iliad. Prior to Aeschines, the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus had already been construed erotically in works by both Aeschylus and Plato (who is responding to Aeschylus). In fragment 135 of the largely lost Myrmidons, once part of the three-part Achilleis of Aeschylus, Achilles seems to reproach the dead Patroclus for disobeying his instructions not to advance too far towards Troy: se/baj de\ mhrw~n a(gno\n ou0k e0ph|de/sw, w} dusxa&riste tw~n puknw~n filhma&twn65 And you did not show reverence for the pure holiness of thighs, you who were unthankful for countless kisses.

Similarly, in fragment 136 we read mhrw~n te tw~n sw~n hu0se/bhs' o9mili/an klai/wn66 Wailing I honoured the intimacy [intercourse?] of your thighs.

It is extremely difficult to know what to make of such tiny fragments taken in isolation, though the reference in Plato to the complete work of which they were originally a part is more informative. It is certainly worth noting that Jeremy Bentham refers to the latter fragment as part of a lengthy, unpublished defence of the legitimacy of same-sex erotic relationships,67 and later in the nineteenth century the following remarks were made by John Addington Symonds in reference to these fragments:



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 295 Achilles, front to front with the corpse of his friend, uttered a lamentation, which the ancients seem to have regarded as the very ecstasy of grief and love and passionate remembrance. Lucian, quoting one of the lines of this lament, introduces it with words that prove the strong impression it produced:—“Achilles, when he bemoaned Patroclus’ death, in his unhusbanded passion burst forth into the very truth.” It would be impossible to quote and comment upon the three lines which have been preserved from this unique Threnos without violating modern taste. To understand them at all is difficult, and to recompose from them the hero’s speech is beyond our power.68

What we have here is a multi-layered history of reception in which later works – Symonds, Pseudo-Lucian, and Aeschylus, in reverse chronological order – cumulatively influence the reading and interpretation of earlier ones. That the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus was sexual is assumed, again, in the speech by Phaedrus in Plato’s Symposium. The issue is which of the two performed which role in the paiderastic relationship. Phaedrus mentions the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus as an example of the courage of love. Achilles was honoured by the gods for being willing not only to die for Patroclus, but also to die as well as him. Patroclus was, according to Phaedrus, the “lover” (e0rasth&j) of Achilles, a view Phaedrus justifies by appeal to Homer, but on which he takes issue with Aeschylus, effectively correcting Aeschylus with reference to (his construal of ) Homer. o9qen dh\ kai\ u9peragasqe/ntej oi9 qeoi\ diafero/ntwj au0to\n e0ti/mhsan, o#ti to\n e0rasth\n ou!tw peri\ pollou= e0poiei=to. Ai0sxu&loj de\ fluarei= fa/skwn 'Axille/a Patro/klou e0ra~n, o$j h]n kalli/wn ou0 mo/non Patro/klou a0ll' a!ra kai\ tw~n h9rw&wn a)pa&ntwn, kai\ e!ti a)ge/neioj, e!peita new&teroj polu/, w(j fa&sin Omhroj. For this reason the gods, being exceptionally pleased [with him], honoured him pre-eminently, because he thus set such high store by his lover. Aeschylus talks rubbish when he claims Achilles was Patroclus’ lover, Achilles being more beautiful not only than Patroclus, but also than all the other heroes, and still beardless, thus much younger [than Patroclus], as Homer says (Plato, Symp. 180a).

This fascinating remark offers an important glimpse into the nature of reception history. It belongs to the reception histories both of the threepart Achilleis of Aeschylus, of which only scant fragments remain and to which the Myrmidons belonged, and of the Iliad. Like Aeschylus, Plato takes liberties with the Iliad, prompting Kenneth Dover to remark on the phrase new&teroj polu/ that, “Phaedrus’ addition illustrates how easily (in ancient and modern times alike) the evidence of texts can be bent.”69

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It illustrates, as Aeschylus and Aeschines do, the way earlier texts are reconfigured by being read through the lens of later social norms. It also illustrates how later construals of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus came to be shaped. Notably, Plato is not the only fourth-century Athenian lens through which Achilles and Patroclus have been refracted, though it has arguably been the most influential. The Symposium of Xenophon, which is at least to some extent dependent on the Symposium of Plato, also re-reads Homer. Xenophon, however, appears to reject the idea that Achilles and Patroclus were in a paiderastic relationship by denying that Patroclus was the boy lover (paidika&) of Achilles. Xenophon would seem, then, to be denying the construal of their relationship implied by the allusion to the Myrmidons of Aeschylus in Plato’s Symposium, though on different grounds to Phaedrus. For Xenophon, Achilles sought to avenge the death of Patroclus because of the spiritual love implied by their comradeship, rather than because of a predominantly physical bond (though it may be that Xenophon is merely denying that the physical bond is what mattered in the relationship: what he is certainly doing is defining the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus as one of noble, selfless comradeship, rather than unequal, interested paiderasti/a, leaving the question of bodily eroticism unanswered). The relevant passage reads: kai\ e0gw_ de/ fhmi kai\ Ganumh/dhn ou0 sw&matoj a0lla_ yuxh=j e3neka u9po\ Dio_j ei0j Olumpon a0nenexqh=nai. marturei= de\ kai\ tou!noma au0tou=: e1sti me\n ga\r dh/pou kai\ Omh/rw| ga/nutai de\ t' a0kou/wn. tou=to de\ fra/zei o3ti h3detai de/ t' a0kou/wn. e1sti de\ kai\ a!lloqi/ pou pukina\ fresi\ mh/dea ei0dw&j. tou=to d' au] le/gei sofa_ fresi\ bouleu/mata ei0dw&j. e0c ou]n sunamfote/rwn tou/twn ou0x h9dusw&matoj o0nomasqei\j o9 Ganumh/dhj a)ll' h9dugnw&mwn e0n qeoi=j teti/mhtai. a)lla_ mh\n, w} Nikh/rate, kai\ 'Axilleu\j Omh/rw pepoi/htai ou0x w(j paidikoi=j Patro/klw a)ll' w(j e9tai/rw? a)poqano/nti e0kprepe/stata timwrh=sai. kai\ 'Ore/sthj de\ kai\ Pula/dhj kai\ Qhseu\j kai\ Peiri/qouj kai\ a!lloi de\ polloi\ tw~n h9miqe/wn oi9 a!ristoi u9mnou=ntai ou0 dia_ to\ sugkaqeu/dein a)lla_ dia_ to\ a!gasqai a)llh/louj ta_ me/gista kai\ ka&llista koinh?= diapepra~xqai. And I say that Ganymede, too, was brought to Olympos by Zeus not on account of [his] body, but on account of [his] soul. His name also testifies to this. I presume you know that, according to Homer, “Hearing it, he is glad.” That is to say, hearing it, he is pleased. Somewhere else there is, “Knowing close counsels in [his] heart.” Based on both of these together, Ganymede is honoured among the gods not because he is sweet in bodily form, but because he is sweet in mind. So then, Nikeratos: Achilles, too, was made by Homer to take exceptional vengeance on behalf of Patroclus not as a



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 297 [viz. Achilles’] beloved boy [paidika&] but as a comrade [e9tai=roj] who had died. Likewise, Orestes and Pylades, Theseus and Peirithous, and many others of the noblest of the demigods are praised in song not because they slept together but because they honoured one another, having accomplished great and glorious things together (Xenophon, Symp. 8.31).

Not only does Socrates, according to Xenophon, portray the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus as one of comradeship motivated by spiritual, rather than physical love, but he begins to associate their comradeship with that of other mythological friends,70 in this case Orestes and Pylades, and Theseus and Peirithous. Each can then by read in light of the others. Orestes and Pylades would undergo the same process of re-reading and re-configuration as Achilles and Patroclus, as Pseudo-Lucian later makes clear. Orestes was the son of Agamemnon who, after his father’s murder by his wife Clytemnestra, assisted by her lover Aegisthus, was taken to Phocis for his own safety.71 There he was protected by King Strophius, and grew up with the king’s son, Pylades. Orestes and Pylades journeyed together to Argos where, in response to an oracle, they took vengeance on Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. In Pseudo-Lucian, the fictional Athenian Callicratidas cites the friendship of Orestes and Pylades in his defence of paiderasti/a. According to Callicratidas, their “loving friendship” (th_n e0rwtikh\n fili/an)72 was that of a “lover” (e0rasth/j), Pylades, and his “beloved” (e0rw&menoj), Orestes.73 Orestes refuses Iphigenia’s request that he take a letter on her behalf to Mycenae, claiming that Pylades is more worthy to do so, a refusal that Callicratidas argues shows Orestes to be acting the part of e0rasth/j rather than that of e0rw&menoj, and which thus reflect a mature reciprocality to their relationship that transcends the e0rasth/j/e0rw&menoj distinction.74 PseudoLucian is dependent on Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris, a few verses of which he cites in Am. 47.75 Notably, the language of paiderasti/a as such is absent from the portrayal of their comradeship in Euripides, suggesting that Pseudo-Lucian – or, perhaps better, his character Callicratidas – is reading this kind of relationship between the lines of Euripides, much as Aeschylus, Plato, and Aeschines did with Homer’s portrayal of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. So ancient friendships between heroes came to be read in light of much later understandings of love between men. In some cases (Aeschylus, Plato, Aeschines, Pseudo-Lucian), though not necessarily all (Xenophon), this could have sexual overtones. It had also become possible to read traditions about the earlier heroes Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades, and Theseus and Peirithous, as well as the more recent

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Harmodius and Aristogeiton, in light of one another. The very fact that Xenophon could differ from Plato in his use of these traditions suggests that these traditions were open to more than one construal and in no way compelled the hearer or reader to find sexual overtones in them, even though certain readers would interpret them thus. This ancient process of re-reading, I suggest, anticipated as well as influenced the use of these traditions in the nineteenth century when, in the wake of both the rise of biblical scholarship outside the Church and the rediscovery of the literary and philosophical heritage of ancient Greece, biblical and ancient Graeco-Roman texts were interpreted in light of one another. 3. Davidic friendship in the Romantic period Let us move forward, then, to the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In Lillian Faderman’s study of romantic friendship between women since the Renaissance, Surpassing the Love of Men, 2 Samuel 1:26 is cited as an epigraph to the book as a whole, while in the title of the book the sex of the one whose love is surpassed is inverted. Faderman’s study shows that by the late eighteenth century, not only had romantic friendship between women become a significant theme in literature, but the biblical relationship between David and Jonathan had become an important metaphor for it. It is noteworthy that David and Jonathan had become a model for romantic friendships between women, as if the biblical friends stood not simply for the value of friendships between persons of the same sex as such, but for the worth of a love between persons of the same sex that surpassed the cloying, societally normative constrictions of heterosexual marriage – the “impingement of cold marital reality,” as Faderman puts it.76 Because of [youthful romantic friendships between women], most women would have understood when those attachments were compared with heterosexual love by the female characters in eighteenth-century novels, and were considered, as Lucy says in The Young Widow, “infinitely more valuable.” They would have had their own frame of reference when in those novels, women adapted the David and Jonathan story for themselves and swore that they felt for each other (again as Lucy says) “a love ‘passing the Love of Men’,” or proclaimed as does Anne Hughes, the author of Henry and Isabella (1788), that such friendships are “more sweet, interesting, and to complete all, lasting, than any other which we can ever hope to possess; and were a just account of anxiety and satisfaction to be made out, would, it is possible, in the eye of rational estimation, far exceed the somuch boasted pleasure of love.”77



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“Passing the Love of Men” is an explicit rewording of 2 Samuel 1:26 (kjv), which seems to have become a code for a same-sex friendship that surpasses the worth of the bond shared by married partners. The explicit contrast with marriage says nothing, of course, about the degree of sexual intimacy, if any, between the friends. What the contrast does, however, is show that it was precisely a contrast between married opposite-sex partners and non-married same-sex partners that was perceived in this biblical friendship. Furthermore, this use of David and Jonathan shows that a friendship that within the biblical narrative itself belongs merely to a subplot of a wider narrative has, in light of the specific concerns of a particular readership, developed a significance of its own independently of the tragedy of Saul, the rise of David, and other apparently more dominant dimensions of the narrative. With reference to romantic friendships between women, Anna Seward is a key figure,78 while in the background to her writing, and that of Lord Byron, lies the immensely significant friendship between Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the Ladies of Llangollen.79 The Ladies of Llangollen are cited alongside David and Jonathan by both Seward and Byron, Faderman writing that Seward “wrote enough verses about the ‘Davidean friendship’ (cf. David and Jonathan) of the two women to fill a small volume.”80 Seward’s connection with the Ladies of Llangollen dates from 1795. It seems that she saw in their romantic friendship a mirror of the ideal she had earlier sought in her friendship with Honora Sneyd, who had lived with Seward and her clergyman father before returning to her own father’s house at the age of nineteen, and whose early death from tuberculosis in 1780 Seward painfully lamented. In a poem dedicated to Sarah Ponsonby, Seward wrote Davidean friendship, emulation warm, Coy blossoms, perishing in courtly air, Its vain parade, restraint, and irksome form, Cold as the ice, tho’ with the comet’s glare.81

“Davidean friendship” here refers to the same-sex devotion of Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, but this phrase presupposes that the reader will immediately make the connection with David and Jonathan as a model of devoted friendship between persons of the same sex. This poem points, then, to an evolving convention of reading that had broader currency than its fragmentary attestation might otherwise suggest. Yet there is more to this fragmentary allusion to David and Jonathan. It is not simply that the love shared by the Ladies of Llangollen can be signified by “Davidean friendship” as a trope representing devoted friendship between persons of the same sex, regardless of whether they are men

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or women. What is truly significant is that the persons in question are women who dare to live as lovers outside, and in implicit subversion of, the patriarchal, heterosexual economy, while the trope used by Seward to signify their love is drawn from a tradition of male homosociality. When read alongside and in light of uses of the David and Jonathan trope later in the nineteenth century, Seward’s poem honouring the Ladies of Llangollen points to the difference between the female homosocial continuum and the male homosocial continuum.82 As the nineteenth century progresses, “David and Jonathan” will continue to be used to refer to close emotional bonds between men that stand in contrast to the bond of heterosexual marriage, but will eventually come to be used to valorize a male homoerotic desire that might otherwise be perceived as threatening to the integrity of masculinity. In the case of the Ladies of Llangollen, however, “Davidean friendship” is subversive of patriarchy, and the heterosexist ideology that constitutes it, because the love of Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby takes place outside of the male-dominated, patriarchally-determined framework of heterosexual marriage.83 In spite of this distinction, however, the David and Jonathan narrative is invoked in both the case of female romantic friendship, and at the end of the nineteenth century in the case of male homoerotic bonds, to valorize relationships that resist ideologically determined social structures that ultimately serve to marginalize and oppress women.84 In his anthology Ioläus, which from its first publication in 1902 has functioned as a major resource for the study of same-sex relationships in history, as well as a contribution to the emerging discourse of human sexuality in its own right, Edward Carpenter cites Byron and Shelley as figures in the early nineteenth century who wrote on the theme of romantic friendship between men.85 Byron and Shelley are not significant purely because of the evidence they offer for reflection on this theme at this point in English history. They are, at the same time, evidence for the reception of biblical, but more obviously Graeco-Roman sources during this period, and, alongside other figures such as Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and Keats, major influences on figures of the late nineteenth century connected to varying degrees with both Aestheticism and the emerging discourse of human sexuality, particularly Symonds and Wilde. In his discussion of Byron, Carpenter cites a letter from Byron to Elizabeth Bridget Pigot of 5 July, 1807, which reads At this moment I write with a bottle of claret in my head and tears in my eyes; for I have just parted with my “Cornelian,” who spent the evening with me. As it was our last interview, I postponed my engagement to devote the hours of the Sabbath to friendship: – Edleston and I have separated for the present, and my mind is a chaos of hope and sorrow. To-morrow I set out



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 301 for London: you will address your answer to “Gordon’s Hotel, Albemarlestreet,” where I sojourn during my visit to the metropolis. I rejoice to hear you are interested in my protegé: he has been my almost constant associate since October, 1805, when I entered Trinity College [Cambridge]. His voice first attracted my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manners attached me to him for ever. He departs for a mercantile house in town in October, and we shall probably not meet till the expiration of my minority, when I shall leave to his decision either entering as a partner through my interest, or residing with me altogether. Of course he would in his present frame of mind prefer the latter, but he may alter his opinion previous to that period; – however, he shall have his choice. I certainly love him more than any human being, and neither time or distance have had the least effect on my (in general) changeable disposition. In short we shall put Lady E. Butler and Miss Ponsonby to the blush, Pylades and Orestes out of countenance, and want nothing but a catastrophe like Nisus and Euryalus to give Jonathan and David the “go by.” He certainly is more attached to me than even I am in return. During the whole of my residence at Cambridge we met every day, summer and winter, without passing one tiresome moment, and separated each time with increasing reluctance. I hope you will one day see us together, he is the only being I esteem, though I like many.86

The way that the four same-sex pairs – the Ladies of Llangollen in the present and Orestes and Pylades,87 Nisus and Euryalus,88 and David and Jonathan in the ancient world – are referred to is suggestive of a shorthand for a certain kind of devoted relationship between persons of the same sex that Byron expected his reader – namely Miss Pigot, though ultimately any reader unanticipated by Byron who happened to have access to Moore’s Life, Letters, and Journals of Lord Byron89 would take her place in the role of reader – to understand. This implies, of course, that David and Jonathan already constituted a well-known model of the kind of relationship Byron has in mind. In his poetic works, there is further evidence of the inspiration of the story of Saul. In his Hebrew Melodies, the poems “Song of Saul before his Last Battle” and “Saul” – with its closing words from the ghost of Samuel, “Crownless, breathless, headless fall/Son and sire, the house of Saul!”90 – show a particular interest in the latter stages of Saul’s tragedy. But David and Jonathan are primarily connected by Byron not with the biblical context in which their friendship is transmitted, but with classical models of friendships between men. They are placed alongside Nisus and Euryalus, who are the subject of Byron’s retelling in Hours of Idleness of the portrayal of this male pair in Book 9 of the Aeneid.91 The sources cited thus far in this section do not, by any means, demand an explicitly sexual construal, though they are open to it, particularly

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when read in light of their later reception (especially that of Byron). That cannot be said of the use made of the David and Jonathan narrative in a hitherto unpublished manuscript by Jeremy Bentham. Bentham cites the David and Jonathan narrative in the context of an impassioned case for the relaxation of laws against erotic relationships between persons of the same sex, a case which is to be read in the context of the gradual emergence, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, of a minority discourse in defence of same-sex erotic relationships.92 In turn, this minority discourse belongs to a much more extensive trend towards the advocacy of sexual liberty, which in England can be traced well back into the seventeenth century.93 The earliest extended defence in English of same-sex erotic relationships during this period seems to be a largely lost work by Thomas Cannon, Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify’d (1749),94 though the earliest scholarly essay known to exist on this theme in English is a c. 1785 work by Bentham.95 The printer of Cannon’s work, John Purser, was indicted, and it is from the indictment against Purser that we know something of the contents of this work. Its importance for the present discussion lies in its appeal to classical precedents to justify the practice of same-sex eroticism. While Cannon’s work seems on the surface to be a condemnation of same-sex eroticism, according to two recent commentators – Hal Gladfelder and Faramerz Dabhoiwala96 – this is to be regarded as disingenuous. Cannon appeals, in particular, to Lucian and Petronius as ancient sources for same-sex eroticism.97 Further, according to the affidavit of Purser’s business associate Hugh Morgan, when accused by Purser of having imposed on him, Cannon, “made an elaborate Display of Learning, in which he talked of Petronius Arbiter and Aretine, and quoted other antient [sic] Writers Greek as well as Roman.”98 The heritage of Greece and Rome, then, would seem by this point to be a decisive element in the advocacy of a non-condemnatory attitude towards same-sex eroticism. Although Jeremy Bentham’s extensive written notes on homosexuality begin c. 1774,99 his reference to David and Jonathan as part of a defence of a liberalization of English legislation against homosexuality dates from his notes of 21 December, 1817. This belongs to the second part of a major treatise, begun in 1817, entitled Not Paul but Jesus, the first part of which was published under the pseudonym Gamaliel Smith in 1823.100 Bentham’s reading of the David and Jonathan narrative is one element in a thoroughgoing re-interpretation of biblical texts deemed relevant to the theme of same-sex eroticism, preceding by almost a century and a half the kind of treatment of these texts that would not be widely available in



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print in English before Derrick Sherwin Bailey’s 1955 work Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition. It is an urgent desideratum that Bentham’s interpretation of these texts be more intensively studied, not simply by students of utilitarianism, or by those interested in attitudes to sex in early nineteenth-century England, but by biblical scholars. Bentham’s broader case is that the position of Jesus was contradictory to the Mosaic Law, in the context of which he addresses the apparent disjunction between a sexual construal of the David and Jonathan narrative and the sexual laws of the Holiness Code. The folios among which those dealing with David and Jonathan are to be found are collected together under the following title and summary: Ch. 12 or B III. Doctrine Part II In Jesus no asceticism 1. Disregard shown to the Mosaic prohibitions against the eccentric pleasures of the bed. 2. Story of Jonathan and David.

Bentham begins his treatment of David and Jonathan by citing what he apparently regarded as the most salient verses from the biblical narrative (1 Sam. 17:56-58; 18:1-4; 20:17; 2 Sam. 1:17, 19, 26).101 In a country which could give birth to such/an occasion/102 a scene as that which originated in the beauty of the young Levite,103 is it possible to entertain a doubt that the nature of that love which had place between David and Jonathan would be matter of doubt? or that it could be more clearly designated by any the grossest than by this sentimental language? Between two young men and the strength of their affection, was not merely to equal but to surpass/the strongest/that can bind together man and woman? So far as regards the inner love of mind no love capable of having place between /male and male/can equal that which is capable of having place between man and woman … [W]ith all love between body and body it is impossible to assign any reason why the /strongest/love between men should exceed the strongest love between man and woman: the love of body to body…can amount to nothing if being added/joined/to the love of mind to mind it makes no addition to its strength. But from/at/the very outset of the story, the clearest exclusion is put upon any such notion as that the love of mind to mind or in a word friendship was in the case in question clear of all indications of the love of body for body in a word of sexual love.104 “Love at first sight” in the words of the title to the play… [N]othing can be more natural. But friendship at first sight, and friendship equal in ardency to the most ardent sexual love! At the very first interview, scarce had the first words that Jonathan…issued from his lips, when the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. In a country in which the/concupiscence of the/whole male population of a considerable town is/kindled/

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The Love of David and Jonathan inflamed to madness by the sight/a transient glimpse/of a single man, what/impartial/eye can refuse to see the love by which/the young warriors/Nisus and Euryalus were bound together in Virgils fable, and Harmodius and Aristogiton in Grecian History?105

Thus Bentham discards the view that the love of David and Jonathan was that of mind for mind, or could be reduced to the notion of “friendship” exclusive of sexual desire. Like Byron, he places David and Jonathan alongside Nisus and Euryalus and, anticipating John Addington Symonds several decades later, he adds the Athenian tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton to the list. It is not other passages in the Bible that Bentham adduces to clarify the meaning of the David and Jonathan narrative, but analogous passages from Greek and Roman sources. Noteworthy is Bentham’s use of rhetorical questions to persuade his imagined reader, for why should Bentham’s reader not “doubt” his unambiguous construal of a polyvalent text, and why should an “impartial” eye only draw the same conclusion as Bentham? We find here, I think, the same kind of textual foundationalism that so weakens Schroer and Staubli’s treatment of the same text. Bentham continues: The connection thus represented as having had place between these two young men not infrequently ties it together with the song in which it is/represented as having been/held up to admiration,106 and numbered among the/passages and/examples in holy writ by which edification is afforded. Of course by those by/on the part of/whom it has been presented to view in this light no suspicion/apprehension/has on that occasion been introduced that by those…whom they expected to have for readers any thing of sensuality…would/could/be regarded as having had place. Jonathan/the one loving the other/loving David as his own soul! Sensuality in so impure a shape is it possible that it could ever have proved the basis of so ardent a love of an affection so ardent so sentimentally expressed? And this love in a book in which the/any/indication of sensuality is represented as sufficing to convert the attachment into a crime of the foulest complexion and which as such is accordingly appointed to be visited by the severest of punishments?107 But if among the Jews this same propensity which under/some/circumstances the law on which it was made capitally punishable108 was regarded without disapprobation this same propensity was under other circumstances regarded not merely with indifference but with admiration, and spoken of in correspondent terms, in this whatever inconsistency there were there would be nothing at all extraordinary. Considered as mere sensuality it would be/regarded with disapprobation/… Considered as a bond of attachment/a support to virtue/between two persons jointly engaged in a course of life regarded as meritorious, it would/might/ nevertheless be respected and applauded.109



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Noteworthy in the final paragraph of this quote is the fact that Bentham treats the biblical texts as speaking with different, indeed contradictory voices. Different texts reflect different circumstances, and the Holiness Code cannot justifiably be used to delimit and control what the David and Jonathan narrative can be allowed to mean. In the next folio,110 Bentham expands his engagement with Greek and Roman sources, again anticipating developments later in the century. The tyrannicidal courage of Harmodius and Aristogeiton Bentham takes to have been grounded in their passion for one another. Likewise, an “admixture of sensuality” is taken by Bentham to be the distinguishing characteristic of the union of the members of the Theban Band. Apparently misquoting frag. 136 of Aeschylus from the all-but-lost Achilleis,111 Achilles and Patroclus are added as a further example, before Bentham alludes once more to Nisus and Euryalus. In a passage dated a month earlier, Bentham places David and Jonathan alongside Jesus and the Beloved Disciple. If/in/the love which in/and by/these passages Jesus was intended to be represented as having towards this John was not the same sort of love as that which appeared to have place between King David and Jonathan the son of Saul it seems difficult/not easy/to conceive what can have been the object in bringing it to view in so pointed a manner accompanied with such circumstances of dalliance/fondness/… That the sort of love of which in the bosom of Jesus/Saint/John is here meant to be represented as the object was of a different sort from/any/that of which any other of the apostles was the object is altogether beyond/uncontestable/out of/dispute. For of this sort of love, whatsoever it was, he and he alone is/in these so/frequently recurring terms maintained as being the object.112 II. Kings I. 17 And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul, and over Jonathan his son… 19. The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places… 26. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. David and Jonathan were accordingly to appearances what in Grecian history/were to each other/Harmodius and Aristogiton, and in Grecian fable Achilles and Patroclus, Nisus and Euryalus.

The use of the relationship between Jesus and the Beloved Disciple as a positive portrayal from scripture of an erotic, same-sex relationship seems to have a slightly longer pedigree than the equivalent use of the David and Jonathan narrative.113 By at least as far back as Jeremy Bentham, however, and perhaps further back than Byron, the latter is used in precisely this way. What made this possible was a range of intertextual competence on the part of Bentham, Byron slightly earlier, and presumably

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others with a comparable biblical and classical education, that embraced not only the biblical texts, but Greek and Roman texts that could be construed as pertaining to same-sex eroticism. Perhaps erotic connotations would have been perceived in the David and Jonathan narrative without these intertexts, but the sources before us find these connotations in the texts as read alongside one another. In the decades that followed, an explicitly sexual reading of the David and Jonathan narrative seems not to have been seriously entertained again until after the emergence of Oxford Hellenism. In between, Christian readers from otherwise deeply antagonistic positions – John Henry Newman and Charles Kingsley, most obviously – would take David and Jonathan as models for particular kinds of male bonding among the devout. 4. The Oxford Movement and Catholic homosociality The Anglo-Catholic branch of Anglicanism has long been associated with same-sex desire.114 This association is one of the things that makes studying sources connected with Anglo- and Roman Catholicisms in the nineteenth century difficult, because it is hard not to read later constructions of homoeroticism back into sources portraying affection between men that may not have had such connotations at the time they were written.115 On the other hand, to make this very point is to impose a distinction on those sources that their authors may not, indeed perhaps could not, have made, or at least would have made in very different terms: the expressions of same-sex affection in early Anglo-Catholic sources may indeed correspond closely, on some level, with later constructions of homoeroticism, even if the authors of these sources would have baulked at the suggestion. This situation has led to confusion on the part of later readers of this material between the categories of sexuality that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and the various discourses of manliness, that is, of the adequate performance of one’s gender role as a man, that existed at earlier periods.116 The result, for us, is an ineluctable indeterminacy that must allow not only for the distance between our early twenty-first century perspectives and the perspectives of those living in the early years of the Anglo-Catholic revival, but also for developments and resignifications during the nineteenth century itself. In his study of Benjamin Jowett, for example, Geoffrey Faber notes how attitudes to profound friendships between men changed radically during the nineteenth century. In connection with the friendship of his great-uncle Frederick William Faber (1814–1863)117 and Roundell Palmer (1812–1895), First Earl of



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Selborne, Faber cites Palmer’s later recollection of the beginning of their friendship. Palmer invokes the heritage of Greece alongside David and Jonathan to interpret his passion for the other young man, in language that could scarcely be used today to describe a relationship between two young men without raising the possibility of sexual love. This is presumably not what Palmer was thinking, though his defensive appeal to “passion” in the context of “friendship” could suggest that he was aware of how his words might be read: In person, [Faber] was extremely prepossessing – of good height, slender figure, fair complexion, bright blue eyes, well-formed features, almost feminine grace. The attraction of his looks and manners, and our agreement in poetical tastes (particularly in appreciation of Coleridge and Wordsworth), soon made us friends, and our affection for each other became not only strong, but passionate. There is a place for passion, even in friendship; it was so among the Greeks; and the love of Jonathan for David was “wonderful, passing the love of women.”118

What we do know is that commonly within the early Oxford Movement there existed deep emotional attachments between men.119 These attachments are connected with a renewed reverence for the celibate vocation, and with the concomitant revival within the English church of monasticism.120 Part of the importance of the Oxford Movement is to be found in the way John Henry Newman and those around him created a homosocial environment at Oxford, through the revival of the tutorial system, which in the later hands of Jowett would make possible a distinctly “socratic” model of learning. Though Newman and Jowett alike would have been horrified to have been instrumental in the process, this model of learning seems to have exercised a significant influence on the later use of Plato’s dialogues to create a positive heritage of same-sex desire.121 Equally important is the evidence, in sources deriving from the Oxford Movement, for (apparently) non-sexual yet deeply committed same-sex friendships inspired by medieval monasticism. In Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, Frederick Roden sought to recover sources within the Roman and Anglo-Catholic traditions of the nineteenth century pertaining to samesex desire, and in particular to what Roden calls “queer virginity.” [Nineteenth century Catholic r]eligious life was queer in its separation from biologically-reproductive, heteronormative culture. Religious orders and monasticism, in their glorification of virginity, allowed safe expressions of same-sex desire, not involving genital sexuality or even physical affection. Rather, desire for God, often mediated by friendship with a person of one’s own gender, opened possibilities that a more sexually aware culture of later decades claimed with greater anxiety and self-awareness.122

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In the kinds of spiritual friendships Roden discusses, deep love for another person existed alongside intense love for God, expressed in language that would be used in other contexts for romantic love. The celibate Christian priest was called to engage, metaphorically, in a romance with God.123 The writings of Newman and John Dobree Dalgairns are of particular note. Newman, to begin with, idealized the celibate religious life in dialogue with the biblical and patristic traditions,124 and had significant same-sex friendships with Richard Hurrell Froude (1803–1836) and Ambrose St John (1815–1875), with the latter of whom Newman was buried.125 His wish to be buried with St John seems to have been in part inspired by the wish of the slain Patroclus that he and Achilles be buried together,126 albeit reinterpreted in light of a long Christian tradition of friendship. David and Jonathan are the inspiration for Newman’s poem on same-friendship, “David and Jonathan,” published in the collection of Tractarian poetry Lyra Apostolica shortly after the Froude’s death, but first written in Malta in 1833.127 The epigraph is 2 Samuel 1:26, and Newman contrasts the parting in love of David and Jonathan, in person during David’s flight from Saul (1 Sam. 20:41–21:1; 23:18), and through Jonathan’s death at Gilboa, with the acrimonious separation of Paul and Barnabas in Acts 15:39. Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. O HEART of fire! misjudged by wilful man, Thou flower of Jesse’s race! What woe was thine, when thou and Jonathan Last greeted face to face! He doomed to die, – thou on us to impress The portent of a blood-stained holiness. Yet it was well: – for so, ’mid cares of rule And crime’s encircling tide, A spell was o’er thee, zealous one, to cool Earth-joy and kingly pride; With battle scene and pageant prompt to blend, The pale calm sceptre of a blameless friend. Ah! had he lived, before thy throne to stand, Thy spirit keen and high, Sure it had snapped in twain love’s slender band, So dear in memory; Paul, of his comrade left, the warning gives, He lives with us who dies, he is but lost who lives.

The friendship between David and Jonathan is idealized in the memory of the survivor, and the memory of this friendship serves to temper



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David’s zeal as king, making him a good moral example to those who read of him in scripture. This is not only a transformation of the biblical text, but a reflection of Newman’s emotional bond with his friend, and of his understanding of the hereafter, which we see well illustrated in a letter from Newman to Henry Edward Manning in 1837, when the latter’s wife was mortally ill.128 Friendship endures beyond the grave, for Newman, because in it, in Bray’s words, “we can see a stray beam or a dim reflection here in this world of what will be our unending delight when one with God in the next.”129 The choice of 2 Samuel 1:26 as an epigraph relates the same-sex friendship idealized in Newman’s poem with his exaltation of the celibate life over that of marriage. The celibate life was also exalted by Dalgairns, who was a member of Newman’s community at Littlemore prior to his reception into the Roman Catholic Church, and later a member of the Birmingham Oratory. His “Life of St Aelred” is part of the attempt to re-member English monastic life as it had existed before the Reformation. The “Life” is also an attempt to valorize a particular way of performing Christian manliness, namely a manliness fulfilled in the context of a celibate, all male, Christian community. This is starkly at odds with the vision of Christian manliness associated with Charles Kingsley, but what is noteworthy is that David, and in particular his friendship with Jonathan, is used by both Dalgairns and Kingsley to justify their respective definitions of Christian manliness. The biblical text is, again, a reversible figure, capable of reflecting conflicting contemporary constructs of gender, only this time the reversibility is not one of openness to competing readings inspired by Christian and pagan intertexts, but one of openness to competing Christian readings. Dalgairns sums up the young Aelred thus: He left school at an early age, but he still continued his studies at court. He might have led, if he had pleased, the march of intellect, as it may be called, in Scotland, and it would have been hard if a mitre and crosier had not fallen to his share. But never was a soul less ambitious than Aelred’s. From his boyhood his sole ambition was concentrated in loving and being loved; his text-book was Cicero on Friendship, which he read with avidity, and endeavoured to carry out in real life. He read romances too, for he knew that story which in after-days he characterised as “a vain tale concerning one Arthur.” The friendship however of David and Jonathan in Scripture, affected him more than all the feats of the Round Table, and the love of Queen Guenever to boot.130

We have reflected here a richly complex process of intertextuality, in which pagan sources are woven together with Christian sources, and then made to shed light on particular contemporary situations,

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monastic friendship in a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey in the first instance, and then same-sex friendship between men in nineteenthcentury Catholicism. There are clear allusions not only to the biblical text, but to the Confessions of Augustine and the De amicitia of Cicero. Though he does not make this explicit, Dalgairns is reflecting Aelred’s own use of ancient sources, most obviously his use of the David and Jonathan narrative, which – echoing the ancient rabbinic tradition preserved in m. Avot 5.16 (albeit presumably unintentionally) – makes the friendship of David and Jonathan one between equals that is not motivated by a desire for material advantage (see De spir. am. 2.62-64; 3.47, 92). It is a model of the ideal spiritual friendship. Aelred uses this model, interwoven with the De amicitia of Cicero, to explore spiritual friendship in the context of a Cistercian abbey, but his use of David and Jonathan is not original to him. It seems in fact seems to derive from one of his sources, the De officiis of Ambrose of Milan.131 This leads to a rather curious “Chinese boxes” or “Russian dolls” effect in the reception history of David and Jonathan, whereby the biblical narrative is used by Ambrose, then used by Aelred as a result of its use by Ambrose, then used again by Dalgairns – who would have known the David and Jonathan narrative separately from its use by Aelred – in his “Life.” At each stage the biblical narrative is being subtly re-signified in light of other intertexts both pagan and Christian, of evolving constructs of gender and understandings of the nature of friendship, and of the needs being addressed by the work in question (the De officiis of Ambrose, the De spiritali amicitia of Aelred, and the “Life of St Aelred” of Dalgairns respectively). The appeal to David and Jonathan has a further rhetorical function. Cloaked with the mantle of scriptural authority the allusion to David and Jonathan lends religious sanction to the especially deep affection Aelred felt for the younger monks Simon and Ivo. Dalgairns, furthermore, taking his cue from Aelred, establishes a gulf between David and Jonathan and the ideals of manliness enshrined in the literature of romantic chivalry, which had been rediscovered and were being put to work in different ways by authors such as Tennyson and Kingsley. This is an important point to note because chivalry is closely linked with the model of David (and Jonathan) in Kingsley’s work, and, as we shall see, points to a significant difference between Dalgairns and Kingsley; but chivalry – transposed into a “New Chivalry” – also resurfaces at the end of the nineteenth century in John Addington Symonds’s appropriation of Walt Whitman’s manly comradeship, which Symonds, in turn, thought to echo the story of David and Jonathan.



