Ship of Fools: Dead Horses: The Pilling Report

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orfeo

Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
I dunno why, but you seem to be getting my near certainty that the text is depicting them as lovers confused with my speculative theories about a marriage, or something similar to one, being depicted between them.

Because not all your posts, or even parts of your posts, make that clear a distinction.

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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
So we have no particular reason to think that the writer of Samuel (or David himself), or the culture he lived in, had any negative views of homosexual acts, and everything we know about the various other cultures of the area tells us that homosexuality was widely accepted and positively regarded, especially among warriors.

Have you considered the possibility that a culture which has no problem with emotionally intense sexual relationships between men might also have no problem with emotionally intense non-sexual relationships between men? And if so, in the absence of an explicit sexual reference, how would you tell them apart?

It's not clear to me whether you are advocating a historical position or a literary one: the question "Did David the historical king of Israel and his friend Jonathan fuck?" is not the same as "Does the final editor of the book of Samuel mean us to infer that his characters David and Jonathan fucked?". To me, it's the second question that counts if we're asking whether there are positive portrayals of gay men in the Bible. David's actual sex life is not widely regarded as a source of moral authority - how the Bible portrays him might be. If your thesis is (as it seems to be) that this was originally a story explicitly about a same-sex erotic pairing, which has been somewhat masked by later editing, then it becomes quite hard to defend the idea that the Bible (as distinct from the pre-canonical sources of the Bible) positively portrays a gay man.

I'm not bothered if the historical David was gay (well, bi-, we can be fairly sure from the Bathsheba story that his attraction to women was real enough), and if he was, I'd be delighted if the Bible writers celebrated that fact. But to me, the 'intense friendship' interpretation is the better reading. There is some much in the David story which is 'larger than life'. David's first battle is not merely against a champion, but against a giant. His 'mighty men' are not merely tough sons of bitches, but epic heroes capable of taking on a moderately sized battalion apiece. His worship, his sins and failings, his repentance, are all extravagant. The story-teller is portraying a king with style.

How would we expect the story to portray the great friendship of David's life that cuts across the political division between his position and the house of Saul? Pretty much, I think, as he portrays the story of David and Jonathan.

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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"

Richard Dawkins

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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
What has the Roman Empire got to do with a story that was set a thousand years earlier, and written at least for or five hundred years earlier?

It's theologically defensible to say that the Old Testament ought to be read through the lens of the New Testament. (Yes, that's not defensible for the purpose of Old Testament studies in their own right.) If so, then the way that the implied readers of the New Testament would react to the Old Testament is important.

quote:
But either way, the opinions of classical Ionians on the sexual habits of their Achaian predecessors haven't got anything to do with whatever the writers of the book of Samuel meant to imply about David and Johnathan.

I think the problem is that we don't otherwise have much of an evidence base to compare the Old Testament with. Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Persian records are scrappy and as far as I know don't tend to address the questions people are interested in. Also, Biblical scholars are more likely to be familiar with Greek literature or find it accessible. It is at least a potential counterbalance to the cultural assumptions of post-Enlightenment Northern Europe.

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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams

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leo
Shipmate
# 1458

Posted

My take on this is that the relationship is one of a middle eastern treaty/covenant

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leo
Shipmate
# 1458

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by mdijon:

quote:
Originally posted by Gildas:
I think that any source which confidently states that the Emperor Constantine abolished gay marriage in the Roman Empire can be filed under "lack of scholarly credentials".
I went straight for the penultimate paragraph and missed that.

The paragraph above that - the last line isn't a paragraph but a link.

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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153

Posted

It's worth noting that there are at least two incidents of claiming-the-throne-by-sex in the Samuel/Kings narrative. Absalom's public and symbolic rape of David's concubines, and Adonijah's request to marry Abishag, who had shared David's bed.

There's some sort of idea there of claiming kingship by cuckolding the former king - and possibly some further meaning that the immediate audience would have got that I don't. So while it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the writer of one of the sources of Samuel thought that a king could be symbolically supplanted by someone asserting sexual possession of his son, it seems to me that if that was the intended meaning, then the writer had the language to express that idea. There doesn't seem to me to be any indication at all in the text that David lies with Jonathan to make the same sort of point that Absalom was making.

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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"

Richard Dawkins

Posts: 4619 | From: Hampton, Middlesex, UK | Registered: Mar 2005 | IP: Logged

Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772

Posted

Even more complicated than the concept that the author may be imaginary are the roles of the editors and translators and anthologists who merge and split multiple versions of the work.

The argument that it's not same sex marriage because modern definitions don't map onto the understanding of marriage in antiquity seems an evasion. No one seems to have any problem with Abraham and Sara as models of heterosexual marriage. Still, it's routinely cited despite complications such as concubines and polygamy.

If you don't accept the writings about Jonathan and David as indicative of a same sex marriage, then the question you have to answer is, what written description would satisfy you that it was a same sex marriage?

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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
If you don't accept the writings about Jonathan and David as indicative of a same sex marriage, then the question you have to answer is, what written description would satisfy you that it was a same sex marriage?

Some indication in the text that they:

Got married;
Had sex;
Shared a home;
Shared a bed;
Used 'marriage' words to describe their relationship;
Were seen by others as a romantic couple;
Were jealous (or at least one of them was) of the other's extra-marital sexual interests;
Took on a parental role to one another's children;
Were accepted as members of one another's families;
Shared their property as a single household.

Even one of those would be a good start, and none of them appear in Samuel. The only one you could even make a case for is David's patronage of Jonathan's son Mephibosheth, and there it's worth noting that David appears not to have known of the man's existence until he is well into adulthood, and that Mephibosheth is certainly not expecting the kindness of a step-father from the king.

David and Jonathan don't behave like a married couple. It's just not in the text.

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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"

Richard Dawkins

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Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651

Posted

Some comments in response to various people:

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Because not all your posts, or even parts of your posts, make that clear a distinction.

My posts were mostly written quite late at night/early in the morning so it wouldn't entirely surprise me if I wasn't entirely clear, sorry if I wasn't. I did try to distinguish the two theses and two different levels of surety.

quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
It's not clear to me whether you are advocating a historical position or a literary one

A literary one. I'm saying that the text as we have it portrays the two as lovers, as the similarities with all the various other same-sex love texts from the ancient world show that the writer was intending to depict that two as lovers. I think it also appears to suggest a marriage between them.

quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
If you don't accept the writings about Jonathan and David as indicative of a same sex marriage, then the question you have to answer is, what written description would satisfy you that it was a same sex marriage?

A great question. And an ever better question would be the same thing but replacing "same sex marriage" with "lovers".

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
What has the Roman Empire got to do with a story that was set a thousand years earlier, and written at least for or five hundred years earlier

Research into homosexuality in the ancient world has shown there seems to have been massive basic similarities across the ancient world in both space and time in terms of how the different cultures of the Mediterranean region thought about sex and same-sex acts. While each culture tended to differ on the details, there are certain basic similarities in thinking that span the period and region from the Epic of Gilgamesh (~2000BC, Persia) through to the Christianization of the Roman Empire (~340AD).

An absolute ban on same-sex acts between males (if that's really what the Levitical passage is saying) is incredibly remarkable as it stands pretty much alone among all the surrounding cultures, both chronologically and spatially. Same-sex acts appear to have been extremely common in the ancient world - vastly more so than today - with many ancient sources simply taking it for granted that the vast majority of men would engage in such acts throughout their lifetime, just as they assume that the men would equally engage in heterosexual sex. There is no apparent interest in the ancient world in any categorisation schemes equivalent to our straight/gay/bisexual categories, simply the assumptions that every man (who isn't a slave or otherwise lacking social standing) will probably have sex with slaves or prostitutes or teenagers of both genders, and will take at least one female wife for the purposes of producing official children who will inherit his property.

quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
Regarding the code of Theodosios (or whoever - the Latin text attributes that particular section to Constans and Constantius), the key phrase is "cum vir nubit in femina", which does literally mean "when a man marries as a woman". Some Googling would suggest it's rather questionable whether it should actually be taken literally, as opposed to being a euphemism for homosexual sex. I think it is rather unlikely to be intended literally, as that would suggest Constans and Constantius were fine with gay sex as long as the couple weren't married, and evidence for gay marriage as a regular Roman institution is otherwise lacking.

In our wedding ceremonies today nearly the only gender difference is that the bride wears a gown and a man a suit. As a result someone could snidely say to a male gay couple getting married "who's going to wear the dress?" (But of course, no one actually does) Roman wedding ceremonies had significantly more gender differences than ours do, and therefore same-sex couples getting married were to some extent forced to have one of them take the role of the female if they wanted it to be anything like a normal marriage ceremony. Multiple sources attest that this did happen reasonably often, and various sources take offence at the fact that during the marriage ceremony a man is acting out the part of a woman - an affront to their ideals of masculinity (no Roman sources have a problem at all with the idea of same-sex acts in and of themselves though - they are taken for granted as likely and acceptable). While we can imagine that some same-sex couples adapted the wedding ceremonies to be gender neutral, no actual reports of gender-neutral ceremonies survive (they would have offended no one, so no one complains about them). However there is a steady flow of vitriol in Roman sources against wedding ceremonies in which one of the men publicly takes the role of the woman (to the point of dressing up and wearing a veil etc), and a man dressing up as a woman during a same-sex marriage ceremony seems to be what is explicitly being banned by the Theodosian code. Whether such a law would have the implicit effect of preventing all same-sex weddings is hard to say because we don't know anything about the existence of gender-neutral ceremonies. We know from Juvenal that as of ~100AD, same sex weddings were not officially recorded as marriages by the Roman government (one of his dialogue characters shows concern that this might change in future). We don't know if that changed between then and 342AD when the Theodosian code law was apparently enacted.

