When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David

By Susan Ackerman

Toward the end of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh King Gilgamesh laments the untimely death of his comrade Enkidu, "my friend whom I loved dearly." Similarly in the Bible, David mourns his companion, Jonathan, whose "love to me was wonderful, greater than the love of women." These passages, along with other ambiguous erotic and sexual language found in the Gilgamesh epic and the biblical David story, have become the object of numerous and competing scholarly inquiries into the sexual nature of the heroes' relationships. Susan Ackerman's innovative work carefully examines the stories' sexual and homoerotic language and suggests that its ambiguity provides new ways of understanding ideas of gender and sexuality in the ancient Near East and its literature.

In exploring the stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and David and Jonathan, Ackerman cautions against applying modern conceptions of homosexuality to these relationships. Drawing on historical and literary criticism, Ackerman's close readings analyze the stories of David and Gilgamesh in light of contemporary definitions of sexual relationships and gender roles. She argues that these male relationships cannot be taken as same-sex partnerships in the modern sense, but reflect the ancient understanding of gender roles, whether in same- or opposite-sex relationships, as defined as either active (male) or passive (female). Her interpretation also considers the heroes' erotic and sexual interactions with members of the opposite sex.

Ackerman shows that the texts' language and erotic imagery suggest more than just an intense male bonding. She argues that, though ambiguous, the erotic imagery and language have a critical function in the texts and serve the political, religious, and aesthetic aims of the narrators. More precisely, the erotic language in the story of David seeks to feminize Jonathan and thus invalidate his claim to Israel's throne in favor of David. In the case of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, whose egalitarian relationship is paradoxically described using the hierarchically dependent language of sexual relationships, the ambiguous erotic language reinforces their status as liminal figures and heroes in the epic tradition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Aug 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9780231507257

Susan Ackerman

Susan Ackerman is the Preston H. Kelsey Professor of Religion and professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Women and the Religion of Ancient Israel; When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David; Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen: Women in Judges and Biblical Israel; and Under Every Green Tree: Popular Religion in Sixth-Century Judah.

Book preview

Prologue

At least a thousand years separate the stories of the ancient Mesopotamian King Gilgamesh and the ancient Israelite King David, or at least a thousand years separate the earliest forms of the stories of Gilgamesh and David that have come down to us.¹ At least a thousand miles, moreover, separate Gilgamesh’s ancient city-state fiefdom of Uruk and David’s ancient capital city of Jerusalem, or at least a thousand miles separated these two cities for any traveler in antiquity, who could hardly journey as the crow flies, across the Arabian desert, but instead had to follow the more roundabout route that tracked the waterways of the Orontes and Euphrates Rivers. Everything we know about the historical Gilgamesh in addition suggests that Gilgamesh was of Sumerian stock and not of the Semitic ethnos of which David was a part.

Nevertheless, scholars have frequently been drawn to compare these two great kings’ tales,² for despite the fact that the earliest forms of the Gilgamesh and David stories that have come down to us are separated by at least a thousand years, the final and most elaborate versions of these narratives—and the ones with which students of ancient Mesopotamian and Israelite literature are most familiar today—are basically contemporaneous, dating from the seventh and sixth centuries BCE.³ It is also the case that, despite the distances that separated them, the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia and the peoples of ancient Israel were closely associated with one another during the period in which the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of David came into their final forms; indeed, the ancient Mesopotamian empires of Assyria and Babylonia conquered and established themselves as overlords of the ancient Israelite Northern and Southern Kingdoms (Israel and Judah) in the eighth through the sixth centuries BCE. Furthermore, whatever we might claim regarding the historical Gilgamesh’s Sumerian origins, the ancient Mesopotamian poem that recounts his tale is a Semitic composition, the creation of the Akkadian people who supplanted the Sumerians of southern Mesopotamia in the late third and early second millennia BCE.

Kings Gilgamesh and David are also both celebrated in their stories as particularly valiant warriors, in fact, as warriors whose heroic abilities are really larger than life. Gilgamesh is lauded in his Epic as the greatest among kings, whose bravery and might surpass any other’s;⁴ thus he is able to kill fearsome monsters that the Epic implies would otherwise never have been defeated. David, likewise, is portrayed as an extraordinarily powerful combatant, said to have killed tens of thousands in battle before he even assumes his throne, while to Saul, who was king at the time and so more plausibly would have been represented as David’s superior, is ascribed the killing of only thousands. Similarly, in the descriptions of the wars he undertakes after he becomes king, David is said to triumph over a phenomenal number of enemy soldiers, killing twenty-two thousand from the troops of the Aramaeans of Damascus and taking another twenty-thousand soldiers and seventeen hundred horsemen from the Aramaean state of Zobah. David furthermore, like Gilgamesh, is able to defeat a particularly fearsome foe that no others had even dared to approach: the enormous Philistine champion Goliath.⁵

