When Heroes Love

The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David

Susan Ackerman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231507257
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire LGBT

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.

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 sex”⁶ 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 pri...