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OF GREETING CARDS AND METHODS: UNDERSTANDING ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN SEX

A few years ago, a former student of mine, one who knew of my interest in hero stories from the ancient Near East, sent me a greeting card.¹ The card features a painting of the biblical heroes David and Jonathan, standing side by side. This painting is rendered in Romanesque or early Gothic style, with David’s and Jonathan’s heads ringed by the sorts of golden haloes that typically adorn biblical paragons in medieval Christian art. At the painting’s top, a similarly haloed Christ, framed within a heavenly cloudbank, looks benevolently down upon the two companions and extends his hands in a gesture of blessing. Yet despite all these characters’ haloes, and despite some other archaizing features, the painting is clearly recent in its execution, as is most obviously indicated by the fact that both David and Jonathan hold parchment scrolls on which are inscribed quotes written in perfectly idiomatic modern English: on Jonathan’s, “Keep your sacred promise and be loyal to me”; on David’s, “How wonderful was your love for me.” David’s quote is echoed on the back side of the card, where the biblical story of David’s and Jonathan’s relationship and of Jonathan’s tragic and untimely death is briefly recounted. The recital concludes, “When Jonathan … [was] slain, David mourned for Jonathan with these words”:²

O Jonathan, in your death I am stricken,

I am desolate for you, Jonathan, my brother.

Very dear to me you were,

your love to me more wonderful

than the love of a woman.

The card’s text then continues:

Times have changed since these events were recorded, and such intense love between two men makes many uncomfortable in our day. For gay men who struggle to remain within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, however, the love between Jonathan and David is an inspiration and strength.

Ever since I received this greeting card from my former student, I have found it difficult to know what to make of it. On the one hand, I support its larger political agenda. Indeed, I have been actively involved in gay rights work over the years, especially at the college where I teach. I was co-convenor of the coalition that helped establish a domestic-partner benefits program for my college’s gay and lesbian employees, and I worked as part of that same coalition to persuade the local United Way—whose fund-raising efforts on my campus are extensive—to drop its support of area organizations that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. I also helped to establish a staff position in my college’s student services area that works to address the needs of our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students, and I co-taught the two initial offerings of my college’s Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies course.

As a biblical scholar, moreover, I have been especially concerned with the specific gay rights issue that the greeting card addresses: the way in which the Bible is used to discuss the place of gay men and lesbians within today’s Jewish and Christian communities of faith and, more generally, the way in which the Bible is used to discuss the place of gay men and lesbians within contemporary society. I have recently been concerned, for example, with the way the Bible was used in the debates surrounding the civil unions legislation that became law on July 1, 2000, in the state of Vermont, just across the Connecticut River from the small New Hampshire town in which I live. This legislation allows gay and lesbian couples to enter into relationships that are legally recognized by the state and thereby to receive from the Vermont government the same state-law benefits and protections that are available to opposite-sex couples through marriage.

To be sure, during the long process that brought the civil unions law into being,³ Vermont state officials repeatedly reminded Vermonters that the Bible, and religion overall, had no place in their discussions. Rather, the issue, as had been made clear in a December 1999 ruling by the Vermont Supreme Court, was constitutional—that under the common benefits clause of the Vermont State Constitution same-sex partners had to be provided with a system of legal association that offered the same rights and privileges Vermont accords to married couples. Yet, even though the Bible and religion officially had no place in Vermonters’ debates over civil unions, the Bible and religion were on call quite a bit, from the chambers of the statehouse where the civil unions statute was being drafted to the Letters to the Editor section of our local paper. Shortly after the civil unions bill passed I was asked to write a brief commentary about the ways the Bible had been evoked in the discussions that took place in these and other forums,⁴ and I have subsequently spoken frequently on the topic.

The gist of my comments on these occasions has basically been the same as the caution Vermont state officials issued to Vermonters during their civil unions debates: the Bible really has no place in discussions about gay and lesbian rights in our contemporary society. But while Vermont state officials sought to disallow discussion of the Bible on constitutional grounds, my reservations stem from a different source: the bounty of research produced by scholars of gay and lesbian studies during the past twenty or so years that tells us that our society’s notion of homosexuality, or, more precisely, of homosexual identity, is just that—ours—a historically and culturally contingent product of our particular time and place. Homosexuality as we conceive of it is thus not something that should be, or even can be, discussed using data that come from the texts and traditions of societies far removed from ours, including those societies that were extant in the modern-day regions of Palestine and Israel during the first millennium BCE and the first century of our era and that produced the corpus of writings we now know as the Bible. To put the matter somewhat more bluntly: the Bible, rooted as it is in an era long ago and a location far away, is simply not in a position to address the phenomenon we in the Euro-American West speak of today as homosexuality.

Now, this is not to claim, let me quickly make clear, that erotic and sexual acts involving same-sex partners were not found in the societies of the biblical world, nor is it to claim that same-sex erotic and sexual interactions are not found in many (if not most) societies other than our own. Rather, the available evidence suggests just the opposite, that erotic and sexual interactions between persons of the same sex are attested in almost all cultures known to us from across time and across the globe. Thus the British historian Jeffrey Weeks can write that same-sex coupling has existed “throughout history, in all types of society, among all social classes and peoples.” Weeks continues, however, by noting that “what have varied enormously” are the ways in which different societies have regarded same-sex erotic and sexual interactions: the ways, for example, in which societies have responded to same-sex interactions—“qualified approval, indifference and the most vicious persecution”—but, more important, the meanings these societies have attached to same-sex erotic and sexual acts and the manner in which those who engage in same-sex erotic and sexual interactions have viewed themselves.⁵

More specifically, according to Weeks and theorists like him: while same-sex erotic and sexual interactions may be ubiquitous among cultures, a sense that participation in these interactions demarcates one as having a homosexual identity is not. It is not at all clear, that is, that cultures other than our own have understood those who participated in same-sex erotic and sexual interactions to belong to a distinct class or category of people whom we would define as homosexuals, individuals who have “most of [their] erotic needs met in interactions with persons of the same sex”⁶ and who also tend to belong to a subculture—what we today often call the gay community—that is made up of other such erotically driven individuals and is distinct and distinguishable from the surrounding society.⁷ Rather, researchers suggest that our impulse to categorize all those who engage primarily or even substantially in same-sex erotic and sexual interactions as a distinct and identifiable type of person, homosexuals, who have a distinct and identifiable way of living in the world, is a creation or construction of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Euro-American discourse. Indeed, those who advocate this sort of position are typically labeled by the rubric social constructionists because of their fundamental conviction that our notion of a homosexual (and, for that matter, heterosexual) identity is a social construct, the effect of social conditioning. Hence it has virtually no constancy across cultures, in the same way social conditioning about many other aspects of our identities is inconstant across cultural space and time—most famously, perhaps, social conditioning regarding gender identity and what constitutes normative masculine and feminine behavior.⁸

The initial evidence that many social constructionists advance in favor of the theory of the homosexual as a distinct and novel creation of modern Euro-American society is linguistic: the fact that the very terms homosexual and homosexuality (and their classificatory analogs, heterosexual and heterosexuality) are recent creations, products of late nineteenth-century scientific discourse. According to the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement, the earliest occurrence of the terms homosexual and homosexuality in an English publication was in 1892,⁹ when the words were used by Charles Gilbert Chaddock in his translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s handbook of sexual deviance, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study.¹⁰ It was not Krafft-Ebing, however, who coined these terms’ German predecessors, Homosexual and Homosexualität; this was the writer Karl Maria Kertbeny, who, as part of his efforts to decriminalize same-sex sexual encounters in Germany, first used the word Homosexual, and also the neologism Heterosexual, in a private letter to the sex-law reformer, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, on May 6, 1868.¹¹ Kertbeny subsequently introduced the term Homosexual and the related terms Homosexualität, “homosexuality,” and Homosexualismus, “homosexualism,” into public discourse in 1869, in two anonymous pamphlets that argued against the adoption of an “unnatural fornication” law throughout Germany. Kertbeny’s friend, the Stuttgart zoology professor Gustav Jäger, later took up Kertbeny’s language of Homosexualität and popularized it in the second (1880) edition of his Die Entdeckung der Seele, and it was from Jäger that Krafft-Ebing learned the word and incorporated an adjectival form of it (homosexuale Idiosynkrasie, “homosexual idiosyncrasy”) into the second and subsequent editions of his Psychopathia Sexualis.¹² From there, as already noted, the terms homosexual and homosexuality (and their heterosexual counterparts) traveled into the English lexicon. The classicist David M. Halperin therefore speaks in his 1986 essay “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality” of the “invention of homosexuality,” at least in the English-speaking world, by Chaddock in 1892,¹³ and the historian Jonathan Ned Katz in his 1995 book The Invention of Heterosexuality similarly writes of the “debut” of the heterosexual in the late nineteenth-century prose of Krafft-Ebing.¹⁴

