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

It was the great Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen, writing in the late 1920s, who first argued that the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu should be understood as sexual in nature.¹ Jacobsen based this suggestion particularly on his interpretation of two of the Gilgamesh Epic’s opening scenes: 1. lines 66–76 of Tablet I of the Standard version, which describe how Gilgamesh, before Enkidu’s creation, was oppressing Uruk, and 2. lines 24–36 of col. i of the so-called Pennsylvania Tablet of the Old Babylonian version (called this because it was purchased by the University of Pennsylvania Museum in 1914), which quote Gilgamesh as he recounts to his mother the second of two dreams he has had that presage the coming of Enkidu, of an axe that he sees lying in the streets of Uruk (the first dream, in which Gilgamesh envisions something like a meteor that falls upon him from the sky, I will discuss further on in this chapter).² Jacobsen translates the initial of the two passages on which he focuses, from the Standard version’s Tablet I, as follows (the brackets in the text are indicated in Jacobsen’s translation; the materials found in parentheses are annotations that I have added):³

Gilgameš (Gilgamesh) does not leave the son to his father, day and night [

he is the shepherd of Uruk [

he is their shepherd and [

the strong, the magnificent, the skillful [

Gilgameš (Gilgamesh) does not leave the girl to [

the daughter of the warrior the bride of heroes [

In his comments on these lines, Jacobsen begins by questioning the conventional interpretation of the day, that Gilgamesh oppressed the sons and daughters of Uruk “by forcing the men to labour at the walls of Uruk and by abducting the young women to his harem.” He asks in particular why the coming of Enkidu should serve as a solution to these problems, given first that Enkidu is nowhere said to have interfered with Gilgamesh’s wall-building projects, meaning his coming should offer no relief to Uruk’s young men, and also given that Enkidu himself is said to have a voracious sexual appetite, meaning that his coming might more logically increase, rather than ease, the sufferings of Uruk’s young women. Because of these concerns, Jacobsen argues, “another explanation” is needed, which he finds in the second passage that he considers.⁴ Jacobsen renders this Old Babylonian text describing Gilgamesh’s axe dream as follows (with the exception of the parenthetical question mark found in the fourth line, which is original to Jacobsen’s translation, the materials in parentheses contain my glosses):⁵

He (Gilgamesh) lay down and saw another

dream and says to his mother:

“My mother, I have seen another one,

I have seen puzzling things (?); in the street of Uruk of the plazas

lay an axe (ḫaṣṣinnum), and

they gathered around it.

The axe (ḫaṣṣinnum), its forms were strange;

I saw it and rejoiced,

I loved (râmum) it and cohabited (ḫabābum)

with it, as if it were a woman (kīma aššatim),

I took it and placed it

at my side (ana aḫīya).”

In discussing this Old Babylonian axe-dream account, Jacobsen concentrates on the lines in which Gilgamesh envisions himself as “loving” (râmum) and “cohabiting” (ḫabābum) with the axe, which it is clear from other parts of the text metaphorically represents Enkidu, “as if it were a woman” (kīma aššatim). This, Jacobsen writes, “cannot mean anything but that homosexual intercourse is going to take place between Gilgameš [Gilgamesh] and the newcomer.” Jacobsen then points to the lines elsewhere in the Epic that describe Enkidu as “a being of enormous sexual vigor” (for example, the lines that describe Enkidu’s six days and seven nights of uninterrupted lovemaking with the prostitute Shamhat). When taken together, Jacobsen argues, these texts indicate that Gilgamesh’s behaviors that so oppressed Uruk must have been sexual in nature: that Gilgamesh—whose partially divine nature, according to Jacobsen, endowed him with both superhuman strength and superhuman virility—was seizing Uruk’s young men and also young women to satisfy his sexual desires. Enkidu, however, because of his own enormous sexual vigor, was able to meet all of Gilgamesh’s sexual needs, and through their “falling in love with each other,” Jacobsen writes, Uruk was “relieve[d] … of the distress which Gilgameš [Gilgamesh] inflicted upon it.”⁶

Only a few commentators have accepted all of the specifics of this “Enkidu as sexual substitute” analysis since Jacobsen first offered it almost seventy-five years ago,⁷ and indeed Jacobsen himself seems to have abandoned many of his earlier interpretation’s details in his later writings. For example, in an article he wrote in the mid-1980s (although it was not published until 1990, just a few years before his death), Jacobsen argues that according to the Old Babylonian version of the Epic, the people of Uruk may have found themselves suffering under Gilgamesh’s rule not because they were being sexually exploited but because “he played much too rough in the games of hockey, popular with the youth of Uruk, bruising them sorely.” In this same essay, moreover, Jacobsen suggests that according to the Epic’s Standard version, it is the building of the walls of Uruk that was the cause of both the young men’s and the young women’s complaints.⁸

Nevertheless, Jacobsen maintained throughout his long career that the Epic of Gilgamesh presumes a sexual relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu.⁹ Thus, in his 1976 book The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion, he characterizes Gilgamesh’s interactions with Enkidu as “a rejection of marriage,” and although in the main text of that volume Jacobsen refers to the substitute relationship that Gilgamesh enters into with Enkidu in seemingly nonsexual terms—a “boyhood friendship” engaged in by an immature Gilgamesh, who “like Barrie’s Peter Pan,” refuses to grow up—he appends a note in which he strongly intimates sexual congress. In this note Jacobsen quotes with approval a 1953 psychiatric text that claims preadolescents, such as Jacobsen understands Gilgamesh to represent, typically experience intimate, loving relationships with members of their own sex that are ultimately superseded, as the subject matures, by “a heterosexual relationship such as is characteristic of adolescence and adulthood.”¹⁰ Jacobsen thus suggests, in so many words, that Gilgamesh’s relationship with Enkidu is “only a phase.” Given that this was one of the most common canards used to describe homosexuality at the time The Treasures of Darkness was written, it seems Jacobsen means to imply that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were homosexual lovers. Moreover, in his 1990 article that I mentioned above, Jacobsen quite explicitly identifies Enkidu, at least in the Old Babylonian version of the Epic, as Gilgamesh’s “lover” and also writes of Enkidu as Gilgamesh’s “beloved,” “who takes the place of a young wife.”¹¹

Others have followed Jacobsen’s lead in order to point to additional language and imagery within both the Old Babylonian and Standard versions of the Epic that might suggest a sexual relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and a maximalist catalog of this sort of homoeroticized imagery, which is what I attempt in the pages that follow, turns out to be extraordinarily rich and full. As already anticipated by Jacobsen, the descriptions of Enkidu found in Gilgamesh’s prescient dreams will prove to be particularly significant, and not just the Old Babylonian axe-dream description on which Jacobsen focused. Equally important is the homoerotic language used by the Standard version in its account of the axe dream and the homoerotic language used by both the Old Babylonian and Standard versions in their accounts of the preceding meteor dream. Other texts of consequence include the wrestling scene in the Old Babylonian version (also partially preserved in the Standard version) in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu first encounter one another and the scene in the Standard version in which they are last together during their lifetimes. Further of note are the scene in Tablet VI of the Standard version in which Gilgamesh spurns the advances of the goddess Ishtar and the scene in the Old Babylonian account in which Gilgamesh rejects the advice of the alewife Siduri to abandon his futile quest for immortality in favor of the pleasures of human society and human sociability. In all I will discuss up to eleven potential examples of the Epic’s homoeroticized imagery that should be considered alongside the eroticized and sexualized imagery that Jacobsen located in the Old Babylonian axe-dream account. These eleven examples are

1. the lines in the meteor-and axe-dream passages in the Standard version that, like the Old Babylonian axe-dream account we have already examined, describe Gilgamesh as “loving” (râmu) and “caressing” (ḫabābu) the metaphorical Enkidu “like a wife” (kî aššate);

2. the Old Babylonian version’s meteor-dream account in which Gilgamesh is said to “embrace” (edērum) the metaphorical Enkidu;

3. the two wordplays kiṣru/kezru and ḫaṣṣinnu(m)/assinnu(m) found in the Standard version’s meteor-dream account and in the Old Babylonian and Standard versions’ axe-dream accounts;

4. the paronomastic reference to Enkidu as Gilgamesh’s “brother” (aḫum) found in the Old Babylonian axe-dream account, and the several descriptions of Gilgamesh and Enkidu as “brothers” found in the Standard version;

5. the wordplay zikru/zikaru/sekru found in the Standard version’s account of the creation of Enkidu;

6. various homoeroticized references that are a part of the wrestling-match account as found in the Old Babylonian version and also (in fragmentary form) in the Standard version, including

a. a possible reference to kissing;

b. portrayals of Gilgamesh and Enkidu as replacing women as the objects of each other’s (eroticized?) interest;

c. the possible use of euphemistic language referring to sexual coupling and genitalia;

7. the lines in the Standard version’s deathbed scene in which Gilgamesh covers the face of the dead Enkidu “like a bride” (kî kallati);

8. scenes in which Gilgamesh spurns women, including

a. the scene in Tablet VI of the Standard version in which Gilgamesh rejects Ishtar’s sexual advances;

b. the scene in the Old Babylonian version in which Gilgamesh rejects the alewife Siduri’s advice about marriage and family.

In the Standard version of the Epic, the description of Gilgamesh’s first prescient dream, of a meteor that represents Enkidu, employs much of the same eroticized and sexualized imagery as does the Old Babylonian version’s account of the axe dream that I have already discussed. Indeed, as we will see, the Standard version’s descriptions of both the meteor dream and axe dream use eroticized and sexualized language derived from the Old Babylonian axe-dream account, with Gilgamesh depicted in the Standard version as “loving” (râmu) the meteor as well as the axe “like a woman” or (more accurately) “like a wife” (kî aššate) and “caressing” it (which seems to be a better translation of Akkadian ḫabābu than Jacobsen’s “cohabiting” with it).¹² These dream accounts in the Standard version read as follows (Tablet I, lines 228–241, 256–264):

THE METEOR DREAM

Gilgamesh arose and recounted a dream, saying to his mother,

“Oh, my mother, I saw a dream this night.

The stars of heaven appeared to me;

(Something) like a meteor (kiṣru) of Anu (the god of the heavens within the Mesopotamian pantheon) kept falling upon me.

I (tried to) lift it, but (it was) too heavy for me;

I (tried to) turn it over, but I was not able to move it.

The land of Uruk was standing around it,

The land was gathered [around it].

Everyone was crowding up to it,

The young warriors were mobbed around it.

They were kissing its feet like (those of) an infant.

[I loved (râmu) it] like a wife (kî aššate), I caressed (ḫabābu) it.

[I lifted it], I laid it at [your] feet.

[And you were to make] it equal to me.”

THE AXE DREAM

[Gilgamesh says] to his mother,

“[My mother, I] have seen a second dream.

[In a street of Uruk-the-Sheepfold] an axe (ḫaṣṣinnu) was thrown down, and they were gathering around it,

[The land of Uruk] was standing around it.

