In my introductory chapter I described the way in which the David and Jonathan greeting card that I was sent by my former student problematically presumes that there is a basic continuity between the means by which same-sex erotic and sexual interactions are conceptualized in the ancient Near Eastern world and the means by which these sorts of interactions are understood in ours. In this chapter, as we turn to look at the David and Jonathan stories in more detail, I wish to begin by considering another problematic presupposition this greeting card assumes, which might in shorthand be called historicity. More specifically, the greeting card’s text—by summarizing the biblical accounts of David and Jonathan and then immediately turning to speak of the time when “these events were recorded”—signals its assumptions that the tale it recounts actually happened and, more generally, that the biblical book of 1 Samuel, in which the stories of David and Jonathan occur, contains a basically accurate account of ancient Israelite history.1 Biblical specialists, however, are almost unanimously agreed that such an exceptionally positivistic assessment cannot be correct. Still, questions concerning the precise degree of historicity that underlies the biblical accounts of David remain unanswered in contemporary scholarship. Thus, while here, as opposed to my discussion in chapter 1, I might justifiably be accused of setting up my greeting card’s exceptional positivism as a straw man, the larger issue the card raises does turn out to require consideration.
Let me be as clear as I can about my position: in raising doubts about the historical reliability of 1 Samuel and, by extension, doubts about the historical reliability of the books that directly precede and succeed 1 Samuel in the biblical corpus (Joshua, Judges, 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings), I do not mean to ally myself with the community of biblical scholars who have undertaken to produce what are sometimes called revisionist histories of biblical Israel.2 As the noted archaeologist of ancient Israel William G. Dever has pointed out,3 these revisionist histories are not really histories at all, as the primary claim of their authors is that the Bible cannot in any sense be read as a historical account. For example, two of the leading exponents of the revisionist position, Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson, write in a jointly authored article, “the Bible is not history,”4 and Thompson elsewhere has stated, “we don’t find the Bible to be a historical record.”5 Rather, according to Lemche, Thompson, and other revisionists, the biblical story is only that—a story. Moreover, in the revisionist account the biblical story is from the point of view of its own chronology a very late one, written during the Persian or Hellenistic periods (the late sixth through the second centuries BCE) and not during the Iron Age period of the twelfth to sixth centuries BCE that the books of Joshua–2 Kings in which we are interested here purport to describe.
More specifically, the revisionists argue that the biblical account that runs from Joshua through 2 Kings is a literary and theological fiction written during the Persian or Hellenistic periods and conceived of by its authors as an attempt to create for their Jewish contemporaries an inspirational tale of a glorious Israelite nation of many centuries past. According to the revisionists, the conclusion that follows is that there was never any such thing as the tribal-era and monarchic-era Israel that the Bible locates in the twelfth to sixth centuries BCE and depicts in Joshua, Judges, 1–2 Samuel, and 1–2 Kings. Rather, in the revisionist understanding, the Bible’s portrayal of this Iron Age Israel is only an invention, an imaginary or even mythic conception projected backward in time by later tradition for ideological reasons.6 According, for example, to Lemche, “No matter how we twist the factual remains from ancient Palestine, we cannot have a biblical Israel that is at the same time the Israel of the Iron Age.”7 Thompson is blunter, “‘Biblical Israel was in its origin a Jewish [by which he means Hellenistic-era] concept,”8 and blunter still, “The Bible is not a history of anyone’s past.”9
For revisionist scholars, moreover, the tales the Bible tells of an early tenth-century BCE King David (ca. 1009–970 BCE), and the related stories of his eleventh-century BCE predecessor King Saul (ca. 1028–1009 BCE) and his mid-tenth-century BCE successor King Solomon (ca. 970–931 BCE), are prime exemplars of the larger literary fiction that they posit. Lemche and Thompson, for example, have stated, “The narratives about David in the Old Testament have little to do with history,”10 and Lemche has elsewhere claimed, “The David of the Bible, David the king, is not a historical figure.”11 Lemche and Thompson have in addition made clear that their claims regarding David’s nonhistoricity go far beyond the concessions that almost all biblical scholars would grant regarding the biblical stories’ propensities toward overstatement and hyperbole. Instead, they assert:12
Our argument is not that the Bible exaggerates the exploits of David, nor is it that Solomon was never as rich as the Bible makes him out to be. We are not dealing with issues of skepticism here. Rather, we are trying to argue that the Bible’s stories of Saul, David and Solomon are not about history at all.