Just because the words do not exist to describe a particular phenomenon, however, does not mean that phenomenon is not present among us. As critics of social construction theory have pointed out, gravity did not come into being only when Newton provided us with a description of its properties,¹⁵ and “people had blood types before blood types were discovered.”¹⁶ Or, to take an example closer to the field of inquiry that is the subject of this book, it seems evident to those of us who specialize in the study of the Hebrew Bible that we can speak of the religion (or probably better religions) of ancient Israel,¹⁷ despite the fact that there is no word in biblical Hebrew for this concept.¹⁸ And so, analogously, can we not speak of heterosexuals and homosexuals as distinct categories of persons that existed before the words that describe them were coined at end of the nineteenth century? Indeed, can we not speak of heterosexuals and homosexuals as distinct categories of persons that are at least implicitly, if not explicitly, present in all cultures? That is, whatever the relative novelty of the terminology, can we not speak of heterosexual and homosexual identities as universal, intrinsic, natural, and essential facts of what it is to be sexual within the human community?

I will return to this so-called essentialist argument below, and its place in ancient Near Eastern and especially biblical scholarship, but for the moment let me focus on the social constructionists’ response to these sorts of questions, which can be summarized by the phrase “words are clues to concepts.”¹⁹ Which is to say: that there are no words to categorize people as homosexual or heterosexual before the late nineteenth century suggests to the constructionists that those who lived before this time did not conceive of a social universe that divided its inhabitants into homosexual and heterosexual individuals. Again, this is not to say there were no same-sex erotic and sexual interactions before the end of the nineteenth century; quite the contrary. Rather, the social constructionists’ claim is that prior to the introduction of the term homosexual and its heterosexual analog, “sex-differences, eroticism, and reproduction” were arranged “in ways substantially different” from the way we categorize these things today.²⁰ As Halperin writes, “although there are persons who seek sexual contact with other persons of the same sex in many different societies, only recently and only in some sectors of our own society have such persons—or some portion of them—been homosexuals.”²¹ Even more forthright is this statement of the historian Robert Padgug: “‘Homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ behavior may be universal; homosexual and heterosexual identity and consciousness are modern realities…. To ‘commit’ a homosexual act is one thing: to be a homosexual is something entirely different.”²²

In order to substantiate these claims, Halperin, Padgug, and social constructionists like them turn from their linguistic observations to introduce a second major line of argumentation, which is to bring forward ethnographic data that come from prior to the late nineteenth century, or from outside our Euro-American matrix, or both, in order to illustrate different cultures’ “substantially different” arrangements of sexual categories.²³ Halperin, for example, turns almost immediately from the introductory proposition of his essay, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality”—that “before 1892 there was no homosexuality”—to cite George Chauncey’s study of United States medical literature from the early to mid-nineteenth century, “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance.”²⁴ In this article Chauncey documents, first, the prevailing language used for behavior that was considered sexually deviant throughout most of the nineteenth century, the language of sexual inversion. He then, and for our purposes more importantly, goes on to describe how the nineteenth century’s understanding of this deviant sexual inversion “did not denote the same conceptual phenomenon as homosexuality.” Rather, sexual inversion “referred to a broad range of deviant gender behavior,” which could be manifest by what was considered deviant object choice (the choice of a same-sex sexual partner), but also (in men) by a fondness for cats or (in women) by a predilection for politics.²⁵ Halperin summarizes, “Throughout the nineteenth century … sexual preference for a person of one’s own sex was not clearly distinguished from other sorts of non-conformity to one’s culturally defined sex-role.”²⁶

Similarly, Katz, in his The Invention of Heterosexuality, illustrates his contention that the words heterosexuality and homosexuality signify a “time-bound historical form—one historically specific way of organizing the sexes and their pleasures” by looking to the data collected by historians John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman on the romantic friendships that existed in the United States in the early nineteenth century.²⁷ Middle-class women especially “formed close attachments that could rival marriage relationships in their personal intensity.”²⁸ These women’s relationships included expressions of physical intimacy—holding hands, kissing, and caressing—although typically not genital stimulation, as is suggested, for example, by these lines from an 1859 novel quoted by D’Emilio and Freedman:

Women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do men. When this is the case … the emotions awakened heave and swell through the whole being as the tides swell the ocean. Freed from all the grosser elements of passion, as it exists between the sexes, it retains its energy, its abandonment, its flush, its eagerness, its palpitation, and its rapture.

So is this highly eroticized, albeit nongenital love—described in the same passage as being “not only in degree as between man and woman, but in kind as between precisely similar organizations”—to be classified as homosexual?²⁹ D’Emilio and Freedman respond by invoking a social constructionist analysis: “The modern terms homosexuality and heterosexuality do not apply to an era that had not yet articulated these distinctions.”³⁰

The most persuasive ethnographic data, however, that Halperin and Katz (among many others) bring to bear to illustrate their social constructionist claims come from ancient Greece,³¹ and Halperin, a classicist, is particularly masterful in his discussion. He begins by offering a close reading of the famous myth regarding human origins that is attributed to Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium.³² In this text Aristophanes is said to claim that there were originally three sexes of human beings, male, female, and androgyne. These original humans, according to Aristophanes, were globular in shape, with eight limbs, four ears, two faces, and two sets of genitals, one front and one back. These humans also, in Aristophanes’ tale, were very powerful, so powerful that the god Zeus, in order to constrain them, cut them in half. These severed halves, as the story goes, sought desperately to reunite with their other, so much so that once reunited the halves devoted all their energies to sustaining a perpetual embrace. As a result, they neglected other bodily needs and thus began to perish for lack of sustenance. Zeus at that point took pity on the halves and so moved their genitals around to the front sides of their bodies and invented sexual intercourse, which allowed the creatures to find “some satiety of their union and a relief” in order that they “might turn their hands to their labors and their interest in ordinary life.”³³ The consequence is three types of sexual congress: males who seek other males (the two halves of the original globe-shaped male), females who seek other females (the two halves of the original globe-shaped female), and males and females who seek each other (the two halves of the original androgyne).