[The land was gathered] around it,

[Everyone was crowding] up to it.

[I lifted it], I laid it at your feet.

[I loved (râmu) it] like a wife (kî aššate), I caressed (ḫabābu) it.

[And you] were to make it equal to me.”

Moreover, when Ninsun, Gilgamesh’s mother, responds by interpreting these dreams for her son, she says of the meteor (Tablet I, lines 244–249, 253):

“The stars of the heavens [appeared] to you;

[(Something) like a meteor (kiṣru) of] Anu kept falling upon you.

[You (tried to) lift it, but (it was) too] heavy for you;

[You (tried to) turn it over, but you were not] able to move it.

[You lifted it, you laid] it at my feet.

[And I will make] it equal to you.

…

[You will love (râmu) it like a wife (kî aššate)], you (will) caress (ḫabābu) it.”

“My son, the axe that you saw is a man,

You will love (râmu) it like a wife (kî aššate), you will caress (ḫabābu) it,

And I will make it equal to you.”

Four times in total, that is, the Standard version’s accounts of Gilgamesh’s two prescient dreams apparently use the same vocabulary that is found in the Old Babylonian axe-dream account of Gilgamesh’s “loving” (râmu) the objects of his dreams “like a wife” (kî aššate) and “caressing” (ḫabābu) them. I say “apparently,” however, for unfortunately, as the brackets in the above translations indicate, the Standard version text is fragmentary at both points in the meteor-dream account where the crucial verb râmu, “to love,” occurs, and it is also fragmentary at one of the two crucial points in the axe-dream account, when Gilgamesh recounts the axe dream to his mother. Nevertheless, because the reading “to love” is present at least once in the Standard version’s axe-dream passage (in Tablet I, line 268, when Ninsun offers her interpretation of the dream), and because it is present as well in the parallel language found in the Old Babylonian axe-dream account (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. i, line 33), commentators are almost unanimously agreed that it must be correct.¹³ Commentators are in addition almost unanimously agreed that, as Jacobsen originally suggested, the verb ḫabābu, “to caress,” can be understood as having sexual connotations.¹⁴ Indeed, ḫabābu definitely has sexual connotations in the only other passage in the Standard version in which it occurs, in Tablet I, lines 163–177, where it is used, twice (lines 170 and 176), to describe Enkidu’s six days and seven nights of intercourse with the prostitute Shamhat. It therefore seems logical—in fact, near mandatory—to conclude that ḫabābu has these same sexual connotations in the Standard version’s meteor- and axe-dream accounts, especially given that the meteor- and axe-dream accounts as found in the Standard version occur almost immediately subsequent to the Standard version’s description of Enkidu’s and Shamhat’s weeklong stint of lovemaking (the account of the week of lovemaking ends in Tablet I, line 178, and the description of the dreams begins only fifty lines later, in Tablet I, line 228).

This conclusion about the sexual connotations of ḫabābu in the Standard version’s meteor- and axe-dream passages suggests in turn (in fact, once more near mandates) that we advance an eroticized or, more specifically, a homoeroticized interpretation of the accounts’ associated language of “loving” (râmu) the metaphorical Enkidu “like a wife” (kî aššate). This interpretation is further promoted in the Standard version through the poem’s positioning of the two dream texts within the larger narrative. As I have just mentioned, the meteor- and axe-dream accounts as found in the Standard version occur almost immediately subsequent to that text’s description of the week Enkidu and Shamhat spent making love, as, shortly after their six days and seven nights of coupling ends, Shamhat tells Enkidu about Gilgamesh’s prescient dreams. Then, immediately upon the conclusion of her recital, the two begin making love again (Tablet I, lines 278–279):

[After] Shamhat had told Enkidu Gilgamesh’s dreams,

They made love (râmu) to one another.

Sex, in short, frames the Standard version’s dream accounts, suggesting the dreams, too, must be read in sexualized terms. Also of note is the use of the verb râmu, “to love,” in this second Shamhat-Enkidu lovemaking passage. We have already seen how the sexual connotations of the verb ḫabābu, “to caress,” as used in the account of Shamhat’s and Enkidu’s lovemaking that precedes the dream accounts suggest that ḫabābu should be understood in a sexual sense when used to refer to Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the subsequent dream passages. So too does the use of the verb râmu, “to love,” in the Shamhat-Enkidu lovemaking scene that immediately follows the reciting of Gilgamesh’s dreams suggest this same verb, when used by Gilgamesh to describe Enkidu in his two prescient dreams, should be taken as having a sexual meaning. Through juxtaposition, that is, the Standard version indicates that Gilgamesh’s “love” for Enkidu as forecast in the dream recitals of Tablet I, lines 228–276, will be much the same—and thus include the same sort of sexual relationship—that is a feature of the “love” of Enkidu and Shamhat as depicted in Tablet I, lines 278–279.¹⁵

The Old Babylonian version handles the narrative’s chronology somewhat differently than it is presented in the Standard version, but ultimately the Old Babylonian makes the same points as does the Standard version text regarding the generally sexualized context of the scene in which the recital of Gilgamesh’s prescient dreams is embedded and consequently the sexual connotations of the dream accounts. Indeed, the Old Babylonian version may make the latter of these two points even more blatantly than does the Standard version, by having Gilgamesh reveal his dreams to his mother at exactly the same time that Enkidu and Shamhat are engaging in their week of lovemaking (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. ii, lines 2–8):

While Gilgamesh relates the dream,

Enkidu sits before the prostitute.

They made love (râmum) to one another.

Enkidu forgot the place where he was born.

For six days and seven nights,

Enkidu was erect,

and he mated Shamhat.

The dreams in the Old Babylonian account are thus positioned in the text so as to suggest that the eroticized and sexualized relationship that Enkidu and Shamhat are in the midst of enjoying will be mirrored in the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu that is forecast in Gilgamesh’s dreams. As in the Standard version, moreover, the correspondence between the two relationships is made explicit through shared vocabulary, the verb râmum, “to love,” being used by the Old Babylonian version both in the passage I have just quoted that portrays Enkidu’s and Shamhat’s lovemaking and in the axe-dream account cited on p. 48 that describes the feelings Gilgamesh will have for the metaphorical Enkidu.¹⁶

As I have just suggested, the way in which Gilgamesh’s prescient dreams are positioned narratively in the Old Babylonian account, with Gilgamesh recounting them to his mother Ninsun in Uruk at precisely the same time that Enkidu and Shamhat are making love in the wilderness, serves to advance an erotic and sexual interpretation of these Old Babylonian dream texts. Still, it must be admitted that the Old Babylonian version’s description of the meteor dream—which is much more distinguished from the subsequent axe dream than are the meteor- and axe-dream accounts in the conflated Standard version—is not as explicitly sexual as is its axe-dream counterpart.¹⁷ Yet despite the fact that this Old Babylonian meteor-dream passage is not as obviously sexual as is the companion axe-dream account, it is not necessarily devoid of eroticized imagery. The passage reads (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. i, lines 1–14):

Gilgamesh arose, he revealed (his) dream;

He spoke to his mother:

“My mother, in my dream (literally, “in that of my night”),¹⁸

I became majestic, I walked about

In the midst of the young warriors.

The stars of the heavens heaped upon me,¹⁹

The [ ] of Anu fell on me.²⁰

I lifted it, it was too heavy for me,

I (tried) to move it, I was not able.

The land of Uruk was gathered around it,

The young warriors were kissing its feet.

I leaned my forehead,

They leaned against me.

I lifted it, I brought it to you.”

This passage then continues by describing Gilgamesh’s mother’s interpretation of this dream, and particularly significant for our purposes is that, in her explanation, Ninsun suggests Gilgamesh will “embrace” (edērum) the meteor or the metaphorical Enkidu (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. i, lines 22–23):

“You will embrace (edērum) it,

You will bring it/lead it forth (tarûm) to me.”

Now it may be that we should understand the embrace envisioned by Ninsun here merely as Gilgamesh’s putting his arms around the meteor to lift it and bring it (tarûm) to his mother, similar to the action Gilgamesh reports himself as performing when he describes leaning his forehead, apparently into the stone in order to pick it up, in the his recounting of the dream. However, the fact that the verb tarûm can mean “to lead (forth)” as well as “to bring” allows for the possibility that the meteorcum-Enkidu need not be picked up and carried to Gilgamesh’s mother but is able to convey itself into Ninsun’s presence. This in turn allows for the possibility that Gilgamesh’s embrace of this heavenly body is more affectionate or even erotic in nature than it is functional. Indeed, in the Standard version of the Epic, the verb “embrace” (edēru) is used only to describe how Gilgamesh and Enkidu hug one another in moments that are, if not specifically eroticized, at least highly emotionally charged. Thus, in Tablet II of the Standard version (line 153), Gilgamesh and Enkidu embrace as Gilgamesh attempts to comfort Enkidu when the latter grieves, perhaps over his lack of a father, mother, and other family (although the text is fragmentary at this point and consequently unclear).²¹ As this scene opens, Gilgamesh’s mother seems to be speaking (Tablet II, lines 145–153):

“Enkidu had no [father nor mother],

His hair hung loose [ ],

He was born on the steppe, no one [ ].”

Enkidu stood there, he heard [her words],

He became worried and [sank down ].

His eyes filled [with tears],

His arms went limp, his strength [turned to weakness].

They (Gilgamesh and Enkidu) seized one another [ ],

They embraced (edēru), their hands like [ ].

In the Standard version’s Tablet XII, line 85, the two embrace again, when the ghost of the dead Enkidu is released from the netherworld to be reunited with Gilgamesh. As this passage begins, the god Ea, whom Gilgamesh has beseeched, speaks to the divine Ugur. Elsewhere in Mesopotamian lore Ugur is understood to be the vizier of Nergal, the lord of the underworld, but here he probably represents Nergal himself.²² Ea commands Ugur to take the steps necessary to free Enkidu (Tablet XII, lines 78–85):

“O, young warrior Ugur [ ],

Now, a hole in the [netherworld you should open up],

So that the ghost [of Enkidu might go forth from the netherworld],

[So that he might tell] to his brother [Gilgamesh the ways of the netherworld].”

The young warrior Ugur [answered him and ].

Now, he opened up a hole in the netherworld,

The ghost of Enkidu went forth from the netherworld like a phantom.

They (Gilgamesh and Enkidu) embraced (edēru), and they kissed (našāqu).

To be sure, caution is advisable in assessing the significance of the use of edēru in both of these passages, first, because we cannot automatically assume that these two Standard version edēru texts can determine the meaning of edērum in the Old Babylonian meteor-dream account, given the millennium that stands between the Epic’s Old Babylonian and Standard versions; second, because the latter of the Standard version’s two edēru texts comes from Tablet XII, which, as I discussed in chapter 2, is only tenuously affiliated with the other eleven tablets of the Standard version tradition. Still, the parallels these passages offer suggest to me that we should probably understand Gilgamesh’s embrace of the metaphorical Enkidu in the Old Babylonian version of the meteor dream to have at least emotional, if not erotic connotations, an interpretation whose likelihood is greatly strengthened, moreover, once we recall the clearly erotic and even sexual connotations of the subsequent axe-dream account as found in the Old Babylonian version and also the larger erotic and sexual connotations of the Enkidu-Shamhat lovemaking scene during which the Old Babylonian dream recitations take place.