Gilgamesh and David are, in addition, both depicted by the ancient world’s storytellers as wanderer kings, kings, that is, who are separated from their royal fiefdoms (or, in David’s case, from his royal fiefdom to be) for long periods while they journey in the wilderness. As W. T. H. Jackson has pointed out, this is a relatively distinctive feature in the traditional literatures of, at least, Western cultures; more typically, in the Western literary corpus, the king is a sedentary figure who stays at home, while nonroyal heroes go forth from the royal court to undertake great adventures (as in, for example, the British stories of King Arthur, who resides in Camelot while the knights of his Round Table ride forth to act on his behalf).⁶ Another feature also relatively distinctive in the stories of both Gilgamesh and David is the fact that each of these hero-kings has a particularly close relationship with a heroic companion, Gilgamesh with a comrade, Enkidu, who was specially created for Gilgamesh by the gods, and David with Jonathan, the son of his royal predecessor, King Saul. Enkidu and Jonathan, moreover, both die tragic and untimely deaths, and Gilgamesh and David, both devastated by these losses, lament them bitterly. The terms of these lament are strikingly similar. Toward the end of the Epic of Gilgamesh Gilgamesh bewails the death of Enkidu by describing him as my friend, whom I loved dearly.⁷ Similarly, toward the end of the narratives that describe his ascent to the combined throne of Israel and Judah, the king-to-be David mourns deeply the death of Jonathan, whose love to me was wonderful, David states, indeed, greater, to David, than the love of women.⁸

Commentators have puzzled over these two expressions of heroic love. For some, the comparison between Jonathan’s love and the love of women that David offers, along with the Bible’s use of other emotionally charged language and images of physical intimacy in its descriptions of David’s and Jonathan’s interactions, suggests that these two heroes’ relationship must be understood as erotic and perhaps even sexual in nature. Likewise, in the Epic of Gilgamesh the loving relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu is at several points portrayed using language and imagery that many scholars have analyzed as eroticized and perhaps sexual as well. Others, however, would not describe either the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu or the relationship of David and Jonathan using the categories of eroticism or sex, claiming instead that the relationships represent only a kind of intense male bonding that these interpreters take to be typical of heroic friendships in the ancient world. As I hope to show in some of the discussion that follows, there are compelling arguments to be made in favor of both these positions, in large part, I will argue, because of the exceptionally ambiguous ways in which erotic and potentially sexual language and imagery are deployed in both the Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of David and Jonathan. In fact, 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.

Still, in this book it will be my contention that, however ambiguous, we need not be doomed to argue inconclusively about the nature of the relationships of either Gilgamesh and Enkidu or David and Jonathan. Rather, I will propose we can develop explanations that satisfactorily account for the Gilgamesh Epic’s and the David story’s eroticized and perhaps even sexualized language and images. Indeed, it will be my contention that although a seeming point of frustration for interpreters, the ambiguity of the texts’ erotic and sexual language and images needs to be understood as an integral and even critical feature of the tales their ancient narrators are trying to tell and the conclusions these narrators hope to promote. Which is to say: it will be my contention in this book that the use of erotic and sexual ambiguity in both the stories of Gilgamesh and David is ultimately not an impediment but a key—perhaps even the key—to the interpretation of these texts.

It will further be my contention, though, that, if we are to unpack and eventually to understand the ways in which ambiguously erotic and sexual language and imagery are integral to the Gilgamesh and David narratives, we will need to be far more attentive than have commentators previously to several features of the ancient Near Eastern world of which Mesopotamia and Israel were a part. First, I believe we must attend more to the nature of sex in the ancient Near Eastern world, or, to be more specific, attend more to the dynamics of sexual relationships in the ancient Near Eastern world, by which I mean both the ways in which sexual roles in the ancient Near East were conceptualized by the peoples of that region and the hierarchical means by which the ancient Near East’s sexual relations were structured. Second, I believe we must attend more to issues of gender, which is to say, both the gendered language and imagery that can be used by the Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of David to describe their heroes (what does it mean, for example, for David to compare Jonathan’s love for him to the love of women?) and also the ways in which the Gilgamesh Epic and the David story each represent their heroes’ erotic and sexual interactions with members of the opposite sex. Finally, and most important, I believe we must pay careful attention to issues of literary construction: what is it about each story’s compositional framework and thematic objectives that leads the Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of David to depict their heroes using arguably eroticized and sexualized representations? David M. Halperin has raised doubts about the interpretive strategies that have conventionally been used to analyze the heroic relationships described in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of David: the appreciative (how beautifully within each text the heroes’ relationship is portrayed) and the documentary (what each text might tell us about the nature of heroic interactions within the culture and the era it purports to describe).⁹ This is a concern I share, and in this study I aim to eschew these appreciative and documentary approaches in favor of an analysis that considers foremost each story’s narrative agenda.