Thompson elsewhere explains that he denies “the existence … of a united monarchy [under David and Solomon] in the tenth century [BCE]—for a number of reasons…. Judah [the purported territorial center of the Davidic monarchy] had almost no settlement at this time. It begins to be settled around 850 to 800. Jerusalem [the purported capital city of David and Solomon] is not settled at all until around 900. We don’t have a tenth-century Jerusalem…. Jerusalem becomes a really major town only after the destruction of [the major urban center] Lachish in 701 B.C.E.”13 In their jointly authored article, Lemche and Thompson similarly argue:14
In the history of Palestine we have presented, there is no room for a historical United Monarchy [that is, the monarchy of Saul, David, and Solomon], or for such kings as presented in the biblical stories of Saul, David, and Solomon. The early period in which the traditions have set their narrative is an imaginary world of long ago that never existed as such. In the real world of that time, for instance, only a few dozen villagers lived as farmers in the Judaean highlands. Timber, grazing land and steppe were all marginal possibilities. There could not have been a kingdom for any Saul or David to be king of, simply because there were not enough people.
But this is not how I or many of the revisionists’ critics would see it.15 Particularly crucial to consider in this regard are two fragments from an Aramaic stele discovered relatively recently at Tel Dan, in Israel’s far north.16 One of these (Fragment A) mentions the “house of David” (btdwd, or [when read with vowels] bêt dāwīd), presumably, that is, the royal house that reigned in Jerusalem during the ninth century BCE, at the time of the stele’s composition, and that traced its ancestry back to the tenth-century BCE King David.17 To be sure, the fact that a ninth-century BCE royal house traced its ancestry back to a tenth-century BCE King David cannot prove definitively that this tenth-century BCE David actually existed, but surely it indicates that a David tradition was extant in Israel well before the Persian or Hellenistic date that the revisionists propose for the beginnings of the David story. According to the revisionist account, however, the evidence of the Tel Dan stele is to be dismissed either as fraudulent (a forgery planted in the remains at Tel Dan by someone attempting to play a joke on the excavators)18 or as referring not to the “house of David” but to the “house of [a god named] Dôd.” This reading is achieved by adding vowels to the stele’s btdwd so that it reads as bêt-dôd rather than bêt dāwīd and then understanding this bêt-dôd to refer to a place or temple name, analogous to, say, the place and temple name bêt-’ēl, or Bethel (the “house of God” or “house of [the god named] El”).19
The revisionist argument concerning forgery is dismissed by most as patently ridiculous and even seems, as several scholars have pointed out, intended as a gratuitous insult directed against the excavation director at Tel Dan, the esteemed Avraham Biran.20 The latter argument, concerning the reading “house of [a god named] Dôd,” while at one point plausible, is now to be judged extremely unlikely, given that the second of the two Tel Dan fragments (Fragment B), found a year after the discovery of Fragment A, quite arguably contains, in line 7, the name Jehoram, son of Ahab, who reigned from ca. 849–843 BCE over the Northern Kingdom of Israel (that is, over the northern half of the originally united nation of Israel, which split into two separate kingdoms after the death of Solomon in ca. 931 BCE). This royal name is followed, moreover, in line 8, by the epithet “king of Israel” (meaning, again, king of the northern half of Israel’s divided monarchy), and then, still in line 8, by what seems to be the name of Ahaziah, son of Jehoram or Joram (these are two variations on the same name), who, according to the biblical account, was the king over Judah, the southern half of Israel’s divided kingdoms, during part of the time