But the general fact that same-sex weddings occurred in the Roman Empire seems well established from the sources. "In short, the evidence certainly suggests that some Roman men participated in wedding ceremonies with other men and considered themselves to be married to those men..... It is in fact precisely the figure of the male bride, rather than the concept of a male couple, that provokes the sometimes anxious reactions to these marriages found in the ancient sources." (Roman Homosexuality, Williams, 1999 (1st ed), p246, 248)

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Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
Some indication in the text that they:
[*]Got married;

They made a covenant to seal their love for each other (1 Sam 18:1-3).

quote:
[*]Had sex;

I think "thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." (2 Sam 1:26) implies sex, as do the various other statements about how much they loved one another, especially given the general culture that sex between two males was something that happened incredibly often.

Some scholars read 1 Sam 20:11 as a euphemism for sex, because Song of Solomon 7:11 can be taken as indicating that lovers like to go out alone into the field where no one else is and get it on. "And Jonathan said unto David, Come, and let us go out into the field. And they went out both of them into the field." (1 Sam 20:11) I don't find the case for that interpretation compelling.

quote:
[*]Shared a home;

They both lived in the palace, so yeah they shared a home.

quote:
[*]Shared a bed;

Okay, that one is never explicitly stated. Though they do sleep in the same general vicinity plenty of times. I imagine if you required the word "bed" to be used and a statement that they shared a bed to be made as your level of proof required for heterosexual couples in the bible, then there would be less than a handful of heterosexual couples depicted in the entire bible!

quote:
[*]Used 'marriage' words to describe their relationship;

The narrator uses "covenant".

quote:
[*]Were seen by others as a romantic couple;

Well, IMO, the text depicts David having a relationship with Saul and Saul getting very jealous at both Jonathan and David because he views his son as stealing his lover. This is what motivates Saul trying to kill (at times) both David and Jonathan.

Saul yells at Jonathan at one point: "do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame, and to the shame of your mother's nakedness?" (1 Sam 20:30) The way Saul critiques Jonathan for his relationship with David in this passage doesn't make any cultural sense unless Saul is assuming the relationship is sexual. Saul thinks the relationship is shameful to Jonathan and Jonathan's mother. That's just not a coherent thing for Saul to say unless Saul is assuming that the relationship is sexual. Even granting that, the inclusion of Jonathan's mother among the shamed parties is very unusual and only seems to make sense if David had been Saul's lover (and thus Jonathan's mother is at fault by virtue of the fact that her son has stolen her husband's lover). Anyway, I think the cultural content of this passage at a minimum implies that Saul regarded the two as a romantic couple, due to how the criticism is worded.

quote:
[*]Were jealous (or at least one of them was) of the other's extra-marital sexual interests;

Well Saul was jealous - see above.

Male lovers in the ancient world took it for granted that they would both have wives to bear them official children. There's no reason to expect any jealousy to be depicted in the text - the existence of a wife is not something to be jealous of, though the existence of another male lover could be.

quote:
[*]Took on a parental role to one another's children;

You'd expect this even if they were Just Good Friends (TM). As you point out, David is indeed nice to Jonathan's child once he becomes aware one exists.

quote:
[*]Were accepted as members of one another's families;

There are sentiments of a united family expressed: "The LORD shall be between me and you, and between my descendants and your descendants forever" (1 Sam 20:42)

quote:
[*]Shared their property as a single household.

Jonathan seems to have envisioned them jointly ruling over Israel: "You shall be king over Israel, and I shall be next to you" (1 Sam 23:17) If the kingdom can be regarded as the household of the king (as various ancient sources do regard it), then joint rule would constitute sharing household and property.

quote:
Even one of those would be a good start, and none of them appear in Samuel.

quote:
David and Jonathan don't behave like a married couple.

I think you're reading your modern conceptions into it and thinking far too much along the lines of "how would they behave if they were people from the modern world who were homosexual lovers?" and also thinking too much along the lines of "how would I personally depict things if I were to write the David and Jonathan story?"

I think that a problem a lot of modern readers have (apart from a tendency to be anachronistic about any cultural behaviours) is that they think "well if I was writing a story about two male lovers I would personally make it REALLY clear because the idea is so unusual it deserves incredible emphasis, and I would obviously extensively discuss the morality (or lack of it) of such a pairing." Because the David and Jonathan story is not written like how a conservative Christian in the modern Western world would write an account of a same-sex couple, conservative Christians have difficulty believing that's what the writer was intending to portray. Whereas those who are familiar with analysing writings from other cultures, and are familiar with how same sex relationships were perceived and depicted in the ancient world, can read the same text and take it as obvious that the writer was intending to portray a same-sex relationship.

Conservative Christians who are personally unfamiliar with homosexual relationships seem often blind also when they encounter them in the modern world - people simply do not pick up on hints when they are not attuned to detecting them - here are two interesting comments I saw internet posters make in the comments section of a news article two weeks ago:

quote:
"My partner and I tend to adjust our PDA according to the environment we are in... But it's funny, those who would tend to have a problem with gay couples tend to view us as brothers or fellow employees or room mates. Those who would tend to be more accepting tend to notice right away that we are a couple.” - Charles H.

Reply: “I think many people see what they want to see. A waitress at a diner where we have eaten regularly for over ten years asked one morning which of us was older. I said "I am by 6 months" to that she replied "wow, it must have been tough on your mother to have two babies so close together" .... duh?” - Michael C.

If people unfamiliar with gay relationships can't spot a gay relationship that's in front of them for ten years, what hope can there be that conservative Christians might actually be able to recognize one when it's in the bible? (Answer: zero. Which I guess explains how conservative Christians can so easily read over the David and Jonathan story and then tell me confidently the two are just good friends)

Posts: 745 | From: NZ | Registered: May 2007 | IP: Logged

orfeo

Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
I think "thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." (2 Sam 1:26) implies sex, as do the various other statements about how much they loved one another,

Eh?

First, you've just denied the existence of 'bromances'.

Second, I try turning this around and applying it to myself and find that it's utter nonsense. I have had deep, INTENSE friendships with women in the past without the slightest desire to have sex with them. One friend of mine, her husband commented that I was in some ways his wife's soulmate. Her husband said this. This is a straight man describing a straight woman's relationship with a gay man, and none of us had the slightest feeling that we were talking about sex.

To be honest I find the tactic of finding implied homosexual relationships in various places to be quite misconceived as a means of securing rights for homosexual couples. It seems to come from a logic that homosexual relationships will be alright so long as they are common enough. Then they will be 'normal'. I don't think it's a good tactic, because half the point of human rights is that they apply to minorities, no matter how tiny those minorities are. I want rights for homosexual couples regardless of whether homosexuals are 10% of the population or 1%. I want rights for homosexual couples because there's nothing wrong with a homosexual relationship, even if only 1 person in a thousand actually wants a homosexual relationship.

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Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
To be honest I find the tactic of finding implied homosexual relationships in various places to be quite misconceived as a means of securing rights for homosexual couples.

I agree. And to reiterate: That's not my aim. I'm not at all interested in trying to use the David and Jonathan story (or the bible for that matter) as a basis for morality or civil rights. I'm just pointing out that I think the conservative reading of the David and Jonathan story is an incorrect interpretation of the text, insofar as I think it's obvious the author intended to depict a same-sex relationship which the conservatives are blind to. I don't regard this as particularly speculative, or a matter of "reading into" the text, it's just a matter of accurately understanding the author's intended meaning. I think in 100 years time when everyone in the western world takes the existence of same-sex relationships completely for granted, that all interpreters of the David and Jonathan story will take for granted that the text is depicting a same-sex relationship. ie I really think it's really there in the text, I really don't think I'm just putting it there, and I don't have ulterior motives for wanting it to be there.

Posts: 745 | From: NZ | Registered: May 2007 | IP: Logged

orfeo

Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878

Posted

Well, I still think you're falling into the basic error, much beloved of tabloid gossip, of assuming that if two people are close there's gotta be sex happening. Which I know from personal experience is not true.

[ 31. January 2014, 02:18: Message edited by: orfeo ]

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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.

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mdijon
Shipmate
# 8520

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
I think in 100 years time when everyone in the western world takes the existence of same-sex relationships completely for granted

What do you mean by "for granted"? You have several people on this thread who as far as I can see have no problem acknowledging or coping with the existence of same-sex relationships but who don't see it your way. Are you suggesting they are blinded by some agenda?

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mdijon nojidm uoɿıqɯ ɯqıɿou
ɯqıɿou uoɿıqɯ nojidm mdijon

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Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
[*]Had sex;

I guess I should add that a small minority of scholars see an explicit and vulgar sexual reference in 1 Sam 20:41. The phrase often translated "David wept more" is a bit problematic in translation and may in fact be a euphemism for sex. (There's a short essay summarizing the views here) I tend to be skeptical of any and all translations (IMO one of the biggest problems in biblical interpretation in general is people being overly sure that their translation is the correct one), so I'm far from endorsing this particular translation, but if you require an explicit statement of them having sex in the text, then the answer is that some people think this is one.