My ultimate goal, then, in the chapters that follow is to explain the eroticized and sexualized depictions of the heroic relationships of the Mesopotamian King Gilgamesh and his comrade Enkidu and the biblical King David and his companion Jonathan within the context of ancient Near Eastern conceptions of sex and sexuality; within the context of the Gilgamesh Epic’s and the David story’s depictions of gender roles and gender relationships; and, most important, within the context of the Gilgamesh Epic’s and the David story’s literary structures. I will begin in chapter 1 by considering the ways in which sexual interactions were construed generally in the ancient Near Eastern world and, more broadly speaking, in the ancient world of the Eastern Mediterranean. Then, in chapter 2, I will briefly introduce the Epic of Gilgamesh before turning, in chapter 3, to describe the language and imagery of the Epic that suggest eroticism and even the sexual. In chapters 4 and 5 I will explore in detail my interpretation of the erotic, sexual, and also gender imagery of the Gilgamesh Epic, before turning to introduce, in chapter 6, the biblical story of David and Jonathan. Then, in chapters 7 and 8, I will offer the same sort of detailed reading of the erotic and sexual imagery found in the David and Jonathan story that I earlier advanced regarding the erotic and sexual imagery of the Gilgamesh Epic. I will further consider, in chapter 8, gender imagery within the David and Jonathan story, imagery that I will comment on briefly in the epilogue as well. Throughout, I have tried, in addition to introducing my own interpretations, to make reference to the most up-to-date bibliography, but I regret to say that A. R. George’s two-volume critical edition of the Gilgamesh Epic did not appear in print in time for me to make use of it before this book went to press.¹⁰

I have been helped by many in my work on this volume, and it is a great joy to offer them my thanks here: first, Dartmouth College, whose award of a Senior Faculty Grant during the academic year 2001–2002 gave me the time away from the classroom I needed in order to complete my manuscript’s initial draft; second, the librarians at Dartmouth’s Baker-Berry Library, in particular Patricia Carter of the Interlibrary Loan Office and William Fontaine in the Reference Department, both of whom have been tireless in their efforts to procure for me the often obscure materials I have required for the execution of my project; third, the many students who have discussed with me my interpretations of the Gilgamesh Epic and the David story in classes on ancient Near Eastern mythology and on the Hebrew Bible that I have taught over the years; and fourth, my family and many friends at Dartmouth and elsewhere, who have been beyond generous in providing me with good counsel, good cheer, and good wine. These include George and Peggy Ackerman, Michael Bronski, Andrew Corbin, Sheila Culbert, William Dever, Mona Domosh, Steve and Elizabeth Dycus, Susannah Heschel, Amy Hollywood, Michael Lowenthal, Reed Lowrie, Jim McQuillan, Peter Machinist, Frank Magilligan, Carol Meyers, Susan Niditch, Saul Olyan, William Propp, Laura Smoller, Richard Voos, Neal Walls, and Richard Wright. Finally, I must extend my thanks to the members of the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College, both past and present, who in reading chapters 4 and 5 will immediately recognize the enormous debt I owe to them and to the comparative analysis of hero stories that we have jointly undertaken in our team-taught introductory course Patterns of Religious Experience. It is with deep pleasure that I express my gratitude to them for this as well as for the many other good ideas and good times we have been able to share during the fifteen years I have spent as their colleague.

1

OF GREETING CARDS AND METHODS: UNDERSTANDING ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN SEX

A few years ago, a former student of mine, one who knew of my interest in hero stories from the ancient Near East, sent me a greeting card.¹ The card features a painting of the biblical heroes David and Jonathan, standing side by side. This painting is rendered in Romanesque or early Gothic style, with David’s and Jonathan’s heads ringed by the sorts of golden haloes that typically adorn biblical paragons in medieval Christian art. At the painting’s top, a similarly haloed Christ, framed within a heavenly cloudbank, looks benevolently down upon the two companions and extends his hands in a gesture of blessing. Yet despite all these characters’ haloes, and despite some other archaizing features, the painting is clearly recent in its execution, as is most obviously indicated by the fact that both David and Jonathan hold parchment scrolls on which are inscribed quotes written in perfectly idiomatic modern English: on Jonathan’s, Keep your sacred promise and be loyal to me; on David’s, How wonderful was your love for me. David’s quote is echoed on the back side of the card, where the biblical story of David’s and Jonathan’s relationship and of Jonathan’s tragic and untimely death is briefly recounted. The recital concludes, When Jonathan … [was] slain, David mourned for Jonathan with these words:²

O Jonathan, in your death I am stricken,

I am desolate for you, Jonathan, my brother.