This typology of erotic interactions, Halperin admits, may look superficially like our division of sexual congress into homosexuality and heterosexuality. But Halperin argues a closer examination reveals that it is not. He points out first that, contrary to what our homosexual-versus-heterosexual distinction assumes, there is nothing in Aristophanes’ story that supposes the males who seek other males and the females who seek other females to be of a common type (what we would call homosexual). Nor is there anything that supposes a contrast between these males who seek other males and the females who seek other females, on the one hand, and the third type of sexual being (what we would call heterosexual), on the other. In Halperin’s words, “nothing in the text allows us to suspect the existence of even an implicit category to which males who desire males and females who desire females both belong in contradistinction to some other category containing males and females who desire one another.”³⁴

Moreover, Halperin goes on to argue, Aristophanes’ myth “features a crucial distinction within the category of males who are attracted to males, an infrastructural detail missing from his descriptions of each of the other two categories.” This is Aristophanes’ insistence that the males who desire other males are not attracted to one another “without qualification”; rather, “those descended from an original male … desire boys when they are men and they take a certain (nonsexual) pleasure in physical contact with men when they are boys.” Halperin, in somewhat of an understatement, describes this insistence on age dissymmetry on Aristophanes’ part as “unexpected,” pointing out that “although his [Aristophanes’] genetic explanation of the diversity of sexual-object choice among human beings would seem to require that there be some adult males who are sexually attracted to other adult males, Aristophanes appears to be wholly unaware of such a possibility, and in any case has left no room for it in his taxonomic scheme.” Reciprocated erotic desire between adult male partners is not admitted in Aristophanes’ myth, that is, and this despite the fact that Aristophanes’ own representation of the constitution of human sexual interactions would seem to imply it. This suggests, by extension, that as indicated above, homosexuals as we define them—“pairs of lovers of the same sex and [roughly] the same age animated by mutual desire for one another”—are not, at least among males, present in the Aristophanes tale.³⁵

Halperin next points out a further implication of this analysis: that the absence of what we define as homosexuals, or at least male homosexuals, in Aristophanes’ myth demonstrates the absence of what we define as homosexuality, or at least male homosexuality, in the world of classical Athens from which Aristophanes’ tale stems. This is because Aristophanes’ myth is, in terms of genre, an etiological fable, “a projection of contemporary practices backwards in time to their imagined point of origin.”³⁶ What Aristophanes describes in terms of the beginnings of human sexuality, that is, is what Athenians were actually doing sexually during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Elsewhere in his essay Halperin elaborates by explaining that in classical Athens sex generally—whether involving same-sex or opposite-sex partners—was conceived of not as we understand it, an act jointly engaged in by two partners, but rather as an act that is described in terms of use, more specifically, the use to which a desiring subject (to be understood as male) puts the object of his sexual desire.³⁷ Halperin contrasts in this regard our idiom “to have sex with someone,” which implies an act in which partners mutually participate, and the Greek idiom, in which the verb “to have sex” (aphrodiziazein) is “carefully differentiated into an active and a passive form.” This is an indication—and one notes again here the constructionist conviction that words are clues to concepts—that sex in the classical worldview is understood not according to our notions of mutuality, but as “an action performed by one person [active] upon another [passive].” The sexual action performed, moreover, is rigidly defined in the Athenian system as penile penetration, meaning obviously, as intimated already, that the sexual actor—or active partner—is male. More important, the active partner must be a certain kind of male, one who is in a socially superior position to the penetrated. Hence, as Halperin writes, the most socially superior of Athenians, “an adult, male citizen of Athens,” can have “legitimate sexual relations only with statutory minors (his inferiors not in age but in social and political status): the proper targets of his sexual desire include, specifically, women, boys, foreigners, and slaves—all of them persons who do not enjoy the same legal rights and privileges as he does.”³⁸

Athenian sexual practices are thus isomorphic (to use Halperin’s word) with Athenian social status and, more generally, with Athenian political life, so that any sexual interactions consistent with the Athenians’ hierarchical principles of social and political organization are considered normative—whether they would be described by us as heterosexual (and typically in our society normative) or homosexual (and typically in our society deviant). What is considered aberrant in this Athenian system, however, is “sex between members of the superordinate group,” that is, sex between two adult male citizens. Indeed, in Halperin’s words, this type of sexual relation is “virtually inconceivable.”³⁹ Halperin concludes: “The currently fashionable distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality (and, similarly, between ‘homosexuals’ and ‘heterosexuals’ as individual types) had no meaning for the classical Athenians: there were not, as far as they knew, two different kinds of ‘sexuality,’ two differently structured psychosexual states or modes of affective orientation.” Rather, the taxonomic distinction that described sexual identity in ancient Athens was “‘active’ and ‘passive,’ dominant and submissive.”⁴⁰ For at least some Athenians, moreover, their active or passive sexual identity was mutable, rather than being—as an essentialist argument might have it—intrinsic, natural, and therefore unchanging. In particular, males eligible for citizenship, although they would have been typologically passive in their youth, would become typologically active upon attaining their majority and entering into a superior social status within the body politic.⁴¹

So carefully does Halperin argue this position, and so meticulously does he amass evidence from classical sources to prove his contention that “‘sexuality’ is a cultural production,” that even he speaks of the debate between his social constructionist convictions and the alternative position of essentialism as potentially sterile.⁴² Similarly, in her 1999 book Getting Medieval, a provocative examination of sex and communities in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England, Carolyn Dinshaw, a professor of Middle English language and culture at New York University, writes of “these days in the late 1990s in which we may have tired of the essentialism/social constructionism debate.”⁴³ Still, I have chosen to spend a fair amount of time on the social constructionist position here because it seems to me it is not necessarily so widely embraced as Halperin’s and Dinshaw’s comments might suggest. The anthropologist Carole S. Vance, for example, in an essay published in 1995, comments that an essentialist approach to sexuality “remains hegemonic,”⁴⁴ and Katz, writing in the same year, speaks similarly of how “the idea … of an essential homosexuality and heterosexuality still functions as the dominant working notion, even of historically oriented researchers.”⁴⁵ Certainly this seems to me to be true among the historically oriented researchers within my own area of scholarly interest and the area of scholarly interest that this book primarily considers, the world of biblical Israel and the ancient Near East. In fact, in looking at studies that address the Bible’s attitudes toward same-sex erotic and sexual interactions, I am struck by how pervasive the essentialist understanding of sexuality is.⁴⁶

One of the earliest⁴⁷ and most formidable spokespersons for an essentialist approach regarding the Bible’s attitudes toward same-sex erotic and sexual interactions was the late John Boswell of the Department of History at Yale University, in his 1980 book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century.⁴⁸ As Boswell’s subtitle makes clear, he is convinced that there were “gay people” long before the invention of homosexuality that Halperin dates to 1892, and that “gay people” is in fact a categorical constant that extends in time over, at least, the first fourteen centuries of Western European history.⁴⁹ The claim within the text itself is broader still, projecting the category gay back to the fifth century BCE and into the Eastern Mediterranean, so that Boswell readily speaks, for example, of the “gay Athenians” attested within classical literature,⁵⁰ of the “gay relationships” of Athens,⁵¹ and of Aristophanes’ descriptions of “gay and nongay men and women” in the Symposium’s myth of human origins that I have described above.⁵² Indeed, in the concluding comments of what could be called his preliminary methodological discussion (chapter 2, “Definitions”),⁵³ Boswell implies what he elsewhere states more clearly,⁵⁴ that “the heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy exists in speech and thought because it exists in reality: it was not invented by sexual taxonomists, but observed by them.”⁵⁵

For the biblical scholar, however, the most salient demonstration of Boswell’s fundamentally essentialist position is found in his exegesis of Rom 1:26–27. These verses are a part of the passage in Paul’s Letter to the Romans that presents the apostle’s arguments regarding the sins of the Gentiles and consequently their need for salvation.⁵⁶ From Paul’s point of view, the fundamental sin was the Gentiles’ failure to “know God,” despite the fact that they should have been able to infer the nature and power of the creator through the glory of the creation. “For this reason,” Paul writes in Rom 1:26–27 (NRSV translation):

God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

Arguments rage over what Paul means by natural and unnatural in these verses. Does natural refer to some universal law or moral truth that proscribes homosexuality? Does unnatural refer to that which is peculiar, extraordinary, unconventional, unexpected, as are same-sex erotic and sexual interactions in most societies? Do natural and unnatural here have nothing to do with same-sex interactions but refer rather to what was considered natural as opposed to unnatural in opposite-sex couplings, with vaginal intercourse being considered natural, whereas anal and oral intercourse were considered unnatural? Perhaps unnatural might refer to bestiality? To a basically natural activity taken to an extreme? To sexual intercourse that cannot lead to procreation? Or do natural and unnatural refer to the specific Greek and also Roman notions of what constitutes natural and unnatural sexual interactions, natural interactions, as described above, being those that involved a socially superior penetrator and a socially inferior penetrated, unnatural interactions being those that somehow violated this hierarchical mandate (as would, by necessity, the sorts of female-female sexual interactions the word unnatural is used in Rom 1:26 to describe)?⁵⁷