that Jehoram ruled in the North (Ahaziah ruled ca. 843 BCE). Such a concentration of royal referents in lines 7–8 virtually demands that the reference to btdwd that follows in line 9 be read as a referring to the royal “house of David” of which the southern King Ahaziah was a scion. Stated somewhat more simply: what Fragment B reveals about the overall royal content of the Tel Dan inscription effectively demonstrates that Fragment A’s reference to btdwd must be read as the “house of David.”21 The noted French epigrapher André Lemaire has in addition made a strong case recently for finding a reference to the “house of David” in the ninth-century BCE inscription of King Mesha of Moab.22 As above, of course, we must remember that this ninth-century BCE evidence can only definitively prove that, one hundred or so years after he supposedly lived, the royal dynasty established in Jerusalem traced its lineage back to a purported David. Still, the conclusion that most naturally follows from this datum, contrary to the revisionist position, is that there must in fact have been a David, who about a century prior to the mid-ninth century BCE established a royal house or dynasty with its seat in the southern or Judahite region of the land of Israel, most likely in Jerusalem.
Indeed, contrary again to the revisionist position, there must have been a tenth-century BCE Jerusalem. Granted, the evidence for this has proven difficult to muster, given that modern demographic and religious realities make the remains of ancient Jerusalem generally inaccessible to archaeologists. It is not clear, moreover, just how many remains from Iron Age Jerusalem could still be found even if archaeological excavation were possible. Jerusalem has been destroyed and rebuilt several times during the course of its millennia-long history, and many of the city’s rebuilders have thwarted those who would today uncover Jerusalem’s past by incorporating materials from older periods into their newer construction.23 In addition, architects responsible for monumental building projects in the Persian and Herodian periods (the late sixth through fourth centuries BCE and the late first century BCE and early first century CE) cleared away some older structures entirely in order to set the foundations of their new edifices on bedrock.24
Still, there exists a reasonable enough collection of tenth-century BCE materials from Jerusalem—walls,25 pottery, and also, perhaps, a distinctive stepped-stone structure26—to indicate that while the tenth-century BCE city was surely modest in scope (more on this below), it was nonetheless there. There must have been as well, despite the revisionist claims, a tenth-century BCE Judah, which is to say, a reasonably-sized community in the southern or Judahite half of the central Israelite hill country, rather than just the “few dozen villagers” Lemche and Thompson posit. In fact, by 1997 Thompson, at least, seems to have backed off from this minimalistic figure in favor of a slightly larger population estimate of circa two thousand,27 but he seems mistakenly to believe that this number, which he takes from the work of the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, represents the entire population of the Judaean hill country and not just, as Finkelstein would have it, the population of the Judaean highlands immediately surrounding Jerusalem.28 The larger region of Judah was far more substantially settled; Carol Meyers in fact speaks of a “population explosion in the Judean hills” in the period “from the late eleventh century well into the tenth century.” Meyers points out, moreover, that this “increase in population density was clearly not a localized Judean phenomenon,”29 and archaeologists now estimate that the tenth-century BCE population of the greater Israelite hill country region would have been at least sixty-five thousand and possibly as large as one hundred thousand.30 Within such a community there are surely “enough people,” contra the revisionist claim, “for [some] Saul or David to be king of.”