After thinking about the various demands people have made in this thread for explicit statements being required before they will accept it's more than a bromance (which I don't agree is a reasonable evidential bar), to me what stands out as the most explicit statement in the text that the Jonathan-David relationship is not just a Really Good Bromance, is Saul's insult of Jonathan in 1 Sam 20:30-31. The insult itself is sexual in nature and seems to only make sense as an insult if Saul thinks David and Jonathan are sexual partners.

Now someone could take the position that "okay, Saul thought they were sexual partners, but he was wrong and a nutter and it was really just a Bromance." Which in turn raises the question of why Jonathan didn't respond by denying to Saul that the relationship was sexual. I guess one response to that is "Jonathan was too busy getting the hell out of there because Saul was throwing pointed weapons at him." But at no point later in the text does Jonathan ever go back to Saul and say anything like "look, those assumptions you made about me and David getting it on, they aren't true, we're just BFF's!" And nor does the narrator ever note that Saul was wrong in his thinking or that he was misconstruing things - it seems pretty reasonable to assume that if Saul thought they were getting it on it's because they were actually getting it on. The first half of the above-linked essay gives a nice survey of various scholars' translations and interpretations of this passage.

I would also like to hear some views of what exactly people think the covenants depicted in 1 Sam 18:1-3 and 1 Sam 23:16-18 are doing/achieving/about. In these passages, the talk of a "covenant" makes it look to me as if the two men are formally pledging themselves to one another. Is that what people here think is going on? I'm suspecting I'm going to get an answer along the lines of "it's a pinky swear to be best friends foreva!" (sigh) Actually, such an answer's fine, if that's what you guys think, but I'm curious to know if it is. Here's a hypothetical also that I'm interested in hearing answers to: If it hypothetically was true that David and Jonathan were for-sure having a sexual relationship, then what do you guys think the text would be meaning by these covenants? Would it be indicating a formal pledge of their love before God, and if so how do you guys see that as the same or different to a "marriage"?

[ 31. January 2014, 05:53: Message edited by: Starlight ]

Posts: 745 | From: NZ | Registered: May 2007 | IP: Logged

Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
The argument that it's not same sex marriage because modern definitions don't map onto the understanding of marriage in antiquity seems an evasion. No one seems to have any problem with Abraham and Sara as models of heterosexual marriage. Still, it's routinely cited despite complications such as concubines and polygamy.

I think I made just that argument when I said modern definitions don't map.

quote:
If you don't accept the writings about Jonathan and David as indicative of a same sex marriage, then the question you have to answer is, what written description would satisfy you that it was a same sex marriage?

The same set of words used as when a writer describes a marriage between a man and a woman. In general there's a difference between David took Bathsheba to be his wife and David lay with Bathsheba, and the text is generally clear about when the first obtains. That's because marriage is a social institution. There are specific rites you have to perform to enter it and specific rites you have to perform to dissolve it. There are people with whom I cannot contract marriage, even if I go through the appropriate ceremony with them, and those categories of people are socially constructed. And so on. So if two people get married that's a fact that can be simply stated.
Contrast whether two people are lovers, or romantically involved, which is not a social institution, and therefore becomes subject to some ambiguity or euphemism. It can be unclear just how far two people have to go before they qualify as lovers. Thus I think it's quite possible to look at a text and say the relationship depicted here is a lovers' relationship without that being specifically stated.
The Song of the Bow seems to me to state that David and Jonathan's relationship is of the same quality as David's relationship with women. So - I'm quite happy to say that it's a lovers' relationship. But the text does not say David and Jonathan adopted institutional roles towards each other.

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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams

Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004 | IP: Logged

Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
I would also like to hear some views of what exactly people think the covenants depicted in 1 Sam 18:1-3 and 1 Sam 23:16-18 are doing/achieving/about. In these passages, the talk of a "covenant" makes it look to me as if the two men are formally pledging themselves to one another.

Rather a good argument that it's not marriage: David only marries Bathsheba once.
There are rather a lot of ways in which two men might pledge themselves to each other, without being married. For example, in an appropriate society a knight might pledge himself to his liege and vice versa. (Or a mafioso might pledge himself to the new boss.) That seems far more comparable to what David and Jonathan are doing here. The two men are formally pledging each other to support each other in current and future power struggles. But that's simply not the institutional content of marriage, either in their society, nor entirely in our own.

Yes, I think David and Jonathan are lovers. But while that is motivating their covenants, it's not what their covenants are about.

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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams

Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004 | IP: Logged

Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
Roman wedding ceremonies had significantly more gender differences than ours do, and therefore same-sex couples getting married were to some extent forced to have one of them take the role of the female if they wanted it to be anything like a normal marriage ceremony. Multiple sources attest that this did happen reasonably often, and various sources take offence at the fact that during the marriage ceremony a man is acting out the part of a woman - an affront to their ideals of masculinity (no Roman sources have a problem at all with the idea of same-sex acts in and of themselves though - they are taken for granted as likely and acceptable).

quote:
However there is a steady flow of vitriol in Roman sources against wedding ceremonies in which one of the men publicly takes the role of the woman (to the point of dressing up and wearing a veil etc), and a man dressing up as a woman during a same-sex marriage ceremony seems to be what is explicitly being banned by the Theodosian code.

I think this is actually evidence that the ceremonies performed did not amount to marriage. If it was legally accepted that one male partner could adopt the woman's role, then that would not attract quite that degree of vitriol.
These statements seem to be part of the usual fascination of the sexually normative with the sexually non-normative. They tell us a lot about how normative sexual identities are constructed in their societies; they tell us little about what the non-normative are doing. Just as statements by medieval monks that heretics bugger each other tell us very little about heresy or homosexuality. But marriage is by definition a socially normative role.

What would prove the existence of same-sex marriage in the ancient world is not descriptions of same-sex ceremonies. What would prove the existence would be lawsuits in which two parties argue about whether they're married or not, or about whether one party is fulfilling their obligations under the marriage contract. Without the legal consequence, a ceremony is empty. What Nero is described as doing is the kind of fantasy that conservatives have when they talk about marriage is being undermined - a camp parody that calls the normative social construction of sexuality into question.

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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams

Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004 | IP: Logged

Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I think this is actually evidence that the ceremonies performed did not amount to marriage.

Without the legal consequence, a ceremony is empty.

I think I'm prepared to simply say "the Roman Empire had gay marriage" because:
a) Gay couples had weddings, and considered themselves 'married' afterwards.
b) This was a socially well-known and tolerated practice, even if disapproved of by some.
The fact that we know virtually nothing about what, if any, the legal consequences of such a marriages were, and we have reason to suspect that perhaps such marriages were never officially recorded as marriages by the state, doesn't to my mind necessarily detract from the fact that the society had the practice of gay-weddings and therefore of gay-marriage in a sense. Although, I'm equally quite sure that modern gay rights activists wouldn't be satisfied if you transported them back to the Roman Empire and it turned out that the state in fact didn't recognize any legal rights for those marriages, so in that sense I could also endorse the statement that "the Roman Empire didn't have gay marriage"! (if I could be sure that it didn't have that legal recognition, which we don't know)

It's kindof interesting to me that in Rome gay marriages faced the opposite problem to what gay marriage has faced in Western society: The religious authorities were totally prepared to do the ceremony and marry gay couples and had no religious objections to gay marriage, but the state authorities apparently weren't particularly interested in recognizing those unions in law and had moral objections to the wedding ceremony (but not the sex).

Posts: 745 | From: NZ | Registered: May 2007 | IP: Logged

Ricardus
Shipmate
# 8757

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:

b) This was a socially well-known and tolerated practice, even if disapproved of by some.

Earlier you referred to Juvenal in support of this idea. I presume the passage you have in mind is Satire 2.126-142. This includes the phrase "If only we live long enough, we will see these things done openly", which, given the overall theme of the poem is "the world is going to the dogs", suggests to me that such marriages were not, in fact, tolerated or publicised, otherwise they would already have been performed openly.

[ 31. January 2014, 12:08: Message edited by: Ricardus ]

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Then the dog ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail. -- Tobit 11:9 (Douai-Rheims)

Posts: 7247 | From: Liverpool, UK | Registered: Nov 2004 | IP: Logged

Ricardus
Shipmate
# 8757

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:

The argument that it's not same sex marriage because modern definitions don't map onto the understanding of marriage in antiquity seems an evasion. No one seems to have any problem with Abraham and Sara as models of heterosexual marriage. Still, it's routinely cited despite complications such as concubines and polygamy.

I don't think the Bible presents a single coherent concept of heterosexual marriage.

I think most of the people arguing against Starlight on this thread are in fact liberal on the gay issue but think Starlight is overstating his case.

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Then the dog ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail. -- Tobit 11:9 (Douai-Rheims)

Posts: 7247 | From: Liverpool, UK | Registered: Nov 2004 | IP: Logged

Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I think this is actually evidence that the ceremonies performed did not amount to marriage.

Without the legal consequence, a ceremony is empty.
I think I'm prepared to simply say "the Roman Empire had gay marriage" because:
a) Gay couples had weddings, and considered themselves 'married' afterwards.