Currently, among scholars, there is no consensus. What is crucial for our purposes at this point, however, is not the merits or flaws of these and other positions but Boswell’s particular take, which is to argue that natural and unnatural in Rom 1:26–27 refer to the nature of the sexual preference that Boswell sees as intrinsic to each of us as individuals: some of us are naturally (intrinsically, fundamentally, essentially) heterosexual, others naturally (intrinsically, fundamentally, essentially) homosexual.⁵⁸ What Paul condemns as unnatural, Boswell goes on to propose, are those who act against the heterosexual orientation that is characteristic or natural for them or “homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual persons.” Paul was not, Boswell concludes, “discussing persons who were by inclination [or we might say, essentially] gay.”⁵⁹

This and other aspects of Boswell’s interpretation of Rom 1:26–27 have been cited again and again, typically with approval, in works on the Bible and same-sex eroticism that come from outside the guild of biblical scholars,⁶⁰ especially in works that attempt to read the Bible in a way that is ultimately redemptive rather than judgmental for contemporary gay men and lesbians who are members of biblically based communities of faith.⁶¹ For example, Chris Glaser, the one-time director of the Lazarus project, “a ministry of reconciliation between the [Presbyterian] church and the lesbian and gay community,”⁶² writes in his book Come Home! Reclaiming Spirituality and Community as Gay Men and Lesbians that Rom 1:26–27 critiques only “behavior that gays and lesbians themselves have been critical of … heterosexuals behaving homosexually.”⁶³ Peter J. Gomes, the Pusey Minister of the Memorial Church and Appleton Chapel and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University, relies on Boswell to reach a similar conclusion in his The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart: Rom 1:26–27, Gomes writes, “does not describe the conduct of homosexuals, but rather of heterosexual people who performed homosexual acts … what is ‘unnatural’ is the one behaving after the manner of the other.”⁶⁴ Likewise, John J. McNeill, a Roman Catholic priest who was “expelled from the Society of Jesus in 1987 for refusing to give up his ministry to gay men and lesbians,”⁶⁵ states in his The Church and the Homosexual that he agrees with Boswell that “Paul apparently refers only to homosexual acts indulged in by those he considered to be otherwise heterosexually inclined; acts which represented a voluntary choice to act contrary to their ordinary sexual appetite.”⁶⁶ Elsewhere, McNeill writes:⁶⁷

I will never forget my joy and sense of liberation when I first read John Boswell’s critique of the traditional [biblical] passages used to condemn homosexuality. I agree with Boswell that it can be established with good scholarship that nowhere in Scripture, the Old and New Testaments, is there a clear condemnation of a loving relationship between two adult gay men or two lesbians.

Scholars in the field of New Testament studies, however, have generally been less complimentary of Boswell’s work. For many, this simply has meant ignoring Boswell’s exegesis altogether.⁶⁸ For example, Victor Paul Furnish, professor of New Testament at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, makes no reference to Boswell’s arguments in his 1994 discussion of Rom 1:26–27, although he is clearly aware of them.⁶⁹ The same is true of Ulrich W. Mauser, professor of biblical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, in his 1996 article that considers Rom 1:26–27,⁷⁰ and of Brian K. Blount, a New Testament professor also at Princeton Theological Seminary, in an article published in the same year, “Reading and Understanding the New Testament on Homosexuality.”⁷¹ Others who do address Boswell directly, moreover, tend to find fault. Mark D. Smith, of the Department of History at Albertson College, remarks that Boswell’s “interpretations of biblical texts … including Romans 1, have been justly criticized,”⁷² and Bernadette J. Brooten, a professor of early Christianity at Brandeis University, articulates some of this criticism by arguing, for example, that Boswell’s position on Rom 1:26–27 does not “precisely [suit] Paul’s culture.”⁷³ Furthermore, Brooten claims that the materials concerning female homoeroticism she has assembled in her magisterial Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism “run absolutely counter” to two of Boswell’s main conclusions in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,⁷⁴ which are, in his words: 1. that “Roman society, at least in its urban centers … regarded homosexual interest and practice as an ordinary part of the range of human eroticism” and 2. that “the early Christian church does not appear to have opposed homosexual behavior per se.”⁷⁵

The noted New Testament scholar Joseph A. Fitzmyer similarly calls Boswell’s analysis “wide of the mark,”⁷⁶ and Richard B. Hays, professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, rather more bluntly characterizes Boswell’s interpretation as “seriously flawed”⁷⁷ and even “untenable.”⁷⁸ Hays particularly points out that although Boswell’s reading of Rom 1:26–27 presupposes that “Paul is describing some specifiable group of heterosexually-oriented individuals whose personal life pilgrimage has led them beyond heterosexual activity into promiscuous homosexual behavior,” Paul’s charge (as I noted above) is instead a “corporate indictment” against “fallen humanity as a whole”; the “them” to which Rom 1:26–27 refers, that is (“For this reason, God gave them up to degrading passions”; emphasis mine), is not the individual members of some sexually disoriented subgroup within the larger Gentile population but the entire Gentile community. Hays also, like Brooten, suggests it is patently false for Boswell to claim the early church in general “does not appear to have opposed homosexual behavior,” noting rather that “every pertinent Christian text from the pre-Constantinian period [including Romans] … adopts an unremittingly negative judgment on homosexual practice, and this tradition is emphatically carried forward by all major Christian writers of the fourth and fifth centuries.”⁷⁹

Still, most of these New Testament scholars, although dismissive of Boswell’s specific conclusions, never fully repudiate his underlying essentialist assumption that we can speak of homosexuality within the biblical tradition. Thus, in his 1994 article, Furnish simultaneously acknowledges that “there was no conception of what modern research calls ‘sexual orientation’” in Paul’s day but goes on to suggest that what we call sexual orientation may be shaped by biological or psychological factors, which is to say: it may be something essential or intrinsic to our nature.⁸⁰ Somewhat similarly, Mauser admits that “the notion of sexual orientation, or sexual preference,” is alien to the biblical world while still speaking of a “homosexual orientation” and “heterosexually oriented people” in biblical times.⁸¹ Moreover, he entitles one version of his 1996 article “Creation, Sexuality, and Homosexuality in the New Testament,” which seems to indicate his belief that there is something that can be identified as homosexuality in the biblical text.⁸² Mauser’s stress on creation, and, more specifically, on the pairing male and female in Genesis 1–2, belies as well his underlying assumption that the Bible prescribes a normative model of heterosexual marriage for human sexual relations to which homosexuality somehow stands opposed. Thus, despite his disclaimers, Mauser seems to assume the biblical world shared our understanding that one is either heterosexual, and so in, or preferring to be in, an opposite-sex relationship, or homosexual, and so in, or preferring to be in, a same-sex relationship.⁸³ Hays, too, insists that the Bible’s discussions of homosexuality must be read against the “backdrop” of “heterosexual marriage” as presented “from Genesis 1 onwards,”⁸⁴ likewise presuming, it seems—contrary to the arguments of, say, Halperin—that homosexuality and heterosexuality existed in the same either/or dichotomy in biblical times as they do in our world. Hays’s sense that he can even speak of biblical homosexuality further suggests his fundamental conviction that there is a thing, homosexuality, within the biblical world that he can examine, and this despite the fact that he does at points speak of the concept of sexual orientation in antiquity as an “anachronism” and signals his awareness of the social constructionist versus essentialist debate.⁸⁵

These same criticisms can be leveled, moreover, against one of the most recent, and also most comprehensive, studies of the Bible and same-sex erotic and sexual acts, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics, by Robert A. J. Gagnon, an associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. As Gagnon’s title suggests, he carefully defines his subject as “same-sex intercourse or homosexual practice, as opposed to homosexual orientation,” and the citation of authors such as Halperin in his footnotes might suggest Gagnon’s careful delineation of his focus is due to his awareness and even acceptance of social constructionist claims. Yet, as Gagnon goes on to describe his reluctance to engage in a discussion of the Bible and “homosexual orientation,” he gives as his reason not the social constructionist critique that sees the notion of “homosexual orientation” as a uniquely modern phenomenon but rather “the Bible’s own relative disinterest toward motives or the origination of same-sex impulses.”⁸⁶ For Gagnon, however, this “relative disinterest” in no way indicates that the category homosexual orientation did not exist in the ancient world; he clearly thinks that it did, taking as his starting point, like Mauser (who was Gagnon’s teacher) and Hays, an either/or dichotomy of heterosexual/homosexual that he finds implicit in the Genesis creation stories. As Gagnon writes, “Scripture rejects homosexual behavior because it is a violation of the gendered existence of male and female ordained by God at creation.”⁸⁷