Very dear to me you were,

your love to me more wonderful

than the love of a woman.

The card’s text then continues:

Times have changed since these events were recorded, and such intense love between two men makes many uncomfortable in our day. For gay men who struggle to remain within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, however, the love between Jonathan and David is an inspiration and strength.

Ever since I received this greeting card from my former student, I have found it difficult to know what to make of it. On the one hand, I support its larger political agenda. Indeed, I have been actively involved in gay rights work over the years, especially at the college where I teach. I was co-convenor of the coalition that helped establish a domestic-partner benefits program for my college’s gay and lesbian employees, and I worked as part of that same coalition to persuade the local United Way—whose fund-raising efforts on my campus are extensive—to drop its support of area organizations that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. I also helped to establish a staff position in my college’s student services area that works to address the needs of our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students, and I co-taught the two initial offerings of my college’s Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies course.

As a biblical scholar, moreover, I have been especially concerned with the specific gay rights issue that the greeting card addresses: the way in which the Bible is used to discuss the place of gay men and lesbians within today’s Jewish and Christian communities of faith and, more generally, the way in which the Bible is used to discuss the place of gay men and lesbians within contemporary society. I have recently been concerned, for example, with the way the Bible was used in the debates surrounding the civil unions legislation that became law on July 1, 2000, in the state of Vermont, just across the Connecticut River from the small New Hampshire town in which I live. This legislation allows gay and lesbian couples to enter into relationships that are legally recognized by the state and thereby to receive from the Vermont government the same state-law benefits and protections that are available to opposite-sex couples through marriage.

To be sure, during the long process that brought the civil unions law into being,³ Vermont state officials repeatedly reminded Vermonters that the Bible, and religion overall, had no place in their discussions. Rather, the issue, as had been made clear in a December 1999 ruling by the Vermont Supreme Court, was constitutional—that under the common benefits clause of the Vermont State Constitution same-sex partners had to be provided with a system of legal association that offered the same rights and privileges Vermont accords to married couples. Yet, even though the Bible and religion officially had no place in Vermonters’ debates over civil unions, the Bible and religion were on call quite a bit, from the chambers of the statehouse where the civil unions statute was being drafted to the Letters to the Editor section of our local paper. Shortly after the civil unions bill passed I was asked to write a brief commentary about the ways the Bible had been evoked in the discussions that took place in these and other forums,⁴ and I have subsequently spoken frequently on the topic.

The gist of my comments on these occasions has basically been the same as the caution Vermont state officials issued to Vermonters during their civil unions debates: the Bible really has no place in discussions about gay and lesbian rights in our contemporary society. But while Vermont state officials sought to disallow discussion of the Bible on constitutional grounds, my reservations stem from a different source: the bounty of research produced by scholars of gay and lesbian studies during the past twenty or so years that tells us that our society’s notion of homosexuality, or, more precisely, of homosexual identity, is just that—ours—a historically and culturally contingent product of our particular time and place. Homosexuality as we conceive of it is thus not something that should be, or even can be, discussed using data that come from the texts and traditions of societies far removed from ours, including those societies that were extant in the modern-day regions of Palestine and Israel during the first millennium BCE and the first century of our era and that produced the corpus of writings we now know as the Bible. To put the matter somewhat more bluntly: the Bible, rooted as it is in an era long ago and a location far away, is simply not in a position to address the phenomenon we in the Euro-American West speak of today as homosexuality.