In fact, the larger erotic and sexual connotations of the passage in which the Old Babylonian dream recitations take place may suggest a reading in which the progression of the meteor dream as followed by the axe dream in the Old Babylonian signifies a relationship in which erotic courtship progresses to sexual consummation. According to such an account, Gilgamesh, when he first encounters the meteor/Enkidu in the Old Babylonian meteor dream, begins to express the attraction he feels, but in a relatively tentative way: through an embrace, and one that need not be understood erotically, either by us, the Epic’s audience, or by the characters who engage in it (lest the attraction between the two fizzle rather than take hold). Yet the attraction, it soon becomes clear, is quite potent, and so Gilgamesh brings/leads the meteor, or the metaphorical Enkidu, to his mother, just as offspring are said to bring new sweethearts to meet their parents elsewhere in the cultures of the ancient Near East: Zipporah, for example, brings her swain Moses to meet her father in Exod 2:20; both Rebekah, in Gen 24:28, and Rachel, in Gen 29:12, bring word of their suitors, Isaac and Jacob, to their parents’ households; and a poem from the Sumerian myths of Inanna (who in Akkadian tradition becomes Ishtar) somewhat similarly describes how Inanna’s paramour Dumuzi (Akkadian Tammuz) visits Inanna’s mother to petition her for permission to court her daughter.²³ This visit to Ninsun, according to the Old Babylonian meteor-dream account, goes well, as Gilgamesh’s mother affirms that the meteor/Enkidu is an appropriate match for her son (this becomes especially apparent once we realize that the adverb minde with which the mother begins her speech interpreting Gilgamesh’s meteor dream [Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet col. i, line 17] should be translated as “certainly,” “indeed,” or “for sure,” as opposed to its more usual meaning of “perhaps” or “possibly”: “certainly Gilgamesh,” Ninsun states, “one who is like you was born on the steppe”).²⁴ Gilgamesh is thus assured that he should go forward with his suit, and consequently, in the axe dream, he responds to the second appearance of an Enkidu icon with much more enthusiasm: he “rejoices” upon seeing the axe (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet col. i, line 32) and expresses his feelings for it more fully: “caressing” the metaphorical Enkidu, “loving” him “like a wife,” and placing him at his side.

Line 31 of col. i of the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet quotes Gilgamesh as saying to his mother regarding his first visioning of the axe, ḫaṣṣīnumma šani būnūšu, which is often translated (as, for example, in the Jacobsen rendition quoted above, p. 48), “As for the axe, strange was its appearance.” The verb šanûm used here, though, could just as easily mean “changed” as “strange,” and if this meaning is implied, or even alluded to in the poem, then we could argue that what has really changed here is Gilgamesh’s response to the objects of his dreams, his tentative reaction to the meteor—an embrace whose significance might seem to be only functional or, even if affectionate in nature, noncommittal—having been transformed, as Gilgamesh becomes surer about his feelings toward the metaphorical Enkidu, into unambiguous expressions of love.²⁵

Anne Draffkorn Kilmer has further drawn scholars’ attention to two terms found in the Standard version’s meteor-dream account and in the Standard and Old Babylonian versions’ axe-dream accounts that, like edērum in the Old Babylonian meteor-dream passage, may not initially seem erotic and/or sexual in nature but may eventually prove to have such connotations. These are kiṣru, which is used in the Standard version meteor-dream account to designate the meteor that Gilgamesh envisions falling from the sky,²⁶ and ḫaṣṣinnu(m), which is used in both the Old Babylonian and Standard version accounts of Gilgamesh’s axe dream to designate the axe that Gilgamesh imagines himself as seeing in Uruk’s streets. Kilmer suggests that both these words are used paronomastically, with the Standard version’s kiṣru, “meteor,” being a pun on the term kezru and the Old Babylonian and Standard versions’ ḫaṣṣinnu(m), “axe,” being a pun on the term assinnu(m).²⁷ The first of these paronomastic terms, kezru, literally means “a male with curled hair.”²⁸ It is only rarely attested, but its more common feminine analog, kezertu, “denotes in OB [Old Babylonian] a member of a class of women under the special protection of Ištar [Ishtar], often mentioned beside ḫarīmtu-women” (as, for example, in Tablet VI of the Standard version of the Gilgamesh Epic, line 161).²⁹ Because ḫarīmtu, moreover, means “prostitute,” and because Ishtar is the goddess who more generally has domain over all aspects of sexual behavior, it seems we should understand the character of the female kezertu, and by extension the male kezru, as being somehow sexualized in nature: “a male wearing his hair in a distinctive manner to suggest prostitution” is how Benjamin R. Foster puts it.³⁰ Such a sexualized connotation further suggests that the kiṣru/kezru wordplay is meant to indicate that the kiṣru, or meteor representing Enkidu that Gilgamesh envisions in the Standard version’s first dream account, is an object that, like a prostitute, is intended to entice Gilgamesh sexually.

The assinnu(m) is a male who is a part of the cultic entourage of Ishtar and thus someone who, through his associations with the goddess of sex and love, seems to have at least some eroticized aspects to his character.³¹ This again suggests that the ḫaṣṣinnu(m)/assinnu(m) pun found in Gilgamesh’s axe-dream visions, in both the Old Babylonian and Standard versions, is meant to portray the ḫaṣṣinnu(m), the axe or the metaphorical Enkidu that Gilgamesh imagines seeing in Uruk’s streets, as an object that, like an assinnu(m), is meant to arouse his erotic desires. Kilmer concludes, “The implication of the double pun is, of course, that the often suspected, much discussed but of late rejected sexual relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu is, after all, the correct interpretation.”³² Recall, however, that this “double pun,” as Kilmer describes it, is found only in the Standard version of the Epic, whereas in the Old Babylonian version the eroticized wordplay occurs only in the axe dream. This accords quite well with the reading of the Old Babylonian dream accounts that I have offered above, which suggests that the Old Babylonian meteor-dream passage employs only oblique erotic references, at best, in order to suggest an early, and quite tentative, stage in the Gilgamesh-Enkidu eroticized relationship; only after the attraction becomes clear do we find in the axe-dream text more explicitly erotic and sexual language—including, as Kilmer’s analysis would suggest, the ḫaṣṣinnu(m)/assinnu(m) wordplay that presents Enkidu as an object of Gilgamesh’s erotic interest.

Another possible wordplay of note for our purposes is found in the lines in the Old Babylonian axe-dream account that occur immediately after Gilgamesh’s descriptions of his “loving” the axe “like a wife” and his “caressing it.” In these, he tells his mother, elqēšūma aštakanšu ana aḫīya (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. i, lines 35–36), generally translated as “I took it (that is, the axe) and placed it at my side,” as, for example, in the translation of Jacobsen quoted on p. 48 above.³³ This reading understands aḫīya as the genitive form, with first-person possessive, of aḫum, “side.” But because Akkadian aḫum can in addition mean “brother,” and because the accusative suffix – šu that is appended to the verb leqûm, “to take,” can be translated as “him” as well as “it,” this passage might as plausibly be rendered, “I took him (that is, Enkidu) and made him my brother.”³⁴ This possibility is significant, because in ancient Near Eastern literature the term brother, and also sister, can sometimes be used euphemistically to refer to a beloved and/or to the object of one’s sexual desire. In the Canaanite Epic of Aqhat, for example, which dates from the mid-second millennium BCE and comes from the northern Levantine city-state of Ugarit, the goddess Anat seems sexually to proposition a human hero Aqhat by saying to him, “You are my brother, and I am [your sister]” (CAT 1.18.1.24).³⁵ The same eroticized language of brother and sister is well known from Egyptian love poetry and from the Hebrew Bible.³⁶ In the Hebrew Bible, for example, the son who is addressed in Prov 7:4–5 is advised to make Lady Wisdom his “sister” and “intimate friend,” rather than to consort with Wisdom’s antithesis, the “strange woman” or “adulteress.”

Other biblical instances of this sort of language are found in the Song of Songs, in which the young woman is repeatedly called by her lover “my sister, my bride” (Cant 4:9, 10, 12, 5:1) and once “my sister, my love” (Cant 5:2). She in turn refers to her paramour as “my brother” (Cant 8:1). Likewise, in the book of Tobit that is found in Roman Catholic Bibles and in the Greek canon, the marriage of Tobias and Sarah is blessed by her father Raguel with a formula strikingly similar to Anat’s words to Aqhat: “You are her brother and she is your sister” (Tob 7:11). Subsequently Tobias refers to his wife Sarah as “sister” (8:4); his father Tobit calls his wife Anna “my sister” (5:21); and Raguel calls his wife Edna “sister” as well (7:15). In addition, in the Roman and Greek Bibles’ Additions to Esther D:9 (or in the citation system used in Jerome’s Latin translation, Esther 15:9), Esther’s husband King Ahasuerus refers to himself as her “brother.”³⁷

In Mesopotamian tradition this euphemistic language of eroticized brotherhood can be found especially in Sumerian texts that are associated with the sacred marriage ritual, a rite that is only imperfectly understood by scholars but that is centered around descriptions of a sexual union between a king of one of Sumer’s city-states (often Gilgamesh’s fief of Uruk) and the goddess Inanna (Akkadian Ishtar), who seems to have been represented in the ritual by one of her priestesses.³⁸ In the epic tale of “Lugalbanda and the Thunderbird,” for example, the hero of the story, Lugalbanda, in a speech to Inanna/Ishtar, calls King Enmerkar of Uruk the “brother” of the goddess, presumably because Enmerkar as Uruk’s king was the sexual partner of one of the goddess’s priestesses in the sacred marriage rite:³⁹

Holy Lugalbanda answered her (saying:)

“Your brother—what did he say,

and what did he add thereunto?

Enmerkar, son of the sun god

what did he say,

and what did he add thereunto?”

Similarly, in a hymn associated with the sacred marriage ritual, the goddess Inanna/Ishtar sings of her “beloved” sexual partner, presumably some king, using the language of “brother.” The text reads as follows (the italics indicate points about which the translator is uncertain):⁴⁰

My beloved met me,

Took his pleasure of me, rejoiced together with me.

The brother brought me to his house

Made me lie on its … honey bed,

My precious sweet, having lain by my heart,

In unison, the “tongue-making” in unison,

My brother of fairest face made 50 times.