Indeed, Gagnon seems so convinced that he can speak of homosexuality in the ancient world that he does not even discuss the positions of Halperin or the other constructionist theorists whom he cites (for example, Michel Foucault, David F. Greenberg, and John J. Winkler), not even in the fifteen-page discussion in his book whose section heading reads (in part), “The Bible has no category for ‘homosexuals’ with an exclusively same-sex orientation,” not even in the first attempt to rebut the assertion of this heading that Gagnon offers, the evidence of Aristophanes’ myth of human origins that Halperin has so meticulously analyzed!⁸⁸ I must say: I find this failure even to address the constructionist position extremely curious, especially given the pains Gagnon takes at every other point in his book to raise objections to his proposed interpretations and answer them. I can only begin to guess at his reasons. I suppose it is possible that Gagnon omitted a discussion of the social constructionist position for lack of space, but it seems hard to imagine that a book that is already over five hundred pages long could not have taken a few more pages to consider one of modern scholarship’s major intellectual paradigms. I regret to say it, as Gagnon and I have known each other for a long time (we were classmates both as undergraduates and as masters students), but I wonder whether Gagnon’s obvious disdain for lesbians and, especially, gay men—whom he brutally caricatures as rampantly promiscuous, as irresponsible when it comes to safe sex, and as guilty of “pick-up murders” associated with anonymous sex and of high rates of alcoholism, sadomasochism, and domestic violence—means he could not bring himself to engage the arguments of scholars such as Halperin, who openly identify as gay.⁸⁹

I regret too that, in turning from Gagnon to consider Brooten’s Love Between Women, it might seem as if I am suggesting that Brooten’s work is akin to Gagnon’s in this or some other regard, for, in truth, it stands in a different league. Certainly, Brooten stakes out a radically different political stance with regard to how her work on the New Testament’s attitudes toward same-sex eroticism might bear on contemporary Christian debates about the church and homosexuality, for while she and Gagnon agree that the New Testament traditions, and Rom 1:26–27 in particular, do in fact condemn same-sex intercourse, Gagnon, as I have already noted, understands this condemnation as rooted in the fundamentals of creation that pertain as fully, as he sees it, within today’s biblically based communities of faith as they did in Paul’s churches. Brooten, however, argues (I believe persuasively; more on this below) that the logic that underlies Paul’s condemnation is distinctive to, and thus pertains only to, the cultural world (and therefore the church) of Paul’s own era. Brooten is also, in my opinion, more thoughtful and more judicious in her treatment of ancient sources than is Gagnon. Nevertheless, I find Brooten unfortunately equivocal when it comes to the question on which I am focusing here: the use—and usefulness—of social construction theory for understanding the sexual relationships of the biblical and ancient Near Eastern worlds. Like Mauser and Hays, in addition to Gagnon, Brooten assumes that the phenomenon we call homosexuality can be found within the world of early Christianity on which her examination focuses; indeed, Brooten goes much further than either Mauser or Hays, and Gagnon as well, in arguing explicitly that there was “a category of persons viewed in antiquity as having a long-term or even lifelong homoerotic orientation.” In fact, according to Brooten, “people in the Roman Empire worked with a concept of homoeroticism that encompassed both men and women”; people in the Roman Empire, that is, worked with a concept very like the modern concept of homosexuality.⁹⁰

Brooten’s attempts to claim a more universal taxonomy of female, and also male homoeroticism, however, have been strongly criticized. For example, Ann Pellegrini, a specialist in gay and lesbian studies at the University of California, Irvine, writes:⁹¹

She [Brooten] seems to bring to her analyses a strong notion of what a lesbian is or should be today. But her conception of sexual love between women and lesbian identity is rooted in contemporary politics, not in the world of early Christianity. There is at best an uneasy fit between the contemporary ethical and political claims Brooten wants her book to make and the historical scene of early Christianity and its classical sources she presents. At worst, her interpretations of the ancient sources become hostage to the contemporary debates she wants her book to intervene in.

Halperin is more blunt: “Brooten’s formulation of her project … organizes her material around the modern concept of homosexuality, redescribes the ancient phenomena in terms of it, and implies that sexuality and sexual orientation are more or less objective phenomena, independent of human perception, rooted in some transhistorical reality.” He goes on to suggest that Brooten follows in the footsteps of Boswell in this regard, by “recapitulating his realist approach to the history of sexuality … and his insistence on the objective facts of same-sex sexual attraction.”⁹² Ironically, that is, Brooten stands accused of committing herself to a program that seems more like Boswell’s essentialist position than not, even though, as I noted earlier she presents herself as repudiating, not affirming, two of the main conclusions of Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality.

Even more ironic: although Brooten’s overall claim that we can locate something like our modern concept of homosexuality within the Roman world of the first Christian centuries seems to represent a basically essentialist understanding of the notion of sexual identity, her more specific descriptions of Roman-era sexual relations, as well as the analysis of Rom 1:26–27 she develops based on those descriptions, echo in many respects the social constructionist position articulated by Halperin with regard to classical Athens. “A strict distinction between active and passive sexual roles governed the prevailing cultural conceptualizations of sexual relations in the Roman world,” Brooten writes; “the distinction between active and passive shaped Roman-period definitions of natural and unnatural: free, adult male citizens ought never to be passive, and women should never be active.” As she continues:

Roman-period writers presented as normative those sexual relations that represent a human social hierarchy. They saw every sexual pairing as including one active and one passive partner, regardless of gender … males could be either active or passive (such as when they were boys or slaves), whereas females were always supposed to be passive.

Early Christian perspectives on sexual relations, she concludes, including the views of Paul, “closely resembled” this Roman understanding.⁹³ Consequently, she argues regarding Rom 1:26, “Paul condemns sexual relations between women as ‘unnatural’ because he shares the widely held cultural view that women are passive by nature and therefore should remain passive in sexual relations,” whereas “a sexual encounter necessarily includes an active and a passive partner.”⁹⁴

With respect to this part of her analysis, moreover, Brooten’s reviewers have typically been complimentary, including (yet another irony) some of the same reviewers who criticized her essentialist claims regarding a Roman-era conception of homosexuality that in many respects parallels our own. For example, T. Corey Brennan, currently a member of the Department of Classics at Rutgers University, writes that “Love between Women succeeds in its main argument” that Paul condemns sexual relations between women as unnatural because they do not conform and cannot conform—women being passive by nature—to the Greco-Roman cultural model that Paul assumes: that all sexual interactions must necessarily include an active and a passive partner.⁹⁵ Ken Stone, who teaches Hebrew Bible at Chicago Theological Seminary, likewise notes that he finds Brooten’s interpretation of Rom 1:26 “generally persuasive,”⁹⁶ as does David G. Hunter, a specialist in the field of early Christianity who is currently professor of religious studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University.⁹⁷ Even more noteworthy are the comments of another specialist in early Christianity, Elizabeth A. Castelli of Barnard College, who has published extensively on issues of women and gender in the early church. Castelli characterizes Brooten’s work on Rom 1:26 as “explicitly positioned against Christian apologetics such as those that have tried to reclaim Paul’s assessments of homoeroticism in a liberatory mode” (Boswell comes to mind) and goes on to describe Brooten as making “a more radical claim: that Paul’s assessment of female homoeroticism is clearly pejorative [and] that Paul’s anti-homoerotic polemic is built upon a thoroughgoing commitment to a gender-stratified society”—that is, again, a commitment to the notion that women are passive by nature and so must remain passive in all sexual interactions. And the merits of this interpretation? Castelli concludes: “Brooten’s exegesis of Paul is painstaking, demanding, and persuasive.”⁹⁸ I agree.