Now, this is not to claim, let me quickly make clear, that erotic and sexual acts involving same-sex partners were not found in the societies of the biblical world, nor is it to claim that same-sex erotic and sexual interactions are not found in many (if not most) societies other than our own. Rather, the available evidence suggests just the opposite, that erotic and sexual interactions between persons of the same sex are attested in almost all cultures known to us from across time and across the globe. Thus the British historian Jeffrey Weeks can write that same-sex coupling has existed throughout history, in all types of society, among all social classes and peoples. Weeks continues, however, by noting that what have varied enormously are the ways in which different societies have regarded same-sex erotic and sexual interactions: the ways, for example, in which societies have responded to same-sex interactions—qualified approval, indifference and the most vicious persecution—but, more important, the meanings these societies have attached to same-sex erotic and sexual acts and the manner in which those who engage in same-sex erotic and sexual interactions have viewed themselves.⁵

More specifically, according to Weeks and theorists like him: while same-sex erotic and sexual interactions may be ubiquitous among cultures, a sense that participation in these interactions demarcates one as having a homosexual identity is not. It is not at all clear, that is, that cultures other than our own have understood those who participated in same-sex erotic and sexual interactions to belong to a distinct class or category of people whom we would define as homosexuals, individuals who have most of [their] erotic needs met in interactions with persons of the same sex⁶ and who also tend to belong to a subculture—what we today often call the gay community—that is made up of other such erotically driven individuals and is distinct and distinguishable from the surrounding society.⁷ Rather, researchers suggest that our impulse to categorize all those who engage primarily or even substantially in same-sex erotic and sexual interactions as a distinct and identifiable type of person, homosexuals, who have a distinct and identifiable way of living in the world, is a creation or construction of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Euro-American discourse. Indeed, those who advocate this sort of position are typically labeled by the rubric social constructionists because of their fundamental conviction that our notion of a homosexual (and, for that matter, heterosexual) identity is a social construct, the effect of social conditioning. Hence it has virtually no constancy across cultures, in the same way social conditioning about many other aspects of our identities is inconstant across cultural space and time—most famously, perhaps, social conditioning regarding gender identity and what constitutes normative masculine and feminine behavior.⁸

The initial evidence that many social constructionists advance in favor of the theory of the homosexual as a distinct and novel creation of modern Euro-American society is linguistic: the fact that the very terms homosexual and homosexuality (and their classificatory analogs, heterosexual and heterosexuality) are recent creations, products of late nineteenth-century scientific discourse. According to the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement, the earliest occurrence of the terms homosexual and homosexuality in an English publication was in 1892,⁹ when the words were used by Charles Gilbert Chaddock in his translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s handbook of sexual deviance, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study.¹⁰ It was not Krafft-Ebing, however, who coined these terms’ German predecessors, Homosexual and Homosexualität; this was the writer Karl Maria Kertbeny, who, as part of his efforts to decriminalize same-sex sexual encounters in Germany, first used the word Homosexual, and also the neologism Heterosexual, in a private letter to the sex-law reformer, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, on May 6, 1868.¹¹ Kertbeny subsequently introduced the term Homosexual and the related terms Homosexualität, homosexuality, and Homosexualismus, homosexualism, into public discourse in 1869, in two anonymous pamphlets that argued against the adoption of an unnatural fornication law throughout Germany. Kertbeny’s friend, the Stuttgart zoology professor Gustav Jäger, later took up Kertbeny’s language of Homosexualität and popularized it in the second (1880) edition of his Die Entdeckung der Seele, and it was from Jäger that Krafft-Ebing learned the word and incorporated an adjectival form of it (homosexuale Idiosynkrasie, homosexual idiosyncrasy) into the second and subsequent editions of his Psychopathia Sexualis.¹² From there, as already noted, the terms homosexual and homosexuality (and their heterosexual counterparts) traveled into the English lexicon. The classicist David M. Halperin therefore speaks in his 1986 essay One Hundred Years of Homosexuality of the invention of homosexuality, at least in the English-speaking world, by Chaddock in 1892,¹³ and the historian Jonathan Ned Katz in his 1995 book The Invention of Heterosexuality similarly writes of the debut of the heterosexual in the late nineteenth-century prose of Krafft-Ebing.¹⁴

Just because the words do not exist to describe a particular phenomenon, however, does not mean that phenomenon is not present among us. As critics of social construction theory have pointed out, gravity did not come into being only when Newton provided us with a description of its properties,¹⁵ and people had blood types before blood types were discovered.¹⁶ Or, to take an example closer to the field of inquiry that is the subject of this book, it seems evident to those of us who specialize in the study of the Hebrew Bible that we can speak of the religion (or probably better religions) of ancient Israel,¹⁷ despite the fact that there is no word in biblical Hebrew for this concept.¹⁸ And so, analogously, can we not speak of heterosexuals and homosexuals as distinct categories of persons that existed before the words that describe them were coined at end of the nineteenth century? Indeed, can we not speak of heterosexuals and homosexuals as distinct categories of persons that are at least implicitly, if not explicitly, present in all cultures? That is, whatever the relative novelty of the terminology, can we not speak of heterosexual and homosexual identities as universal, intrinsic, natural, and essential facts of what it is to be sexual within the human community?