This same language of eroticized brotherhood is also found in several other sacred marriage hymns. For example, in a hymn called by one of its translators (Samuel Noah Kramer) “Lettuce Is My Hair,” a priestess, speaking for Inanna/Ishtar, sings of her hair, which has been specially coifed in anticipation of her enacting the sacred marriage ritual with her “brother,” King Shu-sin of Ur (ca. 2037–2029 BCE).⁴¹ The italics in the translation again indicate points about which the translator is uncertain:⁴²

My attendant arranges it,

The attendant (arranges) my hair which is lettuce, the most favored of plants.

The brother has called me into his life-giving gaze,

Shu-sin has called me to his refreshing …

Another sacred marriage hymn associated by Kramer with Ur’s King Shu-sin (although his name is not actually mentioned in the text) similarly records how the priestesses of Inanna/Ishtar call the king their “brother” as they sing to him in anticipation of the sacred marriage rite. The italics here indicate words that are untranslated from the Sumerian; the notes in parentheses are my additions:⁴³

“You are our brother, [you are our] …,

[You are] the … brother of the palace,

You are our ensi (the city’s priest-king) of the magur-boat,

You are our nubanda (a high palace official) of the chariot,

You are our … of the … chariot,

You are our city father and judge,

You are the son-in-law of our father,

Brother, you are the son-in-law of our father

You are our most prominent of the sons-in-law,

Our mother provides you with all that is good.”

This text is particularly significant because, toward its end, the priestesses speak simultaneously of the king as their “brother” and as the “son-in-law of our father.” This makes absolutely clear that the king as brother is one who has joined the family of the priestesses/goddess through the ritual of marriage.⁴⁴

Unfortunately, all these sacred marriage hymns come from Sumerian tradition, whereas there are no Akkadian examples of which I am aware in which this same language of eroticized brotherhood is used. This lack of Akkadian examples, however, may simply be due to the vagaries of preservation and discovery, as only a very few Akkadian love songs have come down to us through the ages (although there was clearly a significant compendium of such songs, as catalogs of love-song titles, one with at least fifty-five entries, are extant).⁴⁵ Note also that the Shu-sin sacred marriage hymns that I have just cited come from only a few decades before the Old Babylonian period of Akkadian history, which is the period to which the Gilgamesh Epic axe-dream text that may paronomastically refer to Enkidu as Gilgamesh’s brother dates. Chronologically speaking, therefore, it is certainly possible that the eroticized meaning of brother found in Sumerian sacred marriage hymns could have been known and used by the author(s) of the Old Babylonian axe-dream account. Still, without Akkadian examples, and given the ambiguities of the paronomastic language used in the Old Babylonian axe-dream text, we cannot say definitively whether the eroticized language of brother is in fact deployed by the Old Babylonian tradition in its axe-dream description of Enkidu. My own suspicion, however, is that we should not let the text’s ambiguities stymie us, but rather find ways to incorporate them into our interpretation, and so I see in this passage the same sort of double entendre that Kilmer locates in the punning language of kiṣru/kezru and ḫaṣṣinnu(m)/assinnu(m) in the Standard and Old Babylonian versions’ dream accounts and that may also be found in the twofold meanings of the terms edērum, “to embrace,” and tarûm, “to bring/lead (forth),” used in the Old Babylonian meteor-dream passage. According to such a reading, the reference to the axe Gilgamesh places at his side is simultaneously to be understood as Gilgamesh’s entering into a eroticized brotherhood with Enkidu.

Elsewhere, Enkidu and Gilgamesh are called brothers at several points in the Standard version of the Epic. For example, toward the end of Tablet VI of the Standard version, just after Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull of Heaven, they are said to be brothers who sit down together (ŠEŠ.MEŠ, which in logographic writing, in which cuneiform signs stand for full words, denotes aḫū, “brothers”). The passage reads (Tablet VI, lines 147–152):

After they had slain the Bull of Heaven, they extracted its heart;

Before Shamash [ ] they placed (it).

Stepping back from before Shamash, they prostrated themselves,

The brothers sat down together.

Gilgamesh likewise seems to be called Enkidu’s brother in a fragmentary passage found in Tablet XII of the Standard version (line 81, quoted above on p. 57). There may again be an evocation of the heroes’ brotherhood in line 45 of Tablet VIII of the Standard version, where Gilgamesh, lamenting over Enkidu’s death, refers to him as the “axe” at his side. Gilgamesh says (Tablet VIII, lines 41–48):

“Hear me, O young warriors, hear me!

Hear me, O elders of Uruk, hear me!

I will weep for Enkidu, my friend,

Like a wailing woman (lallaritu), I will wail bitterly.

The axe at my side (aḫu), in which my arm trusted,

The sword at my belt, the shield at my face,

My festive garment, my luxurious sash:

An evil fate arose and robbed me.”

While the other metaphorical images used of Enkidu in this passage (the sword, the shield, the festive garment, and the sash) appear to have no special significance, the description of Enkidu as an axe at Gilgamesh’s side seems a clear reference back to Gilgamesh’s second dream that envisions the coming of Enkidu using the metaphor of an axe. It thus might be seen as referring back to the double entendre of aḫum, “side,” and aḫum, “brother” that I have argued is present in the Old Babylonian description of that dream vision. As elsewhere, however, we must be clear that it is precarious to assume anything definitive about the relationship between the language of the Old Babylonian and the Standard versions, given the thousand years that separate these two texts.

It is in addition precarious to assume anything definitive regarding the language of brothers that is found in most translations of the opening scene of the Standard version’s Tablet VII, which describes the ominous dream Enkidu has during the night after he, Gilgamesh, and the other young men of Uruk have celebrated Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s victory over the Bull of Heaven. In this dream Enkidu envisions the great gods meeting and deciding that as punishment for the killing of the Bull, and also for the killing of Huwawa/Humbaba, the guardian of the Cedar Forest, Enkidu must die. As a bereft Enkidu reports this dream to Gilgamesh, he repeatedly calls him “my brother,” beginning his dream report, for example, by saying, “O my brother, the dream which [I saw] last night!” (line 3), and concluding by saying (lines 19–22):⁴⁶

“O my brother, you are indeed my dear brother. I will [not] be brought up again to my brother from the netherworld. I will take my seat with the shades. [I will cross] the threshold of [the dead], and I will never [see] my dear brother again with my eyes!”

Unfortunately, however, this part of the Epic is preserved for us only in a prose fragment written in Hittite, and it is thus impossible to say whether the eroticized language of brother was used in any Akkadian version of the text.

According to Stephanie M. Dalley, yet another wordplay that intimates the eroticized and even possibly sexualized nature of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship is found in the lines in the Standard version’s Tablet I that describe the gods’ decision to create Enkidu. In this scene Enkidu is twice described using the word zikru (lines 79 and 83), which Dalley suggests may allude paronomastically both to the terms zikaru/zikru, meaning “male”/“man,” and to the term sekru, the male analog of the sekretu, a woman of high rank often associated with the palace and the king’s harem.⁴⁷ Crucial to this proposal is the very unusual use of zikru in line 79 of Tablet I. Typically in Akkadian, including elsewhere in the Epic of Gilgamesh (for example, Tablet IV, line 192, Tablet VII, line 130, Tablet IX, line 139, Tablet XI, line 33), zikru means “word” or “utterance” as well as “order.” Consequently, most commentators presume that in Tablet I, line 83, when the birth goddess Aruru creates Enkidu zikru ša Anim, she creates Enkidu according to the “word” or “utterance” or “order” of the god Anu, the head of the pantheon who had decreed that a companion for Gilgamesh should be brought into being. Foster, for example, translates, “She [Aruru] conceived within her what Anu had commanded.”⁴⁸ But Tablet I, line 79, which speaks of how Aruru is to create Enkidu as zikiršu, “as his/its zikru,” is more difficult, and several interpreters assume that the pronoun here refers to Gilgamesh and that zikru must mean something like “counterpart,” “replica,” “equivalent,” or “equal.”⁴⁹ Thus Dalley renders the stanza in which line 79 falls as follows. The gods are speaking to the birth goddess:⁵⁰

“You, Aruru, you created [mankind (?)]!

Now create someone for him (zikiršu), to match (?) the ardour (?) of his energies!

Let them be regular rivals, and let Uruk be allowed peace!”

Still, as her many question marks indicate, Dalley considers much of this translation uncertain. What her analysis seems to suggest, though, is that the uncertainty is deliberate and is intended to indicate the ambiguous connotations of zikru: first, the term’s association with zikaru/zikru, “male”/“man,” and, second, its association with the sekru, which Dalley defines as “cult personnel of uncertain sexual affinities who were found particularly in Uruk, associated with Ishtar’s cult.”⁵¹ Enkidu as “his zikru” thereby seems described, according to Dalley’s reading, as a male and sexual counterpart for Gilgamesh, which is to say, as the male object of Gilgamesh’s erotic desire.

The degree to which we can find homoeroticized imagery in the Old Babylonian version account of the wrestling match in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu first encounter one another is unclear. According to some commentators, the fragmentary opening lines of the so-called Yale Tablet of the Old Babylonian version (called this because it is a part of the Yale University Babylonian Collection) describe how Gilgamesh and Enkidu kiss and become friends after their combat comes to an end (col. i, lines 19–20).⁵² They kiss as well in the Standard version, in Tablet XII, line 85, when the ghost of the dead Enkidu is released from the netherworld to return to Gilgamesh (quoted above on p. 57). However, as I have previously noted, the relevance of Tablet XII for our analysis of the Gilgamesh Epic is disputed, and there are also many scholars of the Epic who are less confident about understanding the Yale Tablet’s fragmentary opening lines as a part of the wrestling-match scene than are the commentators I have just mentioned. The significance of kissing within the ancient Near Eastern world, too, is a matter of some debate. In our culture such an act typically implies intimacy, and often eroticized intimacy. But while ancient Near Eastern kissing can similarly be interpreted as an indication of love or affection, it is often to be understood as an act of homage offered by an inferior to a superior (as in, for example, Tablet VI, line 15, Tablet VII, line 141, and Tablet VIII, line 85). Or, when exchanged between equals, it can signify respect (as, for instance, in 2 Sam 20:9).⁵³

Still, because they fit so well, it is tempting to read the Yale Tablet’s opening lines as being a part of the wrestling-match scene, and it is furthermore tempting to read both of the Old Babylonian and Standard version scenes in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu kiss as having at least some erotic connotations. I have already suggested concerning the Standard version’s Tablet XII passage, for example, that the context there, if not explicitly erotic, is at least highly emotionally charged, and thus Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s hugging and kissing upon being reunited after Enkidu’s descent into the netherworld need to be understood in some sense as affectionate. Especially noteworthy in this regard is the insistence of the Tablet XII text on reciprocal hugging and kissing, which at least precludes the possibility that the kiss and hug are expressions of homage; these acts must rather be understood as signifying respect or affection. As I have already indicated, the highly emotional context of the overall passage suggests to me that the latter is the correct interpretation, and I would likewise suggest that the kiss Gilgamesh and Enkidu seem to exchange in the Old Babylonian version after their wrestling match is finished should also be interpreted as somehow affectionate. Certainly, the fact that, as in Tablet XII, it is reciprocated (“They kissed and formed a friendship”; emphasis mine) means again that the kiss cannot be taken as an indication of obeisance.