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The chief importance of Aelred derives from his use of David and Jonathan in relation to friendship in De spiritali amicitia. But the question of Aelred’s own sexuality has become a live issue in modern scholarship, thanks in large part to the work of John Boswell.132 This question is attended by many of the same ideological and methodological problems as the debate concerning the David and Jonathan narrative in 1 and 2 Samuel, and is likewise to be regarded as a question of modern exegesis. The use of David and Jonathan by Aelred is caught up with two separate modern scholarly questions: that of the openness of the biblical narrative to being read as representing a sexual relationship between David and Jonathan, and that of Aelred’s own erotic desires. How Boswell reads Aelred is determined by his understanding of human sexuality, by the way same-sex desire is enacted and represented at various stages in history, and by his understanding of the biblical narrative. How Boswell appropriated these sources in his research in the late twentieth century differs strongly from Dalgairns, who was certainly not trying to reconstruct a history of gay people in the Middle Ages; yet inasmuch as the work of Dalgairns is concerned with representing a certain kind of deep emotional attachment between men, his work does in fact form part of the process that would eventually make it possible for Boswell and others to “discover” same-sex eroticism in the same sources, when, a century and a half later, they brought to these sources a different agenda and different understandings of gender and friendship. All of this seriously complicates the attempt to understand either Aelred or Dalgairns on their own terms. Dalgairns’s “Life,” while long neglected, did have a history of reception in English monasticism, one example of which is noted by Peter Anson in his biography of Aelred Carlyle. Carlyle was born Benjamin Fearnley Carlyle in 1874, but took the name Aelred on becoming an Oblate of St Benedict in 1893 after reading what Anson calls, not unjustifiably, Dalgairns’s “somewhat sentimental biography.”133 For Anson, who was later a member of the Benedictine community established by Carlyle on Caldey Island, Carlyle’s attraction to Aelred was connected both with the appeal of the romantic portrayal of medieval monasticism by Dalgairns, and with the relative openness of Aelred’s Cistercian order, as portrayed by Dalgairns, to “particular friendships”: It is easy to understand why this somewhat sentimental biography, with its quaint old-world frontispiece, drawn by A. W. Pugin, depicting S. Aelred vested in a Gothic Revival chasuble, apparelled alb and amice, and standing in a crocketted niche, made an instant appeal to the young oblate. It conveys a romantic and somewhat Pre-Raphaelite idea of early medieval monastic life… As he read on he came to many a passage which proved

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Anson elaborates on this point in his account of the life of Carlyle’s Benedictine foundation on Caldey Island, where he draws a strong comparison between Aelred’s affection for younger Cistercian monks and Carlyle’s affection for particular novices or professed monks on Caldey. Carlyle’s distress when a favourite departed Caldey is likened by Anson to the distress of Aelred on the death of his beloved Simon: It must be admitted that “[Aelred of Rievaulx] was inclined to favouritism and the joys of spiritual friendship with charming young men.”135 This was equally true of Aelred of Caldey. It could be said of each that he was usually sustained by close friendships. Our Abbot, like his patron, generally had his “Simon,” “Hugh,” “Ivo,” or “Little Ralph.” It was not only the twelfth century Cistercian abbot who chose a young monk “who soothed him when he was worried, and refreshed his leisure.” His twentieth century disciple emulated him in this respect… If any specially favoured novice or professed monk decided that he was not called to the cloister and left the Island, Aelred of Caldey would mourn his loss in much the same words as Aelred of Rievaulx used in the famous lamentation for Simon, the companion of his youth, found in the Speculum Caritatis, which must have been inspired by David’s lament for the death of Jonathan, ending with the words: “As the mother loveth her only son, so did I love thee.”136

Anson assumes here that his reader is familiar with 2 Samuel 1:19-27, but perhaps also with a particular construal of it: but as what? As David’s memory of an erotically charged relationship, or simply of a same-sex friendship with no erotic overtones? What is not clear is whether or not Anson is criticizing Carlyle for becoming excessively and unhealthily attached to individuals within the community, and whether or not he is implying that such attachments were rooted in, or even expressed, through sexual desire. He certainly makes no such thing explicit, but it is clear that with the passage of time, and with the benefit of wider reading, Anson came to view Carlyle’s approach to the discernment of vocations, and to the discernment of vocations on the part of novices, negatively.137 In any case, the biblical friendship of David and Jonathan is being used



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by Anson to clarify Aelred of Rievaulx’s lament for Simon for the modern reader, and thereby to clarify the medieval monk’s influence on Aelred Carlyle’s relationships with younger members of the homosocial, hierarchical, community on Caldey. Also influenced by the Oxford Movement was Christina Rossetti (1830– 1894), whose devotional work Letter and Spirit refers briefly to David and Jonathan. In this extended commentary on the greatest commandment, published in 1883, Jonathan is mentioned as example of a “friend,” in the context of a long list of biblical figures who exemplify the love for others that is the fulfilment of the greatest commandment: At the noble name of Friend we recall Jonathan, more than royal in his disregard of that throne on which he delighted to install one whom he loved with a love wonderful, passing the love of women (1 Sam. xviii. 1-4, xx. 11-17, 41, 42, xxiii. 16-18; 2 Sam. i. 26). Thus centuries later St. John the Baptist claimed for himself no title nobler or dearer than that of Friend of the Bridegroom, to hear Whose voice was the fulfilment of his joy (St. John iii. 29).138

The context is a list of figures from the Hebrew Bible who are taken to be exemplary of the kinds of human relationships in which the command to love God and neighbour is to be worked out. There are strong echoes in this passage of the selflessness of Jonathan’s friendship that we saw earlier in Aelred. As if picking up on the fact that in the biblical text David is never said to love Jonathan – or anyone, for that matter – Rossetti does not mention David and Jonathan as an example of a mutual relationship, in which love is expressed by each for the other. It is Jonathan alone of the pair who is cited under “the noble name of Friend.” It should also be recognized that this is part of a long biblical illustration of the way that the command to love one’s neighbour is the necessary outworking of the command to love God unreservedly.139 The treatment of David and Jonathan by Rossetti cannot meaningfully be understood outside that framework. Letter and Spirit is a devotional commentary based on Mark 12:28-30; Matthew 22:39, 40; Exodus 20:3-17. Frederick Roden comments that “In Letter and Spirit, Rossetti writes of several same-sex affectional pairings that eventually lead to Christ in the New Testament.”140 This, however, is misleading because it ignores the wider context in which Rossetti places them. To be sure, Rossetti’s own emotional relationships with other women, and her representation of same-sex relationships between women in works such as “Goblin Market,” have left her work open to later homoerotic re-readings. But although in Letter and Spirit both Ruth and Naomi141 and David and Jonathan142 are mentioned, they are

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not mentioned as exemplary same-sex affectional pairings as such. Ruth and Jonathan are cited in the context of a succession of figures from the Hebrew Bible who offer models of different kinds of human relationship that might offer a moral pattern to Christians obliged to fulfil the command to love others in the context of their human relationships: thus Ruth is an example of extraordinary filial devotion to Naomi, and Jonathan, like Hiram,143 is an example of friendship. Abraham is mentioned as father and uncle,144 Joseph as brother,145 Aaron as priest,146 and David as a by no means blameless king.147 Jonathan, then, is a model of a friend living out a commandment still binding on Christians, to love one another. It is Jonathan alone who is the example, not David and Jonathan together. 5. Protestant manliness In between – notionally, if not precisely chronologically – the Oxford Movement with its particular effects on the one hand, and the emergence of Oxford Hellenism with its particular effects on the other, is “Muscular Christianity,” a term which, despite his misgivings with respect to it,148 came to be attached to the vision of Christianity advocated by Charles Kingsley, and which would subsequently be used explicitly by Edward Cracroft Lefroy in an address in Oxford before the Keble Essay Club that responded to the so-called “Hellenistic Naturalism” of John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater. Although he and Newman never met, Charles Kingsley was in many respects Newman’s ideological polar opposite.149 Indeed, it was a written conflict between Kingsley and Newman – which, incidentally, provides a fascinating study in the relationship between authorial intention, textual effect, reader response, and the politics of “truth”150 – that led Newman to pen his Apologia pro Vita sua in 1864. In between the lines of this conflict were competing understandings of manliness, which David Hilliard has memorably described as “the subtle misogamy of Newman versus the robust uxoriousness of Kingsley.”151 It is noteworthy, then, that both Newman and Kingsley – as well as Dalgairns, Thomas Hughes, and Frederic William Farrar – used the David and Jonathan narrative, but in relation to starkly different models of manliness. In a series of sermons before the University of Cambridge, first published in 1866, Kingsley used a series of texts connected with David from the Psalms and Samuel as a basis for his reflections on “Muscular Christianity.” Kingsley’s sermons are evidence for the role a particular representation of David was to play in the muscular Christian construction of masculinity and femininity. In his sermon “David’s Weakness”



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on Psalm 78:71-73, Kingsley opined that, “both sides of the kingly character, the masculine and the feminine, are brought out in David. For the greedy and tyrannous, he has indignant defiance: for the weak and helpless, patient tenderness.”152 The motive Kingsley claimed for this choice of theme for his sermons was his discomfort with the term “Muscular Christianity,” and the potential of the term to be misconstrued. Kingsley attacked sharply the revival in England of medieval monasticism, on account of its exaltation of what he regarded as the least worthy of feminine attributes, praising medieval chivalry instead as an ideal of Christian manhood.153 [The] first and better meaning [of Muscular Christianity] may be simply a healthy and manful Christianity, one which does not exalt the feminine virtues to the exclusion of the masculine.154 That certain forms of Christianity have committed this last fault cannot be doubted…as time went on, and the monastic life, which, whether practised by man or by woman, is essentially a feminine life, became more and more exclusively the religious ideal, grave defects began to appear in what was really too narrow a conception of the human character. The monks of the middle ages, in aiming exclusively at the virtues of women, generally copied little but their vices. Their unnatural attempt to be wiser than God, and to unsex themselves, had done little but disease their mind and heart. They resorted more and more to those arts which are the weapons of crafty, ambitious, and unprincipled women. They were apt to be cunning, false, intriguing. They were personally cowardly, as their own chronicles declare; querulous, passionate, prone to unmanly tears; prone, as their writings abundantly testify, to scold, to use the most virulent language against all who differed from them; they were, at times, fearfully cruel, as evil women will be; cruel with that worst cruelty which springs from cowardice.155 [A]mong [the warriors of the Middle Ages] arose a new and a very fair ideal of manhood; that of the “gentle very perfect knight,” loyal to his king and to his God, bound to defend the weak, succour the oppressed, and put down the wrong-doer; with his lady, or bread-giver, dealing forth bounteously the goods of this life to all who needed; occupied in the seven works of mercy, yet living in the world, and in the perfect enjoyment of wedded and family life.156

Kingsley is here working with very specific constructions of gender, selecting one particular retrieval of the heritage of the Middle Ages as a resource for contemporary – that is mid-nineteenth century – masculinity. In so doing he is reifying a particular vision of the Christian family and its relation to both masculinity and the Christian tradition. His vision, as he expounds it here, is radically at odds with that of Dalgairns who, in his “Life of St Aelred,” which idealizes pre-Reformation monasticism, offers

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the following corrective to idealized notions of medieval chivalry in an account of the life of King Stephen. Alas! chivalry is but an ideal, a high and beautiful standard, created by Christianity, but never realised except in individuals; for one St Louis there were a thousand Bluebeards. The knight of the twelfth century was not the fantastic and often licentious champion of later times; but in King Stephen’s time at least he was often a needy adventurer, who roamed about the country, pillaging his neighbours, and looking out for a fief.157

In the following chapter Dalgairns defends monasticism in the recently founded Cistercian house at Rievaulx thus: “Alas! there have been worldly and ambitious hearts, beating beneath the monk’s habit, for no outward forms can keep the soul against its will; but Rievaux [sic] was not at all a likely place to harbour such monks.”158 Dalgairns was as concerned as Kingsley that Christianity be “masculine,” as illustrated by a passage in the “Life of St Aelred”159 where, in a discussion of Aelred’s Speculum caritatis, he notes the contrast between “the grave and masculine Gregorian chants” and the “languid and effeminate music” of expressions of the monastic life less austere than the Cistercian. It is simply that Dalgairns on the one hand, and Kingsley on the other, construed the connotations of “masculine” rather differently: for Dalgairns, masculinity was defined by austerity and self-control, and in the case of the abbey of Rievaulx was expressed through the rigours of the monastic life. Kingsley’s chivalric ideal of manliness is next associated with the emergence of Protestantism, which becomes for him a moment in Christian history when a certain masculine ideal was victorious over the lamentable femininity of the medieval Church. At the same time, the recovery of the literal sense of scripture enabled the Old Testament to be read aright, and made it possible to see the example of David as an ancient embodiment of the chivalrous masculine ideal to be recovered from the accretions of monastic – thus feminine – ecclesiastical allegorization: A higher ideal, I say, was chivalry, with all its shortcomings. And for this reason; that it asserted the possibility of consecrating the whole manhood, and not merely a few faculties thereof, to God; and it thus contained the first germ of that Protestantism which conquered at the Reformation. Then was asserted, once for all, on the grounds of nature and reason, as well as of Holy Scripture, the absolute sanctity of family and national life, and the correlative idea, namely, the consecration of the whole of human nature to the service of God, in that station to which God had called each man. Then the Old Testament, with the honour which it puts upon family and national life, became precious to man, as it had never been before; and such a history as David’s became, not as it was with the mediæval monks, a mere repertory of fanciful metaphors and allegories: but the solemn



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 317 example, for good and for evil, of a man of like passions and like duties, with the men of the modern world.160

This passage honours the recovery of both the sensus litteralis of the David story and the humanity of its central character, by means of a particular construal of the legacies of medieval chivalry and the Reformation. It is also an implicit appraisal, in connection with this image of David, of the English national life into which Kingsley’s Cambridge hearers were supposed to enter. At work here is a complex interweaving of constructs: constructs of gender, of nationhood, of historical exemplars, of ideals derived from scripture, of the nature of textual meaning. In stark opposition to Kingsley’s David is what he saw as a second, debased, and utterly unconscionable notion of “Muscular Christianity,” according to which, “provided a young man is sufficiently brave, frank, and gallant, he is more or less absolved from the common duties of morality and self-restraint.”161 Against this is pitted David as an example of chivalry and virtue, albeit not a flawless one, for young men to follow. [David’s] is the character of a man perfectly gifted, exquisitely organized. He has personal beauty, daring, prowess, and skill in war. He has generosity, nobleness, faithfulness, chivalry as if a mediæval and Christian knight. He is a musician, poet, seemingly an architect likewise. He is, moreover, a born king. He has a marvellous and most successful power of attracting, disciplining, ruling his fellow-men. So thoroughly human a personage is he, that God speaks of him as a man after His own heart; that our blessed Lord condescends to call himself especially the Son of David.162

David’s “chivalry” is a theme to which Kingsley returns as a model of Christian manliness. In his sermon on “David’s Anger,” which addresses the moral problem raised by David’s curse on his enemies in Psalm 143:12, Kingsley weaves three elements into his interpretation: an appeal to David’s intentions as a means of reclaiming his reading of the psalm from mistaken interpreters; an attack on the – to him – false appropriation of biblical curses by “mediæval monks”; and an implicit recognition of the unworthiness of pagan literature, in the form of Virgil’s Aeneid, in comparison with Christian: What David meant by these curses, can be best known from his own actions. What certain persons have meant by them since, is patent enough by their actions. Mediæval monks, considered, but too often, the enemies of their creed, of their ecclesiastical organization, even of their particular monastery, to be ipso facto enemies of God; and applied to them the seeming curses of David’s psalms, with fearful additions, of which David, to his honour, never dreamed. “May they feel with Dathan and Abiram the damnation of Gehenna,” is a fair sample of the formulæ which are found in

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The Love of David and Jonathan the writings of men who, while they called themselves the servants of Jesus Christ our Lord, derived their notions of the next world principally from the sixth book of Virgil’s Æneid. And what they meant by their words their acts shewed. Whenever they had the power, they were but too apt to treat their supposed enemies in this life, as they expected God to treat them in the next. The History of the Inquisition on the continent, in America, and in the Portuguese Indies – of the Marian persecutions in England – of the Piedmontese massacres in the 17th century – are facts never to be forgotten… Do we find a hint of any similar conduct on the part of David? If not, it is surely probable that he did not mean by his imprecations what the mediæval clergy meant.163

It is in the context of this weaving of the character of David that we find two sermons on 2 Samuel 1:26, “David’s Deserts”164 and “Friendship; or, David and Jonathan.”165 The first of these is, in essence, a sermon on the virtue of self-control,166 a virtue which the Oxford Movement and its followers would also, if in a slightly different way, have associated with manliness. Kingsley takes 2 Samuel 1:26 as his starting point and reads this verse in the light of the canon of Christian, that is Protestant scripture, but also in relation to a particular ideal of heterosexual marriage. In proclaiming Jonathan’s love to be “passing the love of women,” David could not truly have understood, as Kingsley and his mid-nineteenth century hearers and readers could, how deep the love of women truly was: Passing the love of woman? How can that be? we of those days shall say. What love can pass that, saving the boundless love of him who stooped from heaven to earth, that he might die on the Cross for us? No. David, when he sang those words, knew not the depth of woman’s love.167 As a fact, we do not find, among the ancient Jews, that exalting and purifying ideal of the relations between man and woman, which is to be found, thank God, in these days, in almost every British work of fiction or fancy.168

The reason is that between the Fall, prior to which the ideal of malefemale relations was exemplified by the first human couple in their prelapsarian state, and the preaching of Jesus, which sought to restore these ideal relations by appealing to the pre-lapsarian union of Adam and Eve as a basis for an absolute prohibition of divorce, relations between men and women were imperfect, marred by sin. Consequently, David himself could not truly have understood the love of women.169 Kingsley picks up and develops his earlier connection between medieval chivalry and Protestantism, claiming that at the Reformation, the ideal of gender relations lost in Eden was fully restored, the way having been prepared by the medieval chivalric ideal of masculinity.170 Here again ideals derived from scripture, a particular grasp of the relationship



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between scripture and reason, constructs of gender and national identity, and anti-Roman Catholic rhetoric, are all interwoven. Kingsley’s rhetoric against Rome here is specifically an attack on clerical celibacy and its implications for the performance of masculinity and femininity.171 [N]o longer on the ground of mere nature and private fancy, but on the ground of Scripture, and reason, and the eternal laws of God; and the highest ideal of family life became possible to the family and to the nation, in proportion as they accepted the teaching of the Reformation: and impossible, alas! in proportion as they still allowed themselves to be ruled by a priesthood who asserted the truly monstrous dogma, that the sexes reach their highest excellence, only when parted from each other.172

Kingsley answers the question implicit in the comparison of 2 Samuel 1:26 – the love of which woman, or which women, is surpassed by that of Jonathan? – by drawing on the story of Nabal and Abigail in 1 Samuel 25:2-42 as an intertext. In a passage that “reads like a scene out of the middle age” and is, indeed, “a forefeeling, a prophecy, as it were, of the Christian chivalry of after ages,”173 Abigail exerts her positive, womanly moral influence on David, turning him from his desire for revenge on Nabal. David nevertheless has more than one woman,174 and thus lacks “an element of pure, single, all-absorbing love.” Thus in 2 Samuel 1:26, it is an inferior love of women, lacking the pure, single-minded, all-absorbing, monogamous, heterosexual marital love of post-Reformation Protestant Europe, to which David compares the wonderful love of Jonathan. The second sermon, also taking 2 Samuel 1:26 as its point of departure, focuses more fully on the friendship between David and Jonathan. Anticipating Christina Rossetti’s reading of Jonathan in Letter and Spirit, Kingsley claims that “[t]he name of Jonathan will remain for ever as the perfect pattern of friendship.”175 Jonathan’s friendship is then read within Kingsley’s construction of masculinity: “We hear first of Jonathan doing a very gallant deed… It is only great-hearted men who can be true friends; mean and cowardly men can never know what friendship means.”176 With reference to 1 Samuel 18:1-4, Kingsley not only shows great insight into the portrayal of the tension created by Jonathan’s greater loyalty to David than to Saul, but also, in his probing of the biblical text, uncovers a question with which the terse, laconic text invites the reader to wrestle: exactly why did Jonathan love David as his own soul? Because his soul was like the soul of David. Because he was modest, he loved David’s modesty. Because he was brave, he loved David’s courage. Because he was virtuous, he loved David’s virtue. He saw that David was all that he was himself, and more; and therefore he loved him as his own soul. And therefore I said, that it is only noble and great hearts who can

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The Love of David and Jonathan have great friendships; who admire and delight in other men’s goodness; who, when they see a great and godlike man, conceive, like Jonathan, such an affection for him that they forget themselves, and think only of him, till they will do anything for him, sacrifice anything for him, as Jonathan did for David. For remember, that Jonathan had cause to hate and envy David, rather than love him; and that he would have hated him if there had been any touch of meanness or selfishness in his heart. Gradually he learnt, as all Israel learnt, that Samuel had anointed David to be king, and that he, Jonathan, was in danger of not succeeding after Saul’s death. David stood between him and the kingdom. And yet he did not envy David – did not join his father for a moment in plotting his ruin. He would oppose his father, secretly indeed, and respectfully: but still, he would be true to David, though he had to bear insults and threats of death.177

Again anticipating Rossetti, Jonathan’s love for his friend is interwoven with his piety, so that love of neighbour (cf. Lev. 19:18) is not to be separated from love of God (cf. Deut. 6:4-5).178 Jonathan becomes, for Kingsley, a model of how a young Christian man should choose his friends.179 The most trustworthy of all loves, of course, is that Christ, of which the love of Jonathan for David is to be understood as a type: “Passing the love of women was his love, indeed; and of him Jonathan was but such a type, as the light in the dewdrop is the type of the sun in heaven.”180 Ultimately, for Kingsley, the choice of human friends is modelled by Jonathan’s choice of David, but this is but a shadow of the more important thing, which is friendship with God in Christ.181 But these sermons are not Kingsley’s only use of David and Jonathan. Much earlier, in an unsigned review published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1850,182 Kingsley, that prophet of Protestant manliness, read Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.” alongside not only David and Jonathan, but alongside ancient Greek male companions, in the case of Socrates and Alcibiades drawn from Plato’s Symposium, which in the hands of Symonds, Wilde, and Forster would become more or less the canonical text in the history of same-sex desire. Blessed, thrice blessed, to find that hero-worship is not yet passed away; that the heart of man still beats young and fresh; that the old tales of David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his nameless friend, of “love passing the love of woman,” ennobled by its own humility, deeper than death, and mightier than the grave, can still blossom out if it be but in one heart here and there to show men still how sooner or later “he that loveth knoweth God, for God is Love!”183

Given his “robust uxoriousness,” it would be difficult to regard Kingsley’s view of Tennyson’s impassioned memorial to his late, beloved friend



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Arthur Hallam, as reflecting anything other than a noble, manly, but moreover non-sexual homosociality.184 This very point, however, is made in different ways by Stolz, Hentschel, Gagnon, and Zehnder to deny a homoerotic dimension to the biblical David and Jonathan narrative, raising the question of the extent to which Kingsley’s “robust uxoriousness” tells us anything at all about his feeling for, or relationships with, men. Part of the significance of this passage is that it illustrates how the same figures – David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and the addressee of many of his sonnets – can be understood by different readers to represent distinct, indeed fundamentally contradictory notions of masculinity and desire. A further perspective on this in Kingsley’s case is to be found in a yet earlier appeal to David and Jonathan, in a letter of 1843 to Fanny Grenfell, whom he would shortly marry. This letter above all shows how inadequate are categories influenced by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexology for interpreting human relationships from an earlier period. In the context of a discussion of Kingsley’s intimate friendship as an undergraduate at Cambridge with Charles Blachford Mansfield, Susan Chitty makes the following remarks: The friendship with Mansfield was Kingsley’s third close association with a member of his own sex, and the one that involved him most deeply. In a letter to Fanny a year later he defended the brotherly love of men, and told her she must not depreciate it. “Remember, the man is the stronger vessel. There is something awful, spiritual, in man’s love for each other.” He considered he was paying her a high compliment when he said, “Had you been a man we would have been like David and Jonathan.” He was always much moved by the beauty of the male body. In an essay in which he denigrated mountains he remarked how much more beautiful was the body of the mountaineer, “if you but strip him of his jacket and breeches”, than the mountain he climbed… After he had been married eight years he claimed he would walk ten miles to see a certain butcher’s nephew playing cricket, “in spite of the hideous English dress. One looks forward with delight to what he would be ‘in the resurrection’.” His younger brother Henry came to share these views, but whereas with Charles any element of homosexuality remained latent, with Henry it became more overt. No doubt Kingsley’s fear of such tendencies in himself accounts for his constant emphasis on “manliness” and athletic prowess… Certainly Fanny recognised how serious a rival Mansfield had been. In her biography of her husband she firmly omitted all mention of the Cambridge friendship.185

Chitty is writing, of course, twenty years before Linda Dowling rightly dismantled the connection between homosexuality and effeminacy with respect to Victorian England. Noteworthy here is Kingsley’s idealization of intimate friendship between men, which he seems to regard as the

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norm and standard of deep emotional commitment. For Kingsley, a truly rich emotional commitment in the context of marriage seems only to be possible between himself and Fanny based on the analogy of intense male friendships. Both here and in the final chapter of Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford, we get inklings of the view that a deep emotional commitment between man and woman is possible, and that women are not necessarily inferior beings in such a partnership in every possible respect; but this, in the context of the early Victorian period, was decidedly not the norm. Kingsley’s fascination with the male body anticipates, notably, the same fascination in the later writings of Edward Cracroft Lefroy, himself influenced by muscular Christianity, and in turn a belated influence on John Addington Symonds. None of this is reducible to modern ideas about “homosexuality,” yet, as we shall see when we return to the work of David Halperin at the end of this chapter, traditions of close male friendships are as much a part of the subsequent invention of the idea of homosexuality as is the idea of sensual attraction of men to other men. Muscular Christianity is a central element in two moralizing novels by Kingsley’s friend Thomas Hughes (1822–1896), the more widely read Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857)186 and its long, rambling, less frequently read sequel Tom Brown at Oxford (1861),187 which was dedicated by Hughes to his mentor and fellow Christian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872).188 The former is set during the 1830s at Rugby School, at which Hughes had been a pupil, and whose headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold (1795–1842),189 the father of Matthew Arnold and generally mentioned in the novel simply as “the Doctor,” haunts its pages and the protagonist’s conscience. Tom Brown at Oxford is more relevant here for its use of David and Jonathan, though the connection between the biblical pair and muscular Christianity is only indirect, and requires an alert and competent reader to make the connection. In the novel, Tom Brown and his friend Jack Hardy have a painful disagreement over Tom’s flirtation with a local barmaid. For Hardy, Tom’s actions have signalled that Tom, like too many of his fellow students, has shown a culpable lack of “true manliness.”190 Indeed, the major theme of the novel could be said to be Tom’s struggle to exhibit true – that is, muscular Christian – manliness. Tom and Hardy are reconciled through Hardy’s father, to whom Hardy has confessed the depth of his attachment to Tom: “Jack is a noble fellow, Mr. Brown… I came here at last yesterday, and have been having a long yarn with him. I found there was something on his mind. He can’t keep anything from his old father: and so I drew out of him that he loves you as David loved Jonathan…”191



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 323 …Tom rushed across to his friend, dearer than ever to him now, and threw his arm round his neck; and, if the un-English truth must out, had three parts of a mind to kiss the rough face which was now working with strong emotion.192

Again, we see here a nexus between constructions of masculinity and Englishness, and the use of biblical models to justify these constructions. The dominant relationships in both Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Tom Brown at Oxford are between men, and relationships between men and women are of significance primarily inasmuch as they affect the bonds between men, such as between Tom and Hardy, and between Tom and Harry Winburn, and as they affect the performance of true Christian manliness. The implied reader of the novel is, moreover, a young Christian man who could do with learning from Tom’s example.193 In the background to Tom’s relationships with other men – and women – are tensions arising from the emergence of Tractarianism in the 1830s, the novel being set in Oxford a decade thereafter. Connected with this is the narrator’s explicit advocacy of muscular Christianity. Our hero on his first appearance in public some years since,194 was without his own consent at once patted on the back by the good-natured critics, and enrolled for better or worse in the brotherhood of muscular Christians,195 who at that time were beginning to be recognized as an actual and lusty portion of general British life. As his biographer, I am not about to take exceptions to his enrolment; for, after considering the persons up and down her Majesty’s dominions to whom the new nickname has been applied, the principles which they are supposed to hold, and the sort of lives they are supposed to lead, I cannot see where he could in these times have fallen upon a nobler brotherhood. I am speaking…with only a slight acquaintance with the faith of muscular Christianity, gathered almost entirely from the witty expositions and comments of persons of a somewhat dyspeptic habit, who are not amongst the faithful themselves. Indeed, I am not aware that any authorized articles of belief have been sanctioned or published by the sect, Church, or whatever they may be. But in the course of my inquiries on the subject of muscular Christians, their works and ways, a fact has forced itself on my attention, which, for the sake of ingenious youth, like my hero, ought not to be passed over. I find, then, that side by side with these muscular Christians, and apparently claiming some sort of connections with them…have risen up another set of persons, against whom I desire to caution my readers and my hero, and to warn the latter that I do not mean on any pretence whatever to allow him to connect himself with them, however much he may be taken with their off-hand, “hail-brother well-met” manner and dress, which may easily lead careless observers to take the counterfeit for the true article. I must call the persons in question “musclemen,” as distinguished from

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The Love of David and Jonathan muscular Christians; the only point in common between the two being, that both hold it to be a good thing to have strong and well-exercised bodies, ready to be put at the shortest notice to any work of which bodies are capable, and to do it well. Here all likeness ends; for the “muscleman” seems to have no belief whatever as to the purposes for which his body has been given to him, except some hazy idea that it is to go up and down the world with him, belabouring men and captivating women for his benefit or pleasure, at once the servant and fomenter of those fierce and brutal passions which he seems to think it a necessity, and rather a fine thing than otherwise, to indulge and obey. Whereas, so far as I know, the least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man’s body is given to him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.196

Like Kingsley, Hughes wishes to make a firm distinction between a positive Christian manliness and a debased, morally and religiously empty muscularity. In a sense, Hughes has narrativized what Kingsley sermonized, making David and Jonathan represent a kind of bond between men that the implied reader is supposed to take, through the relationship between Tom and Hardy, as a moral example.197 Considerably more one-dimensional a character than Tom Brown, though in a sense no less a literary vehicle for the propagation of true Christian manliness, is the eponymous protagonist of Frederic William Farrar’s 1860 novel Julian Home.198 Although all but forgotten today, apart from those with a professional interest in the literature of the Victorian period and its background, Farrar’s novels were popular in the 1860s.199 Farrar (1831–1903) had been a student of F. D. Maurice at King’s College, London, and was a master at Harrow School from 1855 to 1871, when he was appointed headmaster of Marlborough (it was during this period that John Addington Symonds was a pupil at Harrow).200 It was, of course, largely as a result of the particular ethos of nineteenth-century English public schools, in which intense adolescent male friendships existed and were fostered, and in which Classics was a staple of the curriculum and the Bible equally a part of everyday literary competence, that traditions of ancient paria amicorum became so central, and came to play such an important part in the subsequent reconstitution of a positive history of same-sex desire.201 In Julian Home, Julian has a deep schoolboy friendship with Hugh Lillyston, a friendship which draws a comparison with David and Jonathan: They were constantly together, and never tired of each other’s society; and at last, when their tutor, observing and thoroughly approving of the



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 325 friendship, put them both in the same room, the school began in fun to call them Achilles and Patroclus, Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades, David and Jonathan, Theseus and Pirithous, and as many other names of paria amicorum as they could remember.202 So, form by form, Lillyston and Julian Home mounted up the school side by side, and illustrated the noblest and holiest uses of friendship by adding to each other’s happiness and advantage in every way. I am glad to dwell on such a picture, knowing, O Holy Friendship, how awfully a school-boy can sometimes desecrate thy name!203

Later in the novel, after Julian has gone up to Camford, we find deeper engagements with the nature of male friendships in a college context. The following passage is exemplary, but is also noteworthy for implying a kind of male friendship and a certain semiotics of the body that is almost unrecognizable today, chiefly because the language of “love” between men combined with this sort of physical closeness has come, at least in the England of the early twenty-first century, potentially to connote same-sex erotic desire: Many thoughts were evidently working in Kennedy’s mind, and they did not all seem to be bright or beautiful as the thoughts of youth should be. Julian’s brain was busy too; and as they paced up and down, arm in arm, the many colo[u]red images of hope and fancy were flitting thick and fast across his vision. He was thinking of his own future and of Kennedy’s, whom he was beginning to love as a brother, and for whose weakness he sometimes feared.204

There is, of course, no reason to read such connotations back into the text, nothing ipso facto to exclude them categorically from the text, and nothing to say what such language and physical expression might connote in other such contexts in the future.205 Julian Home is part not only of the reception history of David and Jonathan, but of the reception histories of the classical traditions connected with these paradigmatic male friendships, and particularly of Cicero, De amicitia, from which the Latin term paria amicorum derives.206 As with Kingsley’s review of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” this is another example of David and Jonathan being read intertextually with classical male friendships, but as both Kingsley and Farrar are writing as classically literate Christians, it is possibly the case – as in Vermigli’s Loci communes, Cowley’s Davideis, and John Gill’s commentary on 1 Samuel207 – that David and Jonathan represent the model of friendship in light of which the others are to be read. It is hard to press this point, however. What is to be noted is that for the schoolboys of Farrar’s fictional Harton,208 these paria amicorum are not only known but proverbial. What will be clear as

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we progress towards the end of the nineteenth century is that David and Jonathan will continue to be read alongside classical paria amicorum by readers with comparable intertextual competence to Kingsley and Farrar, but that their signification will change as perceptions of the nature of male friendships and their relation with same-sex desire changes, particularly in the hands of figures who, like John Addington Symonds, have a vested interest in reconstituting a history of same-sex eroticism. David and Jonathan, then, are claimed by advocates of what was problematically termed, by others, “muscular Christianity,” just as their relationship had been claimed by advocates of a very different form of Anglicanism, the Tractarian, with which Kingsley in particular but also Hughes stood in a somewhat tense relationship. Both these strands of Christian reading had complex effects not only on each other, but on subsequent developments with respect to the relationship between Christianity and the construction of gender. Both depend, furthermore, on the possibility of reading the biblical narratives in relation to the retrieval of different aspects of the heritage of medieval Christendom, monasticism, and chivalry. This process becomes still more complex when the relationship between the authority of the Christian heritage and the authority of the heritage of ancient Greece becomes explicitly problematized. Here the issue of Oxford Hellenism becomes significant. The study of the literary heritage of ancient Greece was revived at Oxford by Benjamin Jowett, and this is important for understanding John Addington Symonds and Oscar Wilde in particular. But the conscious retrieval of this heritage has a longer pedigree, going back to the German Hellenists of the eighteenth century,209 and ultimately to the Renaissance. This retrieval is deeply implicated, particularly in the works of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, with a qualified rejection of Christianity. This led to an ideological opposition between the heritages of medieval Christianity and ancient Greece,210 in other words, “the pitting of a ‘Greek’ ideal of life, derived in large part from the German Hellenists, against a rejected ‘medieval’ Christianity.”211 The tension between “Hebraism” and “Hellenism” lies behind an essay by Edward Cracroft Lefroy, who drew on muscular Christianity to seek to resolve this tension. For Lefroy, the issue was the relationship between “Hebraism” and “Hellenism” as ideals of life, and the way “muscular Christianity” might offer an adequate synthesis of the best elements of both.212 He distinguishes between “pseudo-Hellenism,” which he associates with Pater and Symonds, and which he slightly misleadingly sums up as “Act according to the promptings of nature, and you cannot go wrong,”213 and Hellenism proper, the legacy of the greatest philosophers,



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legislators, and statesmen of ancient Greece, which held up as an ideal “the good” (to\ kalo/n) and “the fitting” (to\ prepo/n). Hebraism he associates primarily with an unhealthy, self-mortifying asceticism. It is muscular Christianity, Lefroy felt, that offers a synthesis of the best of Hebraism and Hellenism: Muscular Christianity includes all that is brightest in Hellenism, and all that is purest in Hebraism. It involves the cultivation of every faculty, the use of every talent. It is the best safeguard against the sin of intolerance and bigotry, for it will keep body, soul, and intellect in stable equilibrium, and equilibrium means moderation.214

Lefroy’s work prompted a belated, posthumous, and in fact largely appreciative response from Symonds,215 which identifies Lefroy’s struggle to find a balance between his Christianity – Lefroy was an Anglican priest – and his Hellenism as very much an inner struggle.216 Symonds’s response is appreciative of Lefroy’s work while criticizing his appeal to muscular Christianity: It was both the strength and the weakness of Lefroy’s philosophy that he began by postulating the Christian faith as a divinely appointed way of surmounting the corruption and imperfection of nature. His strength; because he undoubtedly lived by this faith. His weakness; because it is impossible to demonstrate or to maintain that Christianity has this efficacy. “Muscular Christianity,” to use his own phrase, “includes all that is brightest in Hellenism, and all that is purest in Hebraism.” Alas! It was not Muscular Christianity but one Muscular Christian, Lefroy himself, who included these two excellences.217

What Symonds praises above all in Lefroy is the way his poems are stamped with a deep appreciation for beauty, especially the beauty of the young male body, a fascination Lefroy shared not only with Symonds, but in different ways with Kingsley and Pater. The “neo-Hellenism” of his poems is “pure and modern,” with a “feeling for physical beauty and strength” that is “devoid of sensuality.”218 This is interwoven in Lefroy with a Christianity that is not ascetic, bringing Hellenism and Christianity together in a way that can speak to an otherwise de-enchanted modern age: We are all of us engaged, in some way or another, with the problem of coordinating the Hellenic and Christian ideals, or, what is much the same thing, of adapting Christian traditions to the governing conceptions of a scientific age. Lefroy proved that it is possible to combine religious faith with frank delight in natural loveliness, to be a Christian without asceticism, and a Greek without sensuality.219

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What does all this have to do with David and Jonathan? The resignification of the relationship between David and Jonathan from a type of romantic, spiritual, apparently non-sexual friendship between men into a type of Whitmanian comradeship in which, even if it is not overtly expressed, the erotic is neither excluded nor sublimated, takes place against the background of a complex network of ideological struggles between the legacy of Tractarianism, various construals of muscular (Protestant) Christianity, different manifestations of “Hebraism” and “Hellenism,” and emergent Aestheticism. In the case of avowedly Christian authors such as Newman, Dalgairns, Kingsley, Hughes, Farrar, and Rossetti, David and Jonathan were part of their authoritative religious heritage, and the biblical pair are cited in their own right as models of spiritual friendship, bearing the stamp of either the heritage of medieval monasticism, or the heritage of medieval chivalry. Kingsley, to be sure, places David and Jonathan alongside classical paria amicorum in his response to Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” but this conjunction already has a long history among Christian authors,220 and neither in Kingsley’s case nor in the cases of Newman, Dalgairns, Hughes, Farrar, and Rossetti, is there any suggestion that David and Jonathan are being consciously appropriated to give the approval of antiquity to sexual relationships between men. This begins to alter with the impact of Oxford Hellenism, albeit in an equivocal fashion. Partly this is due to the influence of revived Greek scholarship, and partly it is due to the whittling away of the authority of Christianity and its sacred scriptures. When David and Jonathan are invoked by Symonds and Wilde, and later by Marc-André Raffalovich, Edward Carpenter, and E. M. Forster, it is alongside putatively analogous Greek traditions, of heroic comrades in the case of Symonds and Carpenter, and of Platonic paiderasti/a in the cases of Wilde, Raffalovich, and Forster, though the boundaries between these different appropriations are to some extent fluid, as is the extent to which they involve the condoning of explicitly sexual relationships (certainly in the case of Carpenter and Forster, but not so clearly in the case of Raffalovich). Despite the fact that all these figures had very complex relationships to various forms of Christianity, the place of David and Jonathan in the canon of Christian scripture is no longer of primarily theological relevance here: their relationship belongs to the cultural heritage of Victorian and Edwardian society, but no longer to an authoritative religious framework. To be sure, it would have been possible to read Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, just about possible to read the same author’s “The Meeting of David and Jonathan,” and barely possible to hear Wilde’s impassioned defence at the Old Bailey without connecting their use of ancient



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sources to sex – or at least erotic desire – between men, but the subsequent reception of Symonds, Wilde, Carpenter, and Forster in particular, and both their known sexual relationships with men, and their roles in either re-ordering or queering societal perceptions of same-sex desire, make it much more difficult for us to avoid making that connection. 6. John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) Symonds is a key figure in the transmission of the David and Jonathan narrative as part of a heritage of same-sex erotic desire. His importance derives from several factors. First, he himself wrote a poem inspired by the David and Jonathan narrative – and perhaps also by his love for one of his students, Norman Moor – in early 1872, and referred to David and Jonathan at several points in his other works. Second, he was one of the more brilliant students of Benjamin Jowett, who played a decisive role in the introduction of historical criticism to the study of the biblical texts and the introduction of German philosophy and critical scholarship into Victorian intellectual culture, but was also most significant for his role in the revival of Greek learning at Oxford, which provided the primary intellectual context in which Symonds was incubated. Third, Symonds is not simply a major figure in Oxford Hellenism, but a decisive figure in the emergence of the discourse of human sexuality. His role is decisive not simply because of his seminal works A Problem in Greek Ethics and A Problem in Modern Ethics, and his collaboration with Havelock Ellis on the foundational study Sexual Inversion, but because of his direct or indirect influence on other key figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and the so-called Uranian poets.221 In his memoirs, Symonds recalls his reading of two of Plato’s dialogues during an exeat from Harrow in March 1858: When we returned from the play, I went to bed and began to read my Cary’s Plato. It so happened that I stumbled on the Phaedrus. I read on and on, till I reached the end. Then I began the Symposium; and the sun was shining on the shrubs outside the ground-floor room in which I slept, before I shut the book up. I have related these insignificant details because that night was one of the most important nights of my life; and when anything of great gravity has happened to me, I have always retained a firm recollection of trifling facts which formed its context. Here in the Phaedrus and the Symposium – in the myth of the Soul and the speeches of Pausanias Agathon and Diotima – I discovered the true liber amoris at last, the revelation I had been waiting for, the consecration

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This passage is noteworthy on many levels, but not least because the possibility that the study of ancient Greek and Latin literature might inappropriately influence the desires of the boys who studied such texts had been a source of worry to some.223 In the case of Frederick W. Faber, writing in August 1835, the danger had been framed in terms of the appropriate place of “heathen” and “Christian” works in the education of boys, the proper object of which should be, “fitting the mind for the reception of truth rather than filling it with knowledge:” The absence of nearly all those characteristics which should mark Christian instruction, the familiarizing the susceptible mind of boyhood with representations of crime and unnatural lust, which the apostle says it is a shame even to make mention of, the entwining around the remembrances of early study the fictions of an impure mythology – these will be fearful items of account at the day of judgment… You teach him to pray night and morning from his cradle upwards that he may not be led into temptation; and then you tamper with his lusts, his feelings, his eternal welfare, by making him pore over Horace’s Odes, where all sorts of enormities are dressed up in all the felicities of melody and diction – in all the charms of levity and jest. His Bible he is taught to read in his native tongue, and but seldom; but these impurities he has painfully to work out from an unknown language, where the impression is of course deeper and stronger.224



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A not dissimilar position is taken by Richard St John Tyrwhitt in a 1877 article directly criticizing Symonds’s then recent work Studies of the Greek Poets.225 Tyrwhitt, however, ironically depending on the work of Jowett, explicitly attacks Symonds both for his “polemical Agnosticism,”226 and for adopting a morally equivocal stance in relation to a culture in which homoerotic love was accepted: These pages are a rebellion against nature as she is here, in the name of nature as described in Athens. And the word nature now brings us unavoidably on awkward ground. Mr. Symonds is probably the most innocent of men; we certainly cannot look upon him in any other light. He might not return the compliment, for everyone who objects to suggestive passages of a certain character is now called prurient by their authors, and this reproach we propose to incur. The emotions of Socrates at sight of the beauty of young Charmides are described for him by Plato, in the dialogue which bears the name of the latter. Socrates’ purity and indeed his asceticism of life are freely and fully vindicated elsewhere by Plato, and will never be disputed here. The expressions put in his mouth are, no doubt, typically Hellenic. But they are not natural: and it is well known that Greek love of nature and beauty went frequently against nature. The word is used equivocally in this book – for the outward show of creation, and for the inward impulses of man; and it is assumed that because the former are generally beautiful, the latter are invariably to be followed. Neither are good, for what is good? They are both here, and must be taken for what they are.227

Tyrwhitt is making a direct association here between paiderasti/a in Plato and the sexual love between men that is “against nature” (para\ fu/sin) in Romans 1:26, a connection he finds in an excursus in Jowett’s influential 1859 commentary on Romans.228 For Tyrwhitt, Symonds’s Hellenism is amoral, and as such will allow that sex and sexual desire between men need not ipso facto be subject to rebuke, a possibility Tyrwhitt finds abhorrent. But Symonds in his Memoirs stresses the potential of the male love he found in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, and by extension his own same-sex desire, to be noble, manly, and a force for good. The contrast he draws between the Platonic love – that is, paiderastic e1rwj – he found in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, and the adolescent sex he was aware of as a schoolboy at Harrow, suggests that he does not see same-sex desire as necessarily an inclination towards gross moral laxity. At the same time, his relation to himself as a desiring subject is a complex matter. His reading of the Symposium and the Phaedrus in 1858 is an important moment in his personal development, both emotionally and intellectually. Symonds’s reading of two of the dialogues most concerned with e1rwj, and in particular with paiderasti/a, was decisive in

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helping him to deal with the moral crisis created by his sexual attraction to other males, but this was a process that – as his Memoirs and extensive correspondence make abundantly clear – was lifelong. Furthermore, his engagement with Plato cannot be separated from his extensive engagement with classical Greek society and literature in general, both as a student of Greats at Oxford and thereafter. From his time at Oxford on he had a lengthy association with Benjamin Jowett, who had been made Regius Professor of Greek in 1855 and became Master of Balliol College in 1870, collaborating with Jowett in his translation of Plato’s Symposium, and disagreeing significantly with him on the subject of Greek love.229 In 1873 and 1876 the two volumes of Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets were published, and in 1883 his A Problem in Greek Ethics, originally written in 1873, was privately printed in a run of just ten copies. In the longer term, the modern debates on sexuality in ancient Greece, and human sexuality in general, could not have evolved as they did without the contribution of these works by Symonds, though it must be said that while works such as A Problem in Greek Ethics and the later A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891), which deal explicitly with issues of sexuality, have been widely read by contributors to these debates, his other writings apparently have not been read quite so widely. Nevertheless, his criticism and his poetry, together with his Memoirs and extensive correspondence, provide an invaluable insight into his emotional and intellectual development, and into how both aspects of his development intersect with his engagement with a range of literary sources of an extent few, if any, individual scholars today would attempt to master. The collection of poems Many Moods was published in 1878, after Studies of the Greek Poets. This volume, and the poem “The Meeting of David and Jonathan” that it contains, are these days unjustly neglected. Indeed, while Symonds mentions in passing in his Memoirs some of the poems this volume contains, there is no mention at all of David and Jonathan in the Memoirs, though there are occasional references in his correspondence. He does, however, mention David and Jonathan in Studies of the Greek Poets and Walt Whitman: A Study, and it is with these references that we can begin to reconstruct the intertextual matrix that provides the context for “The Meeting of David and Jonathan.” In a letter to Henry Graham Dakyns on 13 January, 1872, Symonds wrote, I cannot write. The one poem of Jonathan & David is done. But the narrative of the Bible is so stupendous that I cannot deal with any more. I can only absorb. It is frantic in me to have thought of mangling it. How selfish it is to write all this to you. Yet who are you to me but my best dearest Comrade?230



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Much of this letter is concerned with Symonds’s anguished feelings for his Clifton College student Norman Moor, with whom he had for four years been in love. With respect to David and Jonathan, the reference can only be to “The Meeting of David and Jonathan,” which was clearly written at some point between 9 and 13 January, 1872. Frederick Roden assumes the poem was written in 1878,231 but this is only the date Many Moods was published. Linda Dowling dates Symonds’s “career…as a leading Victorian homosexual apologist and advocate of reform in the British laws and attitudes governing homosexuality” to early 1872, in response to Robert Buchanan’s attack on the poetry of the pre-Raphaelites.232 But in terms of his incubation in biblical and classical texts, this was also a period during which he had been immersed in the study of Greek poetry, leading up to the publication of Studies of the Greek Poets. On 9 January, 1872 Symonds visited the Bristol artist Edward Clifford to view his painting David, from which he seems to have taken inspiration for his poem,233 a copy of which he subsequently offered to show Clifford.234 Between then and 13 January, when he wrote the letter to Dakyns cited above, “The Meeting of David and Jonathan,” in some form at least, was written. Symonds seems to have sketched an earlier poem entitled “David’s Epilogue,”235 perhaps a rewriting of 2 Samuel 1:19-27, but this appears to have vanished without trace. “The Meeting of David and Jonathan” is an elaboration of 1 Samuel 17:54–18:7, and is thus significant for showing not only how David and Jonathan might have been understood in the 1870s, but how readers may perceive gaps in an ancient and influential text that can then be creatively elaborated. The poem was published in a collection written over the preceding fifteen years and dedicated to Roden Noel.236 Alongside “The Meeting of David and Jonathan” are several other poems dealing with love between men, including “The Lotos-Garland of Antinous,”237 the fruit of Symonds’s developing fascination with the relationship between Hadrian and his young beloved. In “The Meeting of David and Jonathan,” the biblical text is not read in relation to other texts in the scriptural canon. Rather, its literary genesis is to be sought in Symonds’s reading of Graeco-Roman and Renaissance literature that deals with love between men. In particular, David and Jonathan represent the ideal of heroic friendship that Symonds found in Homer’s portrayal of Achilles and Patroclus, though there are nevertheless strong hints that Jonathan is the elder of the two lovers and David the younger, suggesting that Symonds has not entirely disentangled Homer’s portrayal of Achilles and Patroclus from those of Aeschylus, Plato, and Aeschines. While any sexual dimension of the love between David and Jonathan is left latent at best, the fact that sexual love between men is frequently no more

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than a suggestion in the literature of this period, together with the fact that Symonds does elsewhere explicitly advocate the validity of same-sex desire, would strongly suggest that Symonds’s reconfiguration of the David and Jonathan story is a key part of the process by which it became possible to read the relationship between the two men as sexual. The poem begins immediately after David’s victory over Goliath. Symonds places Jonathan in the scene narrated in 1 Samuel 17:55-58, which in the Bible only refers explicitly to Saul, Abner, and David. When David appears, he is described as a beautiful boy. The curtain rose: in poured the ruddy sun Sphering a slender stripling, dim and dun Amid that glory, like an olive tree High on a hill-top you can hardly see For all the fire behind it. Round his hair, Flaming like gold, God set the golden glare — A coronal whereof the radiance smote Saul’s eyes; and in the centre, like a mote, Swam the sweet boy’s face, marvellously wan With wonder and with awe for thinking on The miracle his sling and stone had wrought…

This first meeting between the older Jonathan and the boy David is the beginning of a love on Jonathan’s part for David greater than Saul’s love for the boy, which may anticipate Gide’s Saül, in which both Saul and Jonathan are in love with David: Saul loved him: but in Jonathan was stirred More love than Saul’s soul held: yet not one word As yet was spoken…

Inasmuch as David is described in the poem as a “slender stripling” and a “sweet boy,” Jonathan and David would seem to represent for Symonds a form of paiderastic relationship, what Oscar Wilde would later defend at his trial as “such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan,” suggesting that the biblical relationship is being deliberately re-worked in light of Symonds’s understanding of Athenian paiderasti/a. We cannot be certain of this, and there are multiform dangers with biographical criticism, but this love of an older for a younger man is exactly the form the relationship between Symonds and Moor took. This is, however, somewhat at odds with the way David and Jonathan seem to be understood in Studies of the Greek Poets, where theirs is a relationship of comrades akin to that of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, which Symonds is keen strongly to distinguish from paiderasti/a.