I will return to this so-called essentialist argument below, and its place in ancient Near Eastern and especially biblical scholarship, but for the moment let me focus on the social constructionists’ response to these sorts of questions, which can be summarized by the phrase words are clues to concepts.¹⁹ Which is to say: that there are no words to categorize people as homosexual or heterosexual before the late nineteenth century suggests to the constructionists that those who lived before this time did not conceive of a social universe that divided its inhabitants into homosexual and heterosexual individuals. Again, this is not to say there were no same-sex erotic and sexual interactions before the end of the nineteenth century; quite the contrary. Rather, the social constructionists’ claim is that prior to the introduction of the term homosexual and its heterosexual analog, sex-differences, eroticism, and reproduction were arranged in ways substantially different from the way we categorize these things today.²⁰ As Halperin writes, although there are persons who seek sexual contact with other persons of the same sex in many different societies, only recently and only in some sectors of our own society have such persons—or some portion of them—been homosexuals.²¹ Even more forthright is this statement of the historian Robert Padgug: "‘Homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ behavior may be universal; homosexual and heterosexual identity and consciousness are modern realities…. To ‘commit’ a homosexual act is one thing: to be a homosexual is something entirely different."²²

In order to substantiate these claims, Halperin, Padgug, and social constructionists like them turn from their linguistic observations to introduce a second major line of argumentation, which is to bring forward ethnographic data that come from prior to the late nineteenth century, or from outside our Euro-American matrix, or both, in order to illustrate different cultures’ substantially different arrangements of sexual categories.²³ Halperin, for example, turns almost immediately from the introductory proposition of his essay, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality—that before 1892 there was no homosexuality—to cite George Chauncey’s study of United States medical literature from the early to mid-nineteenth century, From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance.²⁴ In this article Chauncey documents, first, the prevailing language used for behavior that was considered sexually deviant throughout most of the nineteenth century, the language of sexual inversion. He then, and for our purposes more importantly, goes on to describe how the nineteenth century’s understanding of this deviant sexual inversion did not denote the same conceptual phenomenon as homosexuality. Rather, sexual inversion referred to a broad range of deviant gender behavior, which could be manifest by what was considered deviant object choice (the choice of a same-sex sexual partner), but also (in men) by a fondness for cats or (in women) by a predilection for politics.²⁵ Halperin summarizes, Throughout the nineteenth century … sexual preference for a person of one’s own sex was not clearly distinguished from other sorts of non-conformity to one’s culturally defined sex-role.²⁶

Similarly, Katz, in his The Invention of Heterosexuality, illustrates his contention that the words heterosexuality and homosexuality signify a time-bound historical form—one historically specific way of organizing the sexes and their pleasures by looking to the data collected by historians John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman on the romantic friendships that existed in the United States in the early nineteenth century.²⁷ Middle-class women especially formed close attachments that could rival marriage relationships in their personal intensity.²⁸ These women’s relationships included expressions of physical intimacy—holding hands, kissing, and caressing—although typically not genital stimulation, as is suggested, for example, by these lines from an 1859 novel quoted by D’Emilio and Freedman:

Women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do men. When this is the case … the emotions awakened heave and swell through the whole being as the tides swell the ocean. Freed from all the grosser elements of passion, as it exists between the sexes, it retains its energy, its abandonment, its flush, its eagerness, its palpitation, and its rapture.

So is this highly eroticized, albeit nongenital love—described in the same passage as being "not only in degree as between man and woman, but in kind as between precisely similar organizations"—to be classified as homosexual?²⁹ D’Emilio and Freedman respond by invoking a social constructionist analysis: "The modern terms homosexuality and heterosexuality do not apply to an era that had not yet articulated these distinctions."³⁰

The most persuasive ethnographic data, however, that Halperin and Katz (among many others) bring to bear to illustrate their social constructionist claims come from ancient Greece,³¹ and Halperin, a classicist, is particularly masterful in his discussion. He begins by offering a close reading of the famous myth regarding human origins that is attributed to Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium.³² In this text Aristophanes is said to claim that there were originally three sexes of human beings, male, female, and androgyne. These original humans, according to Aristophanes, were globular in shape, with eight limbs, four ears, two faces, and two sets of genitals, one front and one back. These humans also, in Aristophanes’ tale, were very powerful, so powerful that the god Zeus, in order to constrain them, cut them in half. These severed halves, as the story goes, sought desperately to reunite with their other, so much so that once reunited the halves devoted all their energies to sustaining a perpetual embrace. As a result, they neglected other bodily needs and thus began to perish for lack of sustenance. Zeus at that point took pity on the halves and so moved their genitals around to the front sides of their bodies and invented sexual intercourse, which allowed the creatures to find some satiety of their union and a relief in order that they might turn their hands to their labors and their interest in ordinary life.³³ The consequence is three types of sexual congress: males who seek other males (the two halves of the original globe-shaped male), females who seek other females (the two halves of the original globe-shaped female), and males and females who seek each other (the two halves of the original androgyne).