The highly sexualized context of the larger passage of which the wrestling-match scene is a part may further suggest the kiss Gilgamesh and Enkidu seem to exchange at their combat’s end is one that goes beyond affection to have erotic connotations. I should quickly say, however, that the specific interpretation of the larger passage in which the wrestling match occurs is contested. Still, the basic parameters seem clear: Gilgamesh is getting ready to bed a woman as part of her marriage celebration.⁵⁴ This woman is understood by some as a priestess whom Gilgamesh, as king of Uruk, is required to bed according to the Mesopotamian tradition of sacred marriage that I have described above. But it seems more likely, according at least to the Old Babylonian tradition (which is much better preserved than the Standard version at this point), that the marriage about to be celebrated could be between any man and woman resident in Uruk and that Gilgamesh intends, as it is implied he regularly did, to claim some kingly privilege of bedding the bride on her wedding night before her new husband was allowed to do so (the so-called ius primae noctis or droit de cuissage).⁵⁵ The crucial lines read (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. iv, lines 26–30):

He (Gilgamesh) is first,

Then the husband is afterwards.

By the counsel of Anu, it is ordered:

With the cutting of his umbilical cord,

She was decreed for him.

Enkidu, while still living in the countryside, hears about this practice from a stranger en route to the festivities and resolves to put an end to it. He thus comes to Uruk and confronts Gilgamesh (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. vi, lines 8–10):

Enkidu obstructed the gate with his foot,

He did not give entrance to Gilgamesh.

They took hold of each other like a bull,

They bent.

They destroyed the doorpost,

The wall shook.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu

Took hold of each other,

Like a bull they bent.

They destroyed the doorpost,

The wall shook.

As the text continues, this wrestling match comes to an end, albeit somewhat abruptly, with Gilgamesh suddenly dropping to one knee (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. vi, lines 20–21). Interpreters have differed on what this gesture means: does it depict Gilgamesh as victorious, or does it indicate that Enkidu has prevailed, or does it signify that the contest is to be considered a stalemate?⁵⁶ Yet however we understand the outcome, what is important for our purposes at this point is that the confrontation apparently ends, according again to the fragmentary opening lines of the Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, with the two combatants’ kiss and with their becoming fast friends. The marriage festivities, and any claim Gilgamesh might make regarding the bridal bed, are almost instantly forgotten, as Gilgamesh immediately turns to focus exclusively on his interactions with Enkidu and especially on the heroic adventures that these two comrades undertake together.

Indeed, so immediate is this shift in Gilgamesh’s attentions that it becomes practically impossible not to suggest that the Epic’s wrestling scene represents some transfer of the narrative’s sexual imagery and energy and thus practically impossible not to suggest that the Epic means us to see Enkidu as replacing the young bride as the object of Gilgamesh’s eroticized interest. This is further suggested by the fact that as Enkidu enters Uruk to confront Gilgamesh he is arguably portrayed as a sexual provocateur. More specifically, according to line 20 of col. v of the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, he is said, upon entering Uruk, to be “correct” or “upright” in appearance.⁵⁷ The word used here for “upright” (išarum), however, also means “penis,” which I would once more propose to interpret in terms of a double entendre: as Enkidu comes into Uruk to engage Gilgamesh, he is imagined as magnificent in appearance and as sporting a magnificent erection.⁵⁸ Furthermore, according to the Standard version, Gilgamesh and Enkidu meet as if they were bride and groom, at the very door of the bīt emūti or marital chamber (Tablet II, line 93),⁵⁹ a detail that becomes particularly significant if we interpret their combat in terms of yet another double entendre, the two heroes’ grappling a “euphemistic description of a different sort of wrestling.”⁶⁰ Gwendolyn Leick, who makes this suggestion, further proposes that the reference to Enkidu using his foot to block the gate (in the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. vi, line 9) or the door of the wedding chamber (in the Standard version, Tablet II, line 91) may be of significance, given the well-known usage of feet as euphemistic for genitalia in, at least, the West Semitic world.⁶¹

It is in addition worthy of note that it is almost precisely at this point in the Epic (in line 3 of col. v of the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet), that Enkidu’s female paramour, the prostitute Shamhat, who has until this moment been the object of his quite fervid sexual interest, makes her last appearance as an actor in the text.⁶² Much like Gilgamesh, that is, Enkidu is represented within the context of the Epic’s wrestling scene as leaving behind a woman to whom he has previously been devoting his copious sexual attentions in order to focus exclusively thereafter on his interactions with a male counterpart. As Neal Walls writes, “In contrast to their previous exploitation of heterosexual relations, neither Gilgamesh nor Enkidu exhibits any desire for women after their meeting. This suggests that their erotic drives are fulfilled in each other.”⁶³ The transferal of Enkidu’s erotic interests seems to have been presaged, moreover, already at the time of Enkidu’s and Shamhat’s first meeting. In the Standard version, at least, the first words Shamhat is reported as speaking to Enkidu, immediately subsequent to their six days and seven nights of uninterrupted lovemaking, urge him to leave the wilderness for Uruk, there to encounter Gilgamesh. Enkidu, we are told, agreed, “knowing in his heart he should have a friend” (Tablet I, lines 196–197). “Knowing in his heart,” we might interpret the Standard version as suggesting, that he should have a companion who will satisfy him more than even the seemingly tireless Shamhat has been capable of, and thus knowing that he should transfer his attentions—including his eroticized attentions?—from the prostitute to Gilgamesh. This point seems to be stressed as well in the Old Babylonian version, although there it is presented somewhat differently, as that text’s description of Enkidu’s magnificent erection upon entering Uruk to engage Gilgamesh (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. v, line 20) can be interpreted as the replacement of and even as the successor to the magnificent erection Enkidu sustained for six days and seven nights while making love with Shamhat (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. ii, line 7). Note again Walls’s comments: “Enkidu’s physical lust for Shamhat’s body is merely his apprenticeship to desire before accepting his true vocation in loving Gilgamesh.”⁶⁴

Another highly eroticized scene in the Epic of Gilgamesh is the passage in Tablets VII and VIII in which Enkidu falls sick and dies and in which Gilgamesh grieves over his corpse. Particularly significant here is the description of how Gilgamesh covers the face of the dead Enkidu “like a bride” (Tablet VIII, lines 58–61):

He covered the face of his friend like a bride (kî kallati),⁶⁵

Like an eagle, he circled above him.

Like a lioness whose cubs are in a pit,

He paced to and fro, forwards and backwards.

Presumably, the reference here to Gilgamesh covering the dead Enkidu’s face alludes to the Mesopotamian tradition of placing a veil over a woman’s face when she was wed in order to mark her marital status.⁶⁶ The metaphor thus recalls Gilgamesh’s meteor and axe dreams, in the Standard version, and his axe dream, in the Old Babylonian version, that envision Enkidu as being “like a wife” to Gilgamesh. It thereby suggests, as do the events of the wrestling scene we have just examined, that Gilgamesh and Enkidu assume spouselike roles for one another. Indeed, when taken together, the wrestling and deathbed scenes suggest that Gilgamesh and Enkidu assume roles as spouselike companions for one another throughout the entire period of time that they spend together, from the moment they meet “until death do them part.” The portrayal found in the deathbed scene, moreover, imagines them as intensely devoted spouses, as is indicated by the depth of grief—and so the depth of loving attachment—that Gilgamesh expresses in his lament over his deceased comrade. He is said to mourn bitterly, “like a wailing woman” (lallaritu; Tablet VIII, line 44, quoted above on p. 65), or, as Kilmer interprets, “like a widow.”⁶⁷

Yet another scene that should be discussed in relation to the Epic’s homoerotic imagery is the episode in Tablet VI in which the goddess Ishtar approaches Gilgamesh after he has returned victorious from the campaign against Huwawa/Humbaba and has reclothed himself in his city finery. Ishtar makes a clear proposition of marriage to Gilgamesh (“You can be my husband, and I can be your wife”; line 9), which Gilgamesh vehemently and sarcastically rejects—because, some commentators have asked, he prefers his relationship with Enkidu?⁶⁸ Note in this regard that, as Tzvi Abusch points out, Gilgamesh’s refusal is otherwise strange. Despite Gilgamesh’s claims, the descriptions of how Ishtar mistreated her former lovers do not prove that she will treat Gilgamesh in the same way; furthermore, we would not necessarily expect that Gilgamesh, who until this point in the Epic has never hesitated to meet even the most fearsome of challenges head-on, would “imagine himself vulnerable to that which might harm a lesser being.” In fact, we might have predicted just the opposite, that Gilgamesh would “be tempted by the challenge that she [Ishtar] poses” and be tempted too by her offer of “status, power, wealth.” We might in addition have predicted that such a great hero, having just returned from defeating a mighty male monster, would follow up by bedding a woman.⁶⁹ Yet despite all this, Gilgamesh spurns the goddess. We might therefore contend,⁷⁰ as Walls writes, that this rejection is “indicative of homoerotic desire,” that “Gilgamesh’s denial of the goddess privileges masculine appeal and the desire for male companionship.”⁷¹

Quite striking in this respect is how often the verb “to love” (râmu)is used in the “rejection of Ishtar” passage, especially in Gilgamesh’s disdainful reply to Ishtar’s proposal, in which he enumerates all those she has “loved,” or who have “loved her,” yet whom she has scorned: Dumuzi (line 42), the allallu bird (line 48), the lion (line 51), the horse (line 53), the shepherd (line 58), Ishullanu, the gardener of Ishtar’s father, Anu (line 64), and, potentially, Gilgamesh himself (line 79). Notably, there are only two other points in the Epic where this verb “to love” is employed in such a concentrated fashion: in the two dream accounts of the Standard version, which repeatedly describe how Gilgamesh will love the metaphorical representations of Enkidu that he envisions (Tablet I, lines 239, 253, 263, and 268), and in Tablet X, in the speeches Gilgamesh makes to the alewife Siduri, the ferryman Urshanabi (earlier Sursunabu), and the flood hero Utnapishtim about his grief over losing Enkidu, “whom I loved” (Tablet X, lines 60, 61, 72, 73, 134, 135, 144, 233, 234, 245, and 246). It is tempting to juxtapose these three different assemblages of loving and thus to suggest that Enkidu, both before Gilgamesh ever met him and long after he died, was to Gilgamesh the love that Ishtar, despite her offer of marriage, would never be. Jacobsen similarly draws our attention to an account found in a fragmentary Old Babylonian text originally published in 1902 by Bruno Meissner (and hence usually called the Meissner Fragment), in which the alewife Siduri speaks to Gilgamesh when he encounters her on the shores of a cosmic sea, toward the end of his journey to see Utnapishtim.⁷² In this scene Siduri urges Gilgamesh to abandon his wanderings in order to return to Uruk and find contentment in a wife and children, counsel that Gilgamesh rejects, significantly to Jacobsen, “in terms of his attachment to Enkidu.” Jacobsen concludes, “Throughout the epic the relationship with Enkidu competes with, and replaces, marriage.”⁷³ Kilmer concurs: “Gilgamesh and Enkidu enjoyed a loving sexual relationship.”⁷⁴

Despite, however, the forceful claims advanced by scholars such as Jacobsen and Kilmer, and despite the collocation of data I have just rehearsed on which claims like Jacobsen’s and Kilmer’s depend, there are many interpreters of the Gilgamesh Epic, and perhaps even a majority, who argue that the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu should not be understood as sexual in nature. Substantial evidence, moreover, can be brought forward in support of these arguments. Most obvious, perhaps, is the fact that “the text of the epic as preserved nowhere portrays sexual contact as taking place between the two heroes.”⁷⁵ Furthermore, as I have already hinted, many of the more implicit references that suggest a sexualized relationship are not totally secure. Edērum, “to embrace,” may have no eroticized connotations in the Old Babylonian account of Gilgamesh’s meteor dream, and, in the term’s occurrences in Tablets II and XII of the Standard version, it may indicate only Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s strong emotional bond without implying erotic attraction. The two points in the epic tradition where Gilgamesh and Enkidu kiss may likewise indicate types of bonding other than sexual.