The evidence does not seem to stretch that far. All the contemporary sources are parodic or satiric. (Is there any comment from Christian sources? Though if the Church Fathers are as reliable and well-informed as modern conservative churchmen on their moral high horses about same-sex relationships, I wouldn't count them as reliable sources either.) We don't have any indication of what the couples involved actually considered their status to be subsequently. There's no evidence cited from funerary inscriptions, for example.

quote:
b) This was a socially well-known and tolerated practice, even if disapproved of by some.

The practice, whatever it is, is disapproved of by all our sources for it. And I'm not convinced that Juvenal is much more reliable evidence for such a social practice than Swift's Modest Proposal is evidence for the practice of cannibalism in Ireland.
It's notable I think that the wikipedia page for Homosexuality in Ancient Rome cited earlier has a number of words for male homosexual partners, but doesn't include any word for 'husband' or equivalent to 'husband'.

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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams

Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004 | IP: Logged

ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460

Posted

There's documentary evidence from 18th century England of men getting pissed in pubs and going through a sort of satirical drag-marriage ceremony. At least some of those men may have actually been in some sort of long term relationship. But I don't think anyone would say there was gay marriage in England in those days.

Not that that has any more relevance to David and Johnathan than the equally irrelevant Romans.

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002 | IP: Logged

ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
I would also like to hear some views of what exactly people think the covenants depicted in 1 Sam 18:1-3 and 1 Sam 23:16-18 are doing/achieving/about. In these passages, the talk of a "covenant" makes it look to me as if the two men are formally pledging themselves to one another.
For example, in an appropriate society a knight might pledge himself to his liege and vice versa. (Or a mafioso might pledge himself to the new boss.)

That's what's happening in the first one. Jonathan gives David his weapons. David is now his man, his warrior, his military servant. As well as being Saul's - Saul and Jonathan take David into their household. The very next thing that happens is David starts getting sent out on military missions.

If we read it through mediaeval eyes rather than modern ones (just as anachronistic) this would clearly be a ritual arming. I recently re-read Malory's Morte D'Arthur. There are many, probably hundreds of examples of a lord arming his followers. It's what you did to show who was who's man. Clothes too. Later on in the bastard feudalism era the weapons got less important but the clothes became more important, and turned into elaborate liveries. The same happens now with the runaway fashion of employers making workers wear uniforms - its a ritual sign of subjection and inferiority. Literally shows who's boss.

In the Middle Ages and Early Modern period such clothes were one of the perks of the job. Servants of powerful lords derived status from their lord and being a kings man was a very hig status. Most people would be proud of it.

Also the poor might not have decent clothes. They'd be thankful for a rich robe. Even a hand-me-down. Especially a hand-me-down from a king or prince.

And there is a practical point too. We've just been told in the previous chapter that David has no arms or armour. Saul and Jonathan have taken him into their household as a warrior. So they give him weapons. What else would you expect?

As for the second covenant, that's Jonathan telling David that he will be on his side if he rebels against Saul. They are plotting a coup, not getting hitched.

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002 | IP: Logged

Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
They made a covenant to seal their love for each other (1 Sam 18:1-3).

“Covenant” isn't marriage. The writer of Samuel could say plainly that people got married. He doesn't say that of David and Jonathan. You have to infer it.

quote:
I think "thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." (2 Sam 1:26) implies sex, as do the various other statements about how much they loved one another

It's consistent with them having had sex, yes. But it isn't a statement that they actually did. And again, the writer of Samuel can and does tell us, quite often, that people had sex. He leaves us in no doubt that David had sex with Bathsheba, Absalom with his father's concubines, Amnon with Tamar. The writer could have said that David and Jonathan had sex. He doesn't. You have to infer it.

quote:
They both lived in the palace, so yeah they shared a home.

There's no way you can justify from the text that David entering into Saul's service equates to setting up home with Jonathan. Especially as, by your interpretation, you want to make David Saul's lover, not Jonathan's at this point.

quote:
Saul yells at Jonathan at one point: "do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame, and to the shame of your mother's nakedness?" (1 Sam 20:30) The way Saul critiques Jonathan for his relationship with David in this passage doesn't make any cultural sense unless Saul is assuming the relationship is sexual.

I read it as meaning something like “Your mum should be ashamed of having dropped her knickers just to produce a son like you”. Yes, its an insult. But it doesn't mean Jonathan was gay. And your thesis seems to be that there wasn't anything particularly shameful in being gay in that culture anyway.

If it is the act of stealing the king's lover that was shameful, then (1) we have even less evidence that David slept with Saul than that he slept with Jonathan; and (2) we have a pretty good idea what it meant, symbolically speaking, to steal the king's lover – it meant that you were claiming the throne. It wasn't a disgraceful deed, it was a rebellious one.

Saul's complaint against Jonathan is almost the opposite. He doesn't think that Jonathan, by taking what was Saul's, is asserting himself above his father as king – he thinks that Jonathan, by supporting the popular David with his friendship, is harbouring a viper who will take the kingdom from their family. His complaint is that Jonathan has failed as heir by not guarding his rights with sufficient courage and cunning. That would not have been his reaction to Jonathan taking his lover.

It is, in my view, quite impossible that the author intends Saul to be the reliable interpreter of the relationship between David and Jonathan. Saul is jealous of David's success and popularity. It is the jealousy of one who has been rejected by God for one who still enjoys God's favour. It is the pathological jealousy of a mentally unstable paranoid king. Saul, of all the characters in the story, is the one who utterly misreads David, who pursues him for treason unjustly and without cause. Saul is wrong. The idea that we look to Saul at his most wrathful for the definitive statement of the truth of David's character is obviously a misreading.

Also, on your interpretation, David enters the king's service, marries the king's daughter, becomes the king's lover, dumps the king, and then starts sleeping with the king's son. And you think that this behaviour would be (1) so unremarkable for the time that the original audience would infer it from sub-text; and (2) regarded as being to David's credit, and strengthening his claim to the throne.

No.

quote:
You'd expect this even if they were Just Good Friends (TM). As you point out, David is indeed nice to Jonathan's child once he becomes aware one exists.

Mephibosheth is five when Jonathan is killed. David makes no enquiry after him until the war with the house of Saul is safely concluded and all legitimate, able-bodied, male-line heirs are dead. One crippled child, and a few sons of a concubine and a daughter (whom David later has murdered) are the only ones to survive the carnage. You cannot read that as David treating Jonathan's family as his own.

quote:
There are sentiments of a united family expressed: "The LORD shall be between me and you, and between my descendants and your descendants forever" (1 Sam 20:42)

“The war between the house of David and the house of Saul lasted a long time” (2 Sam 3:1). The writer sees no joining of the families taking place in reality.

quote:
Jonathan seems to have envisioned them jointly ruling over Israel: "You shall be king over Israel, and I shall be next to you" (1 Sam 23:17) If the kingdom can be regarded as the household of the king (as various ancient sources do regard it), then joint rule would constitute sharing household and property.

But it didn't happen. Besides, the kingdom is distinct from Saul's personal lands and property (2 Sam 9:7) and though David does direct the disposition of that property, he does so as king, securing the inheritance of Mephibosheth as Saul's male-line heir, not as if David were the heir himself making a personal gift.

quote:
Because the David and Jonathan story is not written like how a conservative Christian in the modern Western world would write an account of a same-sex couple, conservative Christians have difficulty believing that's what the writer was intending to portray.

I'm not sure how many of the people engaging on this thread would self-identify as 'conservative', but I'm pretty sure that none of them are anti-gay. Most of us, I think, would not be unhappy to find a positive depiction of same-sex marriage in the Bible. I'd certainly be pleased to find one. I just don't think that David and Jonathan's story is it.

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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"

Richard Dawkins

Posts: 4619 | From: Hampton, Middlesex, UK | Registered: Mar 2005 | IP: Logged

Carys

Ship's Celticist
# 78

Posted

Being asexual, it bugs me when people take it as read that a close friendship has to be sexual. I think truthfully we cannot tell on the evidence we have what the exact nature of the relationship between David and Jonathan was and any attempt to claim that we do says more about our own assumptions than those of the text. But I also think that this discussion shows the problem with claiming a biblical understand of marriage, because there are several and few if any of them are that close to our modern idea of marriage. I think it could be argued strongly that the married women's property act 1870 was a more fundamental change in the understanding of marriage than equal marriage today. I would argue that not seeing women as property/letting them have an identity other than their husband's, is a deepening of the understanding of men AND women being made in the image of God, and there being no male and female in Christ, but it is certainly not "the biblical view"™.

Carys

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O Lord, you have searched me and know me
You know when I sit and when I rise

Posts: 6896 | From: Bryste mwy na thebyg | Registered: May 2001 | IP: Logged

ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460

Posted

Yes. The truly radical reinterpretation of marriage in the Bible is Paul's. Possibly the most egalitarian and companiate view of marriage we have in well-known writings from before the modern era.