Other New Testament scholars who in my opinion persuasively bring a social constructionist analysis to bear on Rom 1:26–27 include David E. Fredrickson, professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary, who in an article on Rom 1:24–27 characterizes the dichotomy of homo/heterosexuality as exclusively modern;⁹⁹ Stanley K. Stowers, professor of religious studies at Brown University; and Dale B. Martin, professor of New Testament studies at Yale. Stowers’s discussion is found in his 1994 book A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles. In chapter 2 of this work he notes generally regarding the ideology of sexual interactions found throughout the ancient Mediterranean world that “there is always a passive and an active partner” and “women are the natural passive partners.”¹⁰⁰ Then, as he turns in chapter 3 to focus on the references to same-sex intercourse in Rom 1:26–27, he writes that “using the modern term homosexuality would invite serious misunderstanding because the concept implies many things about sex and gender that are utterly foreign to antiquity.”¹⁰¹ The view of the ancient world, he reiterates, understands sex and gender wholly in relation to the dichotomy of active and passive, and women, as naturally passive, can only properly have sexual relations with men, who are more naturally active: from this stems Paul’s censure of female-female same-sex acts in Rom 1:26. Stowers’s point here is, obviously, similar to Brooten’s, and Stowers, also like Brooten, notes that the ancient world’s active-passive dichotomy mirrors the ancients’ ideology of social status: “natural sex,” Stowers writes, “is by definition the penetration of a socially subordinate person by a socially superior person.”¹⁰²

However, Stowers goes further than Brooten, who focuses almost exclusively on Paul’s condemnation of female homoeroticism in Rom 1:26, by using his observations about sex and social status in order to analyze Paul’s denunciation of male-male same-sex acts in Rom 1:27. According to Stowers, the ancients’ conviction that sex must be defined in terms status means that embedded in all sexual relations is an act of mastery: for a man to penetrate a female, for example, means he has control over her. Conversely, Stowers argues, a man who allows himself to be penetrated as if he were a woman has improperly ceded his position as master, and the penetrator has also acted improperly in encouraging the other’s unmanliness. Crucial here in Stowers’s argument is his sense that an integral part of the Greco-Roman concern with a man’s mastery over others was an “ethic of self-mastery,” especially mastery over one’s own desires, which Stowers proposes underlies Paul’s rhetoric in Rom 1:27 (and, indeed, as Stowers sees it, Paul’s rhetoric in all of Romans). What keeps a man a man in sexual relations, according to this ethic’s logic, is his not “being overcome with passions in ‘a woman-like way,’” or (paraphrasing Stowers’s translation of Rom 1:27) his not allowing himself to be “burned up with … appetite for … another man.”¹⁰³

In his article published on Rom 1:18–32 in 1995, Martin writes similarly to Stowers of the “radical difference between the logics of sexuality that underwrite Romans 1, on the one hand, and the modern logic, on the other,”¹⁰⁴ and states more generally, “the ancients had no conception of homosexual orientation in the modern sense … they did not differentiate the different sexual activities into a bimorphic dichotomy framed by two different kinds of desire.”¹⁰⁵ Rather, according to Martin, the ancients saw a desire for a same-sex partner, and especially “male attraction to beautiful males,” as perfectly natural; what was unnatural, or beyond nature, however, was same-sex intercourse that sprung from an excess of this same-sex desire (as, in the ancients’ minds, gluttony was an unnatural act that resulted from the excessive exercise of the perfectly natural desire to feed oneself). More specifically, according to Martin—who is very like both Brooten and Stowers in this regard—what is unnatural about same-sex intercourse in the ancient understanding is its “disruption of the male-female hierarchy,” it being “contrary to nature” for a man to allow himself, as Martin quotes Plato as writing, “to be covered and mounted like cattle,” that is, to be placed in the receptive or passive [female] position in male-male intercourse. Likewise, it would be “contrary to nature” for a woman to assume the insertive or active [male] position in female-female sexual congress.¹⁰⁶ As I have already suggested, I find Stowers’s and Martin’s analyses on these points compelling; Stephen D. Moore, professor of New Testament at Drew Theological Seminary, agrees, praising both what he describes as Stowers’s “edifying” and “masterful” discussion (the pun fully intended on Moore’s part) and Martin’s “superbly argued” exegesis, one that shows, in Moore’s words, that the Rom 1:26–27 and modern understandings of sexuality “are so drastically different as to preclude any paraphrase of this incalculably influential passage that would assimilate it to the modern concept of homosexuality.”¹⁰⁷

Deirdre J. Good, professor of New Testament at the General Theological Seminary in New York, similarly labels as “insightful” another of Martin’s articles, on the translation of two terms found in 1 Cor 6:9, malakos and arsenokoitēs, which modern interpreters most typically assume refer to same-sex intercourse, or at least male same-sex intercourse. Good calls this article “insightful,” moreover, particularly because of the constructionist position it promotes.¹⁰⁸ As Martin writes, his intent is to “challenge the objectivist notion that the Bible … can provide contemporary Christians with a reliable foundation for ethical reflection” by pointing out, for example, how dramatically English translations and scholarly interpretations of the term arsenokoitēs changed in the mid-twentieth century, reflecting “the nineteenth century’s invention of the category of the ‘homosexual.’” In Martin’s words:¹⁰⁹

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century … the translation of arsenokoitês shifted from being the reference to an action that any man might well perform, regardless of orientation or disorientation, to refer to a “perversion,” either an action or a propensity taken to be self-evidently abnormal or diseased. The shift in translation, that is, reflected the invention of the category of “homosexuality” as an abnormal orientation, an invention that occurred in the nineteenth century but gained popular currency only gradually in the twentieth … the interpretations were prompted … by shifts in modern sexual ideology.

The translation of malakos in English Bibles, as Martin demonstrates, also shifts quite dramatically in the mid-twentieth century, the earlier translation of “effeminate” being replaced by terms derived from the “modern medicalized categories of sexual, or particularly homosexual ‘perversion.’” Our evidence from ancient sources, however, makes clear that “effeminate” is the much better translation, although Martin insists we must be clear that effeminacy in the ancient world was construed much differently than it is in ours:

A man could be condemned as effeminate for, among many other things, eating or drinking too much, enjoying gourmet cooking, wearing nice underwear or shoes, wearing much of anything on his head, having long hair, shaving, caring for his skin, wearing cologne or aftershave, dancing too much, laughing too much, or gesticulating too much.

Sexually, “effeminacy was implicated in heterosexual sex as much as homosexual—or more so.” Modern translations that link the “effeminacy” of malakos to homosexuality are thus wrong and the result solely, Martin concludes, of our “shifts in sexual ideology.”¹¹⁰

Martin’s article documenting the culturally conditioned nature of our translations of malakos and arsenokoitēs appears in a volume of collected essays in which the final piece, by Jeffrey S. Siker, of the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University, effectively summarizes the constructionist position as we have surveyed it thus far. Siker writes:

It has become apparent that what we mean by the term “homosexuality” in the late twentieth century is for the most part rather different from what the biblical texts are discussing. Indeed, in order to prevent reading our own modern understandings of homosexuality anachronistically back into the biblical texts, I think we should stop talking about what the Bible has to say regarding “homosexuality.” … Since the ancients did not have our notions of “heterosexual” and “homosexual” sexual orientations, to persist in using these terms when discussing “biblical sexual ethics” (yet another artificial construct) is misleading at best.

As he continues:¹¹¹

In our eagerness to apply the Bible to our contemporary questions about homosexuality, we often fail to see that what the Bible was talking about and what we are talking about are not just a little different but very different, to the point that I have come to conclude that the Bible offers almost no direct teaching about homosexuality as we understand it.