Wilfried G. Lambert has also argued, regarding the language of the Old Babylonian and Standard version dream accounts, that when “loving for sexual pleasure is meant, the Babylonian term is not ‘love a wife,’” aššatu(m), but “‘love a woman,’” sinništu(m). Thus, as Lambert sees it, “the emphasis of the dream[s] may be on the steadfastness of the love, rather than on [their] sexuality.” Furthermore Lambert contends that it is not necessarily the case that the symbolic meaning of the dreams, even if sexual, is to be taken literally.⁷⁶ Martti Nissinen has in addition called into question the sexualized interpretation Kilmer has offered of, especially, the ḫaṣṣinnu(m)/assinnu(m) pun found in Gilgamesh’s axe-dream vision. While neither denying the presence of the wordplay, nor denying the association of the assinnu(m) with the cult of Ishtar, the goddess of sex and love, Nissinen insists that the assinnu(m) should be described as asexual rather than eroticized in character, a eunuchlike individual who, in the words of one text, typically “fails to achieve a sexual climax during intercourse.”⁷⁷ This, as Nissinen writes, is hardly Enkidu’s “emphasized masculinity.”⁷⁸

It is further unclear whether the Epic’s descriptions of Gilgamesh and Enkidu as brothers can be taken as referring euphemistically to the two heroes as one another’s beloved and/or the object of one another’s sexual desire. As I have already noted, I cannot cite any parallels to the language of eroticized brotherhood that come from within Akkadian tradition, and while this may be the result only of the idiosyncrasies of preservation and discovery, it is nevertheless—given our generally quite large corpus of Akkadian manuscripts—a matter of some concern. Moreover, while the Sumerian, Ugaritic, and biblical examples that I cited in the first section of this chapter are helpful and suggestive,⁷⁹ in all of them the terms brother and also sister are used to refer to lovers and/or objects of sexual desire who are members of the opposite sex. Thus, in Sumerian sacred marriage texts, it is the goddess Inanna or her priestesses who speak of the king as brother, and in Ugaritic tradition, it is Anat who speaks in this way of the male Aqhat, whom she propositions. Likewise, in the biblical materials, it is the male and female lovers who call each other brother and sister in the Song of Songs; the husbands Tobias, Tobit, and Raguel who call their wives sister in the deuterocanonical book of Tobit; and another husband, King Ahasuerus, who refers to himself as his wife’s brother in the Additions to Esther.

Indeed, only one time in all of Sumerian, Ugaritic, and biblical tradition might the term brother be used to refer to one man as the object of another man’s erotic interest: this is in 2 Sam 1:26, when David refers to Jonathan as “my brother” (’āḥî). As I will discuss more thoroughly in chapter 7, the larger context in which this epithet is found—it is a part of the lament in which David compares Jonathan’s love for him to the love of women—may suggest that David’s description of Jonathan as his brother is to be taken as eroticized in nature. But the David and Jonathan story, as we will also see in chapter 7, is as shot through with the language of covenant bonding as it is with the language of erotic attraction, and, as Saul M. Olyan will argue in a forthcoming article, the term brother in 2 Sam 1:26 might well be understood as part of this covenant tradition: brother often means “covenant partner” in treaty texts of the West Semitic world.⁸⁰ We cannot, therefore, claim 2 Sam 1:26 as a secure parallel for the possible use of brother in a homoeroticized sense in the Gilgamesh Epic.

And then there is the problem that I would take to be the most significant for those who advocate that the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu should be understood as erotic or even sexual in nature: the dangers of “trying to map” our own sexual categories onto ancient texts “and onto the erotic and emotional patterns contained in them.”⁸¹ Certainly, the two most emphatic proponents of a sexualized interpretation of the Gilgamesh-Enkidu relationship, Kilmer and Jacobsen, must be faulted in this regard, as they both rather facilely assume that our conception of homosexuality—and the dichotomy it posits of homosexual versus heterosexual—is applicable across time and space and so applicable in the ancient Mesopotamian world. Jacobsen especially, in arguing that Gilgamesh has a relationship with Enkidu that “replaces marriage,” seems guilty of presuming that the peoples of the ancient Near East categorized sexual identity according to the either/or dichotomy used in modern Euro-American culture and thus shared our society’s sense that one is either heterosexual, and so in, or preferring to be in, an opposite-sex relationship such as marriage, or homosexual, and so in, or preferring to be in, a relationship with a partner of the same sex. Kilmer is perhaps more circumspect, but she does quote Jacobsen’s comments about Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship as an alternate to marriage with approval, which suggests that she, like Jacobsen, posits a Mesopotamian heterosexual-homosexual dichotomy analogous to what is found in contemporary Euro-American society.

However, as my discussions in chapter 1 should lead us to expect, our evidence, while somewhat sparse, clearly indicates that our cultural conceptions about heterosexuality and homosexuality do not hold in the ancient Mesopotamian context.⁸² Rather, as three texts from the Middle Assyrian Laws (ca. 1225 BCE) that speak of acts of sexual intercourse particularly demonstrate, the Mesopotamian system of categorizing and understanding same-sex (and opposite-sex) erotic and sexual interactions was very different from our own. The first (MAL A §18) describes the punishments that will be incurred by a man who falsely spreads rumors that accuse another man’s wife of having intercourse outside her marriage. The second (MAL A §19) describes similar punishments that will be incurred by a man who falsely spreads rumors claiming that another man, called his tappā’u, “comrade,” “colleague,” “companion,” or even “neighbor,” is having sex with men. The third (MAL A §20) describes what will happen to a man who actually does have sex with his male tappā’u or “comrade.” The punishment for the latter crime is particularly severe; the accused, if found guilty, will be used sexually and then castrated. This text reads:⁸³

§20 If a man has intercourse (nâku) with his comrade (tappāšu) and they prove the charges against him and find him guilty, they shall have intercourse (nâku) with him and they shall turn him into a eunuch.

Crucial to note here for our purposes is that MAL A §20, while it certainly understands that two men are involved in the proscribed sexual act, pronounces punishment for only one. It pronounces, moreover, an initial punishment (“they shall have intercourse with him”) that seems to follow the principle of lex talionis, the law of retribution that requires of the convicted that he suffer the same harm that he is understood to have done to another. The issue in MAL A §20, therefore, is not a condemnation of homosexuality as we generally understand it—sexual interactions between persons of the same sex who are motivated by mutual desire for one another—but a condemnation of a sexual act of penile penetration that one man, as understood by this law, has wrongly performed upon another.⁸⁴ The law, to be sure, is unclear about what exactly was wrong about the performance. Was the sexual act nonconsensual and so the accused is guilty of rape?⁸⁵ Or is the problem here that the accused, in penetrating a tappā’u or “comrade,” has penetrated a social equal rather than a social inferior, even though it may only be an inferior, as in the Greco-Roman world, that the Middle Assyrian Laws considered a legitimate object of a superior’s erotic desire?⁸⁶ Or, as Olyan and Ken Stone have argued for ancient Israel,⁸⁷ is any placing of a male in the sexually receptive position considered wrong in the Mesopotamian world, regardless of issues of consent and regardless of issues of social status?

The Israelite evidence, because it is roughly contemporaneous with the Middle Assyrian Laws and because it comes from another Semitic culture, suggests to me that the latter proposition is the case: that the placing of any man in the sexually receptive position is considered wrong in the Mesopotamian world.⁸⁸ Indeed, it is tempting to read the punishments prescribed by MAL A §20 in the light of Olyan’s and Stone’s analyses in order to suggest that both halves of the punishment the convicted suffers, being used sexually and castration, are to be understood as examples of the lex talionis. It is tempting, that is, to suggest first, that as Olyan, Stone, and also Phyllis A. Bird have shown for Israelite society,⁸⁹ Mesopotamian tradition believes it to be wrong to place any man in the receptive position in male-male sexual intercourse because it improperly feminizes him. Mesopotamian law, I would then suggest, avenges this improper feminization by requiring that the perpetrator be feminized himself, initially by being placed in the feminized or receptive position in sexual intercourse and then by being made womanlike through castration.

Important support for this thesis can be found in MAL A §20’s use of the verb nâku to describe the act of male-male coupling. As Lambert has pointed out, this verb, which is normally used in Akkadian to describe male-female intercourse, is gendered in its usage. Thus, while “in grammar, the verb has the theoretical possibility to express mutual action,” in actual texts “the man always does the act to the woman, never the other way around.”⁹⁰ As in the world of classical Athens that I described in chapter 1, that is, intercourse seems understood in Mesopotamia as a matter of use, the use an active (always male) partner makes of a passive (typically female) one. For a man to make use sexually of another male, it follows, is to treat him as if he were a woman, or to feminize him, and this is what I suggest MAL A §20 regards as improper and avenges, according to the lex talionis, by placing the perpetrator in the passive or female position and then by castrating him.