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Unlike the biblical text, with the possible exception of 1 Samuel 20:17 and 2 Samuel 1:26, the love between the two men is mutual, which suggests that Symonds is re-reading the biblical narrative through the filter of a reception history in which David and Jonathan have attained the status of a pair of friends like Achilles and Patroclus, Theseus and Peirithous, or Orestes and Pylades: … As some still mountain well Is silvered on its surface by the slow Arising of the full moon orbed and low, From the star-set peaks impendent; so the tone Of that melodious voice, thrilling alone Through the tent’s stillness, changed the yearning deep Within the breast of Jonathan, and sleep Fell from his soul. A man by love new-made, His every hope upon the heart was laid Of Jesse’s son. Then, as he bent and burned, The eyes of David on his eyes were turned; And in that moment their twin lives became The single splendour of one spiry flame, Shooting from sundered brands to blend the might Of married fires and leap aloft with light.

Jonathan’s love for David is inspired by the sight and sound of his beloved, awakening senses muted in the laconic, written biblical text. There is also a hint here of the language of marriage: the passive participle “married” here is a metaphor for the union of flames, which in turn is a metaphor for the deep unity that binds Jonathan and David. Although their relationship is not explicitly portrayed as sexual, their emotional bond is expressed physically, and perhaps suggestively, in a poetic elaboration of 1 Samuel 18:1-4 that shows the influence also of 20:41. Thither with David, fleet of foot, and still, Lest men should mar his purpose, from the hill Unto the valley shadows went and ran, Large in the lucent twilight, Jonathan. There by an ancient holm-oak huge and tough, Clasping the firm rock with gnarled roots and rough, He stayed their steps; and in his arms of strength Took David, and for sore love found at length Solace in speech, and pressure, and the breath Wherewith the mouth of yearning winnoweth Hearts overcharged for utterance. In that kiss Soul unto soul was knit and bliss to bliss.

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This passionate scene takes the place of the rather bland biblical reference to the cutting of a covenant. When Jonathan surrenders his clothing and armour to David, it symbolizes not only their covenant, but the deeper union of their souls. Symonds also sees here the surrender by Jonathan of the right to succeed Saul (cf. 1 Sam. 23:17),238 but there is no question here of one manipulating the other, or exploiting his feelings: the two men are in love. Then, for the prince found bare embracement scant To stand for token of such covenant As he would strike with David, from his waist He plucked the girdle, and the robe unlaced That fell around his loins; next the blade, Hilted with ivory and gold, he laid Upon the grass before him, and his bow. These things he gave to Jesse’s son, that so, Wearing his raiment and his armour, he Within his sight a second self might be. Nor were words wanting; for he bowed his head Even to the breast of Jesse’s son, and said: “Nay, take them, David! Darling art thou called, Darling of all men, Darling of the Lord, But most my Darling – mine – whose heart is thralled, Whose soul is even as thy soul! Take this sword, Wherewith I smote the Philistines, what time Swarming they fled from Michmash, horde by horde, To Ajalon. Take this my bow, the prime Of yew-boughs, fashioned for an archer’s hand: This mantle and this belt, wherewith I climb Saul’s throne, or in the gate for judgment stand. Take all, for all I have hath fallen to thee; And I am thine. Lo, as a winter wand, Flowerless and leafless on the almond tree, Waiteth, till on a sudden spring doth wake The wonder of her buds to ecstasy; So doth my soul beneath thy beauty break Her prison-bands of deadness! Yea, I lean Forth to thy sweetness and thy strength to slake With dews of life, with heaven-shed light serene, The drought that still hath bound me. Till this eve I lived not: now I live; now find how keen Are those swift shafts wherewith the Lord doth cleave The hearts of lovers. – I am not like thee, Godlike in voice, in gesture; yet can weave Kindness around thee, till the people see Thou art their prince as I am – yea, till thou,



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 337 My better, take and wield this sovereignty, While I beneath thy throne in homage bow. — Scion of Jesse! Like an arrowy palm, That nestles ’neath a sheltering cedar-bough Until her time be come; then, strong and calm, Shoots heaven-ward, shadowing with ascendant crest The sombre roof that nursed her, dropping balm Into the sable cedar’s rugged breast; Shalt thou o’er me and mine up-soar, God-sent, With gifts prophetic and with fervour blest Beyond such lot as ours. – I am content To be thy second. – Let us stand together, We twain against the world, indifferent To fate and fortune. – In clear summer weather Twin eagles I have seen sailing alone The cloudless blue, twin roes upon the heather Bounding: the like are we – so strong of bone, So fleet of foot, so firm of will, to raze The heathen remnant from this land, and throne Jehovah in his seat of steadfast praise.— Oh, for the beauty of thy brows, my brother! Oh, for thy keen unwavering royal gaze! Dearer art though than sister or than mother, Than moonèd eyes of maidens:239 for should death Take thee, where in the whole world dwells another To wake my winter, and with spirit-breath Stir the sealed fountains of my slumbering life? Dear to my heart is she who tarrieth Now at the tent-door for my feet, the wife Whose breasts are built with beauty as a tower.240 Dear is the damsel I have gained in strife, And soothed and tended like a stricken flower, Till she too loved me. But this Love, this wonder, That leaps upon me with a warrior’s power, Whose eyes are lightnings, and whose voice is thunder, Wherein the flesh is nought the heart’s life all, Who rives the crystal walls of heaven asunder, Who welds my soul to thine a willing thrall — This Love, this Life, this Word of living God, Lo, David, He is Lord! He bids us fall Here in this place upon the hallowed sod, To swear a sacrament and solemn vow. — Stretch forth, I prithee stretch, thy shepherd’s rod. See: it is broken. This is mine: take thou That part. Now neither time nor chance shall sever The troth that we have plighted. Brow to brow, Let us pace forth, to live, one soul, for ever.”

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While the love of the two men is mutual, this long outpouring of devotion on Jonathan’s part reflects the one-sidedness of the biblical narrative, in which Jonathan’s is clearly the more intense emotional attachment. David never speaks. There is a sense here that David and Jonathan are to work together to “raze the heathen remnant from this land,” which shows the clear influence of classical paria amicorum: in the biblical text this pair never fight together, in stark contrast with, for example, Orestes and Pylades in Euripides. As I argued in the previous chapter, in order to read a David and Jonathan narrative as such in 1 and 2 Samuel, readers must do some work, make connections, fill in gaps, consciously or unconsciously, from their wider intertextual competence. In the case of Symonds, this would have included a vast range of Greek and Latin literature from Homer’s Iliad and the tragedies of Euripides to Cicero’s De amicitia and Virgil’s Aeneid. Clear also in this passage is the contrast between Jonathan’s intense love for David and the far inferior love of all the women in his life, including his wife. This contrast precedes a further token of their covenant, the breaking and sharing of David’s shepherd’s rod, which is a token of “the troth that we have plighted,” drawing again on the language of marriage. Were we to read this poem on its own, out of context, we might have an interesting footnote to the reception history of the biblical text. What makes it significant is the fact that it was penned by a figure who, in his other writings, sought to defend same-sex relationships between men, and in the process contributed to laying the foundations for tracing a history of same-sex eroticism. In the chapter on Achilles in Studies of the Greek Poets, Symonds discourses on the effect Homer’s portrayal of Achilles had on the Greek imagination, paying particularly attention to its effect on Alexander the Great.241 Most pertinent to our theme, however, is Symonds’s treatment of the comradeship of Achilles and Patroclus. Not only does he make a direct comparison between this comradeship in Homer and the biblical David and Jonathan, but he weaves the language of 2 Samuel 1:26 allusively into his discussion of Achilles, on the assumption that the language of the Bible was so familiar to his readers that no more explicit connection need be made:242 In Achilles, Homer summed up and fixed for ever the ideal of the Greek character. He presented an imperishable picture of their national youthfulness, and of their ardent genius, to the Greeks. The “beautiful human heroism” of Achilles, his strong personality, his fierce passions controlled and tempered by divine wisdom, his intense friendship and love that passed the love of women, above all, the splendour of his youthful life in death made



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 339 perfect, hovered like a dream above the imagination of the Greeks, and insensibly determined their subsequent development.243

In his summary of the central theme of the Iliad, Symonds writes The wrath of Achilles against Agamemnon, which prevented him at first from fighting; the love of Achilles, passing the love of women, for Patroclus, which induced him to forego his anger and to fight at last; these are the two poles on which the Iliad turns.244

A further biblical allusion, this time to 2 Samuel 1:23, appears in Symonds’s comment on the death of Achilles: “His ashes were mingled with those of Patroclus. In their death they were not divided.”245 The biblical verse here refers to the death in the battle of Gilboa of Saul and Jonathan, part of David’s dirge following their death. Until Symonds shows his hand, we are left wondering in what sense the love of Achilles for Patroclus passes that of women, what layers of meaning are contributed by the addition of this gloss, and what connotations it would have borne for educated Victorian readers incubated in the literary worlds of the Bible and Homer. Symonds duly offers some clarification: Nearly all the historians of Greece have failed to insist upon the fact that fraternity in arms played for the Greek race the same part as the idealisation of women for the knighthood of feudal Europe. Greek mythology and history are full of tales of friendship, which can only be paralleled by the story of David and Jonathan in our Bible. The legends of Heracles and Hylas, of Theseus and Peirithous, of Apollo and Hyacinth, of Orestes and Pylades, occur immediately to the mind. Among the noblest patriots, tyrannicides, lawgivers, and self-devoted heroes in the early times of Greece, we always find the names of friends and comrades recorded with peculiar honour. Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who slew the despot Hipparchus of Athens; Diocles and Philolaus, who gave laws to Thebes; Chariton and Melanippus, who resisted the sway of Phalaris in Sicily; Cratinus and Aristodemus, who devoted their lives to propitiate offended deities when a plague had fallen upon Athens; these comrades, staunch to each other in their love, and elevated by friendship to the pitch of noblest enthusiasm, were among the favourite saints of Greek legendary history. In a word, the chivalry of Hellas found its motive force in friendship rather than in the love of women; and the motive force of all chivalry is a generous, soul-exalting, unselfish passion. The fruit which friendship bore among the Greeks was courage in the face of danger, indifference to life when honour was at stake, patriotic ardour, the love of liberty, and lionhearted rivalry in battle. “Tyrants,” said Plato, “stand in awe of friends.”246

In this passage, Symonds does a number of things. First, he seeks to recover the example of comradely love between men in ancient Greece

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as a moral ideal for his own life, and for the Victorian society for which he was personally so ill-fitted. Second, in presenting such comradeship as a moral ideal he is attempting to distance himself from the purely physical eroticism between men of the kind that shocked and disgusted him at Harrow, a point that becomes a little clearer in A Problem in Greek Ethics when he contrasts Plato’s portrayal of Achilles and Patroclus with that of Homer.247 The distinction Symonds makes is based on the Platonic distinction between “celestial” (ou0ra&nioj) or “heroic” and “mundane” (pa&ndhmoj) or “vulgar” love made by Pausanius in Plato’s Symposium.248 Third, while Symonds is concerned here with comradeship in ancient Greece, by drawing David and Jonathan into his discussion he is indirectly, and perhaps inadvertently offering a commentary on 1 and 2 Samuel. In his discussion of Achilles, Symonds is determined to keep separate the moral ideal of comradeship between men from purely physical eroticism. This, at least, would seem to be his intent when he writes that “Achilles and Patroclus cannot be charged with having sanctioned by example any vice, however much posterity may have read its own moods of thought and feeling into Homer.” There is a reflection here, it seems, of Symonds’s own struggle to understand the nature and implications of his own sexual attraction to other men. In light of this, his comment to Dakyns that “[i]t is frantic in me to have thought of mangling it” (viz. the biblical portrayal of David and Jonathan) suggests that the same struggle may lie behind his poetic rewriting of the biblical narrative of their meeting, particular when we take account of his letter to Dakyns from London on 11 January, 1872, in which his engagement with David and Jonathan seems somehow to be accompanied by the temptations of Shakespearian demons.249 Do these demons, then, represent for Symonds his physical desire for other men divorced from the altruistic ideal of male comradeship to which he claimed allegiance? Equally significant, however, is the fact that Symonds here shows an awareness that the reception of Homer among later readers involves the anachronistic importation into the Iliad of later perspectives and concerns, a point dealt with above in connection with Aeschylus, Plato, Xenophon, and Aeschines.250 Symonds makes this point more clearly in connection with the reference to the Myrmidons of Aeschylus in Plato’s Symposium. Plato, discussing the Myrmidones of Æschylus, remarks in the Symposium that the tragic poet was wrong to make Achilles the lover of Patroclus, seeing that Patroclus was the elder of the two, and that Achilles was the youngest and most beautiful of all the Greeks. The fact, however, is



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 341 that Homer himself raises no question in our minds about the relations of lover and beloved. Achilles and Patroclus are comrades. Their friendship is equal. It was only the reflective activity of the Greek mind, working upon the Homeric legend by the light of subsequent custom, which introduced these distinctions. The humanity of Homer was purer, larger, and more sane than that of his posterity among the Hellenes.251

Symonds concludes elsewhere that “homosexual relations were not prominent in the so-called heroic age of Greece,”252 and that paiderasti/a as it existed in fifth-century bce Athens was read back into Homer, drawing an intriguing parallel with the anachronistic reading of the Bible: The Homeric poems were the Bible of the Greeks, and formed the staple of their education; nor did they scruple to wrest the sense of the original, reading, like modern Bibliolaters, the sentiments and passions of a later age into the text… Homer stood in a double relation to the historical Greeks. On the one hand, he determined their development by the influence of his ideal characters. On the other, he underwent from them interpretations which varied with the spirit of each successive century. He created the national temperament, but received in turn the influx of new thoughts and emotions occurring in the course of its expansion.253

Symonds also appeals to David and Jonathan to elucidate the theme of comradeship in the poems of Walt Whitman. The poetry of Whitman, whom Xavier Mayne would call “one of the prophets and priests of homosexuality,”254 and the use of whose name was, in Richard Dellamora’s words, a “signifier of male-male desire” in the context of Victorian literary culture,255 had an extraordinary effect on Symonds, and later on Edward Carpenter,256 Oscar Wilde, and E. M. Forster. More recently, his poetry has become a standard feature of anthologies of literature concerned with love between men. What is much less clear is the extent to which the reception of Whitman’s work reflects anything like his intentions. The relationship between intention and reception is relevant here because in his correspondence with Whitman, Symonds was deeply concerned with pinning down the author’s intentions in writing Calamus, a series of poems first published in the third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1860. The issue is complicated by the fact that despite the existence of correspondence between Whitman and English admirers, it is clear neither whether, nor to what extent, Whitman’s own understanding of his poems changed after he wrote them, nor whether Whitman was being entirely honest with his correspondents in his disavowal of a homoerotic construal of his poems. The importance of Whitman for Symonds is clear from the following passage in his 1893 study:

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The Love of David and Jonathan In 1889 I allowed the following words of mine to be circulated in a collection of what may be called testimonials to the bard of Camden: “ ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which I first read at the age of twenty-five, influenced me more perhaps than any other book has done, except the Bible; more than Plato, more than Goethe. It is impossible for me to speak critically of what has so deeply entered into the fibre and marrow of my being.”257  

The most important section of Symonds’s study for our purposes is chapter five,258 in which Symonds discusses Calamus with a particular focus on “adhesiveness, or the love of comrades.” Whitman’s poems are treated to a richly intertextual engagement, in which they are freely interwoven with classical and, on one occasion, biblical sources. Thus, with reference to “To a Western Boy”259 Symonds remarks, …Whitman never suggests that comradeship may occasion the development of physical desire. On the other hand, he does not in set terms condemn desires, or warn his disciples against their perils. There is indeed a distinctly sensuous side to his conception of adhesiveness… Like Plato, in the Phædrus, Whitman describes an enthusiastic type of masculine emotion, leaving its private details to the moral sense and special inclination of the individuals concerned.260

Here Plato’s Phaedrus is used to interpret Whitman’s poem, whose interpretation is then treated as a matter for the individual reader to determine in dialogue with an allusive and suggestive text. We might compare this with Symonds’s earlier comment that …there is some misapprehension abroad regarding the precise nature of what Whitman meant by “Calamus.” His method of treatment has, to a certain extent, exposed him to misconstruction… The melody is in the Dorian mood – recalling to our minds that fellowship in arms which flourished among the Dorian tribes, and formed the chivalry of pre-historic Hellenes.261

What Symonds finds in Whitman is an evocation of the ideal of comradeship between men that Symonds himself had found in his study of the Greek poets. Moreover, Symonds regards this as a means of ennobling sexual desires for other men that might so easily have nothing more than a physical focus. The following lengthy, but nonetheless crucial passage makes this clear: Studying his works by their own light, and by the light of their author’s character, interpreting each part by reference to the whole and in the spirit of the whole, an impartial critic will, I think, be drawn to the conclusion that what he calls the “adhesiveness” of comradeship is meant to have no interblending with the “amativeness” of sexual love. Personally, it is undeniable that Whitman possessed a specially keen sense of the fine restraint



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 343 and continence, the cleanliness and chastity, that are inseparable from the perfectly virile and physically complete nature of healthy manhood. Still we have the right to predicate the same ground-qualities in the early Dorians, those founders of the martial institution of Greek love; and yet it is notorious to students of Greek civilisation that the lofty sentiment of their masculine chivalry was intertwined with much that is repulsive to modern sentiment. Whitman does not appear to have taken some of the phenomena of contemporary morals into due account, although he must have been aware of them. Else he would have foreseen that, human nature being what it is, we cannot expect to eliminate all sensual alloy from emotions raised to a high pitch of passionate intensity, and that permanent elements within the midst of our society will imperil the absolute purity of the ideal he attempts to establish. It is obvious that those unenviable mortals who are the inheritors of sexual anomalies, will recognise their own emotion in Whitman’s “superb friendship, exalté, previously unknown,” which “waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men,” the “something fierce in me, eligible to burst forth,” “ethereal comradeship,” “the last athletic reality.” Had I not the strongest proof in Whitman’s private correspondence with myself that he repudiated any such deductions from his “Calamus,” I admit that I should have regarded them as justified; and I am not certain whether his own feelings upon this delicate topic may not have altered since the time when “Calamus” was first composed.262 These considerations do not, however, affect the spiritual quality of his ideal. After acknowledging, what Whitman omitted to perceive, that there are inevitable points of contact between sexual anomaly and his doctrine of comradeship, the question now remains whether he has not suggested the way whereby abnormal instincts may be moralised and raised to higher value. In other words, are those exceptional instincts provided in “Calamus” with the means of their salvation from the filth and mire of brutal appetite? It is difficult to answer this question; for the issue involved is nothing less momentous than the possibility of evoking a new chivalrous enthusiasm, analogous to that of primitive Hellenic society, from emotions which are at present classified among the turpitudes of human nature.263

Having offered this bold construal, Symonds reads “When I Peruse the Conquer’d Flame”264 in relation to ancient examples of his ideal: Its pathos and clinging intensity transpire through the last lines of the following piece, which may have been suggested by the legends of David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades…265 Reading some of his poems, we are carried back to ancient Greece – to Plato’s Symposium, to Philip gazing on the sacred band of Thebans after the fight at Chaeronea.266

What Symonds has done here is to weave Whitman’s poems together with several examples of comradeship from ancient Greece and the

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single biblical example of David and Jonathan into a vision of how samesex eroticism might be ennobled and made into a positive moral force for society. In this he anticipates Carpenter, who was strongly influenced by both Symonds and Whitman. The construal of the David and Jonathan narrative is governed here by the convergence of a particular range of intertexts and the concern of Symonds to use these texts, in effect, to redeem same-sex eroticism between men from connotations of moral depravity and from social marginalization. 7. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and Teleny (1893) It is arguably Symonds who bears most responsibility for the erotic resignification of David and Jonathan, particularly given his influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially on Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster. Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets was owned, read, and annotated by Wilde.267 Indeed, it is entirely possible that the connection between David and Jonathan and Greek love made by Wilde is owed to Symonds, though it cannot be ruled out that Wilde made that connection independently. The use of the David and Jonathan trope by Wilde (and perhaps Gide), however, has arguably had a more direct impact on the subsequent reading of their relationship than that of Symonds, chiefly because Wilde has been more widely read, not least on account of his de facto status as a kind of protomartyr for the cause of the liberation of gay men. The use of “David and Jonathan” as shorthand for same-sex desire, and moreover same-sex desire regarded positively, is a deeply ironic development. The irony is that this same biblical relationship had been invoked earlier in the Victorian period as an ancient type of the manly Christian, not only in the context of establishing in what such manliness should consist, but in the context of a rejection of the imputation of homoerotic nuances into a work – Tennyson’s In Memoriam – that was proving susceptible to just such a reading.268 The irony extends further, for it was against the very construct of manliness that had been so decisively shaped by this muscular Christianity that Wilde’s distinctive brand of flamboyant aestheticism was to be defined,269 and by Wilde himself that one of the most influential uses of David and Jonathan as a signifier for same-sex desire was to be made. We turn first, though, to a work that was almost certainly not penned by Wilde, at least not in its entirety. In the early work of English gay erotica Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal, which was privately printed for Leonard Smithers in London in 1893,270 and has sometimes been attributed,



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in whole or in part, and with questionable justification, to Oscar Wilde,271 the narrator and protagonist, Camille Des Grieux, recalls a biblically saturated conversation with his mother the morning after his first meeting with the Hungarian pianist René Teleny, his future lover: “Yes, I grant that last night he did play brilliantly, or, rather, sensationally; but it must also be admitted that you were in a rather morbid state of health and mind, so that music must have had an uncommon effect upon your nerves.” “Oh! You think there was an evil spirit within me troubling me, and that a cunning player – as the Bible has it – was alone able to quiet my nerves.” My mother smiled. “Well, nowadays, we are all of us more or less like Saul; that is to say, we are all occasionally troubled with an evil spirit.” Thereupon her brow grew clouded, and she interrupted herself, for evidently the remembrance of my late father came to her mind; then she added, musingly — “And Saul was really to be pitied.” I did not give her an answer. I was only thinking why David had found favour in Saul’s sight. Was it because “he was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to”? Was it also for this reason that, as soon as Jonathan had seen him, “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”? Was Teleny’s soul knit with my own? Was I to love and hate him, as Saul loved and hated David? Anyhow, I despised myself and my folly. I felt a grudge against the musician who had bewitched me; above all, I loathed the whole womankind, the curse of the world.272

This passage is a monument not only to late nineteenth-century attitudes to same-sex eroticism in Western Europe, but to the complex relationship between attitudes to same-sex eroticism between men at that period and the perceived status of women. Filtered through this mix is the biblical text. Des Grieux finds himself and his sexual attraction to Teleny refracted through the attraction to David of both Saul and Jonathan. The erotic attraction of both Saul and Jonathan to David anticipates André Gide’s rereading of the biblical narrative in his tragedy Saül, written shortly after Teleny. Again, there is nothing to suggest that such a reading of the David and Jonathan narrative is a novum, though it is noteworthy in terms of focalization that it is he alone who makes this connection, whereas his mother finds Des Grieux’s apparent mental strain mirrored in the madness of Saul. This is significant in itself for understanding the reception history of Samuel, since it shows that the story of Saul was understood by the author(s) of Teleny in the early 1890s to have an inescapably tragic dimension,273 which can be alluded to in order to alert the reader to the tragic dimension of the relationship between Des Grieux and Teleny.

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Des Grieux portrays Teleny as modelled on the biblical description of David. This is fairly obvious in the dialogue just cited, where there are allusions both to David’s role as musician in Saul’s court and to his physical beauty, but may be more subtly present in Des Grieux’s later recollection of his mother’s suggestion that, “Every woman was in love with him, and their love was necessary to him,”274 which echoes the love of women in Israel for David.275 The allusion to the David and Jonathan narrative cannot be understood in isolation from the use of other ancient texts in Teleny. The novel is replete with biblical and classical allusions. Among biblical allusions, those to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the liaison of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife are particularly prominent. Among the many classical allusions, the relationship between Hadrian and his beloved Antinous is especially significant, functioning as a Leitmotif throughout the novel, beginning with Teleny’s performance in the opening chapter, during which he and Des Grieux share a vision of Hadrian and Antinous that anticipates Teleny’s fate.276 Whether or not Oscar Wilde had any involvement in the authorship of Teleny, he was aware of the sexual construal of the David and Jonathan narrative we find in the novel. In what has been described by H. Montgomery Hyde as “the finest speech of an accused man since that of Paul before King Herod Agrippa,”277 Wilde cites David and Jonathan as a positive and honourable example of same-sex love between men, and in so doing he draws on his background as a brilliant classical scholar,278 immersed in the dialogues of Plato, to reinterpret the relationship between David and Jonathan as an example of the “celestial” (ou0ra&nioj) love advocated by Pausanias in Plato’s Symposium.279 Inasmuch as “[t]he explosion of homosexual discourse at the turn of the century occurred despite – or perhaps because of – the public verdict of the Wilde trials,”280 Wilde’s reading of the David and Jonathan narrative is an important indicator that this narrative was itself an integral part of that discourse which, many decades later, would be turned back on the David and Jonathan narrative by interested parties in the guild of biblical scholars, and function as the lens through which the narrative would be re-read. Under cross-examination by Charles Gill at his trial in April 1895 on charges of “committing acts of gross indecency with various male persons,”281 Oscar Wilde alluded to David and Jonathan to illustrate the “Love that dare not speak its name” of Lord Alfred Douglas’s poem “Two Loves”: “The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 347 you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the “Love that dare not speak its name,” and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.282

Wilde’s defence has been very widely cited,283 and has been compared with the following passage from Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray – described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as proving “a durable and potent centerpiece of gay male intertextuality,” providing “a durable and potent physical icon for gay male desire,” and contributing to setting “the terms of a modern homosexual identity”284 – in which Basil Hallward’s love for Dorian is eulogized: Basil would have helped him to resist Lord Henry [Wotton]’s influence, and the still more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament. The love that he bore him – for it was really love – had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses, and that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michael Angelo [sic] had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself.285

This passage clearly distinguishes between two kinds of love, reflecting Wilde’s reading of Plato’s Symposium. Since The Picture of Dorian Gray predates the publication of “Two Loves” in 1894 it is entirely possible that the novel is part of the inspiration for Douglas’s poem. While David and Jonathan do not appear here, the similarity between this passage and Wilde’s defence at this trial is undeniable. Both reflect the appropriation of historical models of same-sex friendship between men as embroidery for the ideal Wilde claims for Basil Hallward (in Dorian Gray) and for himself (at his trial). At his trial, Wilde was defending himself against a charge of gross indecency by appeal to David and Jonathan, Plato, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare, who are meant collectively to represent to Gill the cultural foundations of the society in which he and Wilde are living.286 Wilde is implicitly charging that society, and its legal system, with hypocrisy in not honouring the love of which he speaks,287 which is, according to him, so amply attested in these culturally foundational sources. What is

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much less clear, however, is the extent to which Wilde is trying to conceal the sexual dimension of that love, and thereby to dissimulate. Wilde is known to have been sexually involved with several men, suggesting that he may be trying to divert attention from the moral turpitude that would inevitably be read into these casual sexual encounters by appealing to the most positive models of same-sex love his cultural competence could offer in a manner that does not make their possible sexual aspects explicit.288 He may, indeed, have understood the David and Jonathan narrative to portray a sexual relationship, but it would not have served his cause to make such an interpretation explicit to Gill at the Old Bailey; or he may have regarded their relationship as non-sexual, and cited it in his support at his trial with the intention of dissimulating, of pulling the wool over the court’s eyes by making his relationships with men appear less morally repugnant than those present would otherwise have been led to believe. Certainly all the examples Wilde cites can be, and have been, read without any explicit suggestion of sex, but the reception history of his trial has made it exceptionally difficult to determine what he actually meant. The indeterminacy is well reflected in early responses to Wilde’s trial. Dalhousie Young and Marc-André Raffalovich, for example, offer decidedly contradictory verdicts that play on how David and Jonathan were read. Responding to the “mass of general vituperation with which the irresponsible public has thought fit to demonstrate its own virtue and its superiority to the author of Dorian Gray,”289 and in particular to aspersions cast on the moral probity of Wilde’s relationships with men, Young remarks As for what has been said about the wickedness of writing an affectionate letter in poetical words and sending it to a friend, I cannot help thinking that none but very foul minds can find anything foul in that. I am thankful to say that I have received many letters containing expressions of ardent affection, and I am proud to confess that I have at least one male friend who kisses me with a love no less pure than that with which I kiss my wife, my mother or my sisters. Why must it be assumed that all intercourse between two men must be either mercenary or charitable? Had no one except Mr. Wilde heard of the friendship of David and Absolom [sic!] “passing the love of women?” Did no one know that all Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to a young lord?290

In stark contrast to this is Raffalovich’s bitter denunciation of Wilde’s hypocrisy. In his account of Wilde’s trial, he cites the passage given above and remarks,



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 349 …Wilde answered [Gill] with an outrageous and hypocritical fervour, banking on the literary ignorance and incapacity of his public… These clichés, hardly acceptable in the mouth of a serious man, leading a somewhat noble life, coming from him should have alienated the public, but on the contrary, he was applauded three times and the judge reprimanded them. A man whose principles are sure, whose life is calm and regulated, whose friendship is a privilege, whose affections are enlightened, intelligent, possibly vehement, would have the right to speak like Wilde or like Socrates. Coming from Wilde these words are distressing. Whatever the purity of his love for Lord Alfred (and why not?), it is certain that Wilde never understood the obligations imposed by a love based on Plato, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo. He did not separate Lord Alfred from horrible friends who jeopardized him, he did not tear himself away when he himself became dangerous for the young man, he did not even have the courage to conduct his life so as not to be compromising, scandalous. When one speaks of the love of David and Jonathan, of W. H. and Shakespeare, one is not alluding to a purely sentimental, purely innocent, mundanely selfish, love. Plato and the others celebrated the training of one soul by another, the love which is the beginning of wisdom. How many times did Shakespeare exhort W. H. to behave well, as he offers to leave if he wrongs him, as he wants to sacrifice himself to the good name of one he cherishes. When did Oscar Wilde take care of the supervision, of the moral education of his young friend? He himself did not even give up company unworthy of a friend disciple of Plato. We know what the Greeks thought of venal men. The public’s ignorance is not matched by the duplicity of Wilde’s speech; but he knows what he did.291

There can be no question of Raffalovich’s disgust at Wilde, whom he sees duplicitously claiming to be a Platonic lover of Douglas, while in fact having nothing of either the self-mastery, or the genuine care for the moral upbringing of his beloved, that a truly Platonic lover should have. Moreover, he is, according to Raffalovich, shamelessly misrepresenting truly noble examples of Platonic love. Thus whereas Young saw hypocrisy chiefly in the public reaction to Wilde, Raffalovich charged not only English society,292 but Wilde himself with gross hypocrisy. Several points should be noted here. First, David and Jonathan are regarded as a “cliché” for a noble, Platonic love between an older and a younger man. This means, second, not only that Raffalovich is aware of a widely acknowledged understanding of their relationship, but is already familiar with its interpretation in the context of a tradition of Platonic love. Their relationship is, again, alive outside its received canonical context. Moreover, third, he is engaging in a contest for ownership of the meaning of their relationship, a contest that to some extent anticipates the ideological contest in which modern biblical scholars have been engaged.293

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It is far from clear, then, that Wilde’s speech can be regarded simply as “the beginning of Wilde’s explicit defence of homosexuality,”294 as Roden puts it, since there is ambiguity about exactly what Wilde is defending, how his own reading of the sources he cites relates to the way he represents them, how he intended this representation to be interpreted by Gill, how he intended it to be interpreted by others in the courtroom (which may not be the same as how he intended it to be interpreted by Gill), how what he said relates to the realia of his own life, and how our judgment of all this is determined by the aftermath of Wilde’s trial and its subsequent reception. Yet Roden nevertheless offers a cogent summary of Wilde’s historicization of same-sex love between men: This declaration places male-male love in a historical framework. Wilde spiritualizes love between men. His aestheticization of same-sex affection not only makes it Greek, but also invokes the biblical model of David and Jonathan … Although a secular literary context is Wilde’s argument, utilization of biblical history places Wilde within the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition that would make homosexuality a sin rather than a pathology. His deployment of the David-Jonathan pairing permits him to speak from a religious space. The public citation of biblical friendship demonstrates his challenge to a theology that demonizes same-sex desire.295

Not only is Wilde effectively attempting to redefine the relationship between the Christian religious tradition and same-sex love between men, he is doing this by bringing David and Jonathan into conversation not with other elements of that tradition, but with Homer, Plato, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare: that is, with a late nineteenth-century reading of classical Greek sources and with the Renaissance, which, perceived as a distinct period, is itself to a significant extent a nineteenth-century invention. In so doing, he reflects not simply his own direct engagement with these sources, but the stamp of his reading of Symonds and Pater and, more generally, of his classical education at Oxford, not only in terms of the content of this education, but in terms of the homosocial ethos of the Oxford he knew. 8. Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) A further key conduit for the David and Jonathan narrative at the beginning of the twentieth century is Edward Carpenter. Carpenter was strongly influenced by Symonds and Whitman,296 and in turn had a decisive influence on Forster, which Forster recalls in a “terminal note” to Maurice.297 Carpenter’s work draws most deeply from Whitman’s idea of “adhesiveness,” the love of comrades, which he takes up and reworks into



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a positive vision of the place of same-sex erotic relationships in modern society. He combines the ancient Greek heritage of comrades who fought against tyranny with Whitman’s appeal to the love of comrades as a force for offsetting and “spiritualising” American democracy, in order to elaborate a vision for transcending class divisions in the service of the common good.298 In Homogenic Love, Carpenter sets out, “to indicate what the world’s History, Literature and Art has to say” on the subject of “the homogenic or homosexual love,”299 “that special attachment which is sometimes denoted by the word Comradeship.”300 He is particularly concerned to use these cultural resources “to dispose of the charge of essential morbidity”301 that had been laid at the door of same-sex eroticism. In this connection, David and Jonathan are read as examples of ancient comrades: When we turn to the poetic and literary utterances of the more civilised nations on this subject we cannot but be struck by the range and intensity of the emotions expressed – from the beautiful threnody of David over his friend whose love was passing the love of women, through the vast panorama of the Homeric Iliad, of which the heroic friendship of Achilles and his dear Patroclus forms really the basic theme, down to the works of the great Greek age – the splendid odes of Pindar burning with clear fire of passion, the lofty elegies of Theognis, full of wise precepts to his beloved Kurnus, the sweet pastorals of Theocritus, the passionate lyrics of Sappho, or the more sensual raptures of Anacreon. Some of the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles – as the Myrmidones of the former and the Lovers of Achilles of the latter – appear to have had this subject for their motive; and many of the prose-poem dialogues of Plato were certainly inspired by it.302

Again, we have David and Jonathan read as though they belong primarily to a tradition of classical paria amicorum. It is difficult to tell, as with the passages from Forster discussed below, whether Carpenter made this connection independently, or whether he owes it to others, such as Symonds. Carpenter’s key work in connection with the reception of David and Jonathan is Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship, the first edition of which was published in 1902, and which apparently came to be colourfully nicknamed The Bugger’s Bible by booksellers.303 Like the earlier and briefer pamphlet Homogenic Love, which had touched on some of the same material, Ioläus can be read as a form of historical retrieval. Carpenter constructs a historical sequence of references to “friendship” customs attested across a vast geographical and chronological range. Carpenter’s purpose was to correct what he saw as a contemporary lack of realization of the importance of friendship as an institution.304 This was, he believed, the consequence of a lack of historical awareness of friendship in other

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times and places. Ioläus clearly reflects the influence of Symonds, whose Studies of the Greek Poets, A Problem in Greek Ethics, and translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets addressed to Tommaso de Cavalieri are all cited as source material.305 It also reflects the influence of Jowett, whose translations of Plato and Thucydides are cited.306 As a work of historical retrieval, Ioläus sidesteps the biblical canon and thus avoids the canonical control over the meaning of the David and Jonathan narrative, excerpting 1 Samuel 17:55–18:4 from both its canonical context and its context in the narrative of Saul’s downfall and the rise of David. Carpenter instead places the David and Jonathan material alongside extracts from works mentioning same-sex friendship customs among what he regards as other “primitive peoples”307 such as the men of the Balonda of the southern Congo and the Manganjas of the Zambesi,308 and the female “flower friends” among what he calls “the Bengali coolies.”309 Carpenter regards the David and Jonathan narrative as reflecting “much the same stage of primitive tribal life” as these other examples, but distinguishes the evidence we have for David and Jonathan by noting that in their case, David’s own “inner feeling” is preserved in 2 Samuel 1:26.310 Carpenter regards 1 Samuel 18:4 as portraying Jonathan’s surrender to David of his “most precious possessions,” which he compares with the Kasendi ceremony among the Balonda to which he had earlier referred, in which the two parties to the friendship treaty exchange “their most precious possessions” as gifts.311 Carpenter places David and Jonathan in the section of his work dealing with “friendship-customs in the pagan and early world,” in which he also places references to male bonding in martial contexts in ancient Greece. He thereby separates them from what he calls “romantic friendship”312 in the dialogues of Plato, which he discusses at length in the following chapter.313 Carpenter here reflects the influence of Symonds, who made a strong distinction between paiderasti/a in Plato and the comradeship between warriors exemplified at an earlier period by the likes of Achilles and Patroclus. Carpenter sees strong similarities, but also notable differences between the Platonic, and later Christian ideas of love. This is clear from his remark, shortly after discussing extracts from Augustine’s Confessions, that “[b]oth are highly transcendental, both seem to contemplate an inner union of souls, beyond the reach of space and time; but in Plato the union is in contemplation of the Eternal Beauty, while in the Christian teachers it is in devotion to a personal God.”314 This reflects an awareness of the strong legacy of Platonism in Christian tradition prior to the medieval rediscovery of Aristotle, but it is equally significant as evidence for the persistence of an awareness of the contested



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borderlines between Christian and “pagan” traditions,315 a theme that has surely by now become familiar. The complexity of the intertextual matrix in which David and Jonathan are made to play by Carpenter is well illustrated by his use of William Morris’s 1896 translation of the medieval French romance “Amis and Amile,”316 a work that Pater discussed in The Renaissance (which seems to be how Carpenter initially encountered it),317 and that Bray has more recently studied in The Friend.318 Pater did not, however, discuss this work in the first edition, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), adding “Amis and Amile” to his earlier discussion of “Aucassin and Nicolette”319 from the second (1877) edition onwards.320 The addition is significant, because it makes the same-sex comradeship of Amis and Amile as much an example of the transgressive “free play of human affection” as the male-female love of Abelard and Héloïse,321 and of Aucassin and Nicolette. Moreover, Pater hints that the bond of Amis and Amile is stronger than the chivalrous love of a knight for his lady, by alluding to the bond between Palamon and Arcite, and their common love for Emelya, in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. Such comradeship, though instances of it are to be found everywhere, is still especially a classical motive; Chaucer expressing the sentiment of it so strongly in an antique tale, that one knows not whether the love of both Palamon and Arcite for Emelya, or of those two for each other, is the chiefer subject of the Knight’s Tale— He cast his eye upon Emelya, And therewithal he bleynte and cried, ah! As that he stongen were unto the herte. What reader does not refer part of the bitterness of that cry to the spoiling, already foreseen, of that fair friendship, which had hitherto made the prison of the two lads sweet with its daily offices – though the friendship is saved at last?322

As Richard Dellamora has argued, Pater here is bringing together medieval Christian culture with Greek traditions of male comradeship,323 a point that becomes clearer still when we recall that it is Theseus and Peirithous who provide the ancient model for Chaucer’s Palamon and Arcite. In the process he is advancing a very different construction of masculinity in relation to medieval chivalry than that discussed earlier by Kingsley. On the one hand, in contrast with Dalgairns, Pater is valorizing chivalry, but partly based on the recognition of the role played by a certain kind of same-sex desire within his apprehension of it; on the other hand, Pater’s appropriation of chivalry here stands in ostensibly stark contrast to the muscular, Protestant manliness of Kingsley. It is simultaneously a subversion of chivalry and a re-valorization of it.324

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Much of this haunts the background to Carpenter’s use of “Amis and Amile,” in which David and Jonathan play a role that cannot derive from the medieval romance alone. In Iolaüs, Carpenter cites Joseph Jacob’s introduction to Morris’s translation, which summarizes the relationship between Amis and Amile thus: “Amis and Amil [sic] were the David and Jonathan, the Orestes and Pylades, of the mediæval world.”325 This produces two series of (inter)textual effects, one in relation to Morris’s Old French Romances, the other in relation to Carpenter’s Ioläus. The work translated by Morris does not itself refer to David and Jonathan together, though it does exhibit a very rich relationship to scriptural antecedents, and it may indeed be that David and Jonathan provide at least part of the literary inspiration for the two friends. That Jacobs perceived such a connection and articulated it the way he did cannot simply be due to a reading of “The Friendship of Amis and Amile” alone, but is due to his much richer reading of Morris’s translation in connection with an indefinite range of other works, in relation to which “The Friendship of Amis and Amile” produces, for Jacobs, a particular sort of meaning. Jacobs knows a particular construal of the David and Jonathan narrative, which he does not specify, as well as a particular construal of the story of Orestes and Pylades, and has in mind a certain way of taking the two stories together – again unspecified, to be inferred by the reader, who is expected to be familiar with both friendships. Moreover, by making the connection between David and Jonathan, Orestes and Pylades, and Amis and Amile in an introduction that could only have been written after Jacobs’s reading of Morris’s translation, the reader is (pre)conditioned to approach Amis and Amile with the ancient Israelite and Greek pairs in mind in a way that Jacobs himself may not have been. Thus when Carpenter takes up this edition of Morris’s translations, he also takes up the reference to David and Jonathan and Orestes and Pylades, whom he treats elsewhere in Ioläus. In turn, the reader of Ioläus is now preconditioned to read all three traditions in relation to one another. Readers of both “The Friendship of Amis and Amile” and Ioläus who are also biblically literate can, furthermore, approach Morris’s translation with the question of the presence of biblical motifs and themes in mind, and, indeed, will find a rich interweaving of such themes and motifs into the fabric of the romance. The narrator writes of Amis, “To the child of Bericain did God give so great wisdom, that one might trow that he were another Solomon.”326 Amis and Amile swear loyalty to one another in a manner that echoes the covenant between David and Jonathan in 1 Samuel 18:1-4:



