“The love of David and Jonathan” across Jewish texts: How biblical heroes became gay havruta

• In Event: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible

Abstract

This paper follows a specific move in the reception history of the narratives of David and Jonathan in 1 Sam.18-20, 23 and 2 Sam.1. It argues that these narratives evolved in modern Jewish literature to represent queer relationships between study partners. It suggests that this development builds upon rabbinic reworkings of the David and Jonathan legend, in addition to the Western tradition of homoerotic reading of 1-2 Samuel. The Hebrew Bible employed the motif of heroic love popular in the ancient epics (what David Halperin calls the literary pattern of heroes and their pals) as a literary tool that served to support the Davidic dynasty’s claim to power. This paper shows that the David and Jonathan imagery established itself as an important queer trope in the works of modern and contemporary Jewish writers such as Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jyl Lynn Felman, Maggie Anton, and K. David Brody. These works typically use the images of David and Jonathan in the context of the love between male Torah scholars, havruta partners, often represented as gay couples. Whereas the legend of David and Jonathan has evolved in the Western tradition as a model for love between men and, more recently, as a foundational text for gay culture, the history of traditional Jewish biblical exegesis lacks explicitly homoerotic interpretations of the David and Jonathan story. This paper demonstrates, however, that some traditions in the Mishnah and in the Talmud reimagine David and Jonathan in homoerotic terms within the context of shared Torah study and, apparently, in response to Greco-Roman philosophical traditions. These rabbinic traditions, along with the modern Western traditions, can explain the role of the David and Jonathan legend in the modern and contemporary Jewish queer texts. This paper uses an interdisciplinary approach that draws from critical biblical scholarship, rabbinics, literary criticism, queer theory, and gender and sexuality studies. It contributes to the field of Jewish queer studies.

Author

• Shlomo Gleibman, King's University College, University of Western Ontario