Still, whatever precise interpretation we adopt of MAL A §20, what is crucial to note for our purposes is the law’s inherent assumption that in the Mesopotamian worldview, male-male sex was necessarily defined in terms of an active-passive dichotomy that is perceived as inappropriate between two comrades or equals. Indeed, it seems that in Mesopotamian thought, as in the Greco-Roman world, the idea of any sexual union, whether same-sex or opposite-sex, between equals or peers was “virtually inconceivable.”⁹¹ As Nissinen writes, “neither homosexual acts nor heterosexual acts were considered as being done by two equals.”⁹² Equals, however, is the way the Epic of Gilgamesh repeatedly describes Gilgamesh and Enkidu.⁹³ According to most commentators, for example, the Old Babylonian and Standard version dream accounts state at no less than five different points that, once Enkidu is brought to her, Gilgamesh’s mother, Ninsun, will make him her son’s “equal” (šutamḫuru(m); see the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. ii, line 1, and, in the Standard version, Tablet I, lines 241, 249, 264, and 269).⁹⁴ Enkidu is also called Gilgamesh’s meḫrum, “equal,” “equivalent,” or “counterpart,” in the Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. v, line 22, after the two heroes actually meet, and Gilgamesh is similarly called Enkidu’s talimu, or “equal,” in Tablet VII, line 137, of the Standard version. They are further described in the Standard version as a “match” for one another (mašālu; Tablet I, line 80, Tablet II, line 32) and possibly even as “doubles” (šanānu; Tablet I, line 81).⁹⁵ Moreover, they are said at several points to be precisely the sort of comrade or colleague to each other (tappā’u, or tappû) of which MAL A §20 speaks (see Tablet I, lines 250 and 270, Tablet III, lines 4 and 9, Tablet IV, line 255, Tablet VII, line 136).

And it is not just language, but the Epic’s content, too, that presents Gilgamesh and Enkidu as equal to one another. To be sure, Gilgamesh is at one point said by Shamhat to have “a strength more mighty” than Enkidu’s (Tablet I, line 221); at another point, however, Enkidu is said by the huntsman whose traps he keeps dismantling to be “the mightiest in the land” (Tablet I, line 107).⁹⁶ Possibly, we as the Epic’s audience are to understand that one of these two speakers must be wrong, but more likely, as I suggest here, is that both are to be taken in some sense as correct and that Gilgamesh and Enkidu are thus to be taken as equally strong in respect to one another.⁹⁷ It also may be that the wrestling match in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu first encounter one another ends in a standstill, which would further suggest that the two heroes are equally matched in terms of their physical prowess (although, unfortunately the text is unclear).⁹⁸

Certainly, though, Gilgamesh and Enkidu seem equal partners in their two great adventures together, the struggles against Huwawa/Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. In the former episode Enkidu’s encouragement and counsel is critical. In fact, in the scenes that describe the two heroes’ preparations for this expedition, the counsel Enkidu will be able to give is identified, in both the Old Babylonian and Standard versions, as not only critical but essential to the enterprise’s success. Thus, in the Old Babylonian version, the elders with whom Gilgamesh consults about the proposed mission tell him not to trust in his own strength (Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, line 249). They say instead (Old Babylonian Yale Tablet, lines 251–256):

“Let Enkidu go in front.

He is aware of the way, he has traveled the road;

He knows the entrances to the forest,

(He knows) all of Huwawa’s tricks.

Enkidu will protect (his) friend,

His eyes see clearly; he will safeguard you.”

In the Standard version essentially the same advice, entrusting Gilgamesh to Enkidu’s care, is repeated, and there twice, once uttered by Uruk’s elders, as in the Old Babylonian version, and then offered a second time, perhaps by Uruk’s young warriors (although the passage is very fragmentary).⁹⁹ In addition, in the Standard version, when the two heroes finally come to the Cedar Forest, it is Enkidu, according to the Epic’s Tablet V, who actually gives the command to slay Huwawa/Humbaba, while Gilgamesh considers letting him live. Moreover, Huwawa/Humbaba is depicted as so cognizant of the fact that it is Enkidu’s decree that will determine his fate that he says to Enkidu, “(My) release lies with you” (emphasis mine). Huwawa/Humbaba then urges Enkidu to ask Gilgamesh to spare his life (Tablet V, lines 197–198).

In their latter confrontation with the Bull of Heaven, the two heroes likewise seem presented as comrades who, in terms of strength, complement one another as they work in tandem to kill the Bull, Enkidu immobilizing it from the rear while Gilgamesh drives in his knife from the front. Furthermore, according to the Hittite text at the beginning of Tablet VII, when the gods debate the appropriate punishment for the killing of these two fearsome creatures, they consider both Gilgamesh and Enkidu equally culpable, even though they ultimately decree that only one—Enkidu—must die. Lambert has further noted that artistic representations of Gilgamesh and Enkidu sometimes portray them as indistinguishable, citing in particular Mitanni and Nuzi seals that represent the two heroes identically in depicting their victory over Huwawa/Humbaba.¹⁰⁰

The people of Uruk perhaps best sum up all this evidence, and the way in which it points to the two characters’ fundamental equivalence, when they say about Enkidu (Old Babylonian Pennsylvania Tablet, col. v, lines 10–12, 21–22):

“He is similar to Gilgamesh in form,

Shorter in stature,

(But) stronger of bone

…

As for the godlike Gilgamesh,

An equal (meḫrum) is here for him.”

And the implication that follows for our purposes? It is, as I have already noted, that scholars such as Jacobsen and Kilmer must be wrong; that the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu cannot be understood as sexual in nature, given that our conception of “two men involved as equals in a voluntary homoerotic relationship … for mutual satisfaction” is fundamentally alien to the Mesopotamian mind.¹⁰¹

But how then are we to understand Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s interactions? Among those who have argued against a sexualized interpretation, the most common answer is that the relationship should be seen as a deeply bonded friendship. Nissinen, William G. Doty, and David M. Halperin are among those who characterize Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship in this way, Nissinen and Doty both describing it as one that is homosocial without being homoerotic (Nissinen’s preferred terminology) or homosexual (the terminology used by Doty). More specifically, Nissinen sees in the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu the kind of close friendship that he thinks often develops between men in cultures such as those of the ancient Near East, in which “men’s and women’s worlds are segregated.”¹⁰² Doty makes a somewhat similar point, arguing that our society so tends to assume that men’s closest relationships need to be with their wives, or at least with women with whom they are erotically and sexually involved, that it fails to value, or even recognize, close male-male friendships. But this, Doty argues, is what the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu represents: the Epic of Gilgamesh, in his words, “is the story of the ideally possible male bond”; it is “about masculine feelings and about expressing them”; it “indicates just how important male friendships are, and how significant to social well-being.”¹⁰³ Yet as this last comment might suggest, Doty’s ultimate goal is very different from Nissinen’s, for while Nissinen is primarily interested in what I called in my prologue a “documentary” approach to the Epic of Gilgamesh—using the Epic to illuminate the nature of social relations in the era it purports to describe—Doty’s interest relates predominantly to our culture, as he wishes to take the Epic’s characterization of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship as a “prospective symbol for what is possible within male friendships” today.¹⁰⁴

Halperin’s goal is different still: as a classicist, his primary interest is in discussing the relationship of the heroic comrades of Homer’s Iliad, Achilles and Patroclus, which he believes is best illuminated when “Achilles and Patroclus are compared to similar pairs of heroic warriors in … other texts from roughly the same period,” including Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Achilles’ and Patroclus’ interactions, Halperin argues, are, like Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s, best described in terms of friendship, although not friendship as some “universal social category” but “a specific cultural formation, a type of heroic friendship that is better captured by terms like comrade-in-arms, boon companions, and the like.”¹⁰⁵ In making this claim, Halperin cites the work of Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, who, like him, look to some specific forms of institutionalized friendship found in non-Western society—“blood brotherhood, trade friends, and bond friends”—in order to help illuminate what they understand to be the great male friendships of Western literature, including the friendships of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and Achilles and Patroclus. These they describe as “dyadic relationship[s]” characterized by “undying loyalty, devotion, and intense emotional gratification.”¹⁰⁶ Both Thomas van Nortwick and Charles R. Beye concur, describing the relationships of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and of Achilles and Patroclus in terms of “male bonding.”¹⁰⁷ Beye in particular insists “there is no sexual relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu.” “Ancient narrators,” he writes, “not silenced by the imperatives of a Judaeo-Christian culture, were explicit about sexuality and would have made clear any sexual relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The same holds true for Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad.”¹⁰⁸

Yet even as they insist that the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu should not be understood as sexual in nature, many of the commentators who argue for the “relationship as friendship” interpretation admit, as I have discussed in the first section of this chapter, that the two heroes’ interactions are described using a wealth of homoerotic imagery, and much more homoerotic imagery than we would necessarily expect to be used of a nonsexualized relationship, even a nonsexualized relationship as close and deeply bonded as Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s is said to be. Indeed, although parts of the evidence I advanced in the first section might be considered suspect, the presence of homoerotic overtones in some of the Epic’s descriptions of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship seems indisputable. For example, while the verb edērum, “to embrace,” need not have eroticized connotations when it is used in the Old Babylonian meteor-dream account, the overall tenor of the Old Babylonian and also the Standard version dream recitations still appears highly sexual. In both versions the dreams are recounted within the same scene during which Enkidu and Shamhat ardently make love; in both versions the verb râmu, “to love,” that Gilgamesh uses of the metaphorical Enkidu is used as well to describe Enkidu’s and Shamhat’s weeklong intercourse; and, in the Standard version, the verb ḫabābu, “to caress,” is likewise used both in the descriptions of Enkidu’s week of sexual interaction with Shamhat and Gilgamesh’s envisioned relations with Enkidu. That Gilgamesh, according to both versions, will love Enkidu “like a wife” may further imply sexual intercourse. As I noted above, this reading has been challenged only by Lambert,¹⁰⁹ and his argument has been effectively countered by Jerrold S. Cooper, who points out, first, that the verb ḫabābu used in conjunction with the “loving like a wife” passages, “when used for human activity always denotes sexual intercourse” (emphasis mine). Cooper further notes that all the other elements mentioned in the dream passages “are realized literally,” and so the references to lovemaking “cannot just be dismissed [as Lambert has suggested] as ‘symbolism.’”¹¹⁰

It is moreover the case that Nissinen, although he disputes Kilmer’s sexualized interpretation of the dream accounts’ ḫaṣṣinnu(m)/assinnu(m) wordplay, lets pass without challenge the eroticized and sexualized readings Kilmer and Dalley have offered of the kiṣru/kezru and zikru/zikaru/sekru puns, although he is clearly aware of them.¹¹¹ Presumably this is because Nissinen acknowledges these puns’ sexualized connotations. Nissinen further admits that “erotic associations” are suggested by the text’s descriptions of Gilgamesh declining Ishtar’s proposal of marriage, which “appears as an alternative to Gilgameš’s [Gilgamesh’s] relationship with Enkidu,” and by Gilgamesh’s covering the dead Enkidu’s face “like a bride.” Even as Nissinen insists, in other words, that the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu “exemplifies less a homoerotic than a homosocial type of bonding,” he still grants that “the relationship between Gilgameš [Gilgamesh] and Enkidu is described as most intimate” and does have a “homoerotic aspect.”¹¹²