David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem 355 And therewith they lighted down from their horses, and embraced and kissed each other, and gave thanks to God of that they were found. And they swore fealty and friendship and fellowship perpetual, the one to the other, on the sword of Amile, wherein were relics. Thence went they all together to the Court of Charles, King of France; there might men behold them young, well attempered, wise, fair, and of like fashion and visage, loved of all and honoured.327

After Amile breaks this covenant by sleeping with the king’s daughter, the narrator remarks, “Yet is not this adventure strange, whereas he was no holier than David, nor wiser than Solomon.”328 When Amis and Amile next meet, they convene in secret to plot how to deal with Amile’s accuser, Arderi, recalling the meeting in secret of David and Jonathan: “Leave we here our folk, and enter into this wood to lay bare our secret… And thuswise they departed each from his fellow weeping.”329 Following a duel in which Amis, disguised as Amile, kills Arderi, the King gives Amis (thinking him to be Amile) his daughter Belisant as a wife,330 recalling Saul’s promise to give his daughter to the vanquisher of Goliath. When Amis is afflicted with leprosy, this is regarded as divine retribution in accordance with the biblical dictum, “God chastiseth him that He loveth.”331 This retribution is woven together with Job and Tobit, who are associated with one another in the Vulgate: Now it befel on a night whenas Amis and Amile lay in one chamber without other company, that God sent to Amis Raphael his angel, who said to him: “Sleepest thou, Amis?” And he, who deemed that Amile had called to him,332 answered: “I sleep not, fair sweet fellow.” Then the angel said to him: “Thou hast answered well, whereas thou art the fellow of the citizens of Heaven, and thou hast followed Job, and Thoby in patience. Now I am Raphael, an angel of our Lord, and am come to tell thee of a medicine for thine healing, whereas He hath heard thy prayers.333 Thou shalt tell to Amile thy fellow, that he slay his two children and wash thee in their blood,334 and thence thou shalt get thee the healing of thy body.”335

Later, following the death of Amis and Amile together in battle against the Lombards, the narrator remarks that, “even as God had joined them together in their life-days, so in their death they were not sundered,”336 which is a direct allusion to 2 Samuel 1:23, where David is mourning the death of Saul and Jonathan together in battle. It is perhaps at the end of Ioläus that Carpenter’s perception of friendship as attested in history is most clearly stated. Here he cites Whitman, in a manner that suggests that he regarded Whitman as little less than a prophet whose vision of male comradeship had the capacity to inaugurate a renaissance of such comradeship as an institution, a renaissance that would have an essentially redeeming effect on society:

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There is a clear sense here of a recovery, by means of Whitman, of an ideal of male comradeship whose roots lie in the pre-Christian, GraecoRoman foundations of Western civilization, but which has been obscured by the benighting effect of Christianity. Although the David and Jonathan narrative was transmitted through the medium of the Christian canon and its accompanying interpretive tradition, David and Jonathan have been removed from that context, which can thus no longer exert control over the narrative, and interpreted instead in relation to models found both among “primitive” tribes, and among the ancient Greeks. 9. E. M. Forster (1879–1970) E. M. Forster was deeply influenced, in different ways, to different degrees, and at different points in his development, by both Symonds and Carpenter.338 His work began to emerge in the years when the impact of the Wilde trials of 1895 was shaping attitudes to masculinity and homoeroticism, and both these themes played a major role in Forster’s fiction.339 It is in connection with these themes, and against this background, that Forster’s use of the David and Jonathan narrative is to be understood. The model of David and Jonathan is used in different ways in Forster’s novels, only being construed in explicit homoerotic terms in Maurice. David and Jonathan appear already, however, in his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), and again in The Longest Journey (1907). What is significant is that the use of the David and Jonathan trope differs from novel to novel, and only becomes explicitly homoerotic in a novel written after, and apparently as a direct result of, Forster’s visit to Edward Carpenter at Millthorpe in 1913.340 Explicit allusions to biblical and classical figures and themes are relatively sparse in Where Angels Fear to Tread, a novel less richly intertextual than The Longest Journey. Issues of gender performance, tensions



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arising from class and age distinctions, and cultural misunderstandings between English and Italian characters play major roles in the novel. Lilia Herriton has been widowed by the death of her husband Charles, whose family, led by the matriarch Mrs Herriton, take an oppressive interest in her life and welfare. Visiting Italy Lilia falls in love with and marries Gino Carella, causing what would prove to be a catastrophic rift between herself and the Herriton family: Lilia gathered somehow from this conversation that continental society was not the go-as-you-please thing she had expected. Indeed, she could not see where continental society was. Italy is such a delightful place to live if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of socialism – that true socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. In the democracy of the caffè or the street the great question of our life has been solved, and the brotherhood of man is a reality. But it is accomplished at the expense of the sisterhood of women. Why should you not make friends with your neighbour at the theatre or in the train, when you know and he knows that feminine criticism and feminine insight and feminine prejudice will never come between you! Though you become as David and Jonathan, you need never enter his home, nor he yours. All your lives you will meet under the open air, the only roof-tree of the South, under which he will spit and swear, and you will drop your h’s, and nobody will think the worse of either. Meanwhile the women – they have, of course, their house and their church, with its admirable and frequent service, to which they are escorted by the maid. Otherwise they do not go out much, for it is not genteel to walk, and you are too poor to keep a carriage. Occasionally you will take them to the caffè or theatre, and immediately all your wonted acquaintance there desert you, except those few who are expecting and expected to marry into your family. It is all very sad. But one consolation emerges – life is very pleasant in Italy if you are a man.341

David and Jonathan here stand for the epitome of male homosociability which, in this context, not only precludes any form of equality between men and women in the Italian society of Forster’s novel, but also precludes female homosociability. The performance of male homosociality is here enabled by the marginal social position of women. Reminiscent of, even if not necessarily directly influenced by the contrast between Michal and Jonathan in 1 Samuel, the status distinction between men and women here is expressed in spatial terms. Men are in a position to circulate openly and freely in the world, while their women are confined to house and church unless rich enough to keep a carriage within which to be further confined, or unless chaperoned by their men. What the David and Jonathan trope does not clearly connote here is homoeroticism between men. It does not absolutely exclude it, particularly

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if we read Where Angels Fear to Tread retrospectively through the lens of Maurice,342 or in light of Oscar Wilde at the Old Bailey, but the homoerotic is at best sublimated. Yet it may indeed be sublimated rather than entirely absent, given that the most tense and complex relationship in the novel is not between a man and a woman, but between the muscular, rough-and-ready Gino and Lilia’s bookish, genteel brother Philip.343 For Joseph Bristow, this is closer to the heart of what Forster is getting at. In the passage cited above, the key issue for Bristow is not, as I suggested, the way that male homosociality radically marginalizes women, but “the problem of women to men in their differing English and Italian contexts.”344 The mention of David and Jonathan is a hint that the novel is about to “purge itself of the obstructive, interfering, and no doubt prattling voices of women before a particularly powerful form of femininity can be ascribed to the men.”345 This the novel achieves through Lilia’s death in childbirth, “eradicating the dominant heterosexual romance,”346 and setting the stage for a rivalry between the two men over Lilia and Gino’s baby. This rivalry “brings about a configuration of homosexual desires that is cleverly contained within an ostensibly heterosexual framework.”347 The narrative, according to Bristow, will only allow the two men to connect if there is a woman involved to facilitate the latent sexual desire between them. This turns out to be Caroline Abbott, Lilia’s former chaperone. It is certainly true that Caroline intervenes in the fight between Gino and Philip following the baby’s ghastly death in a road accident, it is she who brings a form of redemption to Philip through her femininity,348 and it is she who makes it possible for the two men to be reconciled in a domestic space in which, in the Italy of Forster’s novel, this would not ordinarily be possible. Her femininity bridges the chasm between the rough, muscular manliness of Gino and the weakly, scholarly effeminacy of Philip, but it is not so clear to me that this amounts to her “facilitating sexual desire” between them. The situation is more complex still, since Caroline herself has fallen in love with Gino, and confesses the same to Philip as he seems on the verge of confessing his love for her.349 The matter is further complicated by Philip’s response – “He heard himself remark: ‘Rather! I love him too! When I can forget how he hurt me that evening. Though whenever we shake hands …’”350 – which leaves one wondering whether this was what he was really going to say to Caroline, what he means by “love,” and whether this tells us anything about this character’s actual motivations or whether he is using a diversion to cover his true feelings for her. A further question is whether it is now possible to look at relationships between men in Forster’s early novels without



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either the explicit homoeroticism of Maurice or homoerotic construals of David and Jonathan getting in the way. David and Jonathan reappear in Forster’s next novel, The Longest Journey. There is perhaps a clearer erotic triangle here,351 between the lame scholar Rickie Elliot, his Cambridge friend Stewart Ansell, and the woman Elliot marries, his cousin Agnes Pembroke. While the homoerotic dimension of the friendship between Elliot and Ansell remains no more than implicit, it is clear that the friendship between these two men seems to represent a stronger bond – albeit one that receives no formal societal recognition and can scarcely be expressed in the available resources of the English language – than the societally authorized heterosexual bond of marriage. A combination of David and Jonathan with one of Shakespeare’s sonnets is used to represent this bond: [H]e was not cynical – or cynical in a very tender way. He was thinking of the irony of friendship – so strong it is, and so fragile. We fly together, like straws in an eddy, to part in the open stream. Nature has no use for us: she has cut her stuff differently. Dutiful sons, loving husbands, responsible fathers – these are what she wants, and if we are friends it must be in our spare time. Abram and Sarai were sorrowful, yet their seed became as the sand of the sea, and distracts the politics of Europe at the moment. But a few verses of poetry is all that survives of David and Jonathan. “I wish we were labelled,” said Rickie. He wished that all the confidence and mutual knowledge that is born in such a place as Cambridge could be organized. People went down into the world saying, “We know and like each other; we shan’t forget.” But they did forget, for man is so made that he cannot remember long without a symbol; he wished there was a society, a kind of friendship office, where the marriage of true minds could be registered.352

There are not so distant echoes here of the use of David and Jonathan by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown at Oxford and by Frederic William Farrar in Julian Home. In each case, a deep emotional bond between boys or men is associated with David and Jonathan. We know Forster was influenced by public school and college novels in his construction of the Cambridge section of The Longest Journey.353 The difference, of course, is that our familiarity with Forster’s own life and struggles, with his later homoerotic novel Maurice, and with the use of both David and Jonathan and Shakespeare’s Sonnets in other contexts, can predispose us to associate this passage with the homoerotic. The text is open to this, yet does not force the reader to accept. The friendship of Elliot and Ansell, symbolized by that of David and Jonathan, is fragile in part because it has no real name and no lasting recognition, despite the fact that it is an emotionally more powerful bond

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than heterosexual marriage, which is represented here by the unhappiness of the biblical Abraham and Sarai. Their societally sanctioned relationship has left a colossal trace on subsequent history, culminating in the consequences of the Dreyfus affair on early twentieth-century European politics – which would again dovetail with the theme of homoeroticism in Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah – whereas the friendship of David and Jonathan, much stronger emotionally yet not societally recognized, has left little more than David’s dirge for his dead friend as a memorial. Regardless of whether or not the friendship between Rickie Elliot and Stewart Ansell is to be most satisfactorily construed in homoerotic terms, there is a certain congruence between this passage and Oscar Wilde’s speech at the Old Bailey twelve years prior to the publication of The Longest Journey. In each case, David and Jonathan represent a certain kind of love daring to speak its name in the only available way, by appeal to a symbol that must stand for it in the absence of a more durable, societally approved and recognized sign. What Rickie longs for here is an equivalent to the registry office, an official means of acknowledging the worth of his friendship, and perhaps memorializing it, ensuring that evidence of its existence and value would not be lost. He thinks in terms of the language of marriage, but in fact it seems to be not simply heterosexual marriage as such that is used here as an analogue, but the “marriage of true minds” we find in Shakespeare.354 The difficulty, of course, is with determining whether Forster had Sonnet 116 as a whole in mind, or whether his use of the phrase “marriage of true minds” reflects no more than the fact that this phrase had entered common parlance. If the latter, then there is a contrast here between heterosexual marriages approved by society, which may well not be of true minds and thus unworthy of such societal recognition in the first place, and a marriage of true minds such as that of Elliot and Ansell, which truly deserves such recognition but does not receive it. If the former, then it may be that Forster is alluding obliquely to the notion that many of Shakespeare’s sonnets are rooted not in his love for a woman, but in his love – in some sense – for a man.355 This, of course, lies behind Wilde’s allusion to Shakespeare at the Old Bailey. But in any case, the possibility of appropriating the language of marriage in this way points to the arbitrariness of the signifier, and raises the question why the use of “marriage” to refer to heterosexual partnerships should be regarded as normative, and its use to refer to same-sex partnerships as no more than a deviation because derivative.356 In Forster’s novel Maurice, completed in 1914 but published only after the author’s death in 1971, the narrator offers us an insight into the inner struggle of Clive Durham, an upper-class Cambridge undergraduate who



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falls in love with a fellow student, Maurice Hall (the Maurice of the novel’s title). His struggle is portrayed as a deep-rooted conflict between his inherited Christian convictions and his emerging awareness of sexual attraction to other men, “this other desire, obviously from Sodom…the impulse that destroyed the City of the Plain.”357 Clive finds release both in his discovery as a young man of same-sex love in the dialogues of Plato, and in his rejection of the Christianity in which he had hitherto been incubated. Inasmuch as Maurice holds up a mirror to Forster’s perceptions of late Victorian and Edwardian attitudes to what we have come to term homosexuality, it also holds up a mirror to aspects of the way both Graeco-Roman and biblical texts were read during these periods. Maurice is as much a novel of class as of sexuality, and Maurice’s subsequent love affair with Clive’s under-gamekeeper Alec Scudder is redolent of the democratic ideal of comradeship between men that we find in the works of Symonds, Carpenter, and Whitman, all of whom influenced Forster; but it is Forster’s use of Greek and biblical intertexts that is of particular interest here. The boy had always been a scholar, awake to the printed word, and the horrors the Bible evoked for him were to be laid by Plato. Never could he forget his emotion at first reading the Phaedrus. He saw there his malady described exquisitely, calmly, as a passion which we can direct, like any other, towards good or bad. Here was no invitation to licence. He could not believe his good fortune at first – thought there must be some misunderstanding and that he and Plato were thinking of different things. Then he saw that the temperate pagan really did comprehend him, and, slipping past the Bible rather than opposing it, was offering a new guide for life. “To make the most of what I have.” Not to crush it down, not vainly to wish that it was something else, but to cultivate it in such ways as will not vex either God or man. He was obliged however to throw over Christianity. Those who base their conduct upon what they are rather than upon what they ought to be, always must throw it over in the end, and besides, between Clive’s temperament and that religion there is a secular feud. No clear-headed man can combine them. The temperament, to quote the legal formula, is “not to be mentioned among Christians,” and a legend tells that all who shared it died on the morning of the Nativity. Clive regretted this. He came of a family of lawyers and squires, good and able men for the most part, and he did not wish to depart from their tradition. He wished Christianity would compromise with him a little and searched the Scriptures for support. There was David and Jonathan; there was even the “disciple that Jesus loved.” But the Church’s interpretation was against him; he could not find any rest for his soul in her without crippling it, and withdrew higher into the classics yearly.358

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The allusion here to David and Jonathan, like the allusion to the beloved disciple of the Gospel of John, does not have the character of a new departure, an eccentric diversion from accepted ways of reading the text that had never been thought of before. There is an implicit allusion to a tradition of reading the David and Jonathan narrative, albeit an unorthodox one. The tension between Clive’s reading and “the Church’s interpretation” makes it clear that, as far as Clive is concerned, what he finds in the David and Jonathan narrative, and in the depiction of Jesus and the Beloved Disciple in the Fourth Gospel, is not what the dominant voices in the Church find. There exists a way of reading the David and Jonathan narrative that is sympathetic to same-sex desire and that, while not unique to Clive, does not have the backing of the authority of the Church and thus cannot aid Clive in his desire to be reconciled to the Christianity with which he grew up. In Maurice, most influential for Clive is the Phaedrus of Plato. This dialogue, with its connotations of homoeroticism, would later be the dominant classical allusion in Mary Renault’s 1953 novel The Charioteer,359 in which the central male characters, Laurie Odell and Andrew Raynes, are at one point dubbed “David and Jonathan.”360 Elsewhere in Maurice the Symposium of Plato functions as a code for Clive to communicate to Maurice the nature of his love for him.361 The allusion to David and Jonathan is separated in Clive’s reading from the interpretation of the Church, and brought into a closer conjunction with Plato’s Phaedrus. That is, the disambiguation of the relationship between David and Jonathan, together with an appreciation of the pertinence of this relationship for Clive’s life, are taken out of the context of the biblical canon and the ecclesiastical tradition of its interpretation and placed alongside Plato instead. Athens here has redefined Jerusalem: the relationship between them we find in Vermigli’s Loci communes, Cowley’s Davideis, and Gill’s commentary has undergone a complete reversal. 10. Conclusion It would be relatively easy to see the reception of the David and Jonathan narrative during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a history of eisegesis, which it is the task of a historically-oriented exegesis to debunk. Such a judgment would, however, say less about either the task of exegesis or the biblical text than it would about the ideological agenda(s) served by the use of a certain kind of narrowly-defined historical criticism. To be sure, the codes used by the likes of Seward, Byron, Bentham, Newman, Dalgairns, Rossetti, Kingsley, Hughes, Farrar, Symonds, Wilde,



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Carpenter, and Forster to understand the David and Jonathan narrative could not have been foreseen by those first responsible for bequeathing the narrative to the posterity that would later canonize it, and that would guarantee its future openness to unlimited interpretation. But the reception history of the David and Jonathan narrative is an illustration not of the lengths to which wilful readers will go to pervert the plain meaning of a text, but of the way the potential openness of a given work may be unfolded and re-activated by later generations of readers. As Aichele has remarked: “No one set of codes can authoritatively release the meaning of the message [of a text]; there is always the possibility of seeing the text in the light of a different set of codes – perhaps a future understanding of the text in terms of codes that are presently unknown.”362 It is the very capacity of the David and Jonathan narrative to be re-read in new and previously unanticipated ways that has ensured its continued influence and its susceptibility to further interpretation. What is also noteworthy about the interpretations we have touched on above is that with the exception of Bentham and Forster’s Maurice, presumably the author(s) of Teleny, and arguably – though not certainly – Byron, Symonds, and Wilde, these interpretations do not compel us to think of David and Jonathan as lovers in the sexual sense. Rather, this construal itself depends on other factors, such as what we know – or think we know, or have become accustomed to believe – about the lives of the authors in question, our reading of the whole works in which David and Jonathan appear, our reading of other works by these authors that might be used to determine their construal of David and Jonathan more precisely, and, perhaps most importantly, the other texts alongside which we place their readings of the David and Jonathan narrative. Similarly, it is from our wider knowledge of Kingsley’s life and work, and the wider context of Hughes’s Tom Brown at Oxford, that a homoerotic construal seems less likely. Yet the very ambivalence of both the biblical narrative and these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century interpretations are what render them open both to the potential for misconstrual and to the potential for queer re-interpretation. It is in the very nature of reception that neither the biblical text nor its myriad (re)readings can ever be decisively owned and controlled. In his reconfigured social constructionist approach to the history of sexuality, David Halperin notes that the contemporary notion of homosexuality is incoherent, but that its incoherence is such as to indicate “the historical accumulation of discontinuous notions that shelter within its specious unity.”363 This “specious unity” imposes a deceptive impression of singularity on what is in fact a multiplicity of discontinuous, though

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partially overlapping, perceptions and constructions of same-sex desire. Halperin points to four main discursive categories or traditions of male sex and gender deviance that are attested transhistorically, across a range of temporally and geographically separate socio-cultural contexts, over which a fifth category, homosexuality itself, claims a false unity: (1) effeminacy; (2) paiderasty, or “active” sodomy, under which he includes the male sexual penetration of a subordinate male in general, whether the subordination is defined in terms of class, age, gender style, or sexual role; (3) friendship or male love, including heroic comradeship; and (4) passivity or inversion.364 The modern European construct “homosexuality,” he claims, ultimately derives from these four models, and imposes a false uniformity on them, with the result that homosexuality is frequently – and wrongly – not distinguished from, say, effeminacy,365 or age-differentiated sex.366 The biblical David and Jonathan would seem, like Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, to fall into Halperin’s third category, even though for Wilde they seem to have fallen into the second, and occasionally Jonathan is placed in the fourth. Where male friendships have existed between social unequals, the possibility is opened up that these friendships could be construed in erotic, hierarchical terms, such as through the lens of paiderasti/a, which goes some way towards explaining how Achilles and Patroclus were understood by some in fourth-century bce Athens. This does not, however, entail that these friendships were in fact sexual, or originally understood to be sexual, 367 though it surely does not ipso facto exclude these possibilities either. Equally, although male friendships between equals have frequently been expressed, historically, using highly emotionally charged language that many modern readers might be more accustomed to associate with heterosexual romance, that in no way necessarily entails that the “friends” in question were lovers. 368 Yet, …the friendship tradition provided socially empowered men with an established discursive venue in which to express, without social reproach, sentiments of passionate and mutual love for one another. And such passionate, mutual love between persons of the same sex is an important component of what we now call homosexuality. So if we are to devise a complete and satisfactory genealogy of male homosexuality, we will have to find room in it for a history of male love.369

Completed before Halperin’s book but not published until the year after (Bray died in November 2001), Alan Bray’s The Friend contributes magnificently to just such a project,370 Bray explicitly distancing himself from the use of sexuality as an organizing category for the material on



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friendship that he collates and interprets in this work. Arguably Edward Carpenter had anticipated, in his Ioläus, aspects of both Bray’s project and that envisaged by Halperin. In between Carpenter at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Bray and Halperin at the beginning of the twenty-first, intervenes the artificially unifying idea of “homosexuality,” shaped not only by the tradition of male love but by other traditions of same-sex desire, and in addition by the effects of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century currents in psychology and psychoanalysis that gave the emotions, devotions, and lived experiences reflected in these traditions the appearance not only of an orientation, but of a pathology.371 Now Halperin’s genealogy is open to debate, a debate I do not wish to enter into here, except to note a significant irony in the role played in it by David and Jonathan. If it is the case that this tradition of male love is a significant part of the genealogy of contemporary homosexuality, then for one thing it becomes harder to make a firm distinction between the ways this tradition is manifested in Bentham, Byron, Newman, Dalgairns, Kingsley, Hughes, Farrar, Symonds, Raffalovich, Carpenter, Forster, and possibly Wilde, since whatever else they each had in mind, a deep emotional bond between men was definitely part of it.372 Why should we then fixate on how sex might serve as the point of difference that distinguishes them from one another, even if they themselves would have wished to force such a distinction? Why should we think that our comprehension of a deep emotional bond between persons is aided by organizing and taxonomizing it primarily in relation to sex?373 Indeed, if sex is not regarded as the key defining characteristic, it may be that the erotically inspired manly comradeship advocated, under Whitman’s influence, by Symonds and Carpenter has more in common with the spiritual friendships of Newman and the other Tractarians, or the friendships of muscular Christians advocated by Kingsley and Hughes, than it does with the neo-paiderastic love of Wilde for Douglas. More importantly, it becomes harder to separate David and Jonathan from the genealogy of homosexuality as such, because their relationship was an integral part of the tradition of male love that contributed to the emergence of the very notion of homosexuality whose applicability to the David and Jonathan narrative has become the subject of dispute. To ask whether the relationship between David and Jonathan was “homosexual,” then, is to mistake the effect for the cause. A much more meaningful question concerns the role David and Jonathan played in the emergence of the modern idea of homosexuality itself.

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1. Tertullian, Praescr. 7.9. 2. Christina Rossetti, letter to Alice Boyd, 30 July, 1866, in Anthony H. Harrison (ed.), The Letters of Christina Rossetti (2 vols.; Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997–1999), 1:277–78. 3. Oscar Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr W. H.,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 1966), 1174. 4. Alan Bennett, The History Boys (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 53; cf. Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner, The History Boys: The Film (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 57. 5. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice, 155. See Chapter 2 above, pp. 86, 116 n. 150. 6. Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 228. The kind of queer virginity that the revival by Newman and his associates of celibacy as a religious discipline embodied was queer not in terms of sexual deviance but rather in terms of the destabilizing of prevailing norms of gender, that is, in terms of the deep challenge it presented to dominant constructions and performances of masculinity (see Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 75–106). 7. Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 266. Cf. idem, “‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’: Same-Sex Biblical Couples in Victorian Literature,” in Raymond-Jean Frontain (ed.), Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture (New York: Haworth, 2003, 2nd edn), 116: “Biblical types offered a means to express homoerotic desire in a safe, socially sanctioned way. The comrade-friendship of the Old Testament between David and Jonathan complemented the New Testament narrative of Jesus and John… The potential for queer namings through David and Jonathan or Jesus and the Beloved Disciple was as strong as through the Greek Damon and Pythias or Roman Hadrian and Antinous. If classical allusions were a vehicle for the homoerotic voice – particularly in the upper-class world of the public school and university – religious pairings were much more common in Victorian literature and were used by men and women alike.” 8. Cf. Mayne, The Intersexes, 258–60. 9. 2 Sam. 1:26 (av). 10. Mayne, The Intersexes, 33–35 (italics mine). 11. Mayne, The Intersexes, 36; cf. p. 255. Mayne here also anticipates Lillian Faderman’s criticisms of the horror of lesbianism felt by twentieth-century scholars who have felt the need to expunge even the vaguest possible suggestion of same-sex eroticism in the context of their eighteenth-century subjects’ romantic friendships with other women (e.g. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 119–20, 134, 141–42). 12. Cf. Mayne, The Intersexes, 409, where the potential for the “intersexual instinct” to “appear in types richly endowed with bodily vigour and sexual force, possessed of an aggressive mental, physical and ethical superiority” is contrasted with its potential to be “blended with effeminacy and a shameful un-virility.” The point is that effeminacy is not to be regarded as inherent in male same-sex desire (cf. Chapter 1 above, nn. 52–53). That said, he nevertheless regards the “passive sodomist” as “more feminine than the activist,” thus tending towards moral, intellectual, and/or physical deficiency (The Intersexes, 411–12).



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13. See above, pp. 300–301. 14. See above, pp. 346–50. 15. Mayne, The Intersexes, 77–78 (italics mine). 16. Mayne, The Intersexes, 188. 17. A good example of the interweaving of the different traditions of male friendships cited by Mayne appears in Marlowe’s Edward the Second (1 i 142-145), a work replete with classical allusion, where Edward portrays himself as Gaveston’s alter ego (cf. 1 Sam. 18:1?) and likens his affection for Gaveston to that of Hylas for Hercules: Why shouldst thou kneel? know’st thou not who I am? Thy friend, thyself, another Gaveston! Not Hylas was more mourned of Hercules Than thou hast been of me since thy exile. Queen Isabella subsequently laments the fact that Edward’s love for Gaveston precludes any love for her by comparing it with the mythical love of Zeus for Ganymede (1 iv 179-182): Like frantic Juno will I fill the earth With ghastly murmur of my sighs and cries; For never doted Jove on Ganymede So much as he on cursed Gaveston. 18. Mayne, The Intersexes, 189. A similar interweaving of biblical and Greek friendships, together with an appeal to the ancient heritage of Northern Europe, appears in an essay by Adolf Brand published in 1930 in the journal Der Eigene, as part of a defence of love between male friends (Freundesliebe): “David boasted of Jonathan that he had great joy and bliss in him and that his love surpassed the love of women. John, the disciple whom Christ loved, had to rest on Jesus’ lap during meals and as the favorite disciple of the master share table and couch with him. The Sacred Band of Thebes, in which every fighting youth was closely bound to the others through friendship and love, carried off the brilliant victory of Leuctra, spurred on and supported through that great love, which overcame all difficulties and dangers. And in ancient Germany, blessed through blood-brotherhood, which was practiced everywhere, there were similar famous male bonds and friend-love stood just as high in honor. For the Edda plainly states that ‘man is the joy of man’” (“Friend-Love as a Cultural Factor: A Word to Germany’s Male Youth,” in Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany: The Youth Movement, the Gay Movement, and Male Bonding before Hitler’s Rise [ed. H. Oosterhuis; trans. H. Kennedy; London: Haworth, 1991], 151). 19. Mayne, The Intersexes, 543. 20. Cf. Chapter 1, n. 57. 21. On this passage Louis Crompton remarks that, “To the modern reader, the elder Mortimer’s catalog of male couples (1.4.390-400), recited to persuade his nephew to tolerate Edward’s infatuation with Gaveston, may look like a piece of progay rhetoric… But we must bear in mind that English tradition often desexualized classical myths or historical relationships” (Homosexuality and Civilization [Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2003], 376). Despite the absence of David and Jonathan from this passage, it is not inconceivable that their friendship lurks in the background of Marlowe’s portrayal of Edward and Gaveston, particularly since Edward utters the  

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following after he returns victorious from battle against the lords responsible for Gaveston’s assassination: Now, lusty lords, now not by chance of war, But justice of the quarrel and the cause, Vail’d is your pride. Methinks you hang the heads; But we’ll advance them, traitors. Now ’tis time To be aveng’d on you for all your braves, And for the murder of my dearest friend, To whom right well you knew our soul was knit, Good Pierce of Gaveston, my sweet favourite. Ah, rebels, recreants, you made him away! (3 iii 37-45). Marlowe’s language here echoes strongly that of 1 Sam. 18:1, which in the Geneva Bible reads, “the soule of Ionathan was knit with the soule of Dauid, & Ionathan loued him, as his owne soule,” though it is possible that this translation, which would shape the Authorized Version of 1611, and Marlowe, independently reflect the same sixteenth-century idiom. 22. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 4 x 26–28. 23. Peter Martyr Vermigli (attrib.), Common Places, 3.11.2-3 (p. 258a-b). The passage in the discussion of friendship where David and Jonathan appear is omitted from Robert le Maçon’s Latin editions of 1576 (London: John Kyngston) and 1583 (London: Thomas Vautrollier). On the successive editions of the Loci communes, see Joseph C. McLelland, “A Literary History of the Loci communes,” in A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli (ed. T. Kirby, E. Campi and F. A. James; Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009), 479–94 (esp. pp. 489–94). 24. Abraham Cowley, “The Preface,” in Poems: Viz. Miscellanies, II. The Mistress, or, Love Verses, III. Pindaresque Odes, And IV. Davideis, or, a Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David (London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1656), n.p. 25. Three pages earlier, Cowley sets out his vision for the Davideis, “…which I designed into Twelve Books; not for the Tribes sake, but after the Patern of our master Virgil; and intended to close all with that most Poetical and excellent Elegie of Davids upon the death of Saul and Jonathan: For I had no mind to carry him quite on to his Anointing at Hebron, because it is the custom of Heroick Poets (as we see by the examples of Homer and Virgil, whom we should do ill to forsake to imitate others) never to come to the full end of their Story; but onely so near, that everyone may see it; as men commonly play the game, when it is evident that they can win it, but lay down their Cards, and take up what they have won.” 26. Thomas Ellwood, Davideis 3.4.39-51 (Davideis: The Life of David, King of Israel. A Sacred Poem in Five Books [London: James Phillips, 1796, 5th edn], 100). Lines 57-58 hint that David and Jonathan had become proverbially synonymous with close male friendship. 27. John Gill, An Exposition of the Old Testament (vol. 2; London, printed for the author, 1764), 473a. Rick Brentlinger optimistically notes that “it is interesting that heterosexual Baptist commentator, John Gill…compares Jonathan and David’s relationship to celebrated Greek homosexual relationships” (Gay Christian 101, 152), without addressing the problem of defining these Greek paria amicorum as homosexual, the way these paria amicorum were re-interpreted through time, even in



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ancient Greece, or the unlikelihood of Gill himself understanding any of these relationships in such terms in the eighteenth century. 28. Cf. Gonda and Mounsey, “Queer People: An Introduction,” 17. 29. Byrne S. Fone (ed.), The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day (Between Men – Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies; New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 30. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 58, and in general, pp. 48–59. Epistemology of the Closet itself has become part of a minority canon – alongside Foucault’s History of Sexuality, of course – by virtue of its status as a foundational work for subsequent developments in queer theory. 31. Fone, The Columbia Anthology, 3–10. 32. Fone, The Columbia Anthology, 3. 33. Fone, The Columbia Anthology, 95–100. Biblical texts cited here are Gen. 18:1– 19:38; Lev. 18:22; 20:13; Rom. 1:26-27; 1 Cor. 6:9-10 (kjv), all excerpted from their canonical context. 34. See Helen Waddell, Songs of the Wandering Scholars (ed. F. Corrigan; London: Folio Society, 1982), 271, 280–81, 314–15. 35. Fone, The Columbia Anthology, 9. Note that the dates given by Fone refer to the first publications of these works, not when they were written. In the case of Symonds’s work, that “The Meeting of David and Jonathan” was written in early 1872 is important for placing it in the context of the development of his oeuvre. See above, pp. 332–33. 36. As argued in Chapter 3 above, such rewritings are an extension of processes already at work within the text itself, if “the text itself ” is not then a redundant expression. 37. Fone, The Columbia Anthology, xxx (italics mine). 38. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994). 39. Drake, The Gay Canon, xv–xvi. 40. Drake, The Gay Canon, xvi. 41. James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (New York: Dial, 1956). The central characters David, a young American man in Paris struggling with his masculinity, desire for other men, and perceived social obligation, and an Italian barman called Giovanni, seem to be loosely based on David and Jonathan, much as David and Jack are in Kings, though in Baldwin’s novel David and Giovanni are explicitly lovers. 42. Drake, The Gay Canon, 10: “Predictive in some ways of Aristophanes’ story in Plato’s Symposium – telling how love is simply the desire of souls once split in two to find each other and reunite – this is nevertheless a relationship impossible to dismiss as mere friendship. It is more, even, than simple familial bonding.” 43. “Theorizing Desire: Inventing Paiderastia” (Fone, The Columbia Anthology, 25–36). 44. “The Italian Renaissance: Amor Socraticus” (Fone, The Columbia Anthology, 131–56). 45. Fone, The Columbia Anthology, 143–48. 46. “Symbolic Sodomite: Society, Oscar Wilde, and the Law” (Fone, The Columbia Anthology, 335–44).

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47. See further, pp. 346–50. Oscar Wilde’s place in the reconstitution of gay history is assured by the frequency with which his life and work are revisited in that connection (cf. Bartlett, Who Was That Man? 26). Within a decade of Wilde’s death, Xavier Mayne could already write that Wilde “may be said to have assumed, even to English dionysians something of the aspect of a judicial martyr,” though Mayne himself, echoing Marc André Raffalovich, regarded the “halo of a ‘martyr’ to homosexualism” as “the less well-bestowed” in Wilde’s case on account of his sexual promiscuity (The Intersexes, 363). 48. See Chapter 3 above, p. 157. 49. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2006), 486–87. As in 2 Samuel, Rilke’s poem is spoken by David. In the same 1908 collection (Der neuen Gedichte: Anderer Teil), Rilke has a poem inspired by the story of Antinous, in the form of a lament spoken by Hadrian (“Klage um Antinous,” Die Gedichte, 485–86). The reception of David and Jonathan in modern Hebrew would be another worthy topic for research. See e.g. the poems collected in Malkah Shaked, I’ll Play You Forever: Scripture in Modern Hebrew Poetry (2 vols.; Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 2005), 1:256–60 [Hebrew]. 50. See Chapter 3 above, n. 394. 51. Lene Østermark-Johansen, “The Apotheosis of the Male Nude: Leighton and Michelangelo,” in Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity (ed. T. Barringer and E. Prettejohn; Studies in British Art, 5; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 121. 52. Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Introduction,” in Barringer and Prettejohn, Frederic Leighton, xxi. 53. E. M. Forster, Maurice (ed. P. N. Furbank; introduction and notes by D. Leavitt; London: Penguin, 2005; 1st edn, London: Edward Arnold, 1971), 228 n. 3. 54. D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest, 187. In particular, D’Arch Smith touches on “The Meeting of David and Jonathan” by John Addington Symonds (Love in Earnest, 12, 181); the anonymously published 1891 novel Tim: A Story of School Life (London: Macmillan, 1891), written by William Johnson Cory’s pupil Howard Overing Sturgis and bearing 2 Sam. 1:26 on its title page; James Henry Hallard’s poem “Passing the Love of Women,” from Hallard’s Carmina: A Volume of Verse (London: Rivingtons, 1899), 15–16, which reminisces nostalgically about the love of two young men; a volume of verse by Edwin Emmanuel Bradford entitled Passing the Love of Women and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, 1913) (on Bradford, see further Eglinton, Greek Love, 397–403); a volume of verse by Lionel Birch entitled Between Sunset and Dawn (Cambridge: Corydon, 1929) that bears 2 Sam. 1:26 in its dedication; and the poem, “Passing the Love of Women,” which may have been written by Marc-André Raffalovich’s friend John Gray, transcribed by Smith in Love in Earnest, 188 and in Ian Fletcher (ed.), The Poems of John Gray (1880–1920 British Authors Series, 1; Greensboro, NC: ELT, 1988), 43–44 (see also the brief discussion in Roden, “‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’” 116–17). In “Passing the Love of Women,” the poet muses wistfully on the love he shared with a young man before his lover left him for a woman, fantasizing that the memory of his former love will always be stronger than his feelings for his wife. In later life Gray, apparently, did not recall having written this poem. Ian Fletcher comments that, “In spite of the dandyish archaisms, it is not precisely  



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in Gray’s manner, suggesting rather some melancholy Uranian schoolmaster with its distinction in line 16 between Uranian and Demotic (heterosexual or, polemically, mulierastic) love. Its competence and feeling, though, are well above the level of George Ives or the other homo-erotic poets of the 1890s” (The Poems of John Gray, 305; cf. p. xi). 55. On which see pp. 332–38. 56. D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest, 180–82. D’Arch Smith helpfully summarizes this kind of evasive, double-coded use of acceptable themes and motifs by the Uranian poets and their predecessors: “…the Uranians often needed recourse to methods of expression which would, at one and the same time, give no cause for shocking the reading public and impress, by their undertones, the already initiated. The easiest, most natural method of achieving this double object was to select a subject which had already obtained historical or literary legitimacy, despite its implications, and adapt or translate it. [Montague] Summers’s and [Fernando Antonio Nogueira] Pessoa’s use of the Hadrian and Antinous legend, Symonds’s translation of Michelangelo’s sonnets, and [Edward Cracroft] Lefroy’s forays into the Theocritan idylls are examples of this form of evasion. The classics were, of course, a storehouse of Uranian material: Theocritus, Philostratus, Catullus, Plato, all were called into service, and the legends of Achilles and Patroclus, Heracles and Hylas, Zeus and Ganymede, proved of exceptional use in expressing an unorthodox passion in a familiar setting” (Love in Earnest, 180). Cf. Sinfield, The Wilde Century, 90, on “the structural double-think in Classics, since Winckelmann, whereby it has served as a conduit for same-sex passion while at the same time disavowing any such concern.” 57. Ralph N. Chubb, Note on Some Water-Colour Drawings (London: Goupil Gallery, 1929) [non vidi], cited in Smith, Love in Earnest, 226: “I believe absolutely in masculine love – boy-love in particular – of which I claim to be an apostle and forerunner. Let prudes and puritans unknowingly worship Satan in their degree; they will find their mistake, for no man can base his life upon a negation. David and Jonathan, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Christ and the youthful John, Plato, Socrates, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare are company good enough for me.” 58. Brian Taylor, “Motives for Guilt-Free Pederasty: Some Literary Considerations,” Sociological Review 24 (1976), 104. On Hallard’s poem see n. 54 above. Taylor’s article studies the strategies Uranian poets used to justify and motivate their paiderastic desires. Hector’s appeal to the Renaissance in the quotation with which this chapter began is a variation on this theme. 59. On Solomon see Colin Cruise et al., Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Merrell, 2005). Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s 1860 woodcut “Jonathans und Davids Freundschaft,” from his Die Bibel in Bildern, now graces the covers of both Ackerman, When Heroes Love, and Römer and Bonjour, L’homosexualité dans le Proche Orient et la Bible. 60. See the discussion in Chapter 3 above, pp. 157–60. 61. See Chapter 3 above, pp. 156–57. 62. Aristogeiton is described as the “lover” (e0rasth/j) of Harmodius in Thucydides, Hist. 6.54.2, and the assassination of Hipparchus is described as “due to an incident connected with a love affair” (di' e0rwtikh\n cuntuxi/an) in 6.54.1. See also Plutarch, Amat. 760b-c; 770b-c; Athenaeus, Deipn. 13.602a. The sexual love of Aristogeiton

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and Harmodius is at best implicit rather than explicit in Carmina convivialia 10-13 (frags. 893-896 PMG); Aristotle, Ath. pol. 18.2-6. 63. Aeschines speaks openly about his own sex life, defending his emotions and actions as a “lover” (e0rasth&j) on the grounds that he loves men honourably, whereas Timarchus has acted dishonourably by selling his body. 64. On this passage, see Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 53; Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love, 262–64. In general on this speech of Aeschines, see e.g. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 19–109; Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World, 17, 20–22, 35–36, 47, 48–53; Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love, esp. 65–67, 117–20 (responding to Dover), 423–25, 451–59. 65. This passage is quoted in Plutarch, Amat. 751c; Athenaeus, Deipn. 13.602e. See August Nauck (ed.), Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Leipzig: Teubner, 1889, 2nd edn; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), 44; Stefan Radt, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (vol. 3; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985), 250. The recent Loeb Classical Library edition of A. H. Sommerstein adopts the reading kath|de/sw in place of e0ph|de/sw, citing the aforementioned passage from Plutarch (Aeschylus, Fragments [ed. A. H. Sommerstein; LCL, 505; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008], 144). See further on this passage Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 70, 197; idem, “Greek Homosexuality and Initiation,” 128; Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World, 10–11; Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love, 261. 66. Ed. Sommerstein, pp. 146–47, following the reading of Peter Paul Dobree. For the textual variants for this line, see Radt, TrGF, 3:251. This passage is cited in Pseudo-Lucian, [Am.] 54. 67. Bentham archive, University College London, Box 161b fol. 460, December 24, 1817. Citing the Greek without translation, Bentham reads kalli/wn (“more beautiful” [?], cf. Plato, Symp. 180a and n. 106 below) instead of klai/wn (see the variants listed in Radt, TrGF, 3:251). I wish to thank Mandy Wise and Valerie Wallace for facilitating access to unpublished manuscripts in the Bentham archive. 68. See John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (vol. 1; 3rd edn; London: Adam and Charles Black, 1893; 1st edn, 1873), 102 (in previous editions this passage appears in vol. 2; thus in the second edition [London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1879] it appears in vol. 2, pp. 65–66; where I quote from Studies in the Greek Poets it will be from the 1893 edition unless otherwise stated). Symonds does not give references to the texts he quotes here, but he is clearly referring to the citation from Aeschylus in Lucian, [Am.] 54. 69. Plato, Symposium (ed. K. Dover; Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 95. Dover’s comment on this passage in Greek Homosexuality, on the other hand, does not stress the difference between Homer and Plato’s Symposium with respect to the social dynamics of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus: “Phaidros is right in saying that Homer represents Achilles as younger than Patroklos (Il. xi 786), yet he does not discard the erotic interpretation of the story” (p. 197; cf. p. 53). Davidson fixates less on the sexual dynamics themselves than on their wider significance: the point about Achilles being honoured by the gods is that in avenging Patroclus’s death he acted virtuously despite not being the e0rasth/j, despite not being inspired by e1rwj (The Greeks and Greek Love, 261–62). Homer, in fact, does not portray Achilles as much younger