As for love surpassing the love of women, that would have been unexceptional in the Middle Ages. Of course the relationship between a man and his lord was deeper and more satisfying than that between man and wife - from their point of view. (I'm not saying they were right about that and we wrong, just putting the feudal era on the table as another set of attitudes and cultural assumptions reading the Bible tthrough their own lenses)

There is an approach to litetature that claims

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002 | IP: Logged

ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460

Posted

(bloody crap text editor on this phone)

... that claims that the plots of stories often turn on a breakdown of the central or pivotal personal relationships in the society that produced them. For us, since at least the 18th century, that is the sexual partnership. In the feudal period its the relationship between lords and their vassals. (Anselm reimagines salvation history on that basis). In the Old Testament the pivotal relationship is between brothers, and society is threatened when that is broken. (In Shakespear plots often turn on father/daughter breakdowns)

Saul's problem is that Jonathan loves David like a brother, not that he loves him like a boyfriend. Maybe he does love him like that - its not in the text but not excluded by it either - but introducing a new brother into the family is potentially dangerous in a way that a lover might not be. (read David's lament for Saul and Jonathan)

And Joab and Abner are wartime consiglieri...

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Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002 | IP: Logged

Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772

Posted

So to skip a few centuries forward. Has anyone written a response challenging the Report?

Posts: 2990 | From: Seattle WA. US | Registered: Nov 2011 | IP: Logged

Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by ken:

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
For example, in an appropriate society a knight might pledge himself to his liege and vice versa. (Or a mafioso might pledge himself to the new boss.)

That's what's happening in the first one. Jonathan gives David his weapons. David is now his man, his warrior, his military servant. As well as being Saul's - Saul and Jonathan take David into their household. The very next thing that happens is David starts getting sent out on military missions.

If we read it through mediaeval eyes rather than modern ones (just as anachronistic) this would clearly be a ritual arming. I recently re-read Malory's Morte D'Arthur. There are many, probably hundreds of examples of a lord arming his followers. It's what you did to show who was who's man. Clothes too. Later on in the bastard feudalism era the weapons got less important but the clothes became more important, and turned into elaborate liveries. The same happens now with the runaway fashion of employers making workers wear uniforms - its a ritual sign of subjection and inferiority. Literally shows who's boss.

In the Middle Ages and Early Modern period such clothes were one of the perks of the job. Servants of powerful lords derived status from their lord and being a kings man was a very hig status. Most people would be proud of it.

Also the poor might not have decent clothes. They'd be thankful for a rich robe. Even a hand-me-down. Especially a hand-me-down from a king or prince.

And there is a practical point too. We've just been told in the previous chapter that David has no arms or armour. Saul and Jonathan have taken him into their household as a warrior. So they give him weapons. What else would you expect?

As for the second covenant, that's Jonathan telling David that he will be on his side if he rebels against Saul. They are plotting a coup, not getting hitched.

Thanks for that! That's a really good explanation, and I've been thinking about it over the last day, and you've convinced me.
[Smile]

So yeah, I'm now convinced it's more likely that the author didn't intend the text to depict them as 'married' than that he did. Thanks guys for the thoughtful responses!

Posts: 745 | From: NZ | Registered: May 2007 | IP: Logged

Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Well, I still think you're falling into the basic error, much beloved of tabloid gossip, of assuming that if two people are close there's gotta be sex happening. Which I know from personal experience is not true.

There are two different male-male friendships that I know of in my own life that I regularly wonder about as to whether they are bromances or romances. So, let me assure you, I am quite familiar with how people can be close without sex, or that it can indeed be sometimes ambiguous to the observer as to whether a relationship is sexual. And let's not forget that even the people involved in relationships can be uncertain what precisely the status of their own relationship is - "are we just friends or are we something more?" is almost a cliche standard question a lot of people ask in a state of confusion about their own relationships.

However, I think the situation is quite a bit different when we are dealing with a text. Because the author of the text, unlike people in real life, generally does know fully what the relationship status of the characters is, and that is almost always reflected in the writing in terms of the portrayal of the characters. It is true, I grant, that the truly best authors in the world are able to accurately reflect the true real life ambiguities and confusions that often arise with regard to relationships. However the vast, vast, majority of authors don't aim for ambiguities or confusion and form clear conceptions of the characters in their own minds and convey them to the readers as clearly as possible. So, for example, as I search my memory, trying to think of any examples where I had difficulty as a reader discerning the real nature of a relationship between two characters, I am drawing an almost complete blank despite being an avid reader who has read hundreds and hundreds of fiction books that included both friendships and romances.

But one case does come to mind, actually, and it is kind of relevant here. It is the Lord of the Rings, at the end of which (in the appendices I think), Legolas and Gimli become friends and tour the world together and then sail off into the West to live in the undying lands together forever. When I first read LotR, sometime around the age of eight I think, I simply took it completely for granted that they were a romantic couple (at that age I didn't know about sex, or gay people, or that relationships were 'supposed' to be male-female only, but I simply assumed a romantic relationship rather than a friendship and the idea that they were 'just good friends' didn't even cross my mind). Last year, when chatting with some friends about the Hobbit movie the issue happened to come up, and I thought "hmm, JRR Tolkien lived in England in the first half of the 20th century and was a Catholic, so he probably wasn't actually intending to write the characters as a gay couple, and the romance between the two of them that I'd just taken completely for granted all those years ago was actually probably just intended as a bromance by the author!" Googling the issue has not really provided me with a definitive answer - on the one hand Tolkien is known to have enjoyed historical fiction stories written by a contemporary of his that were set in ancient Greece and involved homosexual couples as the main characters, and on the other hand people point out that while Tolkien liked to read about other cultures he seems to have filtered them through his own Christian worldview before expressing them in the world of Middle Earth that he himself was creating so he is likely to have filtered out the idea of homosexuality. Which leaves me still in a state of confusion about how likely Tolkien himself is to have thought of Legolas and Gimli as being a romance vs a bromance. (My friend, tongue in cheek, pointed out amusingly that they can't have been a romance in Tolkien's mind because that would be an interracial couple and an interracial couple would have been considered scandelous the 1940s! The interwebs in turn, though, points out that Tolkien's thematic purpose in the bromance/romance of Legolas and Gimli is that they in themselves are renewing the friendship that once existed between Elves and Dwarves back in the good old days of middle earth.)

So, anyway, that is one ambiguous case out of however many hundred books I have read (and it's main ambiguity comes because of the brevity of the account which is about 2 sentences long), which is why I observe that books are generally much much less ambiguous that real life about the relationship status of characters. I think that is something that happens because usually authors try and communicate their conception of their story's world clearly to the reader, and the author's own conception of the characters relationships is unambiguous and that in turn gets shared with the reader. (...or, it strikes me, another valid moral that could be taken from this anecdote is that even before I knew what sex was I tended to over-read romance into ambiguous bromances... so maybe that's just something I do!)

But in general I would observe the following things:
1. Writers nearly always have a clear opinion themselves on whether two characters are romantically involved or not.
2. Writers are usually trying to convey the status of their characters relationships clearly to the readers, and don't generally set out to deceive the readers.
3. For writers to convey to readers that there is a romantic relationship happening between two characters usually requires no more than a sentence or a few words that contains an implication or a hint. It's really easy for readers to get it from even really small hints. This is because romantic relationships are really common, and can be hinted at in numerous ways - writers don't need to spell out the sex scenes for us because we're quite capable of inferring a sex scene from something as minimal as three trailing dots in the right context.
4. Because readers tend to pick up well on really small hints of romance, writers who are attempting to clearly depict characters who are not in a romantic relationship tend to go for all-out-avoidance of language that could hint at a romance because they are well aware of the likelihood of readers misconstruing it. This typically leads to friendships being clarified explicitly in texts as only bromances, or having any emotional and physical affection dumbed down significantly in order to avoid the reader mistaking it for a romance. So I think friendships do often 'pay a price', as it were, in stories and get their true emotional and physical content often reduced in order to simply stop readers from inferring a romance where the author isn't intending one.
5. I note that one exception to this is where the author can be sure the reader will not infer a romantic relationship despite otherwise emotionally/physically charged language - an example that comes to mind is, say, a story of camaraderie between fighter pilots from the world wars mentioned earlier in the thread. In that instance, the culture of the time is such that both writer and reader know that a strong emotional bond between the characters is hugely likely, but the story invovling a sexual relationships between them is incredibly unlikely. So both reader and writer know that any emotionally/physically charged statements made in the text should be interpreted along bromantic and not romantic lines and therefore the writer is going to feel quite safe making such statements in the sure knowledge that they won't be misinterpreted, and the reader will know to interpret such statements in the correct way and will know that if they were supposed to interpret it as a homosexual relationship then the writer would be handing out some really clear statements that something seriously unusual and counter-cultural was going on and that the reader shouldn't be taking it to be just a bromance.

What I think is happening with the David and Jonathan story is that some readers are applying the above exception, and taking it for granted that (exactly like with the fighter pilots) the writer and original readers would have both taken for granted that homosexuality was wrong and counter cultural and was inherently massively unlikely between David and Jonathan. The culture in England around the 1940s was pretty much entirely lacking public depiction of homosexual relationships because the culture was so completely pervaded by a Christianised morality that it can be absolutely assumed by writers and readers in that period of any story about fighter pilots that zero homosexual acts are occurring between characters unless they are explicitly stated. Christian readers usually apply this same idea to the David and Jonathan story - ie an assumed backdrop of Christian morality - and thus a massive proportion of Christians everywhere simply read it as a bromance and don't even conceive of the idea that a homosexual relationship might be being depicted. Furthermore they take it for granted that if the author was meaning that homosexual acts were occurring then the text would explicitly state it because such acts would be so unusual and inconceivable that they would obviously be spelled out by the writer if that's what the writer was actually trying to convey.