The New Testament scholar Herman C. Waetjen somewhat more pointedly states, “none of the texts in the Bible’s two testaments that deal with sexual deviance can or should be related to what today is being called ‘homosexuality.’”¹¹²

Still, despite Siker’s attempts to speak of the Bible as a whole, and despite Waetjen’s more specific insistence that the insights of social construction theory apply equally to “the Bible’s two testaments,” that is, to both the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament, the fact is that, as in New Testament studies, social construction theory has been used less often than it might by Hebrew Bible scholars. In his article “The Bible and Homosexuality,” J. Glen Taylor, who teaches Hebrew Bible at Wycliffe College (the Toronto School of Theology) at the University of Toronto, initially seems an adherent of social constructionist methodology when he notes that “the term ‘homosexuality’ does not match well with the way in which the Bible itself addresses the issue.” But the reason Taylor then offers—“that homosexuality can refer to a condition or inclination apart from the acting-out of sexual relations, whereas the Bible does not recognize this distinction”—really misses the larger constructionist point that even the describing of a homosexual condition or inclination assumes a system of sexual categorization that is distinctive to our modern society. In addition, like Mauser and Hays in their exegeses of Rom 1:26–27, Taylor suggests a contrast between the Bible’s texts regarding “homosexual relations” and the biblical “affirmation” of heterosexual marriage, thus presuming, it seems, that heterosexuality and homosexuality existed in the same either/or relationship within the biblical world as they do within our own.¹¹³

More fully cognizant of the constructionist position, yet ultimately ambivalent, is the Finnish Hebrew Bible scholar Martti Nissinen in his 1998 book Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective. In his introductory chapter Nissinen describes for his readers the essentialist/constructionist debate and seems to evince a certain amount of sympathy for the constructionist position. He writes, for example, that “sexual preference … must be examined in the larger framework of gender, body, and society” and similarly that “same-sex interaction cannot be simply equated with ‘homosexuality’ but must be viewed within the broader framework of gender identity, which in each culture and each individual involves different interpretations.” Even more explicitly, Nissinen notes that “all the sources examined in this study derive from the time ‘before sexuality,’ that is, before ‘sexuality’ and its derivatives were conceptualized through the scientia sexualis in the nineteenth century C.E.”;¹¹⁴ Nissinen’s footnote after this statement cites, moreover—seemingly with approval—the book that has been described as the locus classicus for the social constructionist program, volume 1 of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality,¹¹⁵ and also a volume of collected essays edited by Halperin and his fellow classicists and constructionists John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, whose title, Before Sexuality, is the source of Nissinen’s phraseology.

Yet, despite all this, Nissinen in the end seems unwilling to embrace the social constructionist claim that homosexuality and its heterosexual analog are categories of our modern world only. Rather, he writes, he does not hold “any particular brief for constructionism” and that people would “have had identities before these were invented by modern scholars”¹¹⁶ More specifically, according to Nissinen, the nineteenth-century notion of “homosexuality” as a “class of people” sharing a medical anomaly “has its roots already in the Roman and Byzantine period.”¹¹⁷ He further states (citing—seemingly once more with approval—Brooten’s Love Between Women and the work of another critic of Halperin, Amy Richlin, on whom Brooten depends),¹¹⁸ “various individual sexual orientations would … have existed among ancient people. Persons with such preferences do appear in ancient sources, and their existence was noted and commented upon by their contemporaries.”¹¹⁹

However, as Halperin has again shown, Nissinen’s analysis of the ancient authority he uses to illustrate these claims, the second-century CE physician Soranos, is flawed. According to Nissinen, Soranos “diagnosed the mollis and the tribades, men and women who habitually engaged in same-sex interaction, as mentally ill.”¹²⁰ On first reading, Halperin admits, this would “certainly seem to be nothing other than homosexuality as it is often understood today.” But what Nissinen fails to note is that elsewhere Soranos makes clear that what is “perverse” about the molles is not their habitual engagement in same-sex interactions per se but the “‘soft’ or unmasculine” role they wish to assume in these interactions, “depart[ing] from the cultural norm of manliness insofar as they actively desire to be subjected by other men to a ‘feminine’ (i.e., receptive) role in sexual intercourse.”¹²¹ Likewise, what is “perverse” about the tribades, women who have sex with other women, is not their participation in same-sex interactions but their pursuing of women “with an almost masculine jealousy.”¹²² The mental aberration manifest by the malles and the tribades, that is, is not their interest in same-sex partners but their sex-role reversal or gender deviance: the malles act deviantly by performing their culture’s standards of the feminine rather than the masculine; the tribades act deviantly by enacting their culture’s standards of the masculine versus the feminine. The conclusion that follows, completely counter to Nissinen’s understanding, is that this Soranos text more sustains than undermines a constructionist analysis.

So what of Hebrew Bible scholars who advocate more fully a social constructionist position? We can note first the interpretation that Saul M. Olyan, a professor of Hebrew Bible at Brown University, has offered of Lev 18:22 and 20:13, the two basically parallel Hebrew Bible texts that forbid a man to lie with another man “the lying down of a woman” (translation Olyan’s). As Olyan notes, multiple commentators both in the past and in our era (indeed, perhaps, a majority of commentators) have understood these texts as proscribing “homoerotic acts in general (frequently labeled ‘homosexuality’ by these scholars).”¹²³ Olyan, however, recognizing that homosexuality and heterosexuality are “modern constructs,”¹²⁴ demonstrates not only that (as is often noted) the two Leviticus texts refer only to male-male homoerotic acts (as opposed to homoerotic acts in general, both male-male and female-female), but that “the lying down of a woman” in these Leviticus passages must be defined solely in relation to male-male anal intercourse (as opposed to other male-male homoerotic acts: oral sex and mutual masturbation, for example). Olyan further shows that the phrase “the lying down of a woman” must be understood generally in terms of receptivity and more specifically, given the context of the levitical passages, as the anal analog to the vaginal receptivity that characterizes the woman’s experience in male-female sexual intercourse. Yet while vaginal receptivity in male-female intercourse is viewed as normative from the levitical point of view, anal receptivity in male-male sexual interactions is not, because, as Olyan argues, “receptivity … is constructed as appropriate exclusively to females” (emphasis mine).¹²⁵ According to Olyan, that is, ancient Israelite society had certain notions about gendered sex roles, and male-male anal intercourse is proscribed because, through one man’s having intercourse with another man as if this second man were a woman, it violates culturally conditioned notions about proper male and female sex roles.

This same insight—that the ancient Israelites considered receptivity in intercourse as culturally appropriate only for females—motivates Ken Stone in his exegesis of Judges 19, the story in which the Benjaminites of the town of Gibeah demand that an Ephraimite sojourning in their midst send out his Levite guest “so that we might know him,” that is, according to the biblical idiom, “so that we might have sexual intercourse with him” (Judg 19:22). Citing Foucault and Weeks (and, elsewhere, Halperin and Winkler), Stone proclaims his suspicions “about the relevance of modern Western beliefs about ‘sexual orientation’” and suggests instead that the threat of same-sex rape in the Judges 19 story needs to be understood according to a “rigid differentiation between male and female gender roles” and “the hierarchical nature of this differentiation.” More specifically, Stone argues that were the threatened rape to occur, the Levite would be forced into the “role of sexual object rather than sexual subject” (the receptive rather than the active partner). Consequently, according to the ancient Israelites’ gender logic, he would be “feminized” and thereby—given the hierarchically inferior position of women in the ancient Israelite worldview—placed in a position of social subordination and dishonor.¹²⁶ This is indeed a grievous insult, and its grievous nature becomes more evident still once we realize that, according to traditions of Near Eastern hospitality, it was honor that was due to the Ephraimite’s Levite guest and his entourage. What the men of Gibeah demand is thus a doubly atrocious proposition: both to deny the Levite the honor he is owed as a guest and to impose dishonor and humiliation on him instead. Stone has in addition argued that the insult constituted by the men of Gibeah’s demand is “compounded within the narrative discourse by the fact that the message [demanding that the Levite come forth to be raped] is not conveyed directly to the Levite, but rather indirectly by means of the host.” In this way, Stone suggests, “the Levite is … not only an object of the intended action of the men of Gibeah, he is also an object of speech.”¹²⁷