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than Patroclus. The tension between Phaedrus and Homer here is to some extent comparable with the use of the David and Jonathan narrative by Ambrose of Milan, who assumes that Jonathan is the younger of the two. For Ambrose David was older and more experienced (prudentior) than the younger (iunior) Jonathan (Ambrose, Off. 1.32.167). The biblical text, if anything, seems to imply the reverse. Ambrose sees David’s trust in Jonathan as an example of trust in someone of goodwill (benevolentia). Jonathan and David were naturally inclined towards similar virtues, because benevolentia produces likeness of character. Jonathan sought to imitate the gentleness of David because he loved him (Ambrose, Off. 1.33.171). Saul’s anger in 1 Sam. 20:33 stems from his belief that Jonathan had placed his friendship with David above duty (pietas) and deference to paternal authority (Ambrose, Off. 2.7.36). Jonathan’s friendship is an example of a friendship that derives from virtuous character (honestas), that takes precedence over wealth, honour, and power (Ambrose, Off. 3.21.125). Ambrose is a good example of the way the David and Jonathan narrative was already being read in light of classical intertexts in the patristic period. The context is a lengthy reworking of the De officiis of Cicero, with echoes not only of Cicero, but of Aristotle on friendship (cf. Aristotle, Eth. nic. 8-9). This to some extent anticipates the use of the David and Jonathan narrative in the De spiritali amicitia of Aelred of Rievaulx (De spir. am. 2.62-64; 3.47, 92), a work that, itself dependent on the De officiis of Ambrose, is a medieval Christian reworking of the De amicitia of Cicero. For the text of the De officiis of Ambrose, see Davidson, Ambrose/De Officiis. For the text of the De spiritali amicitia of Aelred, see Aelredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia (vol. 1; Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Medievalis 1; ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot; Turnhout: Brepols, 1971). On the question of the difference in age between David and Jonathan, see now Rowe, “Is Jonathan Really David’s ‘Wife’?,” which challenges the assumption that there was much age difference between them at all. 70. Cf. Xenophon, Symp. 8.28. 71. See e.g. Euripides, El. 14-18. 72. Contrast the e9tairikh\ fili/a, “comradely friendship” to which Aristotle refers in Aristotle, Eth. nic. 9.10, apparently alluding to famous paria amicorum. 73. Pseudo-Lucian, [Am.] 47. 74. See Foucault, The Care of the Self, 224–25. 75. Euripides, Iph. taur. 311-12, 598-99, 603-605. 76. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 106. 77. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 106–107. Faderman’s allusion is to William Hayley, The Young Widow; or, the History of Cornelia Sedley, in a Series of Letters (Dublin: Printed for Messrs. L. White, P. Byrne, P. Wogan, H. Colbert, A. Grueber, C. Lewis, J. Moore and J. Halpen, 1789). 78. See further Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 132–38; eadem, Chloe plus Olivia, 37–43. 79. See further Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 120–25, 137–38; Chloe plus Olivia, 32–36. 80. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 121. 81. The full poem “To Miss Ponsonby” is given in Faderman, Chloe plus Olivia, 43. The final verse describes the life of the Ladies of Llangollen in paradisiacal terms:

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82. This distinction is central to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s landmark study Between Men. For Sedgwick, the male homosocial continuum runs from the kind of male bonding that is based on homoerotic desire to the kind of male bonding that is deeply homophobic and antagonistic to homoeroticism, whereas the female homosocial continuum has no point that is so sharply antagonistic to homosexuality. This distinction, however, may not obtain transhistorically, so while my use of this distinction may be pertinent to the nineteenth century (Sedgwick’s study focuses on the English novel from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries), there is no reason to regard it without further ado as applicable to other contexts. Sedgwick’s work, incidentally, enables us to re-read the position taken by biblical scholars such as Stolz, Hentschel, Zehnder, and Gagnon on David and Jonathan: their need to reject outright the possibility that David and Jonathan were homosexual lovers is an instance of “the radically disrupted continuum, in our society, between sexual and nonsexual male bonds” (Sedgwick, Between Men, 23), where the former must be excluded for the sake of the integrity of the masculinity of the biblical men in question (and arguably also that of these male biblical scholars themselves). 83. Cf. Gayle Rubin’s remarks on women’s separatism in response to a sex/gender system in which the significance of women is purely and simply as items of exchange cementing socio-economic relationships between men: “Separatism can be seen as a mutation in social structure, as an attempt to form social groups based on unmediated bonds between women. It can also be seen as a radical denial of men’s ‘rights’ in women, and as a claim by women of rights in themselves” (“The Traffic in Women,” 175; cf. pp. 183, 193–94). 84. I am referring here both to the forms of misogyny that are oppressive of women, and the misogyny inherent in homophobia that is oppressive of the “feminine” in men (for which distinction see Sedgwick, Between Men, 20; cf. pp. 216–17), which in turn trades on the same profoundly problematic gender constructs that help to perpetuate structures that oppress women. Taking my cue from Sedgwick, although male homoeroticism in some contexts – classical Athens might be a good example, but there are many others – can be implicated in misogyny, it does not seem obvious to me that there is a necessary nexus between the two. 85. Edward Carpenter, in Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1906, 2nd edn), 160–66. The 1906 edition contains an appendix with additional references (pp. 185–224). 86. This is printed as letter XIV in Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron with Notices of his Life (vol. 1; London: John Murray, 1830), 112–14, and the section alluding to the Ladies of Llangollen, Orestes and Pylades, and David and Jonathan is cited from this edition by Carpenter, Ioläus, 160–61. My citation is from Moore, but cf. Leslie A. Marchand (ed.), Byron’s Letters and Journals (vol. 1; Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1973), 124–26. Mayne cites this passage in his discussion of Byron’s same-sex desire in The Intersexes, 357, as does Eglinton in Greek Love, 356– 57, and Ruth Vanita cites part of this letter in Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex



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Desire and the English Literary Imagination (Between Men – Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies; New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 50, in a discussion of the influence of Sappho as a model of same-sex relationships both between women and between men in Romantic poetry (Sappho and the Virgin Mary, 37–61). The “Cornelian” referred to is a choirboy at Trinity chapel called John Edleston, two years Byron’s junior, to whom Byron had written a poem of that title. Edleston had given a cornelian to Byron as a gift. See further Marchand, Byron’s Letters and Journals, 1:87–88 (to Augusta Byron, 7 January, 1806), and 1:122–24 (to Elizabeth Bridget Pigot, 30 June, 1807). In his journal for 12 January, 1821, Byron writes of his friendship with Edward Noel Long and his romantic attachment to Edleston thus: “His friendship [viz. Long’s], and a violent, though pure, love and passion [viz. Edleston’s]— which held me at the same period—were the then romance of the most romantic period of my life” (Marchand, Byron’s Letters and Journals, 8:24). For the text of “The Cornelian,” see The Poetical Works of Lord Byron: Complete in One Volume (collected and arranged by T. Moore, et al.; London: J. Murray, 1847), 398b. 87. The friendship of Orestes and Pylades would have been well-known to Byron and others who were classically literate. In Euripides, Electra, Pylades is described by Electra as the “companion in arms” (paraspisth/j) of Orestes (886). In Orestes Orestes describes him as his “dearest among men” (fi/ltaton brotw~n, 725) and “surest of friends” (fi/lwn … tw~~n e0mw~n safe/state, 1619; cf. Iph. taur. 919), and in Iphigenia in Tauris, Orestes addresses Pylades with the words “I found you the dearest of my friends” (e0mw~n ga\r fi/ltaton s' hu[ron fi/lwn, 708). After Orestes and Electra have been condemned to death, Pylades despairs of life without the “comradeship” of Orestes (sh=j e9tairi/aj a!ter) in Orest. 1072 (cf. 1079). Responding to Iphigenia’s questioning, Orestes in Iphigenia in Tauris says that he and Pylades are brothers “in love, though we are not brothers by birth” (filo/thti/ g': e0sme\n d' ou0 kasignh/tw ge/nei, 498). 88. Nisus and his younger companion Euryalus are Trojan warriors who take part in the funeral games in Sicily to honour the deceased father of Aeneas (Virgil, Aen. 5.294-96, 315-61), and are killed during a daring raid on the Rutuli (Aen. 9.176-502). The “catastrophe” to which Byron refers is presumably the death of the two friends. The reference to Nisus and Euryalus, and indeed to the Aeneid generally, is significant also on another level, because whether Byron intended it or not it echoes an older tension between pagan epic and Christian scripture. In a study of Abraham Cowley’s use of the Nisus and Euryalus passages from the Aeneid in his Davideis, Stephen Guy-Bray has argued that Cowley was unable fully to contain the homoeroticism that such allusions would inevitably have connoted to the classically literate reader, and that this prevented Cowley from completing a sacred epic that would have had to culminate in a version of David’s lament for Jonathan that could in no way have avoided making the homoerotic obvious. See Guy-Bray, “Cowley’s Latin Lovers,” and cf. n. 25 above. This theme is much less clear in Ted-Larry Pebworth’s slightly earlier discussion of the David and Jonathan material in Cowley’s Davideis, which, he argues, bears the strong imprint of Thomistic and Renaissance Neo-Platonic concepts of love, on which Cowley drew to mould an image of idealized friendship in David and Jonathan (“Cowley’s Davideis and the Exaltation of Friendship,” in Frontain and Wojcik, The David Myth in Western Literature, 96–104).

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89. Such as Edward Carpenter (Ioläus, 164–65). 90. Moore, The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, 465b. In a more sardonic vein, Byron alludes to the singing of the Psalms in Trinity chapel in his 1806 poem “Granta: A Medley” (Moore, The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, 385a-86a): If David, when his toils were ended, Had heard these blockheads sing before him, To us his psalms had ne’er descended,— In furious mood he would have tore ’em. 91. See “The Episode of Nisus and Euryalus: A Paraphrase from the Æneid, Lib. IX,” in Moore, The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, 393a–96a. 92. See Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s study “Lust and Liberty,” Past and Present 207 (2010), 89–179 (esp. pp. 160–74). Biblical texts other than the David and Jonathan narrative had earlier been significant in this process, in particular the passages from the Gospel of John that refer to the relationship between Jesus and the Beloved Disciple. For example, in London in November 1698, Captain Edward Rigby attempted to seduce William Minton. Having asked Minton “whither he should fuck him,” a naive Minton responded “how can that be,” to which, according to Minton’s evidence, Rigby replied: “I will shew you how, for it was noe more then what was done in our forefathers tyme: our Saviour called St. John the handsome Apostle for that Reason…doe you not read it in the scripture?” (London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/ SP/1698/12/24 [information of William Minton, 7 November 1698]; non vidi, cited in Dabhoiwala, “Lust and Liberty,” 162–63). Dabhoiwala discusses Bentham’s contribution to the advocacy of decriminalizing same-sex erotic relationships in “Lust and Liberty,” 168–74 (see esp. his mention in this connection of the relationship between Jesus – possibly “a participator in the Attic taste” – and the Beloved Disciple [p. 169]). I wish to thank Philip Schofield for directing me to Dabhoiwala’s important work, and for sharing his own preliminary transcriptions of the relevant Bentham manuscripts, which are in places exceedingly difficult to decipher. 93. See, in detail, Dabhoiwala, “Lust and Liberty.” Dabhoiwala’s case is that the advocacy of sexual liberty was a pervasive, if wholly unintentional effect of the intellectual developments of the European Enlightenment. It is noteworthy that the same intellectual developments that made possible the advocacy of sexual liberty also made possible the modern (and postmodern) approaches to the biblical texts. Both together made possible the construal of the David and Jonathan narrative as representing an erotic relationship. 94. See Hal Gladfelder, “In Search of Lost Texts: Thomas Cannon’s Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify’d,” Eighteenth-Century Life 31 (2007), 22–38; Dabhoiwala, “Lust and Liberty,” 164. 95. See Louis Crompton, “Jeremy Bentham’s Essay on ‘Paederasty’: An Introduction,” Journal of Homosexuality 3 (1978), 383–87; idem, “Jeremy Bentham’s Essay on ‘Paederasty’: Part 2,” Journal of Homosexuality 4 (1978), 91–107. Bentham’s unpublished notes on the subject apparently go back to c. 1774 (Crompton, “Introduction,” 383; idem, Byron and Greek Love, 20). 96. Gladfelder, “In Search of Lost Texts,” 29–30; Dabhoiwala, “Lust and Liberty,” 164. 97. Gladfelder, “In Search of Lost Texts,” 30–32. According to Gladfelder, Cannon



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appeals to Lucian’s representation of the myth of Zeus and Ganymede (Dial. d. 4), the account in Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon 85–87, of Eumolpus and his lusty ephebe beloved – who at one point (§87) inquires of an exhausted Eumolpus, “Why aren’t we doing [it]?” (Quaere non facimus?) – and apparently also to (Pseudo-)Lucian, Amores. In ch. 51 of Tobias Smollett’s 1748 novel The Adventures of Roderick Random, Earl Strutwell, who is “notorious for a passion for his own sex,” defends sex between men with reference to Petronius ([ed. P.-G. Boucé; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], 309–10). 98. The National Archives, Public Record Office, KB 1/10/5, affidavit of Hugh Morgan (6 May, 1751). Non vidi, quoted here from Dabhoiwala, “Lust and Liberty,” 164; cf. Gladfelder, “In Search of Lost Texts,” 27. 99. See the works by Louis Crompton cited in n. 95 above. 100. Gamaliel Smith, Not Paul, but Jesus (London: Printed for John Hunt, 1823). Despite the fact that most of Bentham’s work on same-sex eroticism remained unpublished in the nineteenth century, it is possible, Richard Dellamora has argued, that his arguments nevertheless circulated, particularly among Philosophical Radicals such as John Stuart Mill (Masculine Desire, 12–14; cf. p. 197). 101. Box 161b fol. 457, December 21, 1817. The verses from 2 Samuel are listed as belonging to “2 Kings,” and verse 19 is listed as verse 18. 102. These words are superscript in the manuscript. It is possible to read them as “on occasion,” (i.e., “occasionally”), which is how Crompton construes the sentence: “In a country which could give birth on occasion to such a scene….” 103. The reference is to Judg. 19:1-30 as evidence for the existence of same-sex desire in ancient Israel. See further Crompton, Byron and Greek Love, 275–76. Bentham is anticipating by well over a century Raphael Patai’s similar treatment of homosexuality in ancient Israel (Sex and Family, 168–76, esp. pp. 169–70). 104. Bentham here anticipates by more than eighty years Hirschfeld’s judgment on 1 Sam. 18:1-4: “Is that the way friendships originate? No, only the light of sexual love is kindled with such swiftness!” (“David und der heilige Augustin,” 288: Ist das die Art, wie Freundschaften entstehen? Nein, mit solcher Schnelligkeit zündet nur der Strahl sexueller Liebe!). 105. December 21, 1817, box 161b, folio 458. Part of this passage is cited in Crompton, Byron and Greek Love, 276–77, but I have followed my own transcription, checked (and at certain points corrected) against Philip Schofield’s. Bentham’s script at this stage in his life was such that it is often impossible to determine with any real confidence what he intended to write, and where I was completely floored I have replaced Bentham’s words with ellipses. 106. I.e., 2 Sam. 1:19-27. 107. Cf. Gen. 19:1-28; Lev. 18:22; 20:13. 108. Lev. 20:13. 109. December 24, 1817, box 161b, folio 459. 110. December 24, 1817, box 161b, folio 460. 111. Bentham’s Greek reads Mhrwn…twn swn eusebhj omilia kalliwn. In A. H. Sommerstein’s recent edition (n. 65 above), this reads mhrw~n te tw~n sw~n hu0se/bhs' o9mili/an klai/wn, “Wailing I honoured the intimacy [intercourse?] of your thighs.” 112. November 28, 1817, box 161b, folio 476.

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113. See e.g. n. 92 above. 114. See the important study by David Hilliard, “Unenglish and Unmanly: AngloCatholicism and Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies (Winter 1982), 181–210. 115. Hilliard, “Unenglish and Unmanly,” 186–87. An example of exactly this kind of re-reading is Geoffrey Faber, Oxford Apostles, 211–26, who suggested that the themes of virginity, celibacy, and profound emotional friendship between men among the Tractarians, especially – though in different ways – Froude, Newman, and Faber, were rooted in an inner wrestling with same-sex erotic desire. On Newman, see e.g. Martin Smith, “A Saintly Gay or a Gay Saint?” Gay Literature 5 (1976), 25–30. 116. This confusion is tied up with the problem of inappropriately and anachronistically associating effeminacy with homosexuality at this period (cf. Chapter 1 n. 52 above). James Eli Adams has summarized the problem well: “The dichotomy of hetero- and homosexuality that emerges from late Victorian discourse has often distorted earlier Victorian constructions of ‘manliness’ by being unreflectively read back on them. To use Foucauldian terms that dominate much recent study of sexuality, Victorian men are ‘marked’ not simply by medico-juridical regulation of the body, but by assignments of gendered identity that circulate outside that discourse, and are shaped through comparatively occasional, informal, even haphazard rhetorical engagements” (Dandies and Desert Saints, 4). For Adams, associating dissident masculinities with transgressive sexuality without further ado imposes the homophobic logic of the hetero/homosexual binary – cf. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet – anachronistically on nineteenth-century sources that suggest a rather more complex series of conflicts over the authority to define who counts as “manly,” on what terms, and in relation to what cultural ideals. 117. Faber believed some of his great-uncle’s affections for other men were rooted in same-sex desire. See n. 115 above. 118. Roundell Palmer, Memorials: Part I. Family and Personal 1766–1865 (vol. 1; London: Macmillan, 1896), 136, cited by Geoffrey Faber, Jowett: A Portrait with Background (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), 90, and Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 287–88. 119. On which see Faber, Oxford Apostles, 211–26; John R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe: The Development of the Victorian Public School (London: Millington, 1977), 189; Hilliard, “Unenglish and Unmanly,” 184–85; Jeffrey Richards, “‘Passing the Love of Women’: Manly Love and Victorian Society,” in Manliness and Morality: MiddleClass Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, 92–122 (J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin [eds]; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 104. 120. On which see e.g. René Kollar, “The Oxford Movement and the Heritage of Benedictine Monasticism,” The Downside Review 101 (1983), 281–90, as well as the classic works by Peter Anson, The Call of the Cloister: Religious Communities and Kindred Bodies in the Anglican Communion (rev. and ed. A. W. Campbell; London: SPCK, 1958), and A. M. Allchin, The Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities 1845–1900 (London: SCM Press, 1958). 121. The University of Oxford ceased to be under Anglican ecclesiastical control after the passing of the Oxford University Act in 1854 (see http://www.legislation. gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/17-18/81/contents, accessed 18 June, 2012), and the subsequent abolition of all religious tests for non-theological degrees at Oxford, Cambridge, and  



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Durham universities through the Universities Tests Act of 1871 (see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/34-35/26, accessed 18 June, 2012). There is an irony in placing Newman and Jowett together in the narrative of this period, given that the revival of the study of the heritage of ancient Greece and the infusion of vibrant intellectual currents from Germany, which were due largely to the influence of Jowett, were diametrically opposed to the Tractarian desire to resubmit to theological – especially patristic – authority. Jowett and Mark Pattison took on board the Oxford tutorial system, which had been revivified by Newman and Hurrell Froude as the vehicle for a distinctly pastorally inclined pedagogical relationship between teacher and student (see Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 78–79, 88–89), and turned it to their own pedagogical ends. The influence of mind upon mind no longer served a primarily religious purpose akin to the cure of souls, but now served to inculcate an intimate engagement with the heritage of ancient Greece that would serve to prepare students to participate in the regeneration of English society. Throughout this period, in Newman’s case just as in Jowett’s, the tutorial provided a homosocial environment. The combination of the homosocial master-student relationship with learning rooted in the heritage of ancient Greece, with the suggestive links in Plato’s dialogues between filosofi/a and e1rwj, sowed the seeds for a revalorization of same-sex eroticism between men in the works of Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Oscar Wilde, despite the fact that this revalorization would have horrified Jowett himself (cf. nn. 223, 228, and 229 below). Jerusalem was to be redefined by Athens. See further e.g. Faber, Jowett, 189–202 (on the reforms of the 1850s); Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 248–49 (on Jowett’s “socratic” relationships with his students); Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 58–68 (on Pater at Oxford); Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, esp. pp. 32–36, 40–41, 62–66. 122. Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 11. Cf. Same-Sex Desire, 23 on the monastic life in nineteenth-century England, which “may be deemed a queer space, a place where same-sex attachments could flourish without society’s policing of deviance.” The notion of the culturally “queer virgin” is an essential element in Roden’s understanding of the sexual liminality of nineteenth-century Catholicism in its ideas and ideals of same-sex friendship. 123. In addition to Roden’s work, see Richard Dellamora’s earlier discussion of the transference of male-male desire from the bodies of other men to that of Christ in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Masculine Desire, 42–57). 124. See the discussion in Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 11–22. 125. On the significance of this burial and the spiritual friendship between Newman and St John that lay behind it, see esp. Alan Bray, “Wedded Friendships,” The Tablet (8 August, 2001) http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/5030; idem (accessed 18 June, 2012), The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 290–304. 126. Il. 23.83-84, 91–92. Bray, Friend, 298–99. There is no parallel in 1 and 2 Samuel to Patroclus’ post mortem wish to be buried with Achilles. In 2 Sam. 1:19-27 it is Saul who is not divided in death from Jonathan, and in 2 Samuel 9 it is in providing for Mephibosheth that David honours his dead friend. 127. John Henry Newman et al., Lyra Apostolica (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1836), 20–21. The authors of the various poems are indicated by a lower case Greek letter at the end of each poem. The key appears in the 1879 edition (p. viii), Newman’s

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work being signified by d. While the authors’ preference was for an anonymous collection of poems that had themselves been previously published anonymously, the signatures are given, according to Newman, so as to honour Froude’s memory. Froude died 28 February, 1836, and the preface to the first edition of Lyra Apostolica is dated All Saints (1 November), 1836. “David and Jonathan” appears in the section entitled “Affliction.” The original date of the poem is given as 16 January, 1833 at Lazaret in Malta in Newman’s Hymns (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1885), 68–69. 128. Bray, Friend, 297–98. Newman wrote: “…if in His great wisdom and love He take away the desire of your eyes, it will only be to bring her really nearer to you. For those we love are not nearest to us when in the flesh, but they come into our very hearts as being spiritual beings, when they are removed from us. Alas! it is hard to persuade oneself of this, when we have the presence and are without experience of the absence of those we love; yet the absence is often more than the presence, even were this all, that our treasure being removed hence, leads us to think more of Heaven and less of earth” (Oriel College, 14 July, 1837, to H. E. Manning, in The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman [vol. 6; ed. G. Tracey; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984], 95). 129. Bray, Friend, 303. Newman’s views on friendship and eternal life are explored by James Tolhurst in “‘A Blessed and Ever-Enduring Fellowship’: Newman’s Thought on Death and the Life Beyond,” Recusant History 25 (2000), 424–57. 130. Dalgairns, “Life of St Aelred,” 94–95 (italics mine). This passage is cited and discussed by Roden in “Aelred of Rievaulx, Same-Sex Desire and the Victorian Monastery,” in Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture (ed. A. Bradstock, S. Gill, A Hogan and S. Morgan; London: Macmillan, 2000), 85–99; idem, Same-Sex Desire, 24–25; “‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’” 124. Roden remarks, “The use of the David/Jonathan trope underscores Dalgairns’ valuation of covenanted male love in same-sex friendship. The pairing is employed elsewhere in the literature of the Victorian period… The pair’s homoerotic significance remains in popular culture, as the French lesbian and gay Catholic organisation equivalent to Dignity in North America is named David and Jonathan. The importance of this coupling in the nineteenth century may be compared with the legal and emotional power of marriage to be found in the genre of the novel” (“Aelred of Rievaulx,” 88; Same-Sex Desire, 25). Roden is not wrong here, but he does not make clear the fact that the David/Jonathan trope is not simply one that Dalgairns uses from the store of his own intertextual encyclopedia, but one that he has drawn from Aelred’s own work. Further, both Aelred in the twelfth century and Dalgairns in the nineteenth must assume a certain intertextual competence in their readers that encompasses a particular construal of the friendship of David and Jonathan. With respect to Roden’s point about marriage, there is an intriguing conjunction between marriage and the David/Jonathan trope in Anthony Trollope’s 1857 novel Barchester Towers. The narrator has Obadiah Slope declare his love for Madeline Stanhope thus: “If he had come there with any formed plan at all, his intention was to make love to the lady without uttering any such declaration. It was, however, quite impossible that he should now deny his love. He had, therefore, nothing for it, but to go down on his knees distractedly against the sofa, and swear that he did love her with a love passing the love of man” (p. 252). This implies a reader competent enough in the reading of scripture to know both 2 Sam. 1:26 and its



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acquired connotations of extra-marital male homosociality, in order to identify the deliberate rewording of the biblical verse to refer to the heterosexual desire of a man for a woman. As such, it echoes – presumably unwittingly – Kingsley’s earlier use of the David and Jonathan trope in a letter to his fiancée (see p. 321 above), but it may also be connected to the ambiguities of Slope’s gender performance (on which see Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 105–106). 131. See further n. 69 above. For James McEvoy, Ambrose’s Christian re-reading of Cicero’s De officiis is a possible model for Aelred’s Christian re-reading of Cicero’s De amicitia (“Philia and Amicitia,” 17; see pp. 16–19 in general on Aelred’s place in the evolution of the theme of friendship from Plato to Aquinas). For the influence of Cicero on Aelred, see also Richard E. Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century (The New Middle Ages; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 31–33. 132. See e.g. Douglass Roby, “Introduction,” in Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship (trans. M. E. Laker; Cistercian Fathers Series, 5; Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1977), 21–22; Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 221–26; Kenneth C. Russell, “Aelred, the Gay Abbot of Rievaulx,” Studia mystica 5 (1982), 51–64; Brian Patrick McGuire, “Sexual Awareness and Identity in Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–1167),” American Benedictine Review 45 (1994), 184–226. Boswell seems to have had no doubts about Aelred’s homosexuality, but this view has by no means gone unchallenged. While taking an agnostic approach to the question of Aelred’s sexuality, Mark Williams has criticized Boswell’s treatment of relevant passages in Aelred’s works in Aelred of Rievaulx’s “Spiritual Friendship” (trans. M. F. Williams; Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 1994), 91–103. McGuire, who entertains the possibility that prior to entering the monastic life Aelred was sexually drawn to another man (“Sexual Awareness and Identity,” 198–201; cf. pp. 219–21), and sees him as a celibate monk “with a powerful sexual drive and a yearning for other men” (p. 222), rightly points out that the question of Aelred’s possible homosexuality is “a typically late twentieth-century concern, one that avoids any final definition,” and is hampered by the fact that in the Middle Ages there was no abstraction corresponding to the modern English term “homosexuality” (p. 186; cf. p. 206). 133. Peter F. Anson, Abbot Extraordinary: A Memoir of Aelred Carlyle, Monk and Missionary, 1874–1955 (London: Faith Press, 1958), 29. Anson’s biography of Carlyle is anything but sentimental, painting a picture of Carlyle as someone seduced by the externals of Anglo-Catholic ritual and with delusions of grandeur, whose attempts to discern his own vocation and foster the vocations of others were often deeply misguided. 134. Anson, Abbot Extraordinary, 29–30. 135. Anson is here citing Maurice Powicke’s introduction to his edition and translation of The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx by Walter Daniel (London: Thomas Nelson, 1950; repr. Oxford Medieval Texts; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), lxv; cf. pp. lix– lxi, lxvi–lxvii. 136. Anson, Abbot Extraordinary, 125 (italics mine). See Aelred of Rievaulx, Spec. car. 1.34; 3.12, 29. 137. This would appear to be the import of the following passage, in which Anson seems to resent both Carlyle’s approach to the discernment of vocations, which would have affected Anson directly as a former member of Carlyle’s community on

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Caldey, and his own former naivété, which he blames partly on the absence of adequate library resources in the abbey: “Looking back nearly half a century, I cannot help feeling that many of the vocations in the Caldey community depended largely on personal affection for the abbot; in fact, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to remain in the monastery without a real love for him as a man. What I did not know at the time, but have since discovered, is that in this respect there was a certain affinity between the spirit of our community and that of the twelfth century Cistercian monasteries, above all Rievaulx, when it was ruled over by S. Aelred between 1147 and 1167. Had I been able to study S. Aelred’s writings when I was a novice, I should have realized how much our Abbot had in common with his patron saint: but neither Migne’s Patrologia Latina nor Tissier’s Bibliotheca Cisterciensis were to be found in our very inadequate library” (Abbot Extraordinary, 124). 138. Rossetti, Letter and Spirit, 62. 139. Cf. Rossetti, Letter and Spirit, 37: “Nevertheless, as the King’s Daughter goes not home except environed by the Virgins that be her fellows; so may we rest assured that our own heart is not right either with God or with man, so long as our inward loyalty fails to embody itself in outward observances”; Letter and Spirit, 45–46: “Christ deigns to claim each obedient disciple as His own ‘brother and sister’: He therefore cannot be less than such to anyone of us who walk in His ways, and we become privileged to do to Himself what we do to even the least of His and our brethren.” 140. Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 49. 141. Rossetti, Letter and Spirit, 52–53. 142. Rossetti, Letter and Spirit, 62. 143. Rossetti, Letter and Spirit, 62–63. 144. Rossetti, Letter and Spirit, 47–49, 55. 145. Rossetti, Letter and Spirit, 54–55. 146. Rossetti, Letter and Spirit, 59–60. 147. Rossetti, Letter and Spirit, 61–62. 148. It was originally applied by reviewers of novels by Kingsley and Thomas Hughes. See Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Religious Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2. In his review of Kingsley, Two Years Ago, T. C. Sandars wrote that Kingsley had made his task “that of spreading the knowledge and fostering the love of a muscular Christianity. His ideal is a man who fears God and can walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours – who, in the language which Mr. Kingsley has made popular, breathes God’s free air on God’s rich earth, and at the same time can hit a woodcock, doctor a horse, and twist a poker round his fingers” (The Saturday Review 3 [21 February, 1857], 176a). 149. See further on the tensions between Kingsley and Newman e.g. Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974), 229–37; Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 95–119 (esp. pp. 107–108, 118–19); Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 35–41; Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, 44–46. 150. See John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita sua (ed. W. Oddie; Everyman’s Library; London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 3–55. 151. Hilliard, “Unenglish and Unmanly,” 188.



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152. Charles Kingsley, David: Five Sermons (London: Macmillan, 2nd edn, 1874; 1st edn, 1866), 2–3 (italics mine). In general on Kingsley’s Christian manliness, with special reference to his novels, see Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 78–133. 153. On the “Victorian cult of chivalry” as part of the background to the works of Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, see Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 17–26. For a relatively recent queer, and broadly new historicist approach to the homoerotic in medieval chivalric texts, see Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and Chivalry. 154. The definition of “muscular Christianity” in this sermon is cited by Edward Cracroft Lefroy in his response to Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds: “Muscular Christianity,” Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate’s Journal (31 May, 1877), 451b. 155. Kingsley, David, 3–6. Cf. Kingsley’s comment on Psalm 51 in his sermon on “David’s Strength” (David, 34–35; italics mine): “Faith it is which gives to [Psalm 51] its peculiarly simple, deliberate, manly tone; free from all exaggerated selfaccusations, all cowardly cries of terror. He is crushed down, it is true. The tone of his words shews us that throughout. But crushed by what? By the discovery that he has offended God? Not in the least. For the sake of your own souls, as well as for that honest critical understanding of the Scriptures, do not foist that meaning into David’s words. He never says that he had offended God. Had he been a mediæval monk, had he been an average superstitious man of any creed or time, he would have said so, and cried, I have offended God; he is offended and angry with me, how shall I avert his wrath?” 156. Kingsley, David, 6–7. 157. Dalgairns, “Life of St Aelred,” 115. 158. Dalgairns, “Life of St Aelred,” 123; see further pp. 129–30, and chs 5–6 and 8 passim on the monastic life. 159. Dalgairns, “Life of St Aelred,” 143. 160. Kingsley, David, 7–8. 161. Kingsley, David, 9–10. See further, pp. 323–24, on Thomas Hughes. 162. Kingsley, David, 13–14. 163. Kingsley, David, 49–51; cf. pp. 62–63. 164. Kingsley, David, 71–89. 165. Kingsley, David, 93–112. 166. See esp. Kingsley, David, 87–89. 167. Kingsley, David, 71. 168. Kingsley, David, 72. 169. Kingsley seems at this point to advocate a relatively progressive position on the relations between men and women: “…even [after the Exile] the law of divorce seems to have been as indulgent towards the man, as it was unjust and cruel toward the woman” (Kingsley, David, 73). Yet this is bought at the price of problematic construals of post-medieval Western Europe as a Christian ideal, and of pre-Christian Judaism as a model of moral imperfection, that can scarcely escape the charge of supersessionism: “In due course of time, when the Teutonic nations were Christianized, there sprang up among them an idea of married love, which shewed that our Lord’s words had at last fallen on good ground, and were destined to bear fruit an hundredfold” (David, 74).

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170. Kingsley, David, 74–75. 171. On celibacy and effeminacy in relation to Kingsley’s disagreement with Newman, see Vance, Sinews of the Spirit, 36–41. 172. Kingsley, David, 75. 173. Kingsley, David, 76. 174. Polygamy, for Kingsley, broke the inexorable divine laws of the universe and incurred necessary punishment for David (David, 78–79; cf. pp. 82, 84). 175. Kingsley, David, 94. 176. Loc. cit. Kingsley is referring here to 1 Sam. 14:6-15. 177. Kingsley, David, 96–97. 178. Kingsley, David, 98. 179. Kingsley, David, 103–11. 180. Kingsley, David, 112. 181. There are echoes here of Wilhelm Vischer’s treatment of David and Jonathan. See Chapter 1 above, n. 95. 182. Charles Kingsley, “In Memoriam [1850] and Earlier Works,” in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage (ed. J. D. Jump; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 172–85; abridged reprint from an unsigned review, Fraser’s Magazine 42 (September 1850): 245–55. Begun shortly after Hallam’s death in September 1833, “In Memoriam” was circulated in a trial private issue followed by three published editions in 1850. Tennyson continued to add sections to the collection, and to revise them in light of their reception, until 1870. On the evolution of In Memoriam, see Susan Shatto and Marion Shaw (eds), Tennyson: In Memoriam (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 8–26, 322–26, and on Tennyson’s negotiation of masculinity in “The Princess” and “In Memoriam,” see Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 16–41; cf. Sinfield, The Wilde Century, 57–62, on “In Memoriam.” 183. Kingsley, “In Memoriam [1850] and Earlier Works,” 185. 184. Thus Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), 6, and cf. Sinfield, The Wilde Century, 59: “Kingsley…worked hard to assimilate In Memoriam to his idea of Christian manliness.” 185. Chitty, The Beast and the Monk, 52–53. The letter in question is dated 28 October, 1843. 186. On which see Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 143–51. 187. See Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 151–65. 188. For the influence of Maurice on Kingsley and Hughes, see Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 52–59. Maurice, incidentally, was chaplain of the Church of St Edward King and Martyr in Cambridge from 1870 to 1872, during which time the recently ordained Edward Carpenter was curate there. 189. For Arnold’s role in shaping the Protestant manliness of Kingsley and Hughes, see Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 69–77. 190. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford (London: Macmillan, 1861), 206 (cited from the 1892 reprint). 191. Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford, 193. The innocuous-looking “as” is ambiguous: does it mean “as much as” or “in the same manner as”? In the former case, the David and Jonathan trope would connote the intensity of same-sex affection; in the latter case, it would connote a certain kind of same-sex relationality, and would beg all sorts



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of questions about what Hughes himself or his Victorian readers would have understood by the allusion, and how the connotations they perceived in David and Jonathan would have been determined (by their familiarity with earlier appeals to David and Jonathan in other male homosocial contexts such as public schools like Rugby and Harrow, by the transmission of David and Jonathan in the context of other paria amicorum, and so on). 192. Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford, 194. See the brief discussion in Richards, “‘Passing the Love of Women,’” 105. 193. Note esp. the narrator’s delightfully condescending, oblique address – in the third person – to “lady readers,” in the apparently unlikely event that there are many: Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford, 353. 194. I.e. in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. 195. See the remarks by Fitzjames Stephen in the Edinburgh Review 117 (January 1858), 176, 190–93, in which Hughes is described as a “disciple” of Kingsley and an exponent of Kingsley’s muscular Christianity. 196. Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford, 98–99. Parts of this passage are discussed in Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 158, and quoted by Jeffrey Richards in “‘Passing the Love of Women,’” 103. 197. See further Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe, 186–87. Honey suggests that the later nineteenth-century suspicion of such friendships as we see in Hughes’s novels was due, in part, to an association between manliness and “stiff-upper-lippery” combined with the after effects of the Labouchère Amendment, the Oscar Wilde trials, and the works of Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter (Tom Brown’s Universe, 192–93). 198. Frederic William Farrar, Julian Home: A Tale of College Life (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1860). On the differences between Tom Brown and the protagonists of Farrar’s novels, see A. Jamieson, “F. W. Farrar and Novels of the Public Schools,” British Journal of Educational Studies 16 (1968), 271–78. 199. Jamieson, “F. W. Farrar,” 275. 200. Farrar is mentioned occasionally in Symonds’s correspondence. See Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters (eds), The Letters of John Addington Symonds (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1967–1969), 1:108–109, 146. 201. Eglinton makes the point, in connection with the appeal to ancient paria amicorum in the (probably) pseudo-Byronic poem Don Leon, a notable defence of paiderastia, that “the classical precedents would have been familiar to any graduate of a British public school” (Greek Love, 363). 202. Farrar, Julian Home, 34. 203. Farrar, Julian Home, 34–35. 204. Farrar, Julian Home, 105. 205. In his brief discussion of Farrar’s novels, Jenkyns comes across as aghast at Farrar’s naïveté (The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 289–90), though Jenkyns is himself well aware of the risks of anachronistically importing homoeroticism into the literature of the period. After citing the allusion in Julian Home to ancient paria amicorum, he remarks, “The extent to which Farrar can ignore the implications of what he writes is extraordinary. Forster describes a class at Cambridge: ‘Mr. Cornwallis observed in a flat toneless voice: “Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice

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of the Greeks”.’ Men like Farrar literally omitted it, omitted it so completely that they ended up by understanding neither the Greeks nor themselves” (p. 290; cf. Forster, Maurice, 41–42). 206. Cicero, Amic. 15: “…from all ages scarcely three or four are named pairs of friends” (ex omnibus saeculis vix tria aut quattuor nominantur paria amicorum). Laelius is expressing the hope that his friendship with Scipio will be remembered in future, just as those of the well-known paria amicorum were. Although Cicero does not identify them in this passage, the reference is presumably to Achilles and Patroclus, Theseus and Peirithous, and Orestes and Pylades, and possibly also to Damon and Pythias (cf. Cicero, On Friendship and the Dream of Scipio [ed. J. G. F. Powell; Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990], 85). 207. See pp. 282–85 above. 208. A mixture of “Eton” and Farrar’s own Harrow, just as the “Camford” to which Julian progresses after school is a mixture of “Cambridge” and “Oxford,” and the river running through Camford, the “Iscam,” is a mixture of “Isis” and “Cam.” 209. David L. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1969), 165–70, 181–91. The influence of the heritage of ancient Greece on Victorian intellectual cultural cannot be dealt with in detail here. In addition to DeLaura, see Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece; Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981); Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality; Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 210. See esp. Matthew Arnold, “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” in Essays in Criticism: First Series (London: Macmillan, 1865), 194–222; idem, “Hebraism and Hellenism,” in Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1869), 142–66. In the latter, Arnold criticizes the preference of his society, as he saw it, for Hebraism over Hellenism, that is, for “doing” over “thinking” (p. 142), of “strictness of conscience” over “spontaneity of conscience” (p. 168), and sought a balance between them. While both traditions have the same aim of “man’s perfection or salvation” (p. 143), they pursue this aim differently: “The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience. Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference; the Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking, the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting” (p. 145). An unhealthy attachment to Hebraism, with its concomitant narrowness of vision, needs to be counterbalanced by Hellenism, striving by means of this balance for a “harmonious perfection only to be won by unreservedly cultivating many sides in us” (p. xxxi). In his earlier essay “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” after comparing the “religion of pleasure” he found in the thirteenth idyll of Theocritus with the “religion of sorrow” he found in St Francis’s Canticle of the Sun, Arnold looks beyond both back to the Greek poetry of the century preceding the Peloponnesian War as that which most closely reflected the “imaginative reason” that is “the main element in the modern spirit’s life” (pp. 221– 22). Pater outlined his vision of the Hellenic ideal – “in which man is at unity with



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himself, with his physical nature, with the outward world” – in a highly influential essay, “Winckelmann,” first published in Westminster Review n.s. 31 (January 1867), 80–110, and subsequently in revised form in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 147–206. The works of Arnold and Pater in the mid to late 1860s differed significantly – though as DeLaura has shown neither is entirely internally consistent – on the extent to which the heritage of ancient Greece could be regarded positively in relation to that of medieval Christianity as a cultural resource for modern society. On the critical relationship of Pater’s “Winckelmann” to the work of Arnold, esp. Arnold’s essay “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” see DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene, 202–222; Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 107–116; Evangelista, British Aestheticism, 36–42. On “Winckelmann” as an attempt to fuse the reappropriation of the heritage of ancient Greece with a valorization of homoerotic desire, see Evangelista, British Aestheticism, 31–36; cf. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, 95–98; Sinfield, The Wilde Century, 89–90; and Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 154–72, though Adams complicates the link between Pater and the valorization of homoerotic desire, first by reading his work more broadly as reflecting the attempt to define a dissident, elite masculinity rooted, via Winckelmann, in the heritage of ancient Greece, but which cannot simply be reduced to an anachronistically inferred homoeroticism (p. 171); and second, by identifying surprising, yet strong commonalities with Kingsley’s muscular Christianity, through their shared fascination with the virile male body (p. 172; cf. the quote from Susan Chitty’s study of Kingsley on p. 321 above). 211. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene, 169. See further pp. 171–81 on the significant differences between Arnold and Pater with respect to Hellenism and its relationship to Christianity. 212. Lefroy, “Muscular Christianity.” See further William Austin Gill, Edward Cracroft Lefroy: His Life and Poems including a Reprint of his Echoes from Theocritus with a Critical Estimate of the Sonnets by the late John Addington Symonds (London: John Lane, 1897), 19–22; Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 284–85; Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 185–87; Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 172–73. 213. Lefroy, “Muscular Christianity,” 451a. Lefroy fears that the pseudo-Hellenism of Pater and Symonds leaves no possibility of halting a decline into moral anarchy. 214. Lefroy, “Muscular Christianity,” 451b–452a. 215. John Addington Symonds, “Edward Cracroft Lefroy,” In the Key of Blue and Other Prose Essays (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1893), 87–110. See also his “A Critical Estimate,” in Gill, Edward Cracroft Lefroy, 189–99, which reprises his appreciation Lefroy’s work without the polemic against muscular Christianity. 216. Esp. Symonds, “Edward Cracroft Lefroy,” 89–90; “A Critical Estimate,” 190–92. 217. Symonds, “Edward Cracroft Lefroy,” 94. 218. Symonds, “Edward Cracroft Lefroy,” 101; “A Critical Estimate,” 194. 219. Symonds, “Edward Cracroft Lefroy,” 109; “A Critical Estimate,” 199. 220. See pp. 281–85 above. 221. A Problem in Modern Ethics was published posthumously and in a limited edition of 100 copies in 1896. For Symonds’s role as “friend and fellow-conspirator” of the Uranian poets, see D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest, 12–18.