In contrast to that type of reading, I'm not at all willing to agree that the David and Jonathan story falls under that sort of "a romance would be inconceivable in that culture" exception. Setting aside the question of whether Israelites at the time of the writer deliberately avoided same-sex relations (I would argue we have no reason to think they did, since most scholars seem to think that the writer of the Deuteronomaic History didn't know about Leviticus), it's abundantly clear from historical evidence that all the surrounding cultures had homosexual relationships on a massive scale - to the point where every adult male who wasn't a slave could pretty much simply be assumed to have had sex with both male and female partners. The book of Samuel is generally thought to have been written during or immediately after the exile in Babylon, during which the Israelites (whatever their own practices) would have learned sbout the levels of same-sex acts and relationships taking place in the culture they were being held by and in its stories (though they were presumably already well aware of the cultural practices of their neighbours). The Deuteronomaic history of which Samuel is a part covers vast periods of Israel's history including periods where Israel embraced many different foreign customs and strayed from the 'true' path. As such, both the author and original readers could take it for granted that at least at some points in Israel's history, there would have been same-sex relationships - since even if Israel itself banned them at any given point in the history, 'straying' Israelites would have had them in inimation of the surrounding cultures.

This means that the writer is well aware that he is not writing in a context of a Judeo-Christian morality where everyone takes it for granted that same-sex relationships between characters are absurdly unlikely or borderline impossible. ie the exception that I identified in point 5 above to the 'normal rules' of romance/bromance depiction definitely does not apply. The author knows he is writing in a world where same-sex sexual relationships are common, he knows his readers will be attuned to inferring these between characters in stories, so he knows that if he wants to depict a relationship between characters that is not sexual then he needs to either explicitly state it's not sexual or keep well away from romantic hints and keep his emotional/physical language to a minimum. He doesn't do this. His depiction of Saul and David (the servants of the king, troubled at their master's rages, locate a beautiful young boy to play the harp, and the king takes great pleasure in this boy's beauty and harp playing, and through being the king's favourite the boy rises through the ranks etc) is a stereotypical depiction of a man-boy sexual relationship in the ancient world. If the writer himself did not think of that relationship as sexual, he would therefore have known he needed to put something in the text to make it clear to readers that it wasn't, since he would have known that his readers would have otherwise made the 'mistake' of infering a sexual relationship where the writer wasn't intending one. But he gives the reader nothing to indicate it is not in fact conforming to the standard stereotype of man-boy sexual relationship – he doesn't 'pull back' from it in the slightest. When we get to the David and Jonathan story, not only does the author not pull back from letting the reader make assumptions, but instead the author launches all out into some of the most emotional and emphatic love language found in the entire bible. As if that wasn't enough, David compares his love for Jonathan directly with the love of women and finds the later lacking, which is an almost identical statement to that made by many other ancient sources who express their own viewpoint on whether they find sex with boys or with girls more satisfying. The writer of Samuel would know that David's statement would sound identical to those statements to his readers, and know the readers are going to jump straight to the assumption that David is comparing his sexual relationship with Jonathan to sex with women, but he does nothing to correct any assumptions that the reader might make on this point.

In short: Given the cultural background in which the writer is writing, he has to know his readers may think that the characters are having same-sex relationships if he portrays them in certain ways. Yet he portrays Saul-David in a way culturally typical of a same sex relationship, and never backtracks on this portrayal, and therefore must have known that readers would assume a sexual relationship. And that goes about a thousand times over for the Jonathan-David relationship, where he doesn't just hint at a relationship but lays it on thick. The text never explicitly says the relationship was just a bromance, and it would have to indicate clearly if it was just a bromance if the author didn't want his original readers making assumptions.

And that is, I think, how we arrive at the situation where on the one hand conservative Christians say “obviously David and Jonathan were just a bromance, and anyone who says otherwise is reading waaaay too much into the text and obviously must have some sort of agenda motivating them, because the text never explicitly says the relationship was sexual and it obviously would if it was.” and on the other hand people who are familiar with ancient cultures and their norms regarding homosexuality and the way their portrayed such relationships take one look at the story and conclude it's depicting a homosexual relationship because it looks the same as how those ancient cultures depicted homosexual relationships.

Posts: 745 | From: NZ | Registered: May 2007 | IP: Logged

orfeo

Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
However, I think the situation is quite a bit different when we are dealing with a text. Because the author of the text, unlike people in real life, generally does know fully what the relationship status of the characters is, and that is almost always reflected in the writing in terms of the portrayal of the characters.

Eh? Again.

That's true of a fictional text. But if David and Jonathan are fictional then I understand the point of this conversation even less than I did before.

I mean, discussions of the relationship of Legolas and Gimli??? We were talking about a report from the Anglican church about ministry here in the real world. I hope you can see that there is no sensible way to argue that the Anglican church ought to change its attitude because of a couple of characters in Middle Earth.

[ 02. February 2014, 07:43: Message edited by: orfeo ]

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Arethosemyfeet
Shipmate
# 17047

Posted

quote:
My friend, tongue in cheek, pointed out amusingly that they can't have been a romance in Tolkien's mind because that would be an interracial couple and an interracial couple would have been considered scandelous the 1940s!

I'm not sure interracial couples were that frowned upon in England (as opposed to the US), and there is little evidence (given his acerbic response to German publishers' enquiries about his ethinicity) that Tolkien himself was racist.

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Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
That's true of a fictional text. But if David and Jonathan are fictional then I understand the point of this conversation even less than I did before.

Any account involves some level of creative control on the part of the author. A journalist writing a news story has to decide what facts to include, what to leave out, what to emphasize and what to play down. Equally if I were to ask a friend "what did you do yesterday", they'd respond giving me only a tiny fraction of the total information about what occurred during the day based on what they felt would interest me and what they were prepared to share - what I would be told would not be an unfiltered factual account of every single event but rather a highly filtered selective account with various biases and editorial choices.

The author of this account of David and Jonathan equally had to make decisions about what to include and what not to, and how to portray the characters. In that sense, the text itself portrays to us the author's conception of the characters. A person might ask "did the events depicted in the text really happen?", but we have no way of knowing (apart from either simply believing the bible), so that's not a particularly interesting or useful question. But we can definitely ask questions about the author's portrayal of the characters and about what the text as we have it says.

quote:
I hope you can see that there is no sensible way to argue that the Anglican church ought to change its attitude because of a couple of characters in Middle Earth.

I thought I was discussing the interpretation of texts actually. I wasn't particularly discussing whether the Anglican church ought to change its attitude (of course it should have long ago), nor am I particularly interested in doing so. As far as I am concerned the Church has failed miserably, pathetically and epically on the homosexuality issue, and its hands are red with the blood of the gay people who have been imprisoned, persecuted, or driven to suicide over the decades by the Church's ongoing unloving, ignorant, and evil crusade against them and their human rights. What the Bible itself says is, in one sense irrelevant to the judgement against the church - because if Bible supports the Church's wickedness then it just makes the Bible harmful and dangerous, and if the Bible doesn't support the Church's position then it makes the Church absurdly stupid for the zealousness with which it has persecuted gay people without cause and shows the incredibly damaging effects of organised religion.

[ 02. February 2014, 09:43: Message edited by: Starlight ]

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Tommy1
Shipmate
# 17916

Posted

Starlight

I'd like make a comment about your use of the word 'just'. You have repeatedly said that some people claim David and Jonathan were 'just really really good friends' or that it was 'just a bromance'.

Your use of the word 'just' implies that you assume that sexual relationships will be assumed to be more emotionally significant than non sexual ones. However as Ken has pointed out above, whilst that is an assumption that post 18th century westerners would tend to make it is not an assumption that would be made in earlier times.

If I can give another example from fiction this is a quote from the 1994 Kevin Costner film Wyatt Earp

quote:
Bessie Earp: We are your wives. Don't we ever count more than the damn brothers?

Wyatt Earp: No, Bessie, you don't.

I suspect that the attitude expressed in the film by Costner as Wyatt Earp was rather more typical of attitudes in Old Testament times than it is today. As ken points out in the Old Testament narratives it is the brotherly relationships that, for good or bad, are shown as being most important.

Indeed doesn't the statement "Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women." suggest that the 'just' runs in the other direction. He loved him more that just a wife (just a concubine, just a boyfriend) he loved him as a brother.

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orfeo

Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
That's true of a fictional text. But if David and Jonathan are fictional then I understand the point of this conversation even less than I did before.
Any account involves some level of creative control on the part of the author. A journalist writing a news story has to decide what facts to include, what to leave out, what to emphasize and what to play down. Equally if I were to ask a friend "what did you do yesterday", they'd respond giving me only a tiny fraction of the total information about what occurred during the day based on what they felt would interest me and what they were prepared to share - what I would be told would not be an unfiltered factual account of every single event but rather a highly filtered selective account with various biases and editorial choices.

The author of this account of David and Jonathan equally had to make decisions about what to include and what not to, and how to portray the characters. In that sense, the text itself portrays to us the author's conception of the characters. A person might ask "did the events depicted in the text really happen?", but we have no way of knowing (apart from either simply believing the bible), so that's not a particularly interesting or useful question. But we can definitely ask questions about the author's portrayal of the characters and about what the text as we have it says.