I would in addition maintain, contrary once more to the revisionists, that the standard scholarly consensus regarding the date of the biblical texts that tell the stories of David is correct. The revisionists, recall, suggest that these texts were written only during the Persian period (that is, during the late sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE) or even during the Hellenistic era of the third and second centuries BCE.31 The standard consensus, however, dates the accounts concerning David as they have come down to us, and the larger complex in which the Davidic materials are embedded (Joshua, Judges, 1–2 Samuel, and 1–2 Kings), to the end of the seventh century BCE or the beginning of the sixth.32 A late seventh- or early sixth-century BCE date for this corpus (which biblical specialists usually call the Deuteronomistic History, because of its writings’ close relationship to the book of Deuteronomy) has traditionally been argued for on textual grounds: because the Deuteronomistic History culminates by lauding the religious reforms of King Josiah, who reigned from ca. 640–609 BCE, scholars have argued that its various narratives came together—at least in a preliminary form—either during or immediately following Josiah’s reign. Certainly, this complex could not have been compiled earlier. And to most biblical scholars it has seemed unlikely, contrary to the revisionists, that it could have come into existence much later, as it reflects barely any knowledge of the calamitous events of the sixth century BCE. The text thus describes only the initial years after the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE and seems to know nothing about the difficulties encountered afterward, including those encountered fifty years later, when the members of the Judahite community who had been exiled to Babylon returned to their homeland and struggled to rebuild both their body politic and some of their culture’s core social institutions (in particular, the Jerusalem temple that the Babylonian army had destroyed).
Quite recently, moreover, Dever has sought to augment these textually-based arguments for the dating of the Deuteronomistic History with archaeological evidence, suggesting that the picture of Israelite life the Deuteronomistic texts present fits only in the period of ca. 1000–600 BCE and that the texts’ date of original compilation (although not necessarily the date of their final editing) must therefore lie within this period as well.33 Regarding, for example, the Deuteronomistic History’s description of the Jerusalem temple said to be built by Solomon in 1 Kings 6–8, Dever writes:34
Every detail of this lengthy description of the building’s plan, construction, and furnishings—even several rare and difficult technical terms in Hebrew—can now be fully illustrated by parallels of Canaanite and Phoenician temples elsewhere. It is rarely noted, however, that temples combining all the details in 1 Kings 6–8 are found in the tenth/ninth century B.C.E.—and only there.
Dever then goes on to note that “by the … Hellenistic period, the Jerusalem temple had been completely demolished and had long disappeared,” and, having made this observation, asks of the revisionists: is it reasonable to argue that the Bible’s detailed and archaeologically plausible description of a temple built by Solomon in the tenth century BCE was invented in a much later age when no such temples existed?35 His answer, obviously, is no: that instead the Deuteronomistic accounts must describe a temple to which the Deuteronomistic Historians were actually witness. These accounts must therefore have had their origins during the years prior to 586 BCE, when Solomon’s temple still stood. As I have already indicated, this is an answer with which I would agree.
Yet despite my efforts to affirm here my convictions, contrary to the revisionists, that there really was a tenth-century BCE David, that there really was a tenth-century BCE Jerusalem, that there really was a tenth-century BCE community living in Judah, and that the biblical accounts of David really do date from the Iron Age period of Israelite history, I do not wish to assert much more than that regarding the historicity of the biblical record with regard to David’s life. Certainly, like almost all biblical scholars, I would deny the historical accuracy of some of the more fantastic aspects of the David stories, such as the 1 Samuel 17 tale of David’s defeat of the ferocious Philistine warrior Goliath (parts of which, in any case, seem to have been borrowed from the story of the hero Elhanan’s defeat of this strapping foe in 2 Sam 21:19).36 Like an increasing number of my colleagues, moreover, I would deny the accuracy of the biblical accounts that accord to David a mighty empire that extended well beyond Israel’s traditional borders to encompass the lands of Edom, Moab, and Ammon in the east and Aramaean territories in the north reaching as far as Damascus. In addition, according to the biblical account, this mighty Davidic empire entered into favorable treaty arrangements with the Philistines on its west, with the Phoenician city of Sidon on the northern Levantine coast, and with the Syrian city of Hamath. No such reconstruction, however, is supported by what we know from the archaeological record or from other extrabiblical evidence.37
Indeed, the archaeological evidence cannot even support the Bible’s notion that a powerful Davidic monarchy existed within the borders of Israel. There is virtually no Davidic-era evidence, for example, of the sort of monumental architecture that we would expect to find in a mighty kingdom and surely no evidence of the sort of standardized monumental architecture that we do see somewhat later in Israelite history and that indicates the presence of a strong and centralized authority able to impose its will (or at least its design preferences!) across the land. There is minimal archaeological evidence as well for substantial urbanization during the time of David, and since urbanization tends to imply a degree of centralization as well as affluence, this again belies the Bible’s notion of David’s monarchy as a powerful and wealthy one.38 There is in particular minimal evidence for substantial urbanization in Davidic Jerusalem (although, as I have noted, there are definitely some Davidic-era remains), which yet again belies the biblical account and its conviction that David built a great city and a large palace there (see especially 2 Sam 5:9–12).39
