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

Jonathan “loved [David] as himself ” (1 Samuel 18:1), and the “Davidic Succession Narrative” (1 Samuel 18–2 Samuel 5) relates how this love led him to thwart the efforts of his father Saul to rid himself of his young rival. So, in recent years, scholars as well as other readers of the Hebrew Bible have begun to ask concerning David and Jonathan, “Were they gay?” The same question has been posed about the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, protagonists of the longest narrative in Mesopotamian literature centering on human characters, a work customarily referred to by modern writers as “The Epic of Gilgamesh.”

In When Heroes Love, religion professor Susan Ackerman considers the role of homoeroticism in these classics of ancient Near Eastern literature. She first prepares the reader by presenting a concise but useful summary of scholarship on homosexuality, concentrating on the recent debate concerning the phenomenology of same-sex love. This argument, which has obvious social and political implications, pits the defenders of the “essentialist” position, who maintain that homosexuality is an inherent characteristic of a substantial fraction of humanity and as such has remained unchanged across the ages, against the “social constructivists.” Members of this latter group, with which the author sensibly identifies herself, do not dispute the central role played throughout history in the psyche and lives of many individuals by sexual attraction to members of their own sex. But they do hold that its expression, like that of many other functions of the human brain, is shaped by societal conditions. In particular, some people in Western societies before the mid-nineteenth century certainly engaged in homosexual acts, but it is anachronistic to consider them to have been “gay,” with all the associations this term conjures up in regard to personal affect, dress, political attitudes, etc. Applying the label “gay” to those belonging to other cultures is even more misleading.

Having established that a “gay” identity is out of the question for our two pairs of heroes, Ackerman proceeds to analyze the nature of their relationships. She concludes that Gilgamesh and Enkidu on the one hand and Jonathan and David on the other are indeed depicted in their stories as sexual partners. Since she also demonstrates that homosexual relations were not generally acceptable in either Mesopotamian or Israelite society, she must then seek an explanation for the attribution of this characteristic to figures who were, after all, highly valued in their respective traditions.

She finds the answer to her paradox in the concept of rite de passage, “rite of passage.” Developed early in the twentieth century by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep to describe a type of ritual marking a change in social status (e.g., birth, marriage, death), this tool was applied by later scholars, particularly Victor Turner, to other social experiences and to works of literature and art. For Ackerman, the relevant aspect of this conceptual framework is the identification within a rite or narrative of a “liminal” period during which social norms are suspended or even reversed as a personage departs from one stage or position in life and becomes established in another. She argues that while David is transformed from a simple shepherd to a glorious monarch and while Gilgamesh progresses from glory-seeking superman to wise and responsible ruler, each inhabits a liminal state, marked by the flouting of conventional sexual roles.

Although it is intriguing, I find this interpretation ultimately unsatisfying. Since the publication of the latest full edition of the Akkadian Gilgamesh material, there remains little doubt that the hero and Enkidu were physical lovers (see A. R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic [Oxford, 2003], pp. 902f.), but Ackerman presents no compelling evidence for such a relationship between David and Jonathan. More damaging to her thesis, however, is the difficulty in viewing these narratives as rites of passage. Such a characterization is to my mind convincing only...