Stone then goes on to point out how several otherwise curious aspects of the Judges 19 story are illuminated by his interpretation. For example, the Ephraimite’s offer to send his virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine out to the men of Gibeah instead of the male Levite for whom they have asked is well explained if the Ephraimite is understood as speaking out of a cultural ideology that presumes “better to hand over my daughter, who is at any rate a proper sexual object, than my Levite guest.” And why is the Ephraimite’s offer of his daughter and the concubine as substitutes for the Levite initially rejected, whereas the concubine is ultimately accepted by the men of Gibeah as an acceptable victim to rape? Because, Stone explains, “a sexual misconduct committed against a woman is, in one sense, an attack upon the man under whose authority she falls…. Thus, although the men of Gibeah did not bring dishonor upon the Levite directly by raping him as if he were a woman, they nevertheless manage to challenge his honor in another way: through his woman.”¹²⁸

This explanation, that the Gibeahites’ actions against the concubine are actually actions against the Levite’s honor, in turn elucidates a third seemingly anomalous feature of the Judges story: why the Levite, when he brings a charge against the Gibeahites to the Israelite tribal council in the opening verses of Judges 20, speaks of Gibeah’s offenses only in terms of himself, describing how his concubine was raped until she died and how his life was threatened. As Stone interprets this language of self-interest: “It is not her welfare that motivates his call for retaliation, but rather the damage that he believes has been done to his own honor.” And what of the fact that the Levite’s charge that his life was threatened is not really true? Stone suggests that, again, the cultural ideology of gender subordination may help us make sense of the Levite’s claim: that the Levite, when he is threatened with being feminized through rape, becomes identified with his concubine, the woman who actually was raped. Thus, like his concubine, he is also threatened with death, at least implicitly.¹²⁹ Alternatively, I might suggest that, within the ancient Israelite cultural understanding Stone has described, even the possibility of being made a feminized object through the act of homosexual rape is so dishonoring that the Levite refuses to admit to Israel’s tribal assembly he faced such potential humiliation. Rather, he presents to his fellow Israelites the false but more comfortable accusation that the Gibeahites threatened to take his life.

Yet, whatever specific interpretation one prefers regarding this last point, it seems clear that Stone’s overall exegesis compellingly explains parts of Judges 19–20 that have heretofore appeared to be interpretive cruxes. Phyllis A. Bird of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary has recognized, moreover, that the same understanding of ancient Israelite gender and sexual ideologies that Stone advances with regard to Judges 19–20 can help explain the kindred story of Sodom and Gomorrah found in Gen 19:1–29. In this tale Abraham’s nephew Lot, while sojourning in the town of Sodom, refuses to give over the two men lodging with him (who unbeknownst to Lot are messengers of God) when the men of Sodom demand that Lot “send them out so that we might know them” (Gen 19:5). That is, as in the Judges 19 story, the men of Sodom demand that Lot’s visitors be sent out so that they might have sex with them, and sex in which the visitors are to be made the receptive partners in anal intercourse. As Bird writes, the text’s underlying premise here is “a distinction of active and passive partners … seen to be fundamental and universal, and … the passive role is always defined as feminine. Hence involvement in homosexual acts in the passive role involves a threat to male identity.” Indeed, as I have already noted, to subject a man to this sort of humiliation is, in the ancient Israelite understanding of sex and gender roles, among the most egregious of insults. Furthermore, as in the Judges 19 story, the insult here is compounded through the denying to Lot’s visitors the honor that the standards of Near Eastern hospitality insist is their due as guests (we can especially see this by comparing the honor Abraham accords these same visitors when they come to him in Gen 18:1–8: he gives them water for washing, food, and a place to sit in the shade during the heat of the day). In fact, so outrageous are the Sodomites’ demands with regard to Lot’s visitors, according to the logic of Gen 19:1–11, that even the suggestion that the men of Sodom might dishonor rather than honor Lot’s guests seals the city’s fate, and thus, despite the fact that no sexual violation actually occurs, the destruction God had threatened to bring upon Sodom is still carried out.

Bird further points out how the Sodom narrative’s descriptions of Lot’s actions once the Sodomites voice their demand make even clearer just how serious an affront their proposition is according to ancient Israel’s sexual worldview, as Lot, somewhat similarly to the Ephraimite host in Judges 19, offers to let the men of Sodom rape his virgin daughters instead of giving his two male visitors over to them. To be sure, Bird notes, the loss of these daughters’ sexual honor through rape would be a shameful thing according to ancient Israel’s sexual mores (we can compare Gen 34:7 and 31, where the rape of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, is considered an outrage by her brothers). Moreover, dishonor would also accrue to Lot were his virgin daughters to be raped, since he as a father is charged with protecting his daughters’ sexual chastity until they marry. Nevertheless, from the narrative’s point of view, Lot’s offer to send forth his daughters to the men of Sodom to be raped is still deemed the right thing to do, as even the potential threats to Lot’s honor and to the honor of his daughters are not as grievous an insult in Israelite thought as is the dishonoring that would be suffered were Lot’s male guests to be treated as women during an act of male-male anal intercourse. A raped woman at least remains within the gender role of receptive female deemed proper in the ancient Israelite understanding, whereas a man who assumes, or is forced to assume, the role of passive partner in an act of male-male intercourse does not. The insult is therefore significantly greater. As Bird states, “male honor … is valued even above a daughter’s virginity.”¹³⁰

Bird, like Olyan, also describes issues of “gender identity and roles” as underlying the prohibitions of Lev 18:22 and 20:13,¹³¹ and Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, more globally states, “The element common to both classical culture (with all of its variations) and biblical culture (with all its variations) is that the taboos and tolerances vis-à-vis same-sex genital practice were tied precisely to structures of maleness and femaleness, to gender and not a putative sexuality.”¹³² Elsewhere, Boyarin more explicitly denies that the Bible “knows … of that entity called by us ‘sexuality,’”¹³³ a statement reminiscent of Bird’s summary estimation: “sexuality as we understand it today is not addressed in the Bible. It is a modern concept.”¹³⁴ Like Olyan and Stone, that is, Boyarin and Bird recommend a social constructionist analysis, the evidence for which Boyarin describes as “compelling.”¹³⁵

As I have indicated above, this is an assessment that I share, believing that the many descriptions of constructionist scholars’ work I have provided demonstrate well the merits of applying a social constructionist analysis to the biblical tradition and that constructionism’s methodological premises should therefore guide all our examinations of ancient Near Eastern erotic and sexual interactions, whether these interactions be opposite-sex or same-sex. I began this chapter with an “on the one hand” statement about the David and Jonathan greeting card I had been sent by my former student: that, on the one hand, I was sympathetic to the card’s message because I am committed to its overarching gay rights agenda. But, as I conclude this discussion, I hope my feelings on the other hand have become clear: that the easy correlation the card posits between the biblical world and ours, and more specifically between the “intense love” of David and Jonathan and “gay men … within the Judaeo-Christian tradition today,” is misguided. Likewise, the relatively easy correlation many biblical scholars seem to posit between homosexuality as it exists in our world and the biblical texts that describe, or may allude to, same-sex erotic or sexual interactions is a mistake. Indeed, my greeting card may have seemed at first glance the proverbial straw man and thus not worth the time I have spent here in extended critique. But because it represents the presumptions most researchers actually hold concerning a basic continuity between the biblical world and ours, I believe that unmasking and dethroning its fundamental presuppositions is crucial in order that these presuppositions be replaced with an understanding that all erotic and sexual interactions in the biblical and ancient Near Eastern world need to be analyzed on that world’s terms.

This sort of analysis is one of my primary goals in the examinations I undertake in this volume, of the homoeroticized language and imagery that are used to describe the heroic relationships of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh and his counterpart Enkidu and the biblical David and his comrade Jonathan. Let me now turn, therefore, to begin my investigation, focusing in the first half of this study on the great Mesopotamian story of heroic companionship, the Epic of Gilgamesh.