All of which is to say: while I do wish to claim that there was a historical David, I do not want to argue that the Bible’s stories about David should be taken at anything close to face value. David was not the sort of powerful potentate the Bible makes him out to be, one who controlled a vast empire, who amassed significant wealth from the tribute collected from his vassals and the booty claimed during his conquests, and who established a major political and religious center in Jerusalem, complete with a magnificent palace and a significant entourage (well-trained military troops, civil officials, priestly authorities, and a harem). Rather, he was a small-scale chieftain who, during the early days of the process that led to Israelite state formation, seems to have gathered around him followers from some of Israel’s tribal communities, especially followers from his own tribal community of Judah and from the tribal communities of Benjamin and Ephraim located to Judah’s north. David seems also to have exercised some measure of control over territories that lay congruent to these tribes’ lands to the north, in the Galilee; to the east, in Transjordan; and to the south, in the Negev.40 All of this, in addition to certain bureaucratic structures and sacral-religious ideologies that David may have put in place, could well have laid the ground for the emergence of full-fledged Israelite statehood.41 Still, it is only later, in the middle decades of the tenth century BCE, that a true state under Solomon emerges (although again not, in my estimation, the extensive and glorious empire of the biblical account).42 To this extent we do need to accept the revisionists’ understanding of the David stories as literature.
But how are we to analyze this literary corpus? Among biblical scholars today the predominant methodological approach (or what is perhaps better described as a collection of related methodological approaches) is what is called narrative criticism, or sometimes the new literary criticism (to distinguish it from the older literary or source criticism that is most famously associated with the nineteenth-century German biblical scholar Julius Wellhausen). Proponents of this narrative or new literary criticism, heavily influenced by strategies of literary criticism developed by students of modern literature (especially students of modern European and American short stories and novels), deliberately focus “upon text rather than context,” upon “the response of the reader in determining the meaning and significance of the text” rather than on “the intention of the author and the original context of the writing.”43 These new literary critics, that is, understand biblical narratives as having “a literary integrity apart from circumstances relating to the compositional process [and] the historical reality behind the story.”44 Their concern is therefore to interpret “the existing text (in its ‘final form’) in terms primarily of its own story world, seen as replete with meaning, rather than understanding the text by attempting to reconstruct its sources and editorial history, its original setting and audience, and its author’s or editor’s intention in writing.”45
I, however, like biblical studies’ older literary or source critics, continue to find that the compositional process, the original context, and the author’s or editor’s intent (in as much as we can determine these things) are crucial to my understanding of a biblical text. With regard to my discussions of the David stories below this means, first, that I will take seriously the various sources for the David story that I believe are found within the Samuel materials and I will also take seriously the way representations of David and his relationship with Jonathan differ among these various sources (in much the same way, I would suggest, that I took seriously our various sources for the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh tradition—the Gilgamesh Epic’s Standard version, the Old Babylonian version, and the Epic’s Sumerian antecedents—and took seriously as well the ways in which portrayals of Gilgamesh and Enkidu varied among these corpora). Moreover, while I do not, as I have noted above, see the various Samuel stories about David as historically reliable, I do intend to take seriously the mindset and worldview of the Iron Age Israelite authors and editors who recounted these Samuel narratives and in addition the mindset and worldview of the Iron Age Israelite audience for whom these stories were intended (in much the same way, I would suggest, that I took seriously the mindset and worldview of the second- and first-millennium BCE Mesopotamian communities that generated our various Gilgamesh accounts). I am convinced, in fact, that the various storytellers of ancient Israel presented their narratives about David in a certain way and that the various redactors of the biblical text preserved certain versions of these storytellers’ tales because these accounts somehow made sense, or “worked,” within the context of the storytellers’ and redactors’ day. Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager have recently claimed, “It matters little whether the biblical accounts are true in the positivistic sense of some historians and biblical scholars. It is enough to know that the ancient Israelites believed them to be so. The stories must have passed some test of verisimilitude, that is, having the appearance of being true or real.”46 This is a statement with which I fully agree.