This typology of erotic interactions, Halperin admits, may look superficially like our division of sexual congress into homosexuality and heterosexuality. But Halperin argues a closer examination reveals that it is not. He points out first that, contrary to what our homosexual-versus-heterosexual distinction assumes, there is nothing in Aristophanes’ story that supposes the males who seek other males and the females who seek other females to be of a common type (what we would call homosexual). Nor is there anything that supposes a contrast between these males who seek other males and the females who seek other females, on the one hand, and the third type of sexual being (what we would call heterosexual), on the other. In Halperin’s words, "nothing in the text allows us to suspect the existence of even an implicit category to which males who desire males and females who desire females both belong in contradistinction to some other category containing males and females who desire one another."³⁴

Moreover, Halperin goes on to argue, Aristophanes’ myth "features a crucial distinction within the category of males who are attracted to males, an infrastructural detail missing from his descriptions of each of the other two categories. This is Aristophanes’ insistence that the males who desire other males are not attracted to one another without qualification; rather, those descended from an original male … desire boys when they are men and they take a certain (nonsexual) pleasure in physical contact with men when they are boys. Halperin, in somewhat of an understatement, describes this insistence on age dissymmetry on Aristophanes’ part as unexpected, pointing out that although his [Aristophanes’] genetic explanation of the diversity of sexual-object choice among human beings would seem to require that there be some adult males who are sexually attracted to other adult males, Aristophanes appears to be wholly unaware of such a possibility, and in any case has left no room for it in his taxonomic scheme. Reciprocated erotic desire between adult male partners is not admitted in Aristophanes’ myth, that is, and this despite the fact that Aristophanes’ own representation of the constitution of human sexual interactions would seem to imply it. This suggests, by extension, that as indicated above, homosexuals as we define them—pairs of lovers of the same sex and [roughly] the same age animated by mutual desire for one another"—are not, at least among males, present in the Aristophanes tale.³⁵

Halperin next points out a further implication of this analysis: that the absence of what we define as homosexuals, or at least male homosexuals, in Aristophanes’ myth demonstrates the absence of what we define as homosexuality, or at least male homosexuality, in the world of classical Athens from which Aristophanes’ tale stems. This is because Aristophanes’ myth is, in terms of genre, an etiological fable, a projection of contemporary practices backwards in time to their imagined point of origin.³⁶ What Aristophanes describes in terms of the beginnings of human sexuality, that is, is what Athenians were actually doing sexually during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Elsewhere in his essay Halperin elaborates by explaining that in classical Athens sex generally—whether involving same-sex or opposite-sex partners—was conceived of not as we understand it, an act jointly engaged in by two partners, but rather as an act that is described in terms of use, more specifically, the use to which a desiring subject (to be understood as male) puts the object of his sexual desire.³⁷ Halperin contrasts in this regard our idiom "to have sex with someone, which implies an act in which partners mutually participate, and the Greek idiom, in which the verb to have sex" (aphrodiziazein) is carefully differentiated into an active and a passive form. This is an indication—and one notes again here the constructionist conviction that words are clues to concepts—that sex in the classical worldview is understood not according to our notions of mutuality, but as an action performed by one person [active] upon another [passive]. The sexual action performed, moreover, is rigidly defined in the Athenian system as penile penetration, meaning obviously, as intimated already, that the sexual actor—or active partner—is male. More important, the active partner must be a certain kind of male, one who is in a socially superior position to the penetrated. Hence, as Halperin writes, the most socially superior of Athenians, an adult, male citizen of Athens, can have legitimate sexual relations only with statutory minors (his inferiors not in age but in social and political status): the proper targets of his sexual desire include, specifically, women, boys, foreigners, and slaves—all of them persons who do not enjoy the same legal rights and privileges as he does.³⁸