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222. Symonds, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, 99–100. See further Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 281; Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, 67. 223. See further e.g. D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest, 2, 5; Sinfield, The Wilde Century, 65. Symonds himself wrote to Oscar Browning after writing A Problem in Greek Ethics and A Problem in Modern Ethics, canvassing Browning’s opinion as to whether the study of the classics by impressionable adolescent boys could be regarded as harmful, and expressing the wish that Browning would himself turn his attention to the problem of sexual ethics. See H. E. Wortham, Oscar Browning (London: Constable, 1927), 261–62, and Symonds’s poignant and heartfelt letter to Jowett on 1 February, 1889, outlining his strong disagreement with Jowett on the nature of paiderasti/a in Plato, and the dangers reading Plato might present to impressionable young men (Schueller and Peters, Letters, 3:345–47). For Symonds the problem was not with boys reading Plato per se, but with same-sex oriented boys in a homophobically intolerant society finding a kindred spirit in Plato and not having the inner strength to pursue the nobler rather than the baser form of paiderastic love. 224. Letter to a friend, 21 August, 1835, in John Edward Bowden, The Life and Letters of Frederick William Faber, D.D. (American edn; Baltimore, MD: John Murphy, 1869), 48–49. The Christian rejection of the study of pagan literature is satirized – and implicitly criticized – by Farrar in Julian Home, in the sanctimonious character Hazlet, who looks piously down his nose at Aeschylus, Agamemnon: “I see you’re engaged on that heathen poet. It often strikes me, Home, that we may be wrong after all in spending so much time on these works of men, who, as St. Paul tells us, were ‘wholly given to idolatry.’ [Acts 17:16] I have just come from a most refreshing meeting at—” (Julian Home, 77). Farrar, of course, is satirizing Hazlet’s view, which points to the fact that the tension between Christianity and classical Greece and Rome was far more complex than either the fictional (yet believable) Hazlet’s rejection of Aeschylus, or Faber’s disdain for the Roman poet Horace, would suggest. On the tension between Christianity and the Greeks in the Victorian period, and the resolution of doubts of various sorts cast on the value of a classical education, see e.g. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 60–73, and cf. Arnold’s attempt to reconcile “Hebraism” and “Hellenism” (n. 210 above). 225. Richard St John Tyrwhitt, “The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature,” The Contemporary Review 29 (1876–1877), 552–66. This article should be read alongside that of Lefroy (see nn. 154 and 212 above) as another, lengthier, attempt to modify Arnold’s balance between Hebraism and Hellenism. 226. Tyrwhitt, “The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature,” 556. 227. Tyrwhitt, “The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature,” 557. 228. Tyrwhitt, “The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature,” 562, 565–66. Cf. Benjamin Jowett, “On the State of the Heathen World,” in The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans, with Critical Notes and Dissertations (London: John Murray, 1859, 2nd edn), 2:74–77. While in his commentary on Rom. 1:26 (p. 65) Jowett does not make the connection explicit, in this excursus it is fairly clear, especially given his concluding use of the customary circumlocution for sodomy: “There are vices which have existed in modern times to a far greater extent than in ancient; there were virtues in ancient times which have never been exceeded; but there were vices also which are not even named among us” (p. 77).



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229. On Jowett’s “Victorian” re-interpretation of paiderastic love in Plato, see Faber, Jowett, 96–99; Turner, The Greek Heritage of Victorian Britain, 424–27. Jowett at one point contemplated writing an essay on Greek love, but to Symonds’s relief, judging by his letter to Jowett of 1 February, 1889, he decided not to: “It surprises me to find you, with your knowledge of Greek history, speaking of this in Plato as ‘mainly a figure of speech.’ – It surprises me as much as I seem to surprise you when I repeat that the study of Plato is injurious to a certain number of predisposed young men” (Schueller and Peters, Letters, 3:345; cf. n. 223 above). Clearly the desire to control the meaning of Plato was as strong among Oxford Hellenists in the later Victorian period as the desire to control the meaning of 1 and 2 Samuel is among modern Jewish and Christian scholars of scripture. See further on the disagreement between Symonds and Jowett: Schueller and Peters, Letters, 3:345–47, 365. 230. Letter to Henry Graham Dakyns, London, 13 January, 1872 (Schueller and Peters, Letters, 2:198). 231. Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 253; idem, “‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’” 119. In addition to Roden’s references to this poem by Symonds, see also Hügel, Homoerotik und Hebräische Bibel, 431. 232. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, 12–13. 233. Symonds wrote thus to Clifford: “My desire to see David is so strong that I have put off my going to London till the afternoon that I may if it is fine come to you soon after 10” (letter to Edward Clifford, Clifton, January 9, 1872; Schueller and Peters, Letters, 2:195). In Symonds’s next two letters to Dakyns we read: “I go at 10.15 to see Clifford’s David and return if all be well at noon to depart by P.M. express” (letter to Dakyns, Clifton, 9 January, 1872; Schueller and Peters, Letters, 2:195); “With faint presences of David & Jonathan one upon each side of me, with Obidicut before my face, with Flibbertigibbet mowing behind my shoulders, & with the huge fog distilling wings of Melancholia-Ennui overhead, I pace the streets of London. Syria would be a better place for assimilating the Semitic mind. No good will come of this” (letter to Dakyns, Union Club Trafalgar Square, London, 11 January, 1872; Schueller and Peters, Letters, 2:196). 234. Symonds’s next letter Clifford alludes to the completed poem: “I hope to come to you tomorrow at 11 or so, & I will try to remember to bring Jonathan & David, if that is the poem you w[oul]d like to see” (letter to Clifford, Clifton Hill House, Clifton, Bristol, 8 February, 1872). 235. “The Poems accumulate. The Song of the Sheepfold was written P.M. yesterday & A.M. today David’s Epilogue begun. But it as bad as botanizing on one’s mother’s grave to put these sacred flowers into my Hortus siccus” (letter to Dakyns, Clifton, Spring 1871; Schueller and Peters, Letters, 2:137). 236. Symonds, Many Moods, v–vi. 237. Symonds, Many Moods, 121–34. 238. Cf. Chapter 1 above, n. 8. 239. Cf. 2 Sam. 1:26. 240. Cf. Song 8:10. 241. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 2:40-71. 242. Cf. Symonds’s apology for citing the Iliad so extensively: “Some apology may be needed for these numerous quotations from a poem which is hardly less widely known and read than Shak[e]speare or the Bible” (Studies of the Greek Poets, 2:59).

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243. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 1:8-9, italics mine. 244. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 2:45, italics mine. Gide cites this passage in a footnote to the fourth dialogue of Corydon (Corydon, 108), as does Edward Carpenter in his discussion of the poetry of male friendship in Greece (Ioläus, 69). Symonds’s construal of the Iliad here is reminiscent of that of Bishop Connop Thirlwall (1797–1875), whose History of Greece Carpenter cites in connection with the theme of friendship: “The argument of the Iliad mainly turns on the affection of Achilles for Patroclus – whose love for the greater hero is only tempered by reverence for his higher birth and his unequalled prowess” (Connop Thirlwall, History of Greece [vol. 1; London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1835], 177; Carpenter, Ioläus, 45). 245. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 2:58 (italics mine). 246. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 2:60-61, italics mine. This passage is quoted by Carpenter in Ioläus, 15–16, in connection with evidence for martial institutions of male friendship (cf. pp. 11–29), and quoted in part in Richards, “‘Passing the Love of Women,’” 101. Richards shows a clear awareness in citing this passage of the way Symonds is repackaging both classical and medieval – though we should also add biblical – traditions in an act of ressourcement that was intended to bolster a very particular Victorian construction of the masculine: “Symonds, although himself a homosexual and homosexual apologist, chose here to list male couples representative of both homosexual paiderastia and of Aristotelian non-sexual fellowship and to link all to spiritual love as in chivalry. This was typical of the ‘official’ Victorian attitude to male couples in Greek history; their exaltation as exemplars of comradeship, virtue, patriotism and male love” (pp. 101–102). 247. Symonds, “A Problem in Greek Ethics,” 233–35 (§6); see the quote from this section in Chapter 1 above, p. 18. Symonds identifies as Greek Love “that mixed form of paiderastia upon which the Greeks prided themselves, which had for its heroic ideal the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, but which in historic times exhibited a sensuality unknown to Homer.” The fact is, however, that an appeal to Achilles and Patroclus without specific reference to a specific instantiation of the tradition to which they belonged could confuse the two things – heroic comradeship and paiderasti/a – that Symonds is here trying to keep distinct; moreover, the confusion may exist not so much in our minds, but in that of the Victorian making the comparison. As Jenkyns notes, “when the Victorians compared their friendships to those of the Greeks, the result could be ambiguous: a reference to Achilles and Patroclus might be either to Homer or to Plato. Some may hardly have known themselves what they meant; how ingenuous or disingenuous was Pater when he described the Spartans taking Castor and Polydeuces as types “of a clean, youthful friendship, ‘passing even the love of women’ ” (The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 287). Jenkyns is here citing Walter Pater’s lecture on Sparta in Plato and Platonism (London: Macmillan, 1893), 208, and speculating on whether Pater meant a sexual or non-sexual love between men. The brief citation of Pater by Jenkyns is from a passage in which Castor and Polydeuces are represented as mythological types of Spartan homoerotic love, the Spartan equivalent of Athenian paiderasti/a: “Lovers of youth they remained, those enstarred types of it, arrested thus at that moment of miraculous good fortune as a consecration of the clean, youthful friendship…which, by system, and under the  



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sanction of their founder’s name, elaborated into a kind of art, became an elementary part of education… The beloved and the lover, side by side through their long days of eager labour, and above all on the battlefield, became respectively, a)i5thj, the hearer, and ei0spnh/laj, the inspirer; the elder inspiring the younger with his own strength and noble taste in things” (loc. cit.). The allusion to 2 Sam. 1:26 is, as in Symonds, in the context of a discussion – which in Pater is little short of a celebration – of a particular form of Greek homoeroticism and, moreover, strongly echoes, two years in advance, Oscar Wilde’s defence of his love of young men at his trial (see above, pp. 346–47). Jenkyns takes a wrecking-ball to Plato and Platonism in The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 253–61. 248. Plato, Symp. 180c-185c, esp. 180e2-3 (see above, pp. 295–96). 249. See n. 233 above. 250. See pp. 291–98 above. 251. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 2:67. Cf. Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, 254 (§12): “Homer represented Patroclus as older in years than the son of Peleus, but inferior to him in station; nor did he hint which of the friends was the e0rasth/j of the other. That view of their comradeship had not occurred to him. Æschylus makes Achilles the lover; and for this distortion he was severely criticised by Plato. At the same time…he treated their affection from the point of view of postHomeric paiderastia.” 252. Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, 229–30 (§2). 253. Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, 230 (§2) (italics mine). 254. Mayne, The Intersexes, 377. Mayne continues, “Its atmosphere [viz. that of homosexuality] pervades Whitman’s poems: being indeed an almost inevitable concurrent of the neo-hellenic, platonic democracy of Whitman’s philosophic muse” (loc. cit.). 255. Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 86. 256. D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest, 3–4. 257. Symonds, Walt Whitman: A Study (London: John C. Nimmo, 1893), 11; cf. idem, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 115–25. 258. Symonds, Walt Whitman, 67–85. 259. Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2004; 1st edn, 1975), 166. 260. Symonds, Walt Whitman, 72; cf. idem, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 116. Symonds is here commenting on extracts from “Scented Herbage of my Breast” (Complete Poems, 146–48), “These I Singing in Spring” (Complete Poems, 151–52), and “O You whom I Often and Silently Come” (Complete Poems, 167). 261. Symonds, Walt Whitman, 70–71; cf. idem, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 117. 262. Cf. Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 118–19. Symonds wrote to Whitman for clarification regarding the possibility of a sexual dimension to manly comradeship in the “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass on 3 August, 1890 (Schueller and Peters, Letters, 3:481–84), and famously received a horrified reply from Whitman dated 19 August, 1890, which Symonds quotes in a letter of 13 February, 1893, to Edward Carpenter (Schueller and Peters, Letters, 3:818-19), and in A Problem in Modern Ethics, 118–19. Symonds’s original question to Whitman, which hints at the position Carpenter would subsequently take in Homogenic Love (see above, p. 251),

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reads thus: “In your conception of Comradeship, do you contemplate the possible intrusion of those semi-sexual emotions and actions which no doubt do occur between men? I do not ask, whether you approve of them, or regard them as a necessary part of the relation? But I should much like to know whether you are prepared to leave them to the inclinations and the conscience of the individuals concerned?” (original underscored; cf. Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 116, where Symonds writes as if this were Whitman’s intention) In his response, Whitman wrote in a tone approaching panic: “that the Calamus part has even allowed the possibility of such constructions as mentioned is terrible – I am fain to hope the pp themselves are not to be even mentioned for such gratuitous & quite at the time undreamed & unrecked possibility of morbid inferences – wh are disavowed by me and seem damnable.” He goes on to defend his heterosexual probity with reference to the six children he had fathered, Symonds suggesting to Carpenter that Whitman thereby “wanted to obviate ‘damnable inferences’ about himself by asserting his paternity.” Symonds is concerned with authorial intent, but not only could Whitman not control how “Calamus” would be construed, we are left wondering whether Whitman is responding disingenuously to Symonds, whether Whitman (as Symonds suggests) changed his mind over the meaning of “Calamus,” whether Whitman had changed his mind over how he wished “Calamus” to be read, whether Whitman adequately understood what Symonds was asking, whether the American context of Whitman’s democratic vision and the middle-class English context of Symonds’s approach to male homoeroticism created barriers to their mutual intelligibility, and the extent to which Whitman was himself fully aware of the scope of his own erotic sensibilities and their potential implications. Whitman’s poems, like the dialogues of Plato and the narratives of 1 and 2 Samuel, have proved to be open to both multiple construals and the object of competing claims to ownership of their meaning, regardless of – perhaps in this case in spite of – what their “author” might have intended. See further Sedgwick’s rich discussion of Whitman’s reception in England on the cusp of “our crystallized homosexual/homophobic world” in Between Men, 201–17, and Antony Copley’s more recent discussion of Whitman’s influence on Edward Carpenter, and the tensions between Whitman and his English disciples in A Spiritual Bloomsbury, 13–23, in which Copley notes that, “It was over his refusal to collude with his English disciples that his concept of comradeship was essentially an endorsement of homosexuality that Whitman most signally failed to live up [to] their expectations of him as a guru” (p. 19). I wish to thank Will Sweetman for pointing me in the direction of Copley’s work. 263. Symonds, Walt Whitman, 74–77; cf. pp. 81–85; idem, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 119–20. 264. Whitman, Complete Poems, 161–62. 265. Symonds, Walt Whitman, 78; idem, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 121. 266. Symonds, Walt Whitman, 79–80; idem, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 121–22. Here Symonds cites “I Dream’d in a Dream” (Complete Poems, 164), “To the East and to the West,” (Complete Poems, 165), and “For You O Democracy” (Complete Poems, 150). 267. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 32–33; Thomas Wright, Oscar’s Books: A Journey around the Library of Oscar Wilde (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), 68–70, 89–90, 181.



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268. See Bristow, Effeminate England, 6. 269. Bristow, Effeminate England, 20–21. 270. Anonymous, Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal (Wordsworth Classic Erotica; Ware, Herts: Wordsworth, 1995; 1st edn, 1893). 271. E.g. Garde, Jonathan to Gide, 658. On the authorship and publication of Teleny, see H. Montgomery Hyde, A History of Pornography (London: Heinemann, 1964), 141–45. In general on Teleny, see Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 254–55; “ ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’” 119–21. To describe Teleny as “gay” erotica is, of course, an anachronism. The novel was written before either “homosexual” or “gay” had gained currency, whereas the language it actually uses has fallen out of favour as denotative of male same-sex eroticism. The novel prefers the language of “socratic love” or “sodomy.” 272. Anon, Teleny, 25. The biblical citations here are both from the kjv, respectively 1 Sam. 16:12 and 18:1. Note also the allusion to David’s music calming Saul in 1 Sam. 16:14-23; 18:10-11. 273. The relationship between the story of Saul and the tragic vision has been an important concern of modern biblical scholars (see esp. W. Lee Humphreys, “The Tragedy of King Saul: A Study of the Structure of 1 Samuel 9–31,” JSOT 6 [1978], 18–27; idem, “The Rise and Fall of King Saul: A Study of an Ancient Narrative Stratum,” JSOT 18 [1980], 74–90; “From Tragic Hero to Villain: A Study of the Figure of Saul and the Development of 1 Samuel,” JSOT 22 [1982], 95–117; David M. Gunn, The Fate of King Saul: An Interpretation of a Biblical Story [JSOTSup, 14; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1980]; Exum, Tragedy and Biblical Narrative, 70–119). It is already explored, however, in Gide’s 1896 drama Saül, and is the lens through which Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704) approached the biblical narrative in David et Jonathas: Tragédie en musique, a five-act opera first performed at the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, 28 February, 1688, based on a libretto by Père Bretonneau, which was written as a series of interludes for a five-act tragedy in Latin, Saül, by Père Chamillart. Charpentier also wrote an oratorio, or histoire sacrée, inspired by the same biblical narrative, Mors Saülis et Jonathae. 274. Anon, Teleny, 26, cf. p. 24. 275. See esp. 1 Sam. 18:6-7, 20, 28. 276. Anon, Teleny, 10, 16, 18, 85, 107, 141, 142. 277. H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962, 2nd edn; repr. New York: Dover Books, 1973), 15. 278. Linda Dowling notes that, “[b]y the time Wilde had completed his Oxford experience…the categories of Greek thought and literature would have become structuring categories of his literary and social imagination. Saturated in the language and literature of ancient Greece, Wilde would repeatedly grasp his own life in the terms supplied by such ancient Greek forms as the life of Socrates or the plays of Aeschylus – which were ever to him a reality more compelling than the lurid implausibilities published in the daily newspapers” (Hellenism and Homosexuality, 123). 279. Plato, Symp. 180c-185c. This passage is the origin of the adjective “Uranian,” used for the group of poets at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries whose work praised the love of adolescent boys above that of women.  

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In general on the Uranian poets see D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest, and for their use of David and Jonathan, see n. 54 above. 280. Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 255. 281. See Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, 154. See Section 2 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885, the notorious Labouchère Amendment: C. White (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1999), 56. 282. Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, 201. The two letters in question were from Wilde to Douglas, and are reproduced in White, Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality, 50–51. Douglas’s poem “Two Loves” was first published in The Chameleon in December 1894, and is reprinted in – among other places – White, Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality, 54–56. Wilde’s reference to Plato anticipates Edward Carpenter’s remark that classical Greek literature, “abounds with references to the romantic attachment [between men] as the great inspiration of political and individual life. Plato, himself, may almost be said to have founded his philosophy on this sentiment” (Ioläus, 42). It also anticipates Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’s comment with respect to romantic friendship between men in Greece that, “[t]heir ideal was the development and education of the younger by the older man, and in this view they were recognized and approved by custom and law as an important factor in the state” (The Greek View of Life [London: Methuen, 1896], 168). 283. See e.g. Richards, “ ‘Passing the Love of Women,’” 94; Hammond, Love between Men, 1–4; White, Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality, 57–58; Roden, “‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’” 118; Wright, Oscar’s Books, 235–36. 284. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 48, 49. Importantly, though, The Picture of Dorian Gray accomplishes this without any explicit suggestion of physical eroticism between men, especially not between Basil Hallward and Dorian. Its role as a “potent centerpiece of gay male intertextuality” belongs to the nexus between the text and its reception, not to the text itself. See further Sinfield, The Wilde Century, 98–105. 285. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (ed. R. Mighall; London: Penguin, 2000; 1st edn, London: Ward, Lock, & Co., 1891), 115. See Mighall’s note on pp. 243– 44, and Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 141–42. The first edition of the novel, which also contains this passage, was published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July 1890. The reference here to Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) is undoubtedly determined by Walter Pater’s essay “Winckelmann” (see n. 210 above). In another similar passage, Wilde’s narrator alludes to the reception of Plato’s Symposium during the Renaissance, Michelangelo’s sonnets to Tommaso dei Cavalieri, Montaigne, and Winckelmann as he elaborates his theory about the relationship between Shakespeare and “Willie Hughes” in “The Portrait of Mr W. H.” (Complete Works, 1174–77). 286. Cf. Hammond, Love between Men, 3 (italics mine): “Several strategies are employed here by Wilde in his list of impeccably canonical heroes. These are mythic figures for Victorian culture, so at one level they guarantee the innocence and orthodoxy of Wilde’s behaviour…by describing this love as pure, intellectual and spiritual, Wilde allows the court to infer that it is not sexual, while many of his hearers will have been used to hearing homosexual desire speak through silences, gaps in texts, moments where language falters and love is left without a name.”



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287. Cf. Hammond, loc. cit.: “Wilde is challenging the puritanically selective historiography of the Victorians, which anxiously erased mention of Greek homosexuality or explained as ardent friendship the feelings expressed in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” 288. In other words, to follow Linda Dowling, there is a strong contrast being made between a focus on the purely physical expression of same-sex desire (viz. “sodomy”) and the spiritually enriching model of male friendship Wilde and others found in the dialogues of Plato. In reference to the work of the Uranian poets, Dowling remarks that, “…the most radical claim of the new Uranian poetry would always be that it sang the praises of a mode of spiritual and emotional attachment that was, at some ultimate level, innocent or asexual. Uranian poetry was able to give voice to a counterdiscourse of spiritual procreancy underwritten by the authority of Oxford Hellenism to precisely the degree it was able to represent itself as superior to the blind urgencies of a merely animal sexuality, either the imperatives of heterosexual reproductivity or, in the language of ancient social and religious taboo, the bestial degradation of sodomy as anal copulation. This pure and intellectual dimension of Uranian love would allow Wilde to defend it so fearlessly from the Old Bailey witness box, and would persuade even the largely cynical Oscar Browning that there had been something more at stake in Aestheticism than a convenient blind for carnal appetite” (Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, 115; on the Wilde trials see further pp. 1–5, 140–54). 289. Dalhousie Young, Apologia Pro Oscar Wilde (London: William Reeves, 1895), 5–6. 290. Young, Apologia Pro Oscar Wilde, 23–24. For Young’s advocacy for the decriminalization of sex between men, which he conflates with ancient Greek paiderasti/a, see Apologia pro Oscar Wilde, 34–44. 291. Raffalovich, Uranisme et Unisexualité, 267–69: “…Wilde répondit avec une fervour révoltante et hypocrite, spéculant sur l’ignorance littéraire et l’incapacité de son public… Ces clichés, à peine admissibles dans la bouche d’un homme sérieux, menant une vie un peu noble, auraient dû venant de lui indisposer le public, mais au contraire, il fut applaudi à trois reprises et le juge réprimanda le public. Une homme dont les principes sont sûrs, dont la vie est calme et réglée, dont l’amitié est un privilege, dont les affections sont éclairées, intelligentes, véhémentes à la rigueur, aurait le droit de parler comme Wilde ou comme Socrate. Venant de Wilde ces paroles sont douleureuses. Quelle que soit le pureté de son amour pour lord Alfred (et pourquoi pas?), il est certain que Wilde n’a jamais compris les obligations imposées par un amour que se base sur Platon, Shakspeare, Michel-Ange. Il n’a pas séparé lord Alfred des horribles amis qui le compromettaient, il ne s’est pas arraché quand il devint lui-même dangereux pour le jeune homme, il n’a pas eu le courage même de mener sa vie de façon à ne pas être compromettant, infamant. Quand on parle de l’amour de David et de Jonathan, de W. H. et de Shakspeare, on ne fait pas allusion à un amour purement sentimental, purement innocent, mondainement égoïste. Platon et les autres ont célébré le dressage d’une âme par une autre, l’amour qui est le commencement de la sagesse. Combien de fois Shakspeare exhorte W. H. à se bien conduire, comme il offre de le quitter s’il lui fait tort, comme il veut se sacrifier [à] la réputation de celi qu’il chérit. Quand est-ce qu’Oscar Wilde s’est chargé de la direction, de la pédagogie morale de son jeune ami? Il n’a pas même renoncé

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lui-même à des fréquentations indignes d’un ami disciple de Platon. On sait ce que les Grecs pensaient des hommes vénals. L’ignorance de public n’est égalée que par la fausseté du speech de Wilde; mais il savait à qui il avait affaire.” 292. E.g. Raffalovich, Uranisme et Unisexualité, 241–43. 293. See Chapter 2 above. 294. Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 147. 295. Loc. cit. 296. Carpenter’s views were not only directly shaped by Whitman, but also indirectly, via Symonds’s study of Whitman. See e.g. Carpenter, Homogenic Love, 46, and n. 262 above. 297. Forster, “Terminal Note,” in Maurice, 219–24; P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (vol. 1; London: Secker & Warburg, 1977), 255–60; Sheila Rowbotham, “In Search of Carpenter,” History Workshop Journal 3 (1977), 130; Wendy Moffat, E. M. Forster: A New Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 112–14. The influence of Carpenter on Forster may go back further than the visit to Millthorpe in 1913 recalled in the “Terminal Note.” See the summary of views in Copley, A Spiritual Bloomsbury, 97. 298. Carpenter, Homogenic Love, 46–48. 299. Carpenter, Homogenic Love, 4. 300. Carpenter, Homogenic Love, 3. 301. Carpenter, Homogenic Love, 26. 302. Carpenter, Homogenic Love, 7–8. The “more civilised nations” are ancient Israel and Greece, contrasted with, say, inhabitants of the islands of the South Pacific or the tribes of sub-Saharan Africa. 303. D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest, 21. 304. See the preface to the second edition of this work (Carpenter, Ioläus, v). 305. Carpenter, Ioläus, 15–16, 20, 31, 46–48, 68–69, 73, 78, 80, 131–33. 306. Carpenter, Ioläus, v-vi, 32–35, 49–59, 72–73. Cf. idem, Homogenic Love, 22– 23, 38. 307. Carpenter, Ioläus, 3. 308. Carpenter, Ioläus, 4–6. 309. Carpenter, Ioläus, 7–8. This passage is soaked in implicit assumptions of European cultural superiority, but so is Kingsley’s sermon on “David’s Weakness,” discussed above, especially the following passage on the debased form of Muscular Christianity: “That physical prowess is a substitute for virtue, is certainly no new doctrine. It is the doctrine of every red man on the American prairies, of every African chief who ornaments his huts with human skulls. It was the doctrine of our heathen forefathers, when they came hither slaying, plundering, burning, tossing babies on their spear-points. But I am sorry that it should be the doctrine of any one calling himself a gentleman, much more a Christian” (David, 10). See also Kingsley’s disparaging references to “mere Eastern metaphor” and “mere Eastern exaggeration,” from which he tries to distance the language of Ps. 27:1 and Psalm 18, in his Cambridge sermon on “David’s Strength” (David, 27, 33); to “the vindictive passions of other Easterns,” from which he tries to distance David’s curse on in his enemies in Ps. 143:12, in his sermon on “David’s Anger” (David, 48); and to “those tragedies which have disgraced, in every age, the harems of Eastern despots,” to which he compares the events



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of the collapse of David’s house in 2 Samuel 11–20 in his sermon on “David’s Deserts” (David, 83). 310. Carpenter, Ioläus, 6. In other words, while we only have the descriptions of European travellers for the other examples he cites (that is to say “etic” perspectives), we have, Carpenter claims, the ipsissima verba of one of the friends involved in the partnership with respect to his emotional feelings about his friend. This, of course, takes the biblical attribution of 2 Sam. 1:19-27 to David at face value, an attribution that is impossible to substantiate in historical critical terms (which doesn’t stop scholars from trying). 311. Carpenter, Ioläus, 5. Cf. idem, Homogenic Love, 7. 312. Carpenter, Ioläus, 41–43. His comments on romantic friendship between men here reflect a remarkable attempt to get rid of what Carpenter saw as the misogyny of Plato in the name of an egalitarian vision of comradeship that did not favour men to the detriment of women: “…it is evident that in…the fact that among the Greeks the love of women was considered for the most part sensual, while the romance of love went to the account of [male romantic] friendship, we have the strength and weakness of the Greek civilisation. Strength, because by the recognition everywhere of romantic comradeship, public and private life was filled by a kind of divine fire; weakness, because by the non-recognition of woman’s equal part in such comradeship, her saving, healing, and redeeming influence was lost, and the Greek culture doomed to be to that extent one-sided. It will, we may hope, be the great triumph of the modern love (when it becomes more of a true comradeship between man and woman than it yet is) to give both to society and to the individual the grandest inspirations, and perhaps in conjunction with the other attachment, to lift the modern nations to a higher level of political and artistic achievement than even the Greeks attained” (Ioläus, 42–43). 313. Carpenter, Ioläus, 47–59. 314. Carpenter, Ioläus, 102–103. 315. See also Carpenter’s remark, with reference to Archbishop John Potter’s work Antiquities of Greece (1698): “That the tradition of Greek thought was not quite obliterated in England by the Puritan movement is shown by the writings of Archbishop Potter, who speaks with approval of friendship as followed among the Greeks” (Ioläus, 147). 316. See William Morris, “The Friendship of Amis and Amile,” in Old French Romances (London: George Allen, 1896), 27–58; Carpenter, Ioläus, 106–108; Richards, “‘Passing the Love of Women,’ ” 98. 317. Carpenter, Homogenic Love, 9. See Walter Pater, “Two Early French Stories,” in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 6th edn, 1893), 8–15, 27–29. 318. Bray, The Friend, 17, 31–35, 94–95, 155, 175–76, 200. See also Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and Chivalry, 35–37. 319. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1–17. 320. Omitted from the second edition and subsequently reinstated was Pater’s famous Conclusion, in which he advocates “the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake” (Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 213), more or less a motto for Victorian Aestheticism. It was omitted in response to criticism of its  

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moral position, and its potentially misguiding effects, levelled at Pater by both the Bishop of Oxford and John Wordsworth. On the place of Studies in the History of the Renaissance in Oxford politics in the 1870s, and particularly the politics surrounding Pater’s withdrawal from running for the Professorship of Poetry in 1877, see Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 158–66. 321. On which see Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 4–6; idem, The Renaissance, 4–8. 322. Pater, The Renaissance, 8–9. 323. Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 153. 324. See further Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 154–58, in relation to the works of Swinburne, Tennyson, Pater, Symonds, and Charles Kains-Jackson. 325. Joseph Jacobs, “Introduction,” in Morris, Old French Romances, xv. Cf. more recently Brain, Friends and Lovers, 30–31, who compares this medieval romance with David and Jonathan, and with the more chronologically proximate Roland and Oliver. The relationship between Amis and Amile is portrayed thus: “And the two children fell to loving one another so sorely that one would not eat without the other, they lived of one victual, and lay in one bed” (p. 28); “Ye be so alike of beauty, of fashion, and stature, and whoso should see you, would deem you to be brethren” (p. 30). Amile addresses Amis as “most well beloved” (p. 35); Amis addresses Amile, “Fair sweet fellow, I desire sore to go see my wife whom I have left behind…” (p. 35); Amile addresses Amis, “Tell me, fair brother, who hath spoken to thee these words of the night?” (p. 47). When Amis and Amile meet during Amis’s illness after a long absence, “straightway [Amis] cast himself upon [Amile] and fell to crying out strongly and to weeping and lamenting, and to kissing and embracing him” (p. 45). 326. Morris, Old French Romances, 29–30. 327. Morris, Old French Romances, 35. Cf. pp. 47–48: “Amis, I have given over to thee man-servant and maid-servant and all my goods… I conjure thee by the faith which is betwixt thee and me, and our fellowship, and by the baptism which we took between me and thee at Rome…” 328. Morris, Old French Romances, 36. 329. Morris, Old French Romances, 38, 39. 330. Morris, Old French Romances, 40, 41. 331. Prov. 3:12; Heb. 12:6. Morris, Old French Romances, 42. For “leprosy,” Morris uses the archaic term “mesel.” 332. Perh. cf. 1 Sam. 3:1-18. 333. Cf. Tob. 3:16-17; 12:12-15. 334. Cf. the trial of Abraham in Gen. 22:1-19. The allusion to Abraham is made explicit on p. 48: “Abraham was saved by faith, and by faith have the hallows vanquished kingdoms; and God saith in the Gospel: ‘That which ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them’” (cf. Mt. 7:12). 335. Morris, Old French Romances, 46. 336. Morris, Old French Romances, 56. Though Amis and Amile were buried separately in different churches, Amile’s body moves supernaturally in the night to be beside that of Amis (pp. 56–57). 337. Carpenter, Ioläus, 177–78.  



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338. Robert K. Martin, “Edward Carpenter and the Double Structure of Maurice,” Journal of Homosexuality 8 (1983), 36. The influence of Carpenter is well-known, since Forster recalls it in the “Terminal Note” to Maurice (cf. n. 297 above), but the influence of Symonds is less easy to trace. Antony Copley has suggested, based on Forster’s Locked Diary, that this influence has been underestimated (A Spiritual Bloomsbury, 125, 138 n. 95). On 12 January, 1912, Forster wrote of Symonds, “I feel closer to him than any other man I have read about. I am proud in some ways to be like him” (non vidi; cited from the Locked Diary in Copley, A Spiritual Bloomsbury, 138 n. 95). P. N. Furbank notes briefly that in the margins of Forster’s diary for New Year’s Eve 1907 there appears a list of authors, including Symonds, Pater, Whitman, and Carpenter (E. M. Forster, 159 n. 1). For Martin, this list indicates Forster’s attempt to reconstitute a homosexual literary tradition (“Edward Carpenter,” 37, 45 n. 8). 339. On the influence of the Wilde trials on Forster’s fiction see Sinfield, The Wilde Century, 126, 140; Bristow, Effeminate England, 63; and esp. Forster’s novel Maurice, 138, where Maurice confesses his homoerotic desires to Dr Barry with the words, “I’m an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.” Sinfield comments with respect to this that “[t]he novel is designed to show that Maurice doesn’t have to be like Oscar Wilde” (The Wilde Century, 140). 340. On the influence of Carpenter on Maurice, see Martin, “Edward Carpenter,” esp. pp. 42–45. Cf. n. 297 above. Martin sees the idealized, Platonic homoeroticism associated with Symonds predominating in the first part of the novel, and a freer homoeroticism, inspired by Carpenter and Whitman (to some extent via Carpenter’s appropriation of Whitman) and allowing for sexual intimacy, dominating towards the end. Part of the significance of this is that Maurice and Alec break free from the constraints of society at the end of the novel. It is the Platonist Clive who wrestles with sources of authority for his life (scripture, the Church, Plato), but Maurice and Alec break free from them: “Do Alec and Maurice have a cast of David [cf. Chapter 1 above, n. 7] in the boathouse? One assumes that their love does not require such appeals to authority, which would in any case be contrary to its spirit, in which two men face the world alone, free to create their lives as they please” (Martin, “Edward Carpenter,” 44). 341. E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread (ed. O. Stallybrass; Abinger Edition; London: Edward Arnold, 1975), 35–36. 342. Esp. the “Terminal Note,” 221, on Clive persuading Maurice to keep their love “Platonic”: “Maurice at this stage is humble and inexperienced and adoring, he is the soul released from prison, and if asked by his deliverer to remain chaste he obeys. Consequently the relationship lasts for three years – precarious, idealistic and peculiarly English: what Italian boy would have put up with it? – still it lasts until Clive ends it by turning to women and sending Maurice back to prison.” 343. When Philip Herriton first lays eyes on Gino, we read that, “the youth was hungry, and his lady filled his plate with spaghetti, and when those delicious slippery worms were flying down his throat his face relaxed and became for a moment unconscious and calm. And Philip had seen that face before in Italy a hundred times – seen it and loved it, for it was not merely beautiful, but had the charm which is the rightful heritage of all who are born on that soil. But he did not want to see it opposite him

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at dinner. It was not the face of a gentleman” (Where Angels Fear to Tread, 23). There are hints of the male homoerotic gaze here reminiscent of Symonds. 344. Bristow, Effeminate England, 66. He continues: “In middle-class England, where women visibly enjoy domestic ‘sisterhood’, they are constantly interposing their quarrelsome femininity between men. Such feminine behaviour is a particular source of irritation since English women possess those qualities of ‘criticism’, ‘insight’, and ‘prejudice’ that the narrator would assuredly like to think belongs solely to the province of men. In Italy, by contrast, the home is not a place in which men may be so close.” 345. Loc. cit. 346. I.e. that of Lilia and Gino. 347. Loc. cit. 348. “There came to [Philip] the earnest desire to be good through the example of this good woman. He would try henceforward to be worthy of the things she had revealed. Quietly, without hysterical prayers or banging of drums, he underwent conversion. He was saved” (Where Angels Fear to Tread, 139). 349. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread, 145. 350. Loc. cit. 351. Erotic triangles in which a woman mediates relations between men are central to Sedgwick, Between Men. The use of the David and Jonathan trope in Forster, especially in Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Longest Journey, thus seems to connote not simply male homosociality, but male homosociality that excludes, or is threatened by, women. These connotations arguably exist not because of the association of David and Jonathan with a tradition of male friendship, but because of the contrast between the love of Jonathan and the love of women in 2 Sam. 1:26. 352. E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey (ed. E. Heine; London: Edward Arnold, 1984; 1st edn, 1907), 64. 353. Martin, “Edward Carpenter,” 37. 354. William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116,” in The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works (ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edn, 1997), 1864b. 355. This is the theme of Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr W. H.,” in which the narrator follows the train of thought of the deceased Cyril Graham and associates Sonnet 116 with the friendship between Shakespeare and the “Willie Hughes” they imagine lay behind the enigmatic dedication to the sonnets: “For this great friendship of ours is indeed a marriage, it is the ‘marriage of true minds’ ” (Wilde, Complete Works, 1167). The background to this is Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium (Wilde, Complete Works, 1174–75); Plato, Symp. 203c-212c. Wilde’s narrator further conjectures that Shakespeare’s rival in Sonnet 80 (The Riverside Shakespeare, 1855b-1856a) is Marlowe, and that Marlowe had intended Willie Hughes to play Gaveston in Edward II (Wilde, Complete Works, 1170, 1191). By this point we have entered a literary labyrinth – or possibly a hall of mirrors – of homoerotic allusion and counter-allusion. Robert Martin has suggested, in reference to this passage, that we are reminded “of the way in which homosexual art can be turned to the purpose of a heterosexual society” (“Edward Carpenter,” 36), which may resonate somewhat with Forster and his characters in The Longest Journey, but is merely begging the question  



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with respect to sonnet 116: the sonnet is only “homosexual art” in the context of its reception. As with David and Jonathan, Plato, and Whitman, Shakespeare here is the object of a contest of ownership, where what is at stake is a heterosexist society’s control of a literary heritage, and the ability of those who dissent from the norm to resist. 356. Neil Bartlett has reflected poignantly on the appropriation of the language of marriage to refer to the love between men in a manner not dissimilar to Forster in The Longest Journey (Who Was That Man? 85–86). 357. Forster, Maurice, 59. 358. Forster, Maurice, 59–60. We are hearing the narrator’s representation of Clive’s subjectivity here, and neither Clive’s point of view, nor the narrator’s, can be equated without further ado with Forster’s own. Parts of this passage are cited by Jenkyns in his discussion of the role Greek learning played in the subversion of received morality during the Victorian and Edwardian periods (The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 281–82). He omits the references to David and Jonathan and Jesus and the Beloved Disciple, however, making the contrast between the Bible and Plato even starker than it is in Forster’s text. 359. Mary Renault, The Charioteer (Longmans, Green and Co., 1953; repr. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994). Although The Charioteer was published almost four decades after Maurice was written, this was still eighteen years before Forster’s novel posthumously saw the light of day. 360. Renault, The Charioteer, 236–37. They are dubbed thus by a nurse responsible for Odell’s care, but it is not clear whether this character understands the homoerotic connotations of the reference, or whether the reader is supposed to pick up these connotations, or whether the allusion is simply to a close and non-sexual male friendship. The use of the Phaedrus in the novel bears much clearer homoerotic connotations. 361. Forster, Maurice, 42, 48, 53. 362. Aichele, Sign, Text, Scripture, 98. 363. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 107. See also Parker, “The Myth of the Heterosexual,” 320–21, and cf. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 47, on the way that the hegemonic homo/heterosexual definitional binary obscures an “unrationalized coexistence of different models.” Sedgwick is here trying to move beyond the view, for which she criticizes both Foucault and Halperin’s earlier work One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, for using a misleading developmental paradigm to understand the history of sexuality, in which one model of sexuality supersedes another through time. Halperin’s later work is an attempt to take on board Sedgwick’s criticism by acknowledging the simultaneous coexistence of different models, whose difference and persistence are obscured by the false, ahistorical unity implied by the label “homosexuality.” 364. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 109. 365. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 110–13. 366. Cf. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 113–17. 367. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 118. 368. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 120. 369. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 121. 370. See esp. Bray, The Friend, 6.

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371. In a survey of homosexuality and male bonding in pre-Nazi Germany that succinctly summarizes the way the medicalization of same-sex desire came to supersede earlier traditions of romantic same-sex friendship, Harry Oosterhuis suggests a scenario that is in broad support of Halperin’s: “What was new in the medical concept was that a medical constitution was involved. The modern concept of homosexuality contains two aspects which were formerly seen as distinct until well into the 19th century: the sexual act of sodomy and the feeling of deep friendship… The medico-psychological construction of homosexuality could be seen as an assemblage of emotions, longings, and behavior which had previously existed independently of one another. What had formerly been seen simply as expressions of true friendship could now have sexual significance” (“Homosexual Emancipation in Germany before 1933: Two Traditions,” in H. Oosterhuis [ed.], Homosexuality and Male Bonding in PreNazi Germany, 15–16). In addition to developments in psychology, developments in the Law also have to be taken into account. In Germany, this would pertain to Paragraph 175, which after the unification of Germany in 1871 superseded Paragraph 143 of the Prussian legal code; in England this would pertain to the notorious Labouchère amendment of 1885. Dellamora has noted the role played by the Labouchère amendment in this process: “…the amendment contributed to the social formation of homosexuality by shifting emphasis from sexual acts between men, especially sodomy, the traditional focus of legislation, to sexual sentiment or thought, and in this way to an abstract entity soon to be widely referred to as ‘homosexuality’ ” (Masculine Desire, 200). 372. Compare the way Symonds attempts to use Whitman’s ideal of democratic manly comradeship to redeem sexual love between men in A Problem in Modern Ethics, 122–25. 373. While I make this point in connection with the scholarly analysis of historical and literary sources rather than with moral judgment per se, it may be compared with the following passage from Carpenter, Homogenic Love, 36–37: “Probably in all this, as in all love, it will be felt in the end by those who devote themselves to each other and to the truth, to be wisest to concentrate on the real thing, on the enduring deep affection which is the real satisfaction and outcome of the relation, and which like a young sapling they would tend with loving care till it grows into a mighty tree which the storms of a thousand years cannot shake; and those who do so heartily and truly can leave the physical to take care of itself. This indeed is perhaps the only satisfactory touchstone of the rightness and fitness of human relations generally, in sexual matters. People, not unnaturally, seek for an absolute rule in such matters, and a fixed line between the right and the wrong; but may we not say that there is no rule except that of Love…?” Cf. Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 140–41, 149–50. This is a world apart from Zehnder, for whom a distinction between sexual and non-sexual relationships must be observed, and even more of a world apart from Gagnon.  