Likewise, Foster, even while claiming that the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu “has no sexual basis at all,”¹¹³ appears to acknowledge that erotic and sexual imagery is used, especially early on in the Epic, to describe Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s interactions: he cites articles by William L. Moran and by Cooper, for example, that indicate that the verb ḫabābu, “to caress,” should be understood in a sexual sense.¹¹⁴ Leick somewhat similarly, despite proposing there is a “sublimation of erotic energy” when Gilgamesh and Enkidu meet and that they “transcend sensuality” as they go off to engage in their first great adventure, the fight against Huwawa/Humbaba, speaks of Enkidu’s “virility,” of Gilgamesh’s “unabated” vigor and “boundless” libido, and even of a possible last night of “sexual passion” between the two heroes before Enkidu is decreed for death. She writes as well of “the strong erotic feelings” that both the meteor and the axe of which he dreams arouse in Gilgamesh, and, as I have mentioned above, Leick also identifies several sexualized euphemisms that may be present in the wrestling-match scene: the fact that the combat itself “could be seen as a euphemistic description of a different sort of wrestling” and the potentially euphemistic references to “the ‘foot’” with which Enkidu blocks Gilgamesh’s way and the “sudden ‘weakness’ that gives way to tenderness.” “Love and erotic attraction play a significant part,” Leick concludes, in describing Enkidu’s role as a match for Gilgamesh, even though she maintains Enkidu’s “destiny to complement Gilgameš [Gilgamesh] … is not directed towards … sensual fulfillment in the arms of his friend.”¹¹⁵

Halperin, too, although beginning his essay on the ancient world’s heroic relationships by deriding the “insidious temptation to sexualize the erotics of male friendship,” allows in this same piece that Gilgamesh’s affections for Enkidu are “described in terms appropriate for relations … with objects of sexual desire.” He cites specifically the descriptions of Gilgamesh “loving” Enkidu “like a wife” and “caressing” him in the various Old Babylonian and Standard version dream accounts and Gilgamesh mourning over Enkidu “like a widow” and veiling his corpse “as if it were a bride.”¹¹⁶ Even the circumspect A. Leo Oppenheim concedes, “it can hardly be denied that an erotic interest is permitted to affect the friendship of the two heroes of the epic.”¹¹⁷

In fact, among them, the various commentators who argue for a non-sexualized interpretation of the Gilgamesh-Enkidu relationship nevertheless affirm—at least in part—six of the eleven potential examples of the Epic’s homoeroticized imagery that I explored in the previous section of this chapter: 1. the lines in the Old Babylonian and Standard version dream accounts that describe Gilgamesh as “caressing” (ḫabābu) and “loving” (râmu) the metaphorical Enkidu “like a wife” (kî aššate); 2. the wordplay kiṣru/kezru found in the Standard version’s meteor-dream account; 3. the wordplay zikru/zikaru/sekru found in the Standard version’s account of the creation of Enkidu; 4. various euphemistic references to sexual intercourse that are found in the wrestling-match scene in the Old Babylonian tradition (and, in fragmentary form, in the Standard version); 5. the lines in the Standard version’s deathbed scene in which Gilgamesh covers the face of the dead Enkidu “like a bride” and then mourns like a bereaved spouse; and 6. the scene in Tablet VI of the Standard version in which Gilgamesh rejects Ishtar’s advances.

None of the various commentators, moreover, who have argued for a nonsexualized interpretation of the Gilgamesh-Enkidu relationship has been able to venture what I find a satisfactory explanation for this homoerotic imagery that they all admit is found, at least to some degree, in the epic tradition. Halperin, for example, accounts for the Epic’s homoeroticized and sexualized imagery by proposing that friendship generally, and more specifically the type of heroic friendship he believes is manifest by Gilgamesh and Enkidu, is, in Halperin’s words, an “anomalous relationship,” one that “exists outside the more thoroughly codified social networks formed by kinship and sexual ties,” at least in most Western cultures and, Halperin suggests, in the ancient Near East as well.¹¹⁸ Consequently, he proposes, the narrators of the Epic of Gilgamesh must appeal to the language of the more established “conjugal relations and kinship relations in order to define, to make familiar, and to situate (both socially and emotionally) the central friendship they wish to explore.”¹¹⁹ According to Halperin, that is, any erotic and sexual imagery found in the Gilgamesh Epic is invoked only to help represent a noneroticized and nonsexual friendship for which there is otherwise no descriptive imagery available. He argues too that the Epic’s representation of the Gilgamesh-Enkidu friendship is meant to “image,” as he puts it “the larger bonds of human sociality,”¹²⁰ “Enkidu’s friendship afford[ing] Gilgamesh a proleptic taste of the pleasures of human sociality, including marriage and paternity, with which he will be invited to console himself by the ale-wife [Siduri] after Enkidu’s death.”¹²¹

Yet, as Walls points out, the specifics of this “Enkidu’s friendship as proleptic” interpretation fail in respect to, at least, the Standard version of the Gilgamesh Epic, in which the speech by Siduri that Halperin takes to be so crucial is omitted. Walls further suggests, contra Halperin, that, even in the Standard version, Gilgamesh’s relationship with Enkidu “competes with, rather than points toward, responsibility to family and society.”¹²² It in addition seems to me that Halperin’s more general argument, that the epic tradition is forced to use the more familiar language of sex, and also kinship, to describe the otherwise anomalous relationship of friendship, could just as easily go the other way, as it appears to be only Halperin’s intuition that friendship is the more appropriate term for categorizing Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship that leads him to read the Epic’s eroticized and sexualized references as metaphorical rather than actual. An interpreter with a different intuition, however (a Jacobsen, say, or a Kilmer), could just as easily argue for a literal reading as opposed to symbolic. One has to raise with Halperin as well, I believe, the question of reception, for even if we were to grant that Halperin correctly describes Gilgamesh’s ancient narrators as using the language of sexual relations to explore a friendship relationship they otherwise lacked the words to depict, can we assume these narrators’ ancient audiences would have grasped this rather subtle point and understood that the text’s eroticized and sexualized language and imagery were directed toward promoting only a construction of heroic friendship? Or would they more likely have heard multiple instances of language and imagery that suggested to them actual erotic and sexual interactions? Or, at a minimum, would they have heard language and imagery that suggested ambiguity, erotic and sexual interplay even within Halperin’s proposed context of friendship?

I also find myself unpersuaded by Nissinen’s explanation for the text’s use of eroticized language despite the fact that, according to Nissinen, the Gilgamesh-Enkidu relationship is not to be read in sexual terms. Nissinen follows Leick in identifying the central ideological concern of the Gilgamesh Epic as a critical examination of “the traditional values of the Sumerian city, as the embodiment of civilization.”¹²³ For both Nissinen and Leick, moreover, the Epic’s descriptions of the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu work in service of this critical examination by juxtaposing the “lavish and sex-hungry city culture,” which is represented in this interpretation, at least initially, by Gilgamesh, with its alternative, the “wild and ascetic” rural world, which is represented by Enkidu.¹²⁴ Both Nissinen and Leick further agree that the result of the Epic’s juxtaposition of these two antithetical models is a rejection of the sexually insatiable culture that urbanization represents in favor of a rural aesthetic that “transcends sexuality”;¹²⁵ this is symbolized, at the end of the Epic, by the transformed Gilgamesh, who has left behind the city but, more important, has left behind the reckless sexual expressions earlier manifested by his urban self: his “rend[ing of] young men from their fathers and young women from their husbands” in Tablet I and his “act[ing] on his right to sleep with the bride on the wedding night before the groom does so” in Tablet II.¹²⁶ These are replaced, according to Nissinen (footnoting Leick), by “an accentuated masculine asceticism.”¹²⁷

Nissinen then argues that the erotic imagery that is used to describe the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu—in, for example, the Standard version’s accounts of the meteor and axe dreams; in Gilgamesh’s rejection of Ishtar, in favor of, as Nissinen sees it, his friendship with Enkidu; and in Gilgamesh’s covering of Enkidu “like a bride” after his death—is central to the Epic’s argument about its preference for the rural aesthetic over the urban, in that the eroticism serves “as the impetus to the transformation which leads first from savage sexual behavior [i.e., from the urban] to mutual love, and finally away from physical sex [i.e., to the rural].” More specifically, he writes:¹²⁸

At the beginning, there is plenty of sex in the lives of Gilgameš [Gilgamesh] and Enkidu, but this lifestyle is presented as primitive and reckless. Already the dream of Gilgameš [Gilgamesh] brings a new, formerly unknown tone to his sexual fantasies: loving tenderness. As the story proceeds, the relationship between Gilgameš [Gilgamesh] and Enkidu deepens and, simultaneously, the sexual passions seem to subside to the point that one can speak of a ‘spiritual’ love between the two men.

As I have already indicated, however, this analysis, both in its general claims and its specific analysis of the Epic’s eroticism, strikes me as problematic. In terms of its general claims I find it problematic to suggest that the Epic intends to call into question the “values of the Sumerian city, as the embodiment of civilization.”¹²⁹ Along with most commentators, I would have said just the opposite: that the Epic intends to celebrate the “advantages of civilized life.”¹³⁰ Both Nissinen and Leick, indeed, are curiously silent about the end of the Standard version’s Tablet XI and its description of Gilgamesh’s return to the city of Uruk and his finding of “peace” (pašāḫu; Tablet I, line 7) within this urban environment. He finds peace there, moreover, precisely because of the great physical monuments of urbanization that are sited in Uruk’s midst (its walls and its Ishtar temple).¹³¹ I further find it odd to describe the countryside as the representative site of asceticism, given that some of the most fervent sexual activity of the Epic—Enkidu’s six days and seven nights of coupling with Shamhat—takes place there. As for Nissinen’s specific analysis of the Epic’s homoerotic imagery, I would ask why eroticism, of all things, would function in the way he describes, as the impetus that moves the action away “from savage sexual behavior” to, ultimately, an end of sexual passion. More logically I might have expected just the opposite: that the erotic would facilitate sexual intimacy, or at least a certain kind of sexual intimacy, not preclude it.¹³²

But an interpretation of the Gilgamesh Epic that looks toward sexual intimacy brings us immediately back to what I described above as the problem I would see as the most significant for those who would advocate an eroticized or sexualized interpretation of the Epic: how can a text that depicts the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu in terms that all commentators admit are, at least to some degree, homoerotic, also be a text in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu are represented as equals, given that an egalitarian sexual relationship is not conceivable within the cultural context in which the Gilgamesh Epic was generated? Yet what might happen if we were to turn this dilemma on its head, so that, rather than letting ourselves by stymied by the Epic’s failure to conform to the ways in which we would expect homoerotic imagery to be deployed in Mesopotamian tradition, we were to embrace the Epic’s non-normativity and ask ourselves whether there are situations in which its eroticized and sexualized language and images, although they seem so inappropriate within the Mesopotamian context, might in fact be acceptable and even expected? My answer to this question, as I will discuss in the chapter that follows, is yes: that in the work that has been done by anthropologists of religion on the phenomenon known as rites of passage, and more specifically in the work that has been done on the use of the rites-of-passage structure within religious narrative, we can find a compelling explanation for the Gilgamesh Epic’s use of homoerotic imagery.