Sorry, while all of that might be perfectly true, if we're basically going to turn this into an intellectual exercise in literary criticism, I'm out of here. I don't see the point. In fact I don't see the point of about 80% of literary criticism in general, because it just illustrates people can milk texts for all sorts of meanings, while studiously avoiding asking authors what they were actually going for.

People are incredibly good at seeing what they want to see. I'm reminded of the terrorism case where the authorities saw a cunningly concealed recording of bomb sites in Disneyland instead of a video camera accidentally turned on in someone's backpack, and saw a clever map of an air force base in Turkey instead of the doodlings of a previous resident of the house that had slipped down the back of the couch.

You're going to see evidence of a same-sex relationship wherever you want to see it, and a conservative Christian is going to see a strong brotherly bond wherever they want to see it. And people like me - and indeed, pretty well all the other participants in the thread, as we've not actually had the most conservative members of the Ship turn up here yet - are just going to sit in the middle in bemusement.

I honestly don't understand why you're doing all this discussing of texts. Now that you're saying it's NOT about reasons for the Anglican church to change its attitude... then why dominate the thread with it. You're allowed too, yes, because Ship threads wander off onto all sorts of tangents. But I honestly don't see why you would have bothered.

And to be honest, I can't be bothered reading it anymore, because I think this is going nowhere of practical value.

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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.

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Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
while studiously avoiding asking authors what they were actually going for.

Getting at what the author was actually going for is exactly what I am trying to do here.

quote:
I honestly don't understand why you're doing all this discussing of texts. Now that you're saying it's NOT about reasons for the Anglican church to change its attitude... then why dominate the thread with it. You're allowed too, yes, because Ship threads wander off onto all sorts of tangents. But I honestly don't see why you would have bothered.

Yes I'd noticed that you seem to have some sort of pure ideal in mind about what this thread ought to be about, which I find a bit strange. The Pilling report made various claims and statements, one of which that almost everyone agrees there are no positive portrayals of same-sex relationships in scripture - a statement I found fault with because I and others think that David and Jonathan are being portrayed positively and in a same sex relationship. I also found fault with a number of other things in the Pilling report, but other posters have seized on the David and Jonathan issue for discussion, which is fine. It's not the most important issue about the Pilling report, but it's definitely related.

quote:
I think this is going nowhere of practical value

Well I definitely agree that the discussion is probably largely over. I have got a lot out of it myself, however. It has inspired me to do a lot more research into homosexuality in the ancient world, and also do a lot of reading about the David and Jonathan story and greatly clarified my own thinking about the story, and helped me come to an understanding of why different people read the story the way they do and thus what people do and don't need to be convinced of to change their readings of it. (The answer being that I've largely convinced myself that those people familiar with how homosexuality in the ancient world was practised and depicted will tend to read the text as a romance, while those unfamiliar with the ancient historical context will read it as a bromance, and actual arguments about the text literally says or doesn't say won't make much progress. And thus to persuade anyone to change their reading I would have to convey quite a large amount of information about homosexuality in the ancient world, which isn't going to happen in the context of a forum thread. But increasingly, as general knowledge about homosexuality in the ancient world becomes more widespread, any scholarly publications on the subject will adopt a romance reading (as they already show a marked tendency toward doing).)

quote:
Originally posted by Tommy1:
I'd like make a comment about your use of the word 'just'. You have repeatedly said that some people claim David and Jonathan were 'just really really good friends' or that it was 'just a bromance'.

Your use of the word 'just' implies that you assume that sexual relationships will be assumed to be more emotionally significant than non sexual ones.

You're over-reading my terminology. One view is saying there's emotional + sexual content to the relationship, the other view is that there is "only" / "just" emotional content and not sexual content in addition to that emotional content.

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Tommy1
Shipmate
# 17916

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:

quote:
Originally posted by Tommy1:
I'd like make a comment about your use of the word 'just'. You have repeatedly said that some people claim David and Jonathan were 'just really really good friends' or that it was 'just a bromance'.

Your use of the word 'just' implies that you assume that sexual relationships will be assumed to be more emotionally significant than non sexual ones.
You're over-reading my terminology. One view is saying there's emotional + sexual content to the relationship, the other view is that there is "only" / "just" emotional content and not sexual content in addition to that emotional content.

If I can quote something you said earlier

quote:
I do however, consider it beyond reasonable doubt that the text of Samuel depicts Jonathan and David as lovers. It's made pretty crystal clear by the various statements of how much they love one another, David comparing his love for Jonathan with that for women etc.

Your statement here only makes sense if your are assuming that people assume that a sexual relationship will be more emotionally significant than a brotherly one. If we are talking about a society where brotherly love is seen as more powerful and significant than sexual love then that assumption doesn't make sense.

Indeed when comparing love David doesn't say his love was 'the same as' the love of a woman, he says it was 'greater'. If someone is living in a society where, like Costner's Wyatt Earp, men would be assumed to love their brothers more than their sexual partners then saying the love was 'greater' than the love of a woman would imply it was brotherly and not sexual.

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leo
Shipmate
# 1458

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
So to skip a few centuries forward. Has anyone written a response challenging the Report?

Yes. Mainstream here disagrees and sayd we shouldn't 'welcome' gays as it might appear to endorse their lifestyle (!). They're also not keen on repenting of homophobia lest it be seen as a departure from upholding family values.

Savi Hensman's critique suggests there is a wider diversity in thought than that painted in Pilling. he also talk of David and Jonathan as examples of what would late be called Christian covenantal love.

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Net Spinster
Shipmate
# 16058

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Tommy1:

Indeed when comparing love David doesn't say his love was 'the same as' the love of a woman, he says it was 'greater'. If someone is living in a society where, like Costner's Wyatt Earp, men would be assumed to love their brothers more than their sexual partners then saying the love was 'greater' than the love of a woman would imply it was brotherly and not sexual.

Well there is the little matter that the Hebrew Bible doesn't have many stories of brothers loving each other. The first set of brothers are Cain and Abel. Esau and Jacob are certainly not loving. Joseph's brothers nearly murder him but settle for selling him into slavery. David's own brother, Eliab, accuses David, and not in tones implying he likes David, of abandoning his family duties to come an watch a battle (1 Samuel 17:28).

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spinner of webs

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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Tommy1:
Indeed when comparing love David doesn't say his love was 'the same as' the love of a woman, he says it was 'greater'. If someone is living in a society where, like Costner's Wyatt Earp, men would be assumed to love their brothers more than their sexual partners then saying the love was 'greater' than the love of a woman would imply it was brotherly and not sexual.

'Greater' implies on the same scale. And it seems unlikely that David thought of the love of women as even on the same scale as male cameraderie.

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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams

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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
In contrast to that type of reading, I'm not at all willing to agree that the David and Jonathan story falls under that sort of "a romance would be inconceivable in that culture" exception.

I think a further problem here is that our category of a romance doesn't translate back into the ancient world without problem. Even in the modern world, it's possible for a relationship to be sexual but not romantic (friends with benefits), or romantic but not sexual (they're just not ready yet). We have certain assumptions about what an erotic relationship normatively involves; that cluster of cultural assumptions isn't a cluster in the ancient world yet. So an erotic relationship between two people in the ancient world is inevitably not going to be quite what we would recognise as a typical romance.

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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams

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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772

Posted

I don't see the problem. The church can just endorse all same sex marriages and assume that they're bromances with a covenant to share inheritance, just like this interpretation of the bible

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Pomona
Shipmate
# 17175

Posted

An interesting tangent has emerged since I looked in this thread last!

Speaking personally as a queer person - it doesn't matter a great deal as to whether the historical David and Jonathan had a romantic or sexual (they are not the same thing) relationship, it's that a queer reading of the Bible is as valid a reading as a socialist one or a feminist one. IMO the Bible is a document containing stories about people who were real people and lived real lives, and therefore some of them were LGBTQ (and indeed A/asexual). Therefore there were gay people in the nation of Israel, in the crowds listening to Jesus preach, in the New Testament churches. That is far more important than searching for hints as to whether David and Jonathan were gay or not by modern standards, not least because that's a pretty futile endeavor.

David and Jonathan are still important queer Biblical icons, though, in the same way that a queer reading of a TV show with homoerotic overtones but no actual gay relationships can produce valid queer icons. The same applies to Naomi and Ruth, and the Centurion's servant - and getting into church history rather than the Bible, St Sebastian. Even St Paul himself can be and is read as a kind of queer icon, with some speculating that the thorn in the side is homosexuality. The point I'm trying to make is that a queer reading of a text which shows potential affirming models of queerness is important, regardless of whether or not there is any actual canonical queerness there. The writer's intention doesn't affect this at all - any purpose to a text is meaningless unless someone is there to receive the text and interpret it.

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Consider the work of God: Who is able to straighten what he has bent? [Ecclesiastes 7:13]

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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Jade Constable:
The point I'm trying to make is that a queer reading of a text which shows potential affirming models of queerness is important, regardless of whether or not there is any actual canonical queerness there. The writer's intention doesn't affect this at all - any purpose to a text is meaningless unless someone is there to receive the text and interpret it.

If you are reading the Bible for authority, intention makes a difference. An interpretation which I take from the text, however true or helpful it might be, is not an authoritative statement about the ethics which God expects me to live by, unless someone with authority (either God, or the original writer as inspired by him) intended it to be there.