Athenian sexual practices are thus isomorphic (to use Halperin’s word) with Athenian social status and, more generally, with Athenian political life, so that any sexual interactions consistent with the Athenians’ hierarchical principles of social and political organization are considered normative—whether they would be described by us as heterosexual (and typically in our society normative) or homosexual (and typically in our society deviant). What is considered aberrant in this Athenian system, however, is sex between members of the superordinate group, that is, sex between two adult male citizens. Indeed, in Halperin’s words, this type of sexual relation is virtually inconceivable.³⁹ Halperin concludes: The currently fashionable distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality (and, similarly, between ‘homosexuals’ and ‘heterosexuals’ as individual types) had no meaning for the classical Athenians: there were not, as far as they knew, two different kinds of ‘sexuality,’ two differently structured psychosexual states or modes of affective orientation. Rather, the taxonomic distinction that described sexual identity in ancient Athens was ‘active’ and ‘passive,’ dominant and submissive.⁴⁰ For at least some Athenians, moreover, their active or passive sexual identity was mutable, rather than being—as an essentialist argument might have it—intrinsic, natural, and therefore unchanging. In particular, males eligible for citizenship, although they would have been typologically passive in their youth, would become typologically active upon attaining their majority and entering into a superior social status within the body politic.⁴¹

So carefully does Halperin argue this position, and so meticulously does he amass evidence from classical sources to prove his contention that ‘sexuality’ is a cultural production, that even he speaks of the debate between his social constructionist convictions and the alternative position of essentialism as potentially sterile.⁴² Similarly, in her 1999 book Getting Medieval, a provocative examination of sex and communities in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England, Carolyn Dinshaw, a professor of Middle English language and culture at New York University, writes of these days in the late 1990s in which we may have tired of the essentialism/social constructionism debate.⁴³ Still, I have chosen to spend a fair amount of time on the social constructionist position here because it seems to me it is not necessarily so widely embraced as Halperin’s and Dinshaw’s comments might suggest. The anthropologist Carole S. Vance, for example, in an essay published in 1995, comments that an essentialist approach to sexuality remains hegemonic,⁴⁴ and Katz, writing in the same year, speaks similarly of how the idea … of an essential homosexuality and heterosexuality still functions as the dominant working notion, even of historically oriented researchers.⁴⁵ Certainly this seems to me to be true among the historically oriented researchers within my own area of scholarly interest and the area of scholarly interest that this book primarily considers, the world of biblical Israel and the ancient Near East. In fact, in looking at studies that address the Bible’s attitudes toward same-sex erotic and sexual interactions, I am struck by how pervasive the essentialist understanding of sexuality is.⁴⁶

One of the earliest⁴⁷ and most formidable spokespersons for an essentialist approach regarding the Bible’s attitudes toward same-sex erotic and sexual interactions was the late John Boswell of the Department of History at Yale University, in his 1980 book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century.⁴⁸ As Boswell’s subtitle makes clear, he is convinced that there were gay people long before the invention of homosexuality that Halperin dates to 1892, and that gay people is in fact a categorical constant that extends in time over, at least, the first fourteen centuries of Western European history.⁴⁹ The claim within the text itself is broader still, projecting the category gay back to the fifth century BCE and into the Eastern Mediterranean, so that Boswell readily speaks, for example, of the gay Athenians attested within classical literature,⁵⁰ of the gay relationships of Athens,⁵¹ and of Aristophanes’ descriptions of gay and nongay men and women in the Symposium’s myth of human origins that I have described above.⁵² Indeed, in the concluding comments of what could be called his preliminary methodological discussion (chapter 2, Definitions),⁵³ Boswell implies what he elsewhere states more clearly,⁵⁴ that the heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy exists in speech and thought because it exists in reality: it was not invented by sexual taxonomists, but observed by them.⁵⁵

For the biblical scholar, however, the most salient demonstration of Boswell’s fundamentally essentialist position is found in his exegesis of Rom 1:26–27. These verses are a part of the passage in Paul’s Letter to the Romans that presents the apostle’s arguments regarding the sins of the Gentiles and consequently their need for salvation.⁵⁶ From Paul’s point of view, the fundamental sin was the Gentiles’ failure to know God, despite the fact that they should have been able to infer the nature and power of the creator through the glory of the creation. For this reason, Paul writes in Rom 1:26–27 (NRSV translation):

God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

Arguments rage over what Paul means by natural and unnatural in these verses. Does natural refer to some universal law or moral truth that proscribes homosexuality? Does unnatural refer to that which is peculiar, extraordinary, unconventional, unexpected, as are same-sex erotic and sexual interactions in most societies? Do natural and unnatural here have nothing to do with same-sex interactions but refer rather to what was considered natural as opposed

Reviews for When Heroes Love

[Red CrmSoda · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

They had sex. The author forgot to answer the point of the entire book.