Chapter 5 Conclusion: The Influence of Oscar Wilde on 1 and 2 Samuel Why have biblical scholars and other interested parties come to ask whether David and Jonathan were engaged in a homosexual relationship? There are three main reasons, which doubtless cloak a myriad minor ones: an affirmation or denial of a homosexual relationship between the two men serves ideological agendas that have come to the fore in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, though their roots are much earlier; the work in which David and Jonathan first appear together, 1 and 2 Samuel, is so constructed as to invite the reader to co-operate actively in the production of meaning, in its actualization as a text, and contains a range of words and phrases that, in certain contexts, can be construed as erotically suggestive; and there exists a reading convention that sees “David and Jonathan” as a reference to a gay relationship, a convention that evolved under the influence of a very complex network of ideological struggles and reading strategies in the nineteenth century. The twist in the tale is that, because their relationship had come by the nineteenth century to be customarily cited as part of a tradition of male friendships of various kinds, David and Jonathan were part of the process by which the modern idea of homosexuality itself came into existence. The question of whether their relationship was homosexual is, then, a decidedly back-to-front one. This has more global consequences for the nature and integrity of Biblical Studies as a discipline, and how biblical scholars go about their business. These consequences have to do with the nature of reading, and of the reception of texts. In his novel Small World, David Lodge has one Persse McGarrigle write a “rather Irish” MA thesis on the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare. “Well, what I try to show,” said Persse, “is that we can’t avoid reading Shakespeare through the lens of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. I mean, who can read Hamlet today without thinking of ‘Prufrock’? Who can hear the speeches of Ferdinand in The Tempest without being reminded of ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land?”1

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This solemn thesis statement is laden with irony, for MacGarrigle is a scholar who has written a decidedly postmodern work despite being more or less illiterate in literary theory. The basic point, however, is fundamental: the way we read texts, even the very questions we ask of them, are already determined by their prior reception. In a similar vein, I am arguing that it is difficult now to read the David and Jonathan narrative other than through the lens of its nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury history of reception. Indeed, one does not even have to have read John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, or E. M. Forster – or even to have heard of them – for this to be the case. Their writings reflect the evolution of a particular reading that has taken on a life of its own and has become conventional in some circles. It has subsequently come to be examined by biblical critics wanting to know what the text really meant. I have tried as far as possible to avoid being drawn into attempting to answer the question whether David and Jonathan were involved in a homosexual relationship, or to determine what the text in which they appear really meant. Instead, I have tried to explain what makes it possible for this question to be asked at all. It may seem, then, as if I have been determined to eschew an historically-oriented exegesis of the kinds I critiqued earlier by the likes of Schroer and Staubli, Zehnder, and Gagnon. I am not sure, however, that this is the case. Perhaps I have, in fact, been doing the opposite, trying to work out what exactly it might mean to do a truly historically-oriented exegesis. Historicist approaches to ancient texts cannot, I suggest, be done adequately without scrutinizing the ways in which the questions we ask are determined, the ways in which our interpretive agendas are shaped ideologically, and the ways in which the texts we study are more or less open or closed. Historicist approaches require a recognition of the historical situatedness of ourselves as scholars, of the questions we ask, and of the texts we study. They require an awareness of the ideological frameworks within which we work, and how they affect how we think and what we write. They require attention to the extent to which the texts with which we engage are open, and the extent to which they are closed, and how this might affect our interpretations, and those of others. Above all, historicist approaches require the acknowledgement that the questions we ask of ancient texts belong to a peculiar moment in the history of the reception, interpretation, and effect of those very texts. At a recent meeting of the Society for Old Testament Study,2 a panel was invited to consider the question, “Reception History: Essential Part of Biblical Studies or Optional Extra?” At least part of the present study would seem to fall squarely within the purview of “reception



Conclusion 405

history,” raising the question of whether I am engaged with something that belongs properly within the sphere of Biblical Studies at all. But this question would be misleading, for a number of reasons. Most obviously, there is no such thing as Biblical Studies. I do not mean that there is no community of scholars and students engaged in the academic study of the texts that have been transmitted as part of the Bibles of Judaism and Christianity, nor that there is no subject matter that these scholars and students share. Rather, I mean that there are historically contingent reasons for the existence of academic disciplines, which in the case of Biblical Studies are bound up with the effects of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment in Western Europe. This study has shown at various points the extent to which the study of one biblical text in particular has to take account of work done by classicists, Assyriologists, literary theorists, historians of sexuality, and so on, the boundaries of whose own disciplines are necessarily porous.3 There is no reason – at least there is no reason that is not inherently theological in its orientation – why Biblical Studies should be constituted in one way rather than another, why it should privilege certain approaches rather than others, and there is thus no reason ipso facto why Biblical Studies should not incorporate reception history as one of its tasks. This is, however, at the same time to admit that there is no essential reason why Biblical Studies as a separate discipline should exist at all. There may be historical, political, and pragmatic reasons – and I believe there are – but these must be negotiated. In any case, the subject matter shared by members of that strange, contingent species we currently call biblical scholars – namely, the biblical texts – themselves incorporate the evidence of their earliest reception. The combination of a tradition-historically complex text such as 1 and 2 Samuel and the intertextual richness of the reading process means that a firm distinction cannot meaningfully be maintained between the biblical texts and their reception. Finally, the questions biblical scholars ask belong themselves to the reception history of the biblical texts. Scholars and their texts alike are inescapably caught up in the infinite, intertextual process of writing and reading. Notes 1. David Lodge, Small World: An Academic Romance (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1984), 52. 2. 4-6 January, 2011, University of Durham, England. The panellists were Deborah Rooke, Katie Edwards, Andrew Mein and John Barton, whose thoughtful contributions I have not sought to summarize or address here.

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3. This point was made with respect to Classics in the nineteenth century by Frank Turner in The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, 7, where Turner notes “the largely undefined nature of classics as a discipline”: “Except for linguistic ability in Greek and Latin, the analytical tools and categories employed to examine a question or problem from Greek antiquity were almost invariably derived from other modern disciplines or modern religious and philosophical outlooks. Modern aesthetics guided the consideration of Greek sculpture. Modern religious sensibilities and anthropological theories determined the interpretation of Greek myths. Modern biblical scholarship influenced the reading of Homer. Modern political thought and anxieties were brought to bear on the Athenian democratic experience. Greek philosophers were judged before the bar of modern epistemology and political philosophy.”

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Revised and edited by R. Hanhart. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006. There is as yet no volume for 1 and 2 Reigns in the Göttingen Septuagint. Salvesen, Alison. The Books of Samuel in the Syriac Version of Jacob of Edessa. Monographs of the Peshitta Institute Leiden, 10; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999. Scherman, Nosson. The Early Prophets with a Commentary Anthologized from the Rabbinic Writings: I–II Samuel. ArtScroll Edition; New York: Mesorah, 2002. Taylor, Bernard A. The Lucianic Manuscripts of 1 Reigns, 2 vols. Harvard Semitic Monographs, 50-51; Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992–1993.

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Aeschines. The Speeches of Aeschines. Loeb Classical Library. Translated by C. D. Adams. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919. Aeschylus. Aeschylus: Fragments. Edited by A. H. Sommerstein. Loeb Classical Library, 505; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Aristotle. Ethica Nicomachea. Edited by I. Bywater. Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894. —The Athenian Constitution. The Eudemian Ethics. On Virtues and Vices. Rev. edn. Loeb Classical Library. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952. Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists, 7 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Translated by C. B. Gulick. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927–1941. Cicero. De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione. Translated by W. A. Falconer. Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923. —On Friendship and the Dream of Scipio. Edited by J. G. F. Powell. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990. Euripides. Euripides, 4 vols. Translated by A. S. Way. Loeb Classical Library; London: William Heinemann, 1912. Homer. Iliad. Translated by A. T. Murray. Revised by W. F. Wyatt, 2 vols. 2nd edn. Loeb Classical Library, 170–71. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 1st edn 1924. Hubbard, Thomas K., ed. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Jacoby, Felix. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 3 vols. Berlin: Weidmann, 1923–1958.



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Academy of the Hebrew Language. The Book of Ben Sira: Text, Concordance and an Analysis of the Vocabulary. Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language and the Shrine of the Book, 1973. Baillet, Maurice. Qumrân Grotte 4.III (4Q482-4Q520). Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, 7. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Beentjes, Pancratius C. The Book of Ben Sira in Hebrew: A Text Edition of All Extant Hebrew Manuscripts and a Synopsis of All Parallel Hebrew Ben Sira Texts. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum, 68; Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006. Blackman, Philip. Mishnayoth, 7 vols. 2nd edn. New York: Judaica, 1964. Braude, William G. The Midrash on Psalms, 2 vols. Yale Judaica Series, 13; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. Charlesworth, James H., ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. Anchor Bible Reference Library; New York: Doubleday, 1983–1985. García Martínez, Florentino, and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, eds. The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 2 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000. Josephus, 9 vols. Loeb Classical Library; Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray, R. Marcus, and L. H. Feldman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926–1965. Sammter, Ascher, Eduard Baneth, M. Petuchowski, S. Schlesinger, David Hoffmann, John

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Cohn and Moses Auerbach. Mischnajoth: Die sechs Ordnungen der Mischna, 3rd edn. Basel: Victor Goldschmidt, 1968. Sanders, James A. The Psalms Scroll of Qumrân Cave 11 (11QPsa). Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan, 4; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. Theodor, J., and Ch. Albeck. Midrash Bereshit Rabba: Critical Edition with Notes and Commentary, 3 vols. Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1965. Yadin, Yigael, ed. The Temple Scroll, 3 vols. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1983.

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Aelred of Rievaulx. Aelredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia. Edited by A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot. Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis, 1; Turnhout: Brepols, 1971. —Spiritual Friendship. Translated by M. E. Laker. Introduction by D. Roby. Cistercian Fathers Series, 5; Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1977. —Aelred of Rievaulx’s “Spiritual Friendship.” Translated by M. F. Williams. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 1994. Ambrose of Milan. Ambrose/De Officiis: Edited with an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Edited by I. J. Davidson, 2 vols. Oxford Early Christian Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Aquinas, Saint Thomas. Summa Theologiae: Latin text and English Translation, with Introductions, Notes, Appendices and Glossaries, 60 vols. plus index volume. Translated and edited by T. Gilby et al. London: Blackfriars, 1964–1980. Augustine of Hippo, Saint. The City of God against the Pagans, 7 vols. Translated by G. E. McCracken. Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. —De Doctrina Christiana. Edited by R. P. H. Green. Oxford Early Christian Texts; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Dalgairns, John Dobree (Bernard). “Life of St Aelred.” In Lives of the English Saints, 53–210. Edited by John Henry Newman. Vol. 5. London: S. T. Freemantle, 1901. 1st edn. London: James Toovey, 1844. Daniel, Walter. The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx. Edited and translated by F. Maurice Powicke. London: Thomas Nelson, 1950. Repr. Oxford Medieval Texts; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Franke, John R., ed. Joshua, Judges, 1–2 Samuel. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament, 4. Downers Grover, IL: InterVarsity, 2005. Kingsley, Charles. David: Five Sermons, 2nd edn. London: Macmillan, 1874. 1st edn, 1866. Migne, Jacques Paul. Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, 162 vols. Paris, 1857– 1886. —Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina, 217 vols. Paris, 1844–1865. Newman, John Henry, et al. Lyra Apostolica. London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1836. —Hymns. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1885. —Apologia pro Vita sua. Edited by W. Oddie. Everyman’s Library; London: J. M. Dent, 1993. Rossetti, Christina G. Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments. London: SPCK, 1883. Tertullian. De praescriptione haereticorum. Introduction, critical text, and notes by R. F. Refoulé. Translated by P. de Labriolle. Sources chrétiennes, 46; Paris: Cerf, 1957. Vermigli, Peter Martyr. Common Places. Translated by A. Marten. London, 1583. —Loci communes. Edited by Robert le Maçon. London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1583. Waddell, Helen. Songs of the Wandering Scholars. Edited by F. Corrigan. London: Folio Society, 1982.



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Medieval literature

Morris, William. Old French Romances. London: George Allen, 1896. Vita Edwardi Secundi: Re-edited Text with New Introduction, New Historical Notes, and Revised Translation based on that of N. Denholm-Young. Edited and translated by W. R. Childs. Oxford Medieval Texts; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.

Anthologies

Carpenter, Edward, ed. Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship, 2nd edn. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1906. 1st edn, 1902. Coote, Stephen, ed. The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse. London: Penguin, 1983. Faderman, Lillian, ed. Chloe plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. Fone, Byrne S., ed. The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day. Between Men – Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies; New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. McCormack, Ian, ed. Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing. New York: Routledge, 1997. White, Chris, ed. Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge, 1999.

Poetry

Birch, Lionel. Between Sunset and Dawn. Cambridge: Corydon, 1929. Bradford, Edwin Emmanuel. Passing the Love of Women. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1913. Byron, George Lord. The Poetical Works of Lord Byron: Complete in One Volume. Collected and arranged by T. Moore, et al. London: J. Murray, 1847. Cowley, Abraham. Poems: Viz. Miscellanies, II. The Mistress, or, Love Verses, III. Pindaresque Odes, And IV. Davideis, or, a Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David. London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1656. Ellwood, Thomas. Davideis: The Life of David, King of Israel. A Sacred Poem in Five Books, 5th edn. London: James Phillips, 1796. 1st edn, 1712. Gray, John. The Poems of John Gray. Edited by I. Fletcher. 1880–1920. British Authors Series, 1; Greensboro, NC: ELT, 1988. Hallard, James Henry. Carmina: A Volume of Verse. London: Rivingtons, 1899. Lockman, John. David’s Lamentation over Saul and Jonathan: A Lyric Poem. London, 1736. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Die Gedichte. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2006. Rossetti, Christina. Poems and Prose. Edited by S. Humphries. Oxford World’s Classics; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Shadduck, G., (ed.). A Critical Edition of Abraham Cowley’s DAVIDEIS. The Renaissance Imagination, 22; London: Garland, 1987. Schecter, Stephen. David and Jonathan: A Story of Love and Power in Ancient Israel. Montréal: Robert Davies, 1996. Shaked, Malkah, ed. I’ll Play You Forever: Scripture in Modern Hebrew Poetry. Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 2005. [Hebrew] Spenser, Edmund. Spenser: Poetical Works. London: Oxford University Press, 1912. Symonds, John Addington. Many Moods: A Volume of Verse. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1878.

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Tennyson, Alfred Lord. Tennyson: In Memoriam. Edited by S. Shatto and M. Shaw. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Whitman, Walt. The Complete Poems. Edited with an introduction and notes by F. Murphy. London: Penguin, 2004. 1st edn, 1975.

Fiction

Anon. Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal. Wordsworth Classic Erotica. Ware, Herts: Wordsworth, 1995. Sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde. 1st edn privately printed for Leonard Smithers, London, 1893. Anon [= Howard Overing Sturgis]. Tim: A Story of School Life. London: Macmillan, 1891. Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Dial, 1956. Eco, Umberto. Il nome della rosa. Tascabili Bompiani, 33. Milan: Bompiani, 1980. et: The Name of the Rose. Translated by W. Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1983. Farrar, Frederic William. Julian Home: A Tale of College Life. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1860. Forster, Edward Morgan. Where Angels Fear to Tread. Edited by O. Stallybrass. Abinger Edition; London: Edward Arnold, 1975. 1st edn, London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1905. —The Longest Journey. Edited by E. Heine. London: Edward Arnold, 1984. 1st edn, London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1907. —Maurice. Edited by P. N. Furbank. Introduction and Notes by D. Leavitt. London: Penguin, 2005. 1st edn, London: Edward Arnold, 1971. Gide, André. The Immoralist. Translated by D. Watson. London: Penguin, 2000. French original, Paris: Mercure de France, 1902. —Corydon. Translated by R. Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. French original, Paris: Gallimard, 1925. Hayley, William. The Young Widow; or, the History of Cornelia Sedley, in a Series of Letters. Dublin: Printed for Messrs. L. White, P. Byrne, P. Wogan, H. Colbert, A. Grueber, C. Lewis, J. Moore and J. Halpen, 1789. Heym, Stefan. The King David Report. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1972. Translated into German as Der König David Bericht. Munich: Kindler Verlag, 1972. Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Edited by A. Sanders. World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. 1st edn, London: Macmillan, 1857. —Tom Brown at Oxford. London: Macmillan, 1861. LaHaye, Tim, and Jerry B. Jenkins. Left Behind, 16 vols. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1995–2007. Lodge, David. The British Museum is Falling Down. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965. —Small World: An Academic Romance. London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1984. Potok, Chaim. The Chosen. London: Penguin, 2009. 1st edn, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966. Renault, Mary. The Charioteer. Longmans, Green and Co., 1953. Repr. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994. Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Roderick Random. Edited by P.-G. Boucé. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. 1st edn, Dublin: Printed by Richard James, 1748. Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers. Oxford World’s Classics. London: Hamlyn, 1987. 1st edn, London: Longmans, 1857. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited with an introduction and notes by R. Mighall. London: Penguin, 2000. 1st edn, London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1891. Young, William Paul. The Shack. Newbury Park, CA: Windblown Media, 2007.



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Plays

Bennett, Alan. The History Boys. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. Bennett, Alan, and Nicholas Hytner. The History Boys: The Film. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Gide, André. Théâtre: Saül-Le roi candaule-Œdipe-Perséphone-Le treizième arbre. Paris: Gallimard, 1942. Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. Edited by J. B. Steane. London: Penguin, 1969.

Collected works

Lasker-Schüler, Else. Sämtliche Gedichte. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhr­ kamp Verlag, 2004. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated and edited by M. A. Screech. London: Penguin, 1991. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works. 2nd edn. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. London: Collins, 1966.

Visual Arts

Carolsfeld, Julius Schnorr von. Die Bibel in Bildern: 240 Darstellungen, erfunden und auf Holz gezeichnet. Bilderklärungen von H. Merz. Zürich: Flamberg Verlag, 1972. Doré, Paul Gustave. The Doré Bible Gallery. Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1890. Omits Doré’s engraving of David and Jonathan. —The Bible Illustrated. New York: Pilsbury Publishers, 1951. Omits Doré’s engraving of David and Jonathan. —The Doré Bible Illustrations. Introduction by M. Rose. New York: Dover Publications, 1974.

Music

Boyce, William. David’s Lamentation over Saul and Jonathan. Words by John Lockman. London 1736 and Dublin 1744. Charpentier, Marc-Antoine. Mors Saülis et Jonathæ, H. 403. Edited by J. Duron. Versailles: Éditions du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, 1992. —David et Jonathas: Tragédie mise en musique, H. 490 (1688). Libretto by P. Bretonneau. Edited by J. Duron. Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1981. Händel, Georg Friedrich. Saul: An Oratorio; or Sacred Drama, HWV 53 (1739). Libretto by Charles Jennens. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1862.

Film

Death at a Funeral. Directed by Frank Oz. 91 mins. Verve Pictures, 2007. Death at a Funeral. Directed by Neil LaBute. 92 mins. Parabolic Pictures Inc., 2010. The History Boys. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. 107 mins. Fox Searchlight Pictures, DNA Films, and BBC Two Films, 2006. King David. Directed by Bruce Beresford. 114 mins. Paramount Pictures, 1985. Prayers for Bobby. Directed by Russell Mulcahy. 86 mins. Once Upon a Time Films, 2009. Priest. Directed by Antonia Bird. 108 mins. BBC Films, 1994. Saved! Directed by Brian Dannelly. 92 mins. United Artists, 2004. Trembling before G-d. Directed by Sandi Simcha Dubowski. 84 mins. Pretty Pictures, 2001.

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Television

Kings. Directed by Francis Lawrence, Ed Bianchi, Tucker Gates, and Clark Johnston. 556 mins. Universal Media Studios, 2009. Silent Witness: Judgement. Series 12. Episodes 7-8. Directed by Diarmuid Lawrence. 120 mins. BBC, 2008.

Autobiography

Palmer, Roundell. Memorials: Part I. Family and Personal 1766–1865, 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1896. Symonds, John Addington. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds. Edited and introduced by P. Grosskurth. London: Hutchinson, 1984.

Correspondence

Bowden, John Edward. The Life and Letters of Frederick William Faber, D.D. American edn. Baltimore, MD: John Murphy, 1869. Dessain, Charles Stephen et al., eds. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, 32 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961–2009. Harrison, Anthony H. The Letters of Christina Rossetti, 2 vols. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1997–1999. Marchand, Leslie, ed. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 12 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1973–1982. Moore, Thomas. Letters and Journals of Lord Byron with Notices of his Life, 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1830. Schueller, Herbert M., and Robert L. Peters, eds. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, 3 vols. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1967–1969.

Bibliography

Babington, Percy L. Bibliography of the Writings of John Addington Symonds. London: John Castle, 1925.

Secondary Literature Works of reference

Botterweck, G. Johannes, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, eds. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. 15 vols to date. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974–2006. Gaebelein, Frank E., ed. The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, 12 vols. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1979–1993. Ginzberg, Louis. The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. Translated by H. Szold and P. Radin. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1909–1938.

Works of criticism and other secondary sources

Ackerman, Susan. “When the Bible Enters the Fray.” Bible Review 16 (October 2000), 6, 50. —“The Personal is Political: Covenantal and Affectionate Love (’āhēb, ’ahăbâ) in the Hebrew Bible.” Vetus Testamentum 52 (2002), 437–58. —When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David. Gender, Theory, and Religion; New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.



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Ackroyd, Peter R. “The Verb Love—’āhēb in the David-Jonathan Narratives—a Footnote.” Vetus Testamentum 25 (1975), 213–14. Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Adeyemo, T., ed. Africa Bible Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006. Aichele, George. Sign, Text, Scripture: Semiotics and the Bible. Interventions, 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. —The Control of Biblical Meaning: Canon as Semiotic Mechanism. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001. Allchin, A. M. (Donald). The Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities 1845–1900. London: SCM Press, 1958. Alter, Robert. The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Anderson, A. A. 2 Samuel. Word Biblical Commentary, 11; Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1989. Anon. “Audio: BBC mars anniversary of KJB with gay slur.” 13 January, 2011. http://www. christian.org.uk/news/audio-bbc-mars-400th-anniversary-of-kjv-bible-with-gayslur/ (accessed 17 January, 2011). Anson, Peter F. The Call of the Cloister: Religious Communities and Kindred Bodies in the Anglican Communion. Revised and edited by A. W. Campbell. London: SPCK, 1958. —Abbot Extraordinary: A Memoir of Aelred Carlyle, Monk and Missionary, 1874–1955. London: Faith Press, 1958. Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism: First Series. London: Macmillan, 1865. —Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1869. Avalos, Hector. The End of Biblical Studies. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007. Bailey, Derrick Sherwin. Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition. London: Longmans, Green, 1955. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 3rd edn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Bar-Efrat, Shimon. Das erste Buch Samuel: Ein narratologisch-philologischer Kommentar. Beihefte zur Wissenschaft vom alten und neuen Testament, 176. Translated by J. Klein. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007. Barringer, Tim, and Elizabeth Prettejohn, eds. Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity. Studies in British Art, 5; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Translated by R. Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. —“De l’oeuvre au texte.” Revue d’esthetique 3 (1971), 225–32. —Image-Music-Text. Essays selected and translated by S. Heath. London: William Collins, 1977. Bartlett, Neil. Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin, 1993. 1st edn, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988. Barton, John. The Nature of Biblical Criticism. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2007. Bentham, Jeremy. See Smith, Gamaliel. Berlinerblau, Jacques. “The ‘Popular Religion’ Paradigm in Old Testament Research: A Sociological Critique.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 60 (1993), 3–26. —“Preliminary Remarks for the Sociological Study of Israelite ‘Official Religion.’” In Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine, 153–70. Edited by L. H. Schiffman, W. W. Hallo and R. Chazan. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999.

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—The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Block, Robert. “Gay King David theory starts Goliath of a row.” The Independent 11 November, 1993. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/gay-king-david-theory-starts-goliath-of-a-row-1472290.html (accessed 17 January, 2011). Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Bodner, Keith. 1 Samuel: A Narrative Commentary. Hebrew Bible Monographs, 19; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008. Boer, Roland. “Queer Heroes.” In Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door: The Bible and Popular Culture, 13–32. Biblical Limits. London: Routledge, 1999. —“Too Many Dicks at the Writing Desk, or, How to Organize a Prophetic Sausage-Fest.” Theology & Sexuality 16 (2010), 95–108. Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980. —The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe. New York: Fontana Press, 1996. Boyarin, Daniel. “Are There Any Jews in the ‘History of Sexuality’?” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1993), 333–55. Brain, Robert. Friends and Lovers. London: Hart-David, MacGibbon, 1976. Brand, Adolf. “Friend-Love as a Cultural Factor: A Word to Germany’s Male Youth.” In Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany: The Youth Movement, the Gay Movement, and Male Bonding before Hitler’s Rise, 145–54. Edited by H. Oosterhuis. Translated by H. Kennedy. London: Haworth Press, 1991. Translation of “Freundesliebe als Kulturfaktor: Ein Wort an Deutschlands männliche Jugend.” Der Eigene (1930 no. 1), 1–8. Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. 2d edn. Between Men – Between Women. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. —“Wedded Friendships.” The Tablet (8 August, 2001), http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/ 5030 (accessed 29 October, 2012). —The Friend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Brenner, Athalya. “Pornoprophetics Revisited: Some Additional Reflections.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 70 (1996), 63–86. Brentlinger, Rick. Gay Christian 101: Spiritual Self-Defense for Gay Christians. Pace, FL: Salient, 2007. Bristow, Joseph. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995. Brueggemann, Walter. First and Second Samuel. Interpretation. Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1990. Burg, B. R., ed. Gay Warriors: A Documentary History from the Ancient World to the Present. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 1999. Calder, William M. “Gold for Bronze: Iliad 2.232-36.” Studies Presented to Sterling Dow on his Eightieth Birthday, 31–35. Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Monographs, 10; Durham, NC: Duke University, 1984. Cantarella, Eva. Bisexuality in the Ancient World, 2nd edn. Translated by C. Ó Cuilleanáin. Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.



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Caquot, André, and Philippe de Robert. Les livres de Samuel. Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament, 6; Génève: Labor et Fides, 1994. Carden, Michael. Review of Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault. The Bible and Critical Theory 8 (2012), 86-89. Carpenter, Edward. Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society. Manchester: Labour Press Society, 1894. Cartledge, Tony W. 1 and 2 Samuel. Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary, 7; Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2001. Chaplais, Pierre. Piers Gaveston: Edward II’s Adoptive Brother. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Chitty, Susan. The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974. Clark, J. Michael. Defying the Darkness: Gay Theology in the Shadows. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1997. Clines, David J. A. Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, 205. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. —“Metacommentating Amos.” In Interested Parties, 76–93. —“David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity.” In Interested Parties, 240–42. Comstock, Gary D. “Love, Power and Competition among Men in Hebrew Scripture: Jonathan as Unconventional Nurturer.” In Religion, Homosexuality and Literature, 9–29. Edited by M. L. Stemmeler and J. I. Cabezón. Gay Men’s Issues in Religious Studies Series, 3; Las Colinas, TX: Monument Press, 1992. Cooper, Emmanuel. The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 1994. Copley, Antony. A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writings of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Countryman, L. William. Love Human and Divine: Reflections on Love, Spirituality, and Friendship. Harrisburg, PN: Morehouse Publishing, 2005. —Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament, 2nd edn. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007. Craig, J. D. “XRUSEA XALKEIWN.” Classical Review 17 (1967), 243–45. Crompton, Louis. “Jeremy Bentham’s Essay on ‘Paederasty’: An Introduction.” Journal of Homosexuality 3 (1978), 383–87. —“Jeremy Bentham’s Essay on ‘Paederasty’: Part 2.” Journal of Homosexuality 4 (1978), 91–107. —Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985. —Homosexuality and Civilization. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003. Cross, Frank Moore. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. —From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Cruise, Colin et al. Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites. London: Merrell, 2005. Culbertson, Philip L. New Adam: The Future of Male Spirituality. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1992. Culler, Jonathan. “In Defence of Overinterpretation.” In Umberto Eco with Richard Rorty,

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Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment. Between Men – Between Women; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Skehan, Patrick W., and Alexander A. DiLella. The Wisdom of Ben Sira. Anchor Bible, 39. New York: Doubleday, 1987. Smith, Gamaliel (pseudonym for Jeremy Bentham). Not Paul, but Jesus. London: Printed for John Hunt, 1823. Smith, Jonathan Z. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism; Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982. Smith, Martin. “A Saintly Gay or a Gay Saint?” Gay Literature 5 (1976), 25–30. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993. Smolar, Leivy, and Moses Aberbach. Studies in Targum Jonathan to the Prophets. Library of Biblical Studies; New York: KTAV, 1983. Solomon, Nathan. “David and Jonathan in Iraq.” In Probing the Frontiers of Biblical Studies, 21–32. Edited by J. Harold Ellens and John T. Greene. Princeton Theological Monograph Series, 111; Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2009. Staalduine-Sulman, Eveline van. The Targum of Samuel. Studies in the Aramaic Interpretation of Scripture, 1; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002. Stansell, Gary. “Honor and Shame in the David Narratives.” Semeia 68 (1994), 55–79. —“David and his Friends: Social-Scientific Perspectives on the David-Jonathan Friendship.” Biblical Theology Bulletin 41 (2011), 115–31. Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. “‘Popular’ Religion and ‘Official’ Religion: Practice, Perception, Portrayal.” In Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel, 37–58. Edited by F. Stavrakopoulou and J. Barton. London: T&T Clark International, 2010. Steinmetz, David C. “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis.” Theology Today 37 (1980), 27–38. Stephen, Fitzjames. Review of Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Edinburgh Review 117 (January 1858), 172–93 [unsigned]. Sternberg, Meir. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985. Stevenson, Edward Irenaeus Prime. See Mayne, Xavier. Stoebe, Hans-Joachim. Das erste Buch Samuelis. Kommentar zum alten Testament, 8/1. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1973. —Das zweite Buch Samuelis. Kommentar zum alten Testament, 8/2; Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1994. Stolz, Fritz. Das erste und zweite Buch Samuel. Zürcher Bibelkommentare: Altes Testament, 9; Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981. Stone, Ken. Sex, Honor and Power in the Deuteronomistic History. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, 234. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. —“1 and 2 Samuel.” In The Queer Bible Commentary, 195–221. Edited by D. Guest, R. E. Goss, M. West, and T. Bohache. London: SCM Press, 2006. Symonds, John Addington. Studies of the Greek Poets, 2 vols. 3rd edn. London: A & C Black, 1893. 1st edn, London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1873, 1876. —A Problem in Greek Ethics, being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion addressed especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists. London: Privately Printed for the AREOPAGITIGA Society, 1908. Originally privately printed in 1883, but written in 1873. Reprint: In Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition, 227–95. By H. Ellis and J. A. Symonds. Edited by I. Crozier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.



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Indexes Index of References Ancient Near Eastern sources Epic of Gilgamesh 8.3-56 268 8.71-91 268 Treaty of Tudhaliya IV and Kurunta of Tarhuntašša §13 260 §14 260 §25 260 KTU 1.17 vi 39-41  114 Sefire stelae I A 1-2  252 A 3  252

A 4  252 A 7  252 A 13  252 B 1  252 B 4  252 B 5  252 B 6  252 B 7  252 B 11  252 B 23  252 B 24  252 B 28  252 B 33  252 B 38  252 II B 2  252

B 18  252 C 13  252 III 4 252 9 252 14 252 17 252 20 252 23 252 27 252 Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon 268 251

Hebrew Bible Genesis 1–3  84–85, 102, 159 2–3  126, 128 2:22 253 2:4–3:24 35 2:24 270 3:14 262 6:2 252 6:8 259 6:18 255 9:9 255 9:11 255 9:12 255 9:13 255 9:15 255

9:16 255 9:17 255 9:20-27 84 9:21  119, 265 9:22 263 9:23 263 12:15 253 15:18 255 16:1-21 243 16:3 253 17:2 255 17:4 255 17:7 255 17:9 255 17:10 255

17:11 255 17:13 255 17:14 255 17:19 255 17:21 255 18:1–19:38 369 18:3 259 18:16–19:29 108 19  57, 72, 105 19:1-28  39, 90, 286, 377 19:1-29  72, 149 19:4-11 84–85 19:19 260 19:24 37 19:26 37

430

The Love of David and Jonathan

Genesis (cont.) 20:13 261 21:8-21 243 21:22-34  200, 257 21:23 261–62 21:23-24 260 21:24 262 21:27 260 21:31  260, 262 21:32 260 22:1-19 398 22:2 249 22:16 262 24:3 262 24:7 262 24:9 262 24:12 261 24:14 261 24:27 261 24:37  253, 262 24:38 253 24:40 253 24:41 253 24:49 261 24:63 262 24:65 262 24:67  249, 252–53 25:28  173, 249 25:33 262 26:3 262 26:23-33 257 26:29 256 26:31 262 27:3 262 27:4 249 27:5 262 27:9 249 27:14 249 27:26  107, 267 27:27  107, 267 28:6 120 28:9 120 29:11  107, 267 29:12 267 29:13  107, 267 29:18  107, 249, 267 29:19 253 29:20  107, 111, 182, 256 29:23 253

29:26 253 29:27 253 29:28 253 29:30  107, 249 29:32 249 30:4 253 30:9 253 30:14 262 30:16 262 30:27 259 30:41 242 30:42 242 31:28  107, 267 31:49-50 255 31:53  255, 262 32:1 107 32:6 259 32:11 261 33:3-4 215 33:4  107, 267 33:8 259 33:10 259 33:15 259 34 173 34:2 249 34:3  249, 259 34:8  253, 256 34:9 253 34:11 259 34:12 253 34:14 253 34:16 252–53 34:17 252 34:19  60, 189, 259 34:21 252–53 37:3 249 37:4 249 37:23  255, 256 38:11 120 38:26 253 38:28 248 39:3 192 39:4 259 40:14 261 41:40 214 41:45 253 42:9 263 42:12 263 44:20  171, 249

44:30  80, 171–72, 248 45:15  107, 267 47:25 259 47:29 259–60 47:31  260, 262 48:10  107, 267 50:1  107, 267 50:4 259 50:5  260, 262 50:6 262 50:24 262 50:25 262 Exodus 2:10 253 2:21 253 2:24 255 4:27  107, 267 6:4-5 255 13:5 262 13:11 262 13:19 262 18:7  107, 267 19:5 254–55 20:3-17 313 20:6  249–50, 261 20:26  263, 265 21:4 253 21:5 249 22:16 253 23:32 255 24:7-8 254 28:42 263 31:16 254 32:13 262 33:1 262 33:12 259 33:13 259 33:16 259 33:17 259 34:9 259 34:10 254 34:12 255 34:15 255 34:27-28 254 Leviticus 1:6 256 2:13 254–55

5:4 262 5:22 262 5:24 262 6:4 256 7:20-21  153–54, 242 15:16-18  153–54, 242 16:23 256 18  72, 94, 133, 208, 211 18:1-5 133 18:6  119, 263, 265 18:6-23  50, 133, 147–48, 154, 241–42 18:7  94, 119, 208, 263, 265 18:8  94, 119, 208, 242, 263, 265 18:9  116, 119, 263, 265 18:10  119, 263, 265 18:11  119, 263, 265 18:12  119, 263, 265 18:13  119, 263, 265 18:14  119, 263, 265 18:15  119, 263, 265 18:16  94, 119, 208, 263, 265 18:17  119, 263, 265 18:18  119, 263, 265 18:19  119, 263, 265 18:22  26, 37, 39, 57, 72, 77, 84–85, 90, 105–106, 108, 110, 135, 144–51, 153–56, 159, 226, 233, 239, 241–42, 286, 369, 377 18:23  151, 240 18:24-30 133 18:26 37 19:12 262 19:18  112, 151–53, 240, 241, 249, 251, 320 19:34  112, 153, 241, 249 20  61, 72, 94, 110, 208 20:9-21  133, 154 20:11  61, 94, 107, 119, 208, 242, 263, 265 20:12  151, 240 20:13  26, 37, 39, 57, 72, 77, 84–85, 90, 105–106, 108, 110, 135, 144–51,

Index of References 431 153–56, 159, 226, 233, 239, 241, 286, 369, 377 20:17  107, 119, 263, 265 20:18  107, 119, 263, 265 20:19  107, 263 20:20  61, 107, 119, 263, 265 20:21  107, 119, 263, 265 20:26 119 22:13 120 24:8 254 26:9 254–55 26:15 254–55 26:42 254–55 26:44 254–55 26:45 254 Numbers 5:19 262 5:21 262 10:33  254–55, 262 11:2 262 11:11 259 11:15 259 14:8 259 14:16 262 14:23 262 14:44  254–55, 262 18:19 254 20:17 262 20:26 256 20:28 256 21:22 262 22:23 262 25:12 255 25:12-13 255 30:3 262 32:5 259 32:10 262 32:11 262 Deuteronomy 1:8 262 1:34 262 1:35 262 2:14 262 4:13 254–55 4:21 262 4:23 254–55

4:31  254, 262 4:37 250 5:2-3 254 5:10  250, 261 6:4-5 320 6:5 250 6:8 248 6:10 262 6:13 262 6:18 262 6:23 262 7:2 255 7:3 252–53 7:7 183 7:8  183, 262 7:9  183, 250, 254–56, 261 7:12  254–55, 261–62 7:13  250, 262 8:1 262 8:18  254–55, 262 9:5 262 9:9 254–55 9:11 254 9:15 254 10:8  254, 262 10:11 262 10:12 250 10:15  183, 250, 256 10:20 262 11:1 250 11:9 262 11:13 250 11:18 248 11:21 262 11:22 250 13:4 250 13:7 176–77 14:13 255 15:16 249 17:2 254–55 19:8 262 19:9 250 21:11  252, 256 21:12 253 21:14  61, 259 21:15 249 21:16 249 21:27 255 21:32 255

432

The Love of David and Jonathan

Deuteronomy (cont.) 22:13  120, 252 22:14  120, 252 22:16 253 22:20 242 23:1 242 23:6 250 23:15 263 23:17-18 84 24:1  60, 259, 263 25:7 258 25:8 258 25:11 205 26:3 262 26:15 262 26:28 255 27:20 242 28:9 262 28:11 262 28:69 254 29:8 254 29:11 254–55 29:12 262 29:13 254 29:20 254 29:24 254–55 30:6 250 30:16 250 30:20  250, 262 31:7 262 31:9  254–55, 262 31:16 254–55 31:20  254–55, 262 31:21 262 31:23 262 31:25-26  255, 262 31:44 255 33:9 254–55 34:4 262

2:20 262 2:21 248 3:3  254–55, 262 3:6 254 3:8 254 3:11 254 3:14 254 3:17  254–55, 262 4:7  254–55, 262 4:9 254 4:18  254–55, 262 5:6 262 6:6 254 6:8  254–55, 262 6:22 262 6:26 262 7:11 254–55 7:15 254–55 8:33  254–55, 262 9:6-7 255 9:11 255 9:15 262 9:15-16 255 9:18 262 9:18-19 255 9:18-20 262 9:19 262 9:20 262 14:9 262 15:16 253 15:17 253 15:18 267 21:43 262 21:44 262 22:5 250 23:7 262 23:11 250 23:16 254–55 24:25 254

Joshua 1:6 262 2 198 2:1-24 200 2:12 260–62 2:12-14 194 2:14 260–61 2:15 260 2:17 262 2:18 248

Judges 1:12 253 1:13 253 1:14  215, 267 1:22-26 260 2:1  254–55, 262 2:2 255 2:15 262 2:20 254–55 3:6 252–53

4 96 4:9 120 5:4 262 6:17 259 8:33 255 8:35 261 9:4 255 9:27 262 9:33 256 9:42 262 9:43 262 9:44 256 9:46 255 9:54 120 11:40 221 12:9 253 13:23 258 14:2 120 14:3 120 14:6 249 15:2 253 15:6 253 15:12 262 15:31 250 16:4 249 16:5-6 120 16:15 249 19 72 19:1 120 19:1-30  39, 72, 90, 149, 286, 377 19:2 120 19:3 253 19:22-25 84 20:27  254–55, 262 20:37 256 21:1  253, 262 21:7 262 21:12 253 21:18  253, 262 21:22 252–53 1 Samuel 1:5 249 1:8 270 1:19-27 146 1:23 249 1:26  221, 268 2:25 258

3:1-18 398 3:14 262 3:17 262 4:3  254–55, 262 4:4  254–55, 262 4:5  254–55, 262 5:6 267 9:1–11:15 163 9:2  94, 246 9:16 238 10:1  107, 238, 267 11:1 256 11:1-15 261 11:2 268 12:12 261 13:2 163 13.3 163 13:3-4 163 14  120, 163, 168 14:1 256 14:6 256 14:6-15 384 14:7 256 14:12 256 14:13 256 14:14 256 14:17 256 14:27 262 14:28 262 14:42 268 14:44 262 14:49-50 163 15:1 238 15:6 261 15:17 238 15:22 259 15:28 163 16–20  112, 135, 245 16 81 16:3 238 16:1-13  163, 245 16:7 92 16:12  94, 120, 238, 246, 393 16:13 238 16:14-23  178, 244, 393 16:18 246 16:19 246 16:19-22 175

Index of References 433 16:20 244 16:21  19, 119, 175, 186, 256 16:21-22 60 16:21-23 94 16:22 259 17 246 17:1-54 119 17:1-58 119 17:12-31 244–45 17:13 246 17:17-18 246 17:25 253 17:31 245 17:41 245 17:42  94, 120, 246 17:44 262 17:48 245 17:50 245 17:51 246 17:51-54 167 17:54  167, 235 17:54–18:7 333 17:55-56 168 17:55-58  166, 244–45, 286, 334 17:55–18:4  286, 352 17:55–18:5  135, 235 17:55–18:6 187 17:56-58 303 17:57  167, 245 17:58 235 18–23 84–87 18  4, 6–7, 228–29 18:1  19, 60–79, 80, 92, 96, 112, 119, 121, 135, 151–53, 164, 168–69, 172–77, 188, 191, 221, 240, 248, 250–51, 254, 260, 266, 284, 367, 393 18:1-4  4–5, 34, 53, 92, 96, 135, 137, 139, 151–52, 161, 163, 166, 177–78, 187–88, 197, 200–201, 226, 240, 252, 254, 257, 271, 286, 288, 303, 313, 319, 335, 354, 377 18:1-6 245