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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"

Richard Dawkins

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mdijon
Shipmate
# 8520

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Starlight:
And thus to persuade anyone to change their reading I would have to convey quite a large amount of information about homosexuality in the ancient world, which isn't going to happen in the context of a forum thread.

Certainly given that the wikipedia articles you've linked to haven't been all that convincing, and haven't touched on ancient Israel in the slightest.

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mdijon nojidm uoɿıqɯ ɯqıɿou
ɯqıɿou uoɿıqɯ nojidm mdijon

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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
If you are reading the Bible for authority, intention makes a difference. An interpretation which I take from the text, however true or helpful it might be, is not an authoritative statement about the ethics which God expects me to live by, unless someone with authority (either God, or the original writer as inspired by him) intended it to be there.

I don't think that follows. For example, (if I understand correctly) the interpretivist arguments of the legal scholar Ronald Dworkin (wikipedia page here) would have it that the authority of the law is the law as interpreted in accordance with the best moral commitments of the judges. For example, even those parts of the Constitution of the United States that were written by slaveowners with the intention of permitting slavery should be interpreted as enjoining racial equality.

In general, when we talk about what somebody intended we do so as a way of adverting to a possible gap between what they intended to do and what they actually did. So where we talk about the intentions of the author we're implying a possible gap between what they intended to say and what they actually said.

This all supposes a legal model of Biblical authority. If Biblical authority is conceived of as the authority of, say, Shakespeare or Homer as a set of foundational or expressive narratives, then the above argument becomes even weaker.

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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams

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Ricardus
Shipmate
# 8757

Posted

There is a Rabbinical tradition of "The law is not in Heaven" (Deuteronomy 30:12), which means that humanity has the authority to interpret the law, now that God has given it to us.

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Then the dog ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail. -- Tobit 11:9 (Douai-Rheims)

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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153

Posted

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
For example, (if I understand correctly) the interpretivist arguments of the legal scholar Ronald Dworkin (wikipedia page here) would have it that the authority of the law is the law as interpreted in accordance with the best moral commitments of the judges. For example, even those parts of the Constitution of the United States that were written by slaveowners with the intention of permitting slavery should be interpreted as enjoining racial equality.

I agree with your interpretation of Dworkin (and think he's pretty much right). His theory is, though, still a theory of intention, though opposed (in US constitutional law terms) to other intentional theories, such as the one that the constitution means exactly what the legislators thought it meant and subjectively intended it to mean when they passed it.

There's an example in 1 Samuel of what I think Dworkin means. Samuel (the prophet) tells Saul “To obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Sam 15:22). It is, IMO, a true interpretation of that passage to say that a Jew or Christian who accepts it as authoritative ought to consider that living under God's commands and doing his will takes precedence over any sort of ritual or observance intended to propitiate him or win his favour.

The occasion of Samuel's rebuke, though, is that Saul was unenthusiastic and inefficient in pursuing genocide. Samuel's subjective intention behind the words “to obey” was “kill them all!”. What we consider it means “to obey” is likely very different – we are thinking of acts of kindness, compassion, generosity and forgivenss as fulfilling the command “to obey”.

A Dworkin-like interpretation would be that we can, and should, look at Samuel's higher-level intention separately from his opinions: Samuel's real intent is to tell Saul (and us) to obey 'what it is that God has in fact commanded', and we can follow that rule even if we disagree with Samuel about the likelihood of God commanding genocide. The principle holds, even if Samuel (or we) are wrong on the facts, and we are most true to the principle when we try to do what our very best discernment suggests is the will of God. Dworkin is definitely not saying that we can make the rule anything we like (on the contrary, he holds that most or all legal questions have objectively right answers, even if lawyers disagree about what they are).

Which is a bit of a digression. I do think subjective intention is important for the point about which David and Jonathan are used as a supposed endorsement of same-sex relationships. The argument on the other side is “the Bible contains no positive portrayals of same-sex couples”, as a reasons for concluding “and therefore God does not approve of them”.*

For the answer “What about David and Jonathan, then?” to work, it's not enough for someone of Jade's opinion to say that for them “a queer reading of a text which shows potential affirming models of queerness is important”. The 'no positive portrayal' argument is not saying 'there is nothing about queer relationships in the Bible that can provide personal support and encouragement to you', it's that the Bible does not give an intentionally approving view of any same-sex relationships. I personally happen to think that any and all Biblical endorsement or celebration of sexual love whatsoever can rightly be used to celebrate same-sex love, since I think that gay people fall in love in the same way as everyone else, but that is a very different thing from saying that the Bible gives an example of a gay man or woman happily in love. For that to be true, one of the Biblical writers would have needed to write specifically about a gay person's experience, intending it to be both positive, and about a gay person.

I'm extremely happy to make a Dworkin-style interpretation of the Bible that if love is good, then to the extent that gay people are loving, their relationships are good** – even if not one of the writers of the Bible in fact held as a subjective opinion that there could be any good in homosexuality at all. If integrity to their principle that 'love is good' leads me to dissent from their subjective opinions, so be it – that would still be a truer reading of their work than one which follows their views on the practical application of the rules, but denies the core principle about the goodness of love. I just don't think that sort of argument is a convincing reply to the (bad) argument against homosexuality which the 'David and Jonathan' issue is usually brought in to answer.

To summarise, in my view, the right answer to “There are no positive portrayals of same-sex relationships in the Bible” isn't “David and Jonathan”. It's “So fucking what?”.

(*I should say I think the argument is flawed: the fact that its an argument from silence, and the assumption that “the Bible” speaks with a single timeless voice on issues of sex and relationships seem to me to be serious problems with it).

(**That's not unqualified endorsement. There can be other principles at work. For example an adulterous relationship*** might be loving (and, to that extent, has some good about it) but fidelity is also a principle of ethics, and by that principle even loving adultery is wrong).

(***Absolutely, emphatically, not intending to compare homosexuality to adultery).

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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"

Richard Dawkins

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Starlight
Shipmate
# 12651

Posted

As I mentioned earlier, this thread has motivated to do much more reading on homosexuality in the ancient world. I am currently half way though Roman Homosexuality by Williams, which appears to be the standard reference work on the subject and which I highly, highly, recommend (though I agree with some of the Amazon reviews that some readers might find it too scholarly).

I've got a shortlist already for myself with regard to homosexuality in ancient Greece, but I'm having trouble finding much that's highly regarded on homosexuality in the Ancient Near East. I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations on good scholarly analyses of homosexuality in the ANE?

One of the things I've learned from Williams' book, which I wasn't previously aware of, is that it was extremely common for Roman masters to make sexual use of slaves they owned (both male and female). Apparently in Roman law an owner could do as he pleased with his own property, slaves included. Williams doesn't really go into detail, but this history website puts it bluntly: "A Roman Citizen was allowed to exploit his own slaves for sex, no matter the age or circumstances of birth. A freeborn Roman could even rape, torture and abuse their property without charge or prosecution." The ability of Roman men to discipline their own slaves however they wished via corporal punishment, would presumably have made it not necessary to use force to 'rape' slaves - the slaves would know they had to obey their master's whims dutifully. (Furthermore, being an obedient slave and getting your master to like you personally seems to have been generally a very good route to getting freed.)

This, to me, raises the question of: "How did Jewish and Christian thinkers deal with the fact that any followers of their religions who became Roman slaves might be commanded by their masters to undertake sexual acts which were otherwise condemned by their own religion?" Paul famously, for example, tells slaves to obey their masters. We also have various reasons to believe that quite a number of the early Christians were Roman slaves. So Christian slaves being commanded to take part in sexual acts with their masters must have been something that happened rather a lot. Furthermore, Williams' study indicates that the slaves were almost always the ones being penetrated in the sex acts (ie passive/bottom if they were male slaves).

In light of that general background, I think it would make no conceptual sense for early Christianity to vehemently condemn the passive partner in a same-sex act. Sexual relationships in the Roman empire were power-structured and the penetrated partner (male or female) generally had no choice in the matter at all (except for the man's actual wife). Condemning people who took a passive role in same-sex acts would simply make no sense because it wasn't a voluntary choice for the vast majority of such people.

Imagining for a moment that early Christianity did actually teach that those who participated in same-sex acts were going to hell (or were at least sinning badly and seriously upsetting God), and that it also told slaves to obey their masters, I have to imagine that this creates an obvious dilemma for many early Christians that surely Paul ought to have addressed in his letters had he really endorsed both ideas! (However, reading Williams' book has served to reaffirm my preexisting view that as far as the linguistics are concerned, trying to translate 'malakos' as "the passive partner in a homosexual act" is completely snigger-worthy.) Anyway, the inherent incompatibility between the ideas of asking slaves to obey their masters and condemning same-sex acts is not something I've seen addressed before or thought of myself until now... Apart from the fact that the conservatives are just ridiculously wrong in the translation of malakos (I think the NJB's "self-indulgent" translation is satisfactory, though also acceptable would be "decadent", "dissolute", "depraved" etc. The concept behind the meaning of malakos when used in a moral sense seems to be "lacking the manly strength to control their desires"), it seems to me that it doesn't actually make conceptual sense for Paul to be condemning the passive role in homosexual acts! Condemning the active role would at least make sense, because it would be sensible to tell any Roman citizens who became Christian to not rape their male slaves (though such a command is presumably implicit already in the Christian ideal of faithfulness to one's spouse), but telling slaves not to be raped is absurd.

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