Q.
164
Were there gay couples in the Bible?
What about Jonathan and David?
Brandon Gilvin
Who is...
?
Brandon Gilvin
I believe a day without breaking a sweat is a day wasted.A.
People had sex in the Ancient Near East, the geographic region in
which the Bible was written. Lots of it. And all different kinds. The
fact that Leviticus 18:22 bans men from having sex with other men
tells us that it was happening.
Particularly for the writers of Leviticus, Israel was to maintain a distinct
identity, and this distinct identity was to manifest itself in ethical and ritual
practices that created a sense of order: separating that which was good/clean/
holy from that which was dirty/defi ling/profane. This sense of order was
pervasive. Certain types of clothing could not be worn together, certain types
of food could not be mixed, and, well, certain body parts were not permitted
to comingle.
People in the Ancient Near East also did not have a contemporary under-
standing of how conception works. They understood a woman’s uterus as a
fertile fi eld where a man’s semen could be planted like a seed. Therefore, the
use of semen in another act (e.g., masturbation or sex with another man) was
considered wasteful.
As for Jonathan and David, it’s debatable. For contemporary readers, this
story of kinship in the midst of warfare expresses an intimacy we are used to
encountering in romance novels, and for scholars, is reminiscent of homoerotic
relationships in other ancient texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad.
Of course, we have to remind ourselves that we also read from our own partic-
ular twenty-fi rst-century point of view. It’s easy for us to see things in our own
culture and then superimpose them on an ancient text.
How ancient texts are read by contemporary readers changes. They
undoubtedly speak to us in our situations, but we must be very cautious not
to assume too much. The ancient world is not ours.
It’s not like there’s a sex tape or scandalous text message that will ever tie
Jonathan and David together. It’s diffi cult enough to fi nd empirical