18:2  94, 97, 175, 178–79, 188, 245, 258, 260 18:2-3  97, 120 18:3  19, 80, 112, 119, 121, 135, 151–52, 164, 170–71, 173, 175, 177, 180, 182–83, 185, 188, 191, 196, 199, 240, 251, 254, 260 18:4  82, 87, 92, 97, 113, 164, 182, 185–86, 226, 256, 257, 352 18:5  164, 260 18:5-7 119 18:6  135, 167, 245 18:6-7 393 18:7  188, 257 18:10-11 393 18:11  209, 268 18:13-16 119 18:14 260 18:15 260 18:16  113, 119, 175, 250 18:17  188, 253 18:17-19  222, 244 18:19 253 18:20  80, 97, 119, 175, 249, 268, 393 18:20-28  190, 244 18:21  97, 253 18:22  121, 175, 188, 250, 258 18:25  188–89, 259 18:25-27 246 18:27  119, 190, 222, 253, 259 18:28  80, 97, 119, 175, 249, 393 18:29 121 18:30  119, 260 19 97 19:1  60, 69, 97, 164, 187–88, 190, 260 19:1-7  135–36, 139, 165–66, 187–88, 190 19:2  187, 191 19:3 262 19:4 191 19:4-6  97, 190

434

The Love of David and Jonathan

1 Samuel (cont.) 19:6  191, 262 19:7 164 19:8  119, 164 19:10  97, 259 19:11  190, 259 19:11-17  97, 158, 165, 190, 244 19:12 259–60 19:14 259 19:17 259 19:18 259 19:18-24 164 19:24 256 20  97, 108, 178, 204, 260 20:1  164–65, 191, 259 20:1-4 97 20:1-23 165 20:1-24 269 20:1–21:1  135, 137, 166 20:3  107, 191, 199, 262, 266 20:7-8 269 20:8  97, 170, 180–81, 194, 196, 255, 261, 268 20:11  61, 63, 199 20:11-17 313 20:12-16 193 20:13  113, 193, 262 20:14  193–94, 261 20:15  182, 193 20:16  193, 268 20:17  19, 34, 43, 61, 79, 112, 121, 135, 151–52, 172–73, 175–77, 182, 199–201, 240, 251, 254, 262, 303, 335 20:20-22 82 20:21 262 20:23 260 20:24-29  153–54, 242 20:24-34 165 20:26  154, 208 20:29 192 20:30  61, 70, 82, 87, 94, 121, 160, 165, 202, 205–12, 226–27, 242– 43, 263 20:30-31  211, 266

20:30-34  90, 210, 218, 263 20:31  113, 204, 206, 244, 256 20:33  209, 373 20:34 209 20:35 262 20:35-42 165 20:36-38 82, 20:41  37, 61, 99, 214–16, 251, 267, 313, 335 20:41–21:1 308 20:42  61, 262, 313 21:1  165, 198 21:2 165 21:5-6 94 22:1 259 22:8  79, 113, 165, 170– 71, 189, 248 22:13  79, 113, 170–71, 248 22:20 259 22:28 215 23:7-13 165 23:13 259 23:14 165 23:14-18 166 23:16-18  139, 244, 313 23:17  113, 256, 266, 336 23:18  121, 165, 180–81, 308 23:27 256 24:17  178, 216 24:22 262 24:23 262 25  147, 238 25:2-42 319 25:8 259 25:11 238 25:15 262 25:22 262 25:24 222 25:39 120 25:40 120 25:42-43 222 25:43 244 25:44  222, 253 26:21 178 26:25 178

27:1 259 27:3  244, 270 27:5 259 27:8 256 27:10 256 28:10 262 30:1 256 30:5  244, 270 30:6 270 30:14 256 30:15 262 30:17 259 30:18 270 31:5 256 31:6 256 31:8 256 31:9  245, 256 2 Samuel 1 84 1:3 259 1:6 259 1:14-16 246 1:17  221, 303 1:17-27  139, 269, 286 1:19 303 1:19-27  4, 61, 166, 170, 216, 220, 284, 312, 333, 377, 379, 397 1:21  146–47, 238 1:23  61, 221, 248–49, 259, 339, 355 1:26  7–8, 15, 19, 34, 37, 39, 43, 46, 58, 61, 77–79, 87, 95, 99, 102, 106, 117, 119, 135–36, 146–50, 156, 158, 160, 170, 172–73, 175–76, 178, 179, 181–82, 202, 214, 217–20, 222–25, 227, 234, 238, 249, 256, 269–71, 291, 298–99, 303, 308–309, 313, 318–19, 335, 338, 352, 380, 389, 391, 400 1:26-27 271 2:2  244, 270 2:4 238 2:5-6 261

2:6 261 2:7 238 3:2 244 3:6-21 244 3:8 261 3:9 262 3:12 256 3:12-16  222, 244 3:12-21 190 3:13 253 3:14  253, 259 3:15 253 3:21 256 3:35 262 3:39 238 5:3  238, 256 5:17 238 6:23 259 7 82 8:7 256 8:11 256 8:12 256 9 379 9:1 261 9:1-13 165 9:3 261 9:7 261 10:2 261 10:8 262 11 147 11–20 397 11:23 262 11:26 102 12:7 238 12:11 253 12:11-12 206 12:24 249 13  173, 182 13:1  107, 182, 244, 249 13:1-22 182 13:2 107 13:4  107, 182, 244, 249 13:5 107 13:6 107 13:7 107 13:8 107 13:10 107 13:11 107 13:12 107

Index of References 435 13:13 116 13:15  111, 182, 244, 249 14:22 259 14:33  107, 267 15:5  107, 267 15:12  171, 248 15:24  254–55, 262 15:25 259 15:26  69, 190, 259 15:31  171, 248 15:33-36 219 16:4 259 16:20-22 242 16:20-23 206–207 16:21 206 18:1 171 18:6 262 18:15 256 19:1-7 190 19:6 259 19:7  19, 111, 113, 244, 250 19:8 262 19:10 259 19:11 238 19:14 262 19:24 262 19:32-39 261 19:40  107, 265 20:9  107, 267 20:11  113, 189–90 20:30 267 21:2 262 21:17 262 22:20  69, 190, 259 22:51 261 23:5  255, 259 23:10 256 23:11 262 24:3 259 1 Kings 1:1-4 145 1:3 253 1:13 262 1:17 262 1:29 262 1:30 262 1:51 262 2:7 261

2:8 262 2:17 253 2:23 262 2:23-24 262 2:42 262 3:3 250 3:6 261 3:6-7 261 3:15  254–55, 262 5 16 5:15  19, 113, 241, 250 5:22 259 5:23 259 5:24 259 5:26 255–56 6:19  254–55, 262 8:1  254–55, 262 8:6  254–55, 262 8:9 268 8:21 254–55 8:23 254–55 9:1 258 9:11 259 9:13 256 10:9  183, 250, 258–59 10:13 259 11:1 249 11:2  111, 182, 249 11:11 254–55 11:19  253, 259 11:29 199 13:33 259 14:9 253 14:21-24 84 15:12-14 84 15:19 255 15:27 248 16:9 248 16:16 248 16:20 248 18:10 262 19:2 262 19:10 254–55 19:14 255 19:18 267 19:20 107 20:34 255 21:6 259 22:16 262 22:47 84

436 2 Kings 2:26 262 4:39 262 7:12 199 9:14 248 10:9 248 11:4  197, 255, 262 11:10 256 11:14 248 11:17 254 12:21 248 13:23 255 14:19 248 15:10 248 15:15 248 15:25 248 15:30 248 17:4 248 17:15 254–55 17:35 254 17:38 254 18:12 254–55 21:23 248 21:24 248 23:2 254 23:3 254 23:7 84 23:21 254 25:24 262 Isaiah 1:11 258 1:23 249 7:3 262 8:12 248 13:17 259 14:24 262 19:18 262 20:4 263 24:5 255 28:15 255 28:18 255 32:11 256 33:8 255 41:8 250 42:6 254 42:21 258 43:4 250 44:28  257, 259 45:1 258

The Love of David and Jonathan 45:23 262 46:10 259 47:3  119, 263, 265 48:1 262 48:14  249, 258–59 49:8 254 49:18 248 53:10 258 54:9 262 54:10 254–55 54:12 259 55:3 254–55 55:11 258 55:12 262 56:4  254–55, 259 56:6  183, 250, 254–55 56:10 249 57:8  79, 249 58:2 258 58:3 259 59:21 254–55 61:8  249, 254 62:4 259 62:8 262 63:9 183 65:12 259 65:16 262 66:3 259 66:4 259 66:10 249 Jeremiah 2:2  78–79, 183, 256 2:25 175 3:16  254–55, 262 4:2 262 5:2 262 5:7 262 5:31 249 6:10 259 6:25 262 7:9 262 8:2 250 9:22-23 261 9:23  259, 261 11:2 254 11:3 254 11:5 262 11:6 254 11:8 254

11:9 242 11:10 254–55 12:9 262 12:16 262 13:4 262 14:10 249 14:18 262 14:21 254–55 20:4 250 20:6 250 22:5 262 22:9 254–55 22:20 250 22:22 250 22:28 259 29:6 252–53 30:14 250 31:2 259–60 31:3  250, 256 31:31 254 31:32 254–55 31:33 254 32:18 261 32:22 262 32:40 254 33:20 255 33:20-22 181 33:21 255 33:23-26 181 33:25 255 34:8 255 34:10 255 34:13 254 34:15 255–56 34:16 255 34:18 254–55 38:16 262 40:9 262 42:22 258 44:26 262 48:38 259 49:13 262 50:5 254 51:14 262 51:63 248 Ezekiel 16:8  120, 178, 254–55, 262–63 16:32 178

16:33 250 16:36  119, 250, 263, 265 16:37  79, 119, 250, 263, 265 16:38 178 16:39 256 16:59 254–55 16:60 254–55 16:61 254–55 16:62 254–55 17:13 255 17:14 255 17:15 255 17:16 254–55 17:18 255 17:19 254–55 18:23 258–59 18:32 259 20:37 254 22:10  119, 263, 265 22:25 248 23:5 250 23:9 250 23:10  119, 263, 265 23:18  119, 263, 265 23:22 250 23:26 256 23:29  119, 263, 265 26:16 256 30:5 254–55 33:11 259 34:25 255 37:26 255 44:7 255 44:19 256 Hosea 1–3 183 2 31 2:5 256 2:7 250 2:9 250 2:11 263 2:12 250 2:14 250 2:15 250 2:20 255 3:1  78–79, 249–50 4:15 262

Index of References 437 4:18 250 6:4 261 6:6 258 6:7 254 7:1 256 8:1 255 8:8 259 8:9 250 9:1 249–50 9:10 250 9:15 250 10:4 255 10:11 249–50 11:1  175, 249–50 11:4 256 12:2 255 12:8 249–50 13:2 267 14:5 250 Amos 1:9 256 4:2 262 4:5 249 5:15 249 6:8 262 7:10 248 7:14 53 8:7 262 8:14 262 Obadiah 7 255 Jonah 1:1 166 1:14 258 Micah 1:11 205 2:8 255 3:2 249 3:3 256 4:10 262 6:8 249 7:20 262 Nahum 3:16 256

Zephaniah 1:5 262 3:17 256 Zechariah 5:3 262 5:4 262 7:9 261 8:17 249 8:19 249 9:11 255 11:10 255 13:6 250 Malachi 1:2 250 1:10 259 2:4 255 2:5 255 2:8 255 2:10 255 2:11 249 2:14  120, 255 2:17 259 3:1  255, 258 3:5 262 3:12 259 Psalms 1:2 259 2:12 267 4:3 249 5:5 258 5:7 270 5:12 250 11:5 249 11:7 249 15:4 262 16:3 259 18 396 18:20  69, 259 18:51 261 22 190 22:9 259 24:4  262, 264 25:10 255 25:14 255 26:8 250 27:1 396

438 Psalms (cont.) 31:24 250 33:5 249 34:13  249, 257–58 35:27 258 37:28 249 38:12 250 40:7 258 40:9 258 40:15 258 40:17 250 41 190 41:12 259 44:18 255 45:8 249 47:5 250 50:5 255 50:16 255 51 383 51:8 258 51:18 258 51:21 258 52 270 52:5 249 52:6 249 55:21 255 63:12 262 68:31 258 69:37 250 70:3 258 70:5 250 73:25 258 74:20 255 74:37 255 78:10 255 78:37 255 78:65 250 78:71-73 315 83:6 255 85:11 267 87:2 250 88:19 250 89:4  255–56, 262 89:29 255 89:35 255 89:36 262 89:40 255 89:50 262 95:11 262

The Love of David and Jonathan 97:10 250 99:4 249 102:9 262 103:18 255 105:8 255 105:8-9 262 105:10 255 106:45 255 107:30 259 109:4  111, 256 109:5  111, 256 109:16 261 109:17 258–59 109:21 261 110:4 262 111:2 259 111:5 255 111:9 255 112:1 259 115:3 258 116:1 250 119:17 249 119:35 259 119:47 249 119:48 249 119:97 249 119:106 262 119:113 249 119:119 249 119:124 261 119:127 249 119:132 250 119:140 249 119:159 249 119:163 249 119:165 249 119:167 249 122:6 249 132:2 262 132:11 262 132:12 255 135:6 258 143:12 396 145:20 250 146:8 249 147:10 259 Job 1:17 256 5:23 256

9:3 258 10:21 261 13:3 258 19:19  250, 256 21:14 258 21:21 259 22:3 259 22:6 256 31:1 256 31:16 259 31:27 267 33:32 258 36:14 84 38:1–41:26 68 38:31 248 39:10 248 40:17 259 40:28 256 40:29 248 Proverbs 1:22 249 2:10 217 2:17  120, 198, 255 3:3 248 3:4 259 3:12  249–50, 398 3:15 259 4:6 249 5:18 183 5:19  111, 182, 249 6:21 248 7:3 248 7:13  107, 214 7:18 249 8:11 259 8:17 249 8:21 249 8:36 249 9:8 249 10:12 256 13:24 249–50 14:20 250 15:9 249 15:12 249 15:17 256 16:13 249 17:9 256 17:17 250

17:19 249 18:2 259 18:21 249 18:24 250 19:8  177, 250 20:13 249 21:1 258 21:17 249 22:11 250 22:15 248 24:26 214 27:5 256 27:6 250 28:23 259 29:3 249 30: 19  61 31:13 259 Ruth 1:1  198, 262 1:8 261 1:9  107, 267 1:14  107, 267 2:2  259, 262 2:3 262 2:8 262 2:9 262 2:10 259 2:13 259 2:22 262 3:13 258 4:15 249 Song of Songs 1:2  107, 214 1:3 249 1:4 249 1:7  60, 80, 151, 240, 249, 251 1:10 220 1:11 262 1:16 61 2:4  111, 256 2:5 256 2:7  61, 111, 256, 259, 263 3:1  60, 80, 151, 249, 251 3:1-4  151, 240 3:2  60, 80, 151, 249, 251

Index of References 439 3:3  60, 80, 151, 249, 251 3:4  60, 80, 151, 249, 251 3:5  111, 256, 259, 263 3:10  111, 256 4:9 267 4:10 267 4:12 267 5:1 267 5:2 267 5:3  119, 256 5:8  111, 256 7:2 220 7:7  61, 111, 220 7:12  61, 63, 199, 226 8:1  61, 107, 214 8:4  61, 111, 256, 259, 263 8:6  61, 111, 256 8:7  111, 256 8:8 267 8:10 389 Qoheleth 3:1 259 3:8 174 3:17 259 4:7-12 112 5:3 259 5:7 259 5:9 249 8:3 258–59 8:6 259 9:1-6 256 9:2 262 9:9 249 12:1 259 12:10 259 Lamentations 1:2 250 1:8 263 1:19 250 Esther 2:7 253 2:8 252 2:14 259 2:15 253 2:16 252 2:17 249

5:8 259 5:10 250 5:14 250 6:6 258–59 6:7 259 6:9 259 6:11 259 6:13 250 7:3 259 8:5 259 Daniel 7–12 133 7:13-14 53 9:4  250, 255 9:27 255 11:22 255 11:28 255 11:30 255 11:32 255 12:7 262 Ezra 4:14 263 9:12 253 10:3 255 10:5 262 Nehemiah 1:5  250, 255 1:11 258 3:38  170, 248 4:2 170 4:17 255 5:12 262 9:8 255 9:32 255 10.31 253 13:14 261 13:25  253, 262 13:26 249 13:29 255 1 Chronicles 2:35 253 3:1 244 10:8 256 10:9 256 11:3 256

440 1 Chronicles (cont.) 14:9 256 14:13 256 15:25  255, 262 15:26  255, 262 15:28  255, 262 15:29  255, 262 16:6  255, 262 16:15 255 16:15-16 262 16:17 255 16:37  255, 262 17:1  255, 262 19:2 261 19:9 262 22:19  255, 262 28:2  255, 262 28:9 189 28:18  255, 262 2 Chronicles 1:8 261 2:10  250, 256 5:2  255, 262 5:7  255, 262 5:10 268 6:11 255 6:14 255 8:15 262 9:8  250, 256, 258–59 9:12 259 11:21 249 13:5 255 15:12 255 15:14 262 15:15 262 16:3 255 19:2  241, 250 20:7  205, 250 21:7 255 23:1 255 23:3 255–56 23:13 248 23:16 255 24:21 248 24:22 261 24:25 248 24:26 248 25:13 256

The Love of David and Jonathan 25:18 253 25:27 248 26:10 249 28:18 256 29:10 255 29:34 256 33:24 248 33:25 248 34:30 255 34:31 255 34:32 255 35:11 256 36:13 262 Tobit 3:16-17 398 5:21 107 5:22 107 8:4 107 12:12-15 398 Judith 16:12 264 Sirach 3:17 249 3:26 249 4:7 249–50 4:12 249 5:15 250 6:4 250 6:5-17 112 6:6 250 6:7 250 6:8 250 6:9 250 6:12 250 6:13 250 6:14 250 6:15 250 6:17 112 6:32 258 6:35 258 7:13 258 7:18  112, 250 7:21  249, 251 7:30 250 7:35 249–50 9:8 249

9:10 250 10:26 259 11:23 259 11:29–12:18 112 11:34 255–56 12:8 250 13:14 250 14:13 250 15:12 255 15:15 258 15:16 259 15:17 258 22:19-26 112 30:28 250 31/34:2 250 31/34:5 249 33:6 250 33:25 264 35:14 259 36:6 250 37:1 250 37:1-6 112 37:2 112 37:4 250 37:5 250 41:19 255 41:22 250 42:8 265 43:7 259 44:12 255 44:17 255 44:20 255 44:22 255 44:23 259 45:11 259 45:15 255 45:24 255 45:25 255 46:13 250 47:8 250 47:22 250 50:9 259 50:24 255 51:13 189



Index of References 441 New Testament

Matthew 5:11 243 7:1 37 7:12 398 18:21 37 18:22 37 22:39 313 22:40 313 Mark 12:28-30 313 Luke 6:37 37 John 3:29 313 8:7 37 11:35 37 14:2 37 21:15-17 42

Galatians 3:19 53 1 Timothy 1:9-10  102, 105 1:10 57 1 Thessalonians 2:3 110 2 Thessalonians 2:8 54 Hebrews 12:6 398 Jude 7 57 2 Peter 2:10 57

Acts 15:39 308 17:6 388

Qumran 4QSamb 6-7 4  204

Romans 1:18-27 104 1:18-32 105 1:26 331 1:26-27  57, 102, 369

4QTNaph 1-3 2  253 1-3 10  253

1 Corinthians 6:9  20, 57, 102 6:9-10  102, 369 11:2-16 31 13 157 13:4-7 243

4QDf 3 9   253 4Q498 1 I, 1  251 11QPsalmsa 21:11-13 189

11QTemplea LXIII, 11  252 LXIII, 12  253 LXV, 7  252 LXV, 8  252 LXV, 11  253 Other ancient Jewish sources Josephus Antiquitates Judaicae 6.8.1 170 6.9.5 235 6.11.1 242 6.11.8 242 6.11.10 242 Pseudo-Philo Liber antiquitatum biblicarum 61:9 235 62:1 235 Rabbinic literature Mishnah m. Naz. 4:3 264 m. Avot 5:16  48, 176, 182, 218, 251, 310 Babylonian Talmud b. Sanh. 19 269 Midrashim Gen. Rab. 32:1 270 38:1 270

Classical Greek sources Aeschines In Timarchum 132-33 293 142-43 294

Aeschylus Achilleis 135 294 136  294, 305

Aristotle Constitution of Athens 18.2-6 372

442 Ethica Nichomachea 8–9 373 8.12.3 251 8.12.4 251 9.4.5 251 9.10 373 Athenaeus Deipnosophistae 13.602a 371 13.602e 372 Euripides Electra 14-18 373 886 375 Iphigenia taurica 311-12 373 598-99 373 603-605 373 708 375 919 375 Orestes 725 375 1072 375 1079 375 Homer Iliad 1.197 247 6.156-57 259 6.218 185 6.219 185 6.236 257 7.299-305 185 7.305 257 19.315-37 268 23.19-23 268 23.83-84 379 23.91-92 379 23.141 247 23.179-83 268 24.44-45 271 Lucian Dialogi deorum 4 377

The Love of David and Jonathan Plato Symposium 179b 263 180a  295, 372 180c-185c  391, 393 180e2-3 391 203c-212c 400

3.92 243 15 386 51 243

Plutarch Amatorius 750d 251 751b 268 751c 372 758d 42 759a 263 759c 251 760b-c 371 761b 258 761d-e 263 770b-c 371

Virgil Aeneid 5.294-96 375 5.315-61 375 9.176-502 375

Pelopidas 18 19 18.4-5 263 Pseudo-Lucian Amores 29 100 47 373 54 372 Strabo Geographica 10.4.21 257 Thucydides Historia belli peloponnesiaci 6.54.1 371 6.54.2 371 Xenophon Symposium 8:28 373 8.31 297 Classical Roman sources Cicero De amicitia 3.46-47 243

Petronius Arbiter Satyricon 85-87 377

Patristic literature Ambrose of Milan De officiis ministrorum 1.32.167  243, 373 1.33.171  243, 373 2.7.36  243, 373 3.21.125  243, 373 3.61 270 Augustine De correctione Donatistarum (Epistula 185) 2:9 243 De civitate Dei 14:7 43 John Chrysostom Homiliae in epistulam I ad Corinthios 33:2 243 Homiliae in epistulam II ad Timotheum 7 243 Theodoret of Cyrrhus Quaestiones in Librum I Regnorum 45 240 Quaestiones in Librum II Regnorum 7 270

Medieval Christian sources Aelred of Rievaulx Speculum caritatis 1:34 381 3:12 381 3:29 381

Index of References 443 De spiritali amicitia Prol. 2-5  243 2.62-64  243, 310, 373 3:47  310, 373 3:92  310, 373

Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae Ia 1.10  229

Index of Authors Aberbach, M.  269, 425 Ackerman, S.  26, 38, 47, 53–54, 103, 114, 172, 229, 248–50, 254, 371, 414 Ackroyd, P. R.  102, 248, 415 Adams, J. E.  41, 366, 378–79, 387, 414 Adeyemo, T.  268, 415, 427 Aichele, G.  88, 118, 126, 142, 229–30, 235, 237, 363, 401, 415 Allchin, A. M. (Donald)  378, 415 Alter, R.  266, 415 Anderson, A. A.  268, 415 Anson, P. F.  311–13, 378, 381–82, 415 Avalos, H.  104, 415 Babington, P. L.  41, 414 Bailey, D. S.  27, 47, 303, 360, 415 Bakhtin, M. M.  127 Bal, M.  209–10, 266, 415, 427 Baldwin, J.  288, 369, 412 Bar-Efrat, S.  205, 241, 245–46, 264, 415 Barringer, T.  290, 370, 415 Barthes, R.  109, 156, 162, 229, 232, 235, 237, 243–44, 415–16 Bartlett, N.  35, 273, 370, 401, 415 Barton, J.  118, 405, 415, 426 Baumgartner, W.  117, 407 Bennett, A.  274, 366, 413 Bentham, J.  106, 111, 241, 283–85, 289, 294, 302–5, 362–63, 365, 372, 376–77, 415, 425 Berlinerblau, J.  76, 104, 112–13, 415–16 Birch, L.  370, 411 Block, R.  34, 416 Bloom, H.  287, 369, 416 Bodner, K.  251, 416 Boer, R.  89, 91–92, 98, 100–101, 103, 106, 114, 119–20, 132, 184, 243, 416 Bonjour, L.  206, 264, 371 Boswell, J.  39, 42, 100–102, 107, 239, 242, 251, 270, 285, 311, 381, 416

Bowden, J. E.  388, 414 Bowden, J. S.  264, 388, 409 Boyarin, D.  38, 416 Boyd, A.  366 Bradford, E. E.  370, 411 Brain, R.  39, 102, 116, 243, 269, 398, 416 Brand, A.  367, 416 Bray, A.  20, 44, 309, 353, 364–65, 379– 80, 397, 401, 416 Brenner, A.  47, 120, 416, 425 Brentlinger, R.  89, 101, 106, 114, 119, 247, 266, 268, 368, 416 Brenton, H.  2–3, 34 Bristow, J.  41–42, 44, 358, 384, 393, 399–400, 416 Brooke-Rose, C.  109, 417–18 Brooten, B.  50 Browning, O.  388, 395 Brueggemann, W.  102, 266, 416 Buber, M.  168, 407 Buchanan, R.  333 Butler, J.  120, 416 Calder, W. M.  257, 416 Cantarella, E.  100–101, 242, 254, 257, 372, 416 Caquot, A.  203, 264, 417 Carden, M.  45, 417 Carpenter, E.  42, 115, 289–90, 300, 328– 29, 341, 344, 350–56, 361, 363, 365, 374, 376, 385, 390–92, 394, 396– 400, 402, 404, 411, 417, 422, 424 Cartledge, T. W.  39, 146–47, 238, 417 Castelli, E.  110 Chaplais, P.  271–72, 417 Chaucer, G.  353 Cheadle, R.  101, 421 Chitty, S.  321, 382, 384, 387, 417 Chubb, R. N.  291, 371 Clark, J. M.  105, 118, 417

446

The Love of David and Jonathan

Clifford, E.  333, 389 Clines, D. J. A.  31, 49, 52, 103, 243, 247, 269, 407, 417 Comstock, G. D.  103, 417 Cooper, E.  22, 45, 417 Coote, S.  45, 411 Copley, A.  42, 392, 396, 399, 417 Countryman, L. W.  39, 42, 45, 104, 119, 242, 272, 417 Cowley, A.  66–68, 109, 111, 136, 157, 169–70, 235, 243, 247–48, 283–84, 286, 325, 362, 368, 375, 411, 420, 424 Crompton, L.  17, 40, 44, 376–77, 417 Cross, F. M.  218, 250, 252, 264, 407 Cruise, C.  371, 417 Culbertson, P. I.  47, 417 Culler, J.  109, 229, 417–19 Dabhoiwala, F.  376–77, 418 Dakyns, H. G.  332, 389 Dalgairns, J. D. (Bernard)  41, 243, 276, 289, 308–11, 314–16, 328, 353, 362, 365, 380, 383, 410 Damrosch, D.  53, 103, 268, 418 Daniel, W.  381, 410 D’Arch Smith, T. D.  273, 290–91, 370– 71, 387–88, 391, 394, 396, 418 Davidson, I. J.  270 Davidson, J.  38–39, 41–42, 60, 106, 239, 257, 267, 372–73, 410, 418 Davies, P. R.  104, 418 DeLaura, D. L.  386–87, 418 Dellamora, R.  45, 341, 353, 377, 379, 384, 387, 391, 398, 402, 418 Derrida, J.  109, 111, 243, 418 Dickinson, G. L.  394, 418 Dietrich, W.  30, 38, 48–49, 54, 103, 112, 207, 244, 265, 418, 423 Dijk-Hemmes, F. van  31, 49, 418 DiLella, A. A.  112, 425 Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W.  116, 118–19, 418 Donfried, K. P.  48, 418 Dover, K. J.  38–39, 42, 239, 257, 267, 372, 409, 418 Dowling, L.  41, 321, 333, 379, 382, 386– 89, 393, 395, 418 Drake, R.  34, 287–88, 369, 418 Driver, G. R.  267, 418 Driver, S. R.  264, 267–68, 271, 418

Eco, U.  24, 46, 69, 101, 109, 118, 123, 125, 128–34, 156, 226, 229–35, 237–38, 240, 243, 412, 418–19, 424 Edelman, D. V.  35, 102, 106, 205, 231, 235, 246, 258, 264, 268–69, 419 Eglinton, J. Z.  36, 41, 101, 107, 251, 370, 374, 385, 419 Eidelberg, P.  34, 419 Ellmann, R.  392, 419 Ellwood, T.  284, 368, 411 Eribon, D.  45, 419 Evangelista, S.  386–87, 419 Evans, G. Blakemore  400, 413 Exum, J. C.  102, 218, 245, 268, 393, 419 Faber, F. W.  306–307, 330, 378, 388, 414 Faber, G.  307, 366, 378–79, 389, 413, 419 Faderman, L.  298–99, 366, 373, 411, 419 Farrar, F. W.  284, 289, 314, 324–25, 359, 362, 365, 385, 388, 412 Fewell, D. N.  90, 101, 104, 106–107, 116–17, 119, 173, 249, 419 Finley, M. I.  257, 419 Fish, S.  228 Fitzmyer, J. A.  252, 408 Flint, P. W.  141–42, 237, 427 Fokkelman, J. P.  51, 101, 269, 419 Fone, B. S.  285–88, 369, 373, 411 Forster, E. M.  32, 42, 170, 245, 288–90, 320, 328–29, 341, 344, 350–51, 356–61, 363, 365, 370, 385–86, 396, 399–401, 404, 412, 417, 419, 423 Foucault, M.  20, 27, 37–39, 44–45, 47, 100, 110–11, 115, 369, 373, 401, 419 Fredericko, S.  34, 420 Frontain, R.-J.  228, 366, 375, 419, 424 Furbank, P. N.  370, 396, 399, 412, 420 Gagnon, R. A. J.  52, 55, 70, 83–88, 90– 93, 98, 100, 104, 110, 115–18, 122, 150–51, 240, 253, 275, 278, 321, 366, 374, 402, 404, 420 Garde, N. I.  34, 98, 393, 420 George, M. K.  2, 107, 237–38, 257, 265, 381, 420, 427 Gide, A.  34–35, 44, 67–68, 109, 288–90, 334, 344–45, 390, 393, 412, 413 Gill, C.  346, 347, 348-50



Index of Authors 447

Gill, J.  263, 270–71, 284, 285, 325, 362, 368-69, 420 Gill, W. A.  387, 420, 426 Ginzberg, L.  414 Gladfelder, H.  302, 376–77, 420 Glueck, N.  260–61, 420 Goetze, A.  107, 408 Gonda, C.  38, 238, 241, 369, 420 Gray, J.  370–71, 411 Green, B.  248, 250, 252–54, 266, 420 Green, M.  9–12, 36 Greenberg, D. F.  37, 103, 265, 420 Greenberg, S.  269, 420 Guest, D. P.  31, 49, 55–56, 102, 104–106, 115, 420, 426 Gunn, D. M.  90, 101, 104, 106–107, 116– 17, 119, 173, 249, 393, 419, 420 Guy-Bray, S.  111, 243, 375, 420 Haley, B.  382, 420 Hallam, A.  321, 384 Hallard, J. H.  291, 370–71, 411 Halperin, D. M.  37–39, 42, 45, 50, 86, 96, 101, 108, 111–12, 116, 120, 157–60, 229, 242–43, 269, 292, 322, 363–65, 401–402, 420 Hammond, P.  247, 394–95, 421 Hanhart, R.  408 Harding, J. E.  49, 233, 421 Harris, E. T.  238, 421 Harrison, A. H.  366, 414 Harrisville, R. A.  230, 421 Hartinger, B.  11–12, 36, 421 Hayley, W.  373, 412 Heacock, A.  38, 44, 48–49, 89, 98–99, 101, 103, 106, 108, 110, 112, 121, 132, 228, 241, 243, 247, 260, 264, 267, 402, 421 Helminiak, D. A.  89, 101, 119, 421 Hentschel, G.  58–59, 106, 117, 145–47, 238–39, 278, 321, 374, 421 Hermann, A.  267, 421 Hertzberg, H. W.  204, 264–65, 421 Heym, S.  7, 36, 68, 412 Hill, J.  229, 421 Hillers, D. R.  114, 421 Hilliard, D.  314, 378, 382, 421 Hirschfeld, M.  202, 213, 263, 267, 289, 421 Hoffner, H. A.  114, 260, 421

Honey, J. R. de S.  378, 385, 421 Horner, T.  57, 89, 101, 146, 421 Hubble, C. A.  101, 119, 257, 265, 421 Huffer, L.  45, 416, 421 Hügel, K.  45–46, 48–49, 101, 106, 108, 113, 244, 389, 421 Hughes, T.  289, 314, 322, 324, 326, 328, 359, 362–63, 365, 382–85, 412, 426 Humphreys, W. L.  393, 422 Hyde, H. M.  346, 393–94, 422 Hytner, N.  366, 414 Iser, W.  228 Jacoby, F.  257, 408 Jakobson, R.  234, 238, 263, 422 Jamieson, A.  385, 422 Jastrow, M.  240, 256, 407 Jauss, H.-R.  110 Jenkyns, R.  378–79, 385–88, 390–91, 401, 422 Jennings, T. W.  35, 57, 89, 93–95, 98, 101, 105–107, 117, 119–20, 186, 207–208, 239, 265, 422 Jobling, D.  16, 30, 39, 57, 89–91, 96, 98, 103, 118–19, 132, 165, 245, 265–66, 422 Jowett, B.  18, 71, 111, 230, 306–307, 326, 329, 331–32, 352, 378–79, 388–89, 419, 422 Joyce, J.  130, 131, 226, 233, 412 Kader, S.  101, 104, 118–19, 265, 422 Kains-Jackson, C.  398 Kaiser, O.  112, 235, 245, 422 Kingsley, C.  284, 289, 306, 309–10, 314–22, 324–28, 353, 362–63, 365, 381–85, 387, 396, 410, 422 Klein, J.  109, 228-29, 422 Klein, R. W.  102, 211, 266, 422 Knust, J. W.  266, 422 Koch, T. R.  57, 106, 422 Koch-Westenholz, U.  107, 427 Koehler, L.  117, 255, 407, 423 Kollar, R.  378, 423 Kristeva, J.  127, 156, 232, 423 LaBute, N.  34, 413 LaHaye, T.  134, 235, 412

448

The Love of David and Jonathan

Landsberger, B.  408 Lasker-Schüler, E.  247, 289, 413 Leavitt, D.  290, 370, 412 Lefroy, E. Cracroft  314, 322, 326–27, 371, 383, 387–88, 420, 423, 426 Lévi-Strauss, C.  253, 423 Lockman, J.  225, 272–73, 411 Lodge, D.  12, 37, 403, 405, 412 Lubac, H. de  229, 423 Maçon, R. le  368, 410 Martin, D. P.  83, 86, 90, 104–105, 115, 117–18, 423 Martin, R. K.  86, 105, 117, 378, 399–400, 423, 425 Masing, U.  194, 260–61, 423 Mayne, X. (= Edward Irenaeus Prime Stevenson)  17, 39–41, 44, 202, 238, 263, 277–81, 341, 366–67, 370, 374, 391, 423, 426 McCarter, P. K.  35, 52, 102–103, 205, 211, 246, 251, 264, 268, 423 McCormack, I.  45, 411 McEvoy, J.  42, 381, 423 McGuire, B. P.  381, 423 McKenzie, S. L.  83, 102, 149–50, 240, 423 McLelland, J. C.  368, 423 Mettinger, T. N. D.  35, 423 Milgrom, J.  104, 110, 241, 423 Moberly, R. W. L.  110, 423 Moffat, W.  396, 423 Montaigne, M. de  17, 40, 279, 347, 394, 413 Moore, T.  376, 411, 414 Moran, W. L.  251, 423 Morgenstern, J.  35, 267, 423 Morris, W.  353–54, 397–98, 411 Mounsey, C.  38, 238, 241, 369, 420 Nardelli, J.-F.  54–55, 101, 104, 114, 119, 165, 208, 229, 245, 264–66, 423 Naumann, T.  30, 38, 48, 53–55, 86, 102– 103, 112, 269, 418, 423 Newman, J. H.  41, 289, 306–309, 314, 328, 362, 365–66, 378–80, 382, 384, 386, 410, 414, 418, 427 Nissinen, M.  30, 37–38, 44, 48, 58, 69, 88, 102, 106, 108, 113, 117–18, 207, 244, 265–66, 269, 424 Noth, M.  112, 424

Olyan, S. M.  43, 78–79, 113, 269, 424 Oosterhuis, H.  367, 402, 416, 424 Østermark-Johansen, L.  290, 370, 424 Palmer, R.  306–307, 378, 414 Parker, H. N.  37–38, 253–54, 401, 424 Parry, D. W.  264, 407 Patai, R.  101, 149, 240, 249, 424 Pater, W.  45, 50, 228, 234, 314, 326–27, 350, 353, 379, 383, 386–87, 390–91, 394, 397–99, 424 Payne Smith, R.  241, 264, 407 Pebworth, T.-L.  375, 424 Peirce, C. S.  126, 128, 231–32, 424 Peisert, M.  31, 49, 101, 103–104, 106, 117, 238, 266, 268, 424 Peleg, Y.  35, 39, 89–90, 96, 98, 116–17, 119–21, 217, 219, 265, 268–69, 424 Polzin, R.  212, 267, 424 Popp, W.  35, 424 Potok, C.  6–7, 36, 412 Raffalovich, M.-A.  44, 275, 289, 328, 348–49, 365, 370, 395–96, 424 Renault, M.  362, 401, 412 Richard, J.-P.  109 Richards, J.  378, 385, 390, 394, 397, 424 Richlin, A.  242 Rilke, R. M.  289, 370, 411 Robert, P. de  203, 264, 416 Robey, D.  233, 424 Roby, D.  381, 410 Roden, F. S.  23, 27, 46–47, 275–76, 285, 307–308, 313, 333, 350, 366, 370, 379–80, 382, 389, 393–94, 396, 425 Römer, T.  53, 103, 205–206, 371, 425 Rooker, M. F.  241, 425 Rorty, R.  109, 417–18 Rosenzweig, F.  168, 407 Rossetti, C.  16, 40, 43, 276, 313, 319–20, 328, 362, 366, 382, 410–11, 414 Rowbotham, S.  396, 425 Rowe, J.  120–21, 373, 425 Rubin, G.  253, 374, 425 Russell, K. C.  381, 425 Sakenfeld, K. Doob  103, 425 Saley, R. J.  264, 407 Salvesen, A.  408



Index of Authors 449

Sandars, T. C.  382, 425 Saussure, F. de  127, 231, 235–36, 425 Schecter, S.  29, 48, 166, 285, 411 Scherman, N.  245, 408 Schroer, S.  26, 30, 47–48, 57–64, 70, 80, 83, 88–89, 91–93, 95, 98, 101, 106– 108, 110, 116–17, 122, 151, 198–99, 239, 258, 304, 404, 425 Schueller, H. M.  385, 388–89, 391, 414 Schüssler Fiorenza, E.  118–19, 425 Sedgwick, E. K.  20, 38, 41–42, 44, 46, 253, 285, 347, 369, 374, 378, 392, 394, 400–401, 425 Seebass, H.  206–207, 211, 265 Segal, M. Z.  250, 425 Setel, T. D.  120, 425 Seward, Anna  289, 299–300, 362 Shadduck, G.  109, 136, 235, 247–48, 411 Shakespeare, William  170, 247, 277, 279, 289, 320–321, 347–50, 359–60, 371, 394–95, 400–401, 403, 413 Shay, J.  47, 246, 272, 425 Sinfield, A.  41–42, 273, 371, 384, 387–88, 394, 399, 426 Skehan, P. W.  112, 426 Smith, G. (= Jeremy Bentham)  302, 377, 415, 426 Smith, J. Z.  143, 237, 426 Smith, M.  86, 105, 112, 115, 117–19, 378, 399–400, 407, 422–23, 426 Smith, W. Cantwell  141–42, 236–37, 426 Smolar, L.  269, 426 Smollett, T.  377, 412 Solomon, N.  47, 246, 272, 426 Spenser, E.  281, 283, 368, 411 Staalduine-Sulman, E. van  222, 248, 426 Stansell, G.  102, 242, 248, 252, 263, 265, 426 Staubli, T.  26, 30, 47–48, 57–64, 69–70, 73, 80, 83, 88–89, 91–93, 95, 98, 101, 106–108, 110, 116–17, 122, 151, 198–99, 239, 258, 304, 404, 425 Steinmetz, D.  229, 426 Stephen, F.  385, 426 Sternberg, M.  155–56, 242, 249, 419, 426 Stoebe, H.-J.  58–59, 74, 112, 203, 221, 223, 263–64, 269–70, 426 Stolz, F.  58–59, 106, 147–50, 238–39, 278, 321, 374, 426

Stone, K.  102–103, 116–17, 119, 206, 265, 422, 426 Sundberg, W.  230, 420 Symonds, J. Addington  18, 26–27, 41–42, 45, 78, 111, 247, 276, 278, 284–86, 289–91, 294–95, 300, 304, 310, 314, 320, 322, 324, 326–29, 331–36, 338–44, 350–52, 356, 361–63, 365, 369–72, 379, 383, 385, 387–92, 396, 398–400, 402, 404, 411, 413–14, 426–27 Tadmor, H.  252, 256, 427 Taggar-Cohen, A.  46, 102, 260, 266, 427 Taylor, B.  291, 371, 427 Tennyson, A. Lord  310, 320, 325, 328, 344, 384, 398, 412, 422 Terrien, S.  101, 265, 427 Thirlwall, C.  390, 427 Thiselton, A.  71, 109–11, 427 Thompson. J. A.  52, 102, 254, 256, 427 Tolhurst, J.  380, 427 Townsley, G. P.  31, 49, 115, 427 Trible, P.  105, 249, 427 Trollope, A.  380, 412 Tsumura, D. T.  205, 215–16, 227, 264, 268–69, 427 Turner, F. M.  386, 389, 406, 427 Tyrwhitt, R. St John  331, 388, 427 Ullendorff, E.  139–40, 152–53, 236, 241, 427 Ulrich, E. C.  264, 407 Vance, N.  382–85, 387, 427 VanderKam, J. C.  120, 141–42, 237, 427 Vanita, R.  374, 427 Vermigli, P. M.  283–84, 325, 362, 410, 423 Vischer, W.  29, 47–48, 384, 428 Waddell, H.  369, 410 Walls, N. H.  114, 428 Watson, F.  104 Weanzana, N.  268, 428 Weaver, W.  109, 412 Webster, J. B.  105, 428 Westenholz, A.  107, 428 White, S. A.  120, 394, 412, 428

450

The Love of David and Jonathan

Whitman, W.  35, 41, 288–89, 310, 328, 341–44, 350–51, 355–56, 361, 365, 391–92, 396, 399, 401–402, 412, 426 Wilde, O. F. O’F.  35, 41–42, 78, 206, 274–75, 278–79, 288–90, 300, 320, 326, 328–29, 334, 341, 344–50, 356, 358, 360, 362–66, 369–70, 379, 385, 391–96, 399–400, 403–404, 412–13, 415, 419, 421, 425, 428 Wink, W.  83, 115–17, 419, 428 Wold, D. J.  83, 104, 110, 118, 428 Wolde, E. van  19, 35, 43, 126–28, 231– 33, 238, 240, 244, 249, 428 Wortham, H. E.  388, 428 Wright, T.  392, 394, 428

Yadin, Y.  410 Young, D.  348, 349, 395, 428 Young, W. P.  134, 235, 412 Youngblood, R.  37 Zehnder, M.  26, 30, 38, 43–44, 46, 52, 58, 60, 62–64, 66–67, 69–83, 88–93, 98, 101–102, 106–15, 122, 132, 139, 150–54, 238, 240–42, 251, 268, 278, 321, 374, 402, 404, 428 Zeikowitz, R. E.  381, 383, 397, 428 Zuckerman, B.  109, 428