What this means more specifically regarding the part of the David stories that interests me most, the narratives concerning David’s interactions with Jonathan, is that while I will not necessarily maintain the historical David had the sort of interactions with a comrade Jonathan these narratives describe—indeed, I will not necessarily maintain that David knew a Jonathan, nor even that the biblical Jonathan existed—I do believe that any explanation I offer of the stories of David and Jonathan has to make sense within the conceptual world of ancient Israel; my explanation has to “fit,” that is, within the parameters of what we can know about ancient Israelite society. This is the same point I have insisted on already in chapter 1 with regard to the arguably homoeroticized language and images that occur within the David and Jonathan stories: these apparently homoeroticized language and images need to be analyzed according to the paradigms of sexual relations operative in the biblical world and not according to the terms in which we have categorized sexual interactions and identity in ours. Furthermore, as I have also already indicated in the prologue, I aim to produce an analysis that, after situating the David stories’ seeming homoeroticized language and images within their ancient Israelite context, explains how these motifs function within the Samuel narrative as a whole. Which is another way of saying that what I ultimately wish to ask of the David stories is the same overarching question I ask in my study of the Epic of Gilgamesh: how do the various elements of the David stories—in particular these stories’ apparent use of homoeroticized language and imagery in their depictions of David’s relationship with Jonathan—work within the Samuel tradition’s larger compositional framework and serve its overall narrative agenda?
My goal, therefore, in the next two chapters, is to consider the potentially eroticized and even sexualized language and imagery found in the David and Jonathan stories, using as much as possible an analysis that both takes seriously the narrative history, the narrative structure, and the narrative agenda of the Samuel tradition and that reflects as well the ancient Israelite mindset and worldview regarding sexual interactions, especially male-male erotic and sexual relations. I will begin, in the first section of chapter 7, by assembling the same sort of maximalist catalog of the homoeroticized language and imagery found in the David-Jonathan narratives that I gathered in the first section of chapter 3 regarding the Epic of Gilgamesh. Then, in the second section of chapter 7, I will describe the reservations some scholars have expressed about pursuing a homoeroticized interpretation of the David-Jonathan stories, just as I described in the second section of chapter 3 the reservations some scholars have advanced regarding a homoeroticized reading of the Epic of Gilgamesh. In particular, with regard to the David and Jonathan story, I will consider other Hebrew Bible passages that speak of erotic and sexual interactions between male partners and the disjunctions between the presentation of male-male sexual interactions in those passages, on the one hand, and the David-Jonathan traditions, on the other. As I will suggest, I find none of the explanations commentators have advanced to elucidate these disjunctions satisfactory, so, in chapter 8, I will turn to offer my own understanding of how the narrative structure and thematic imperatives of the Samuel materials might illuminate the ways in which arguably eroticized language and characterizations are used within the stories of David and Jonathan in service of the text’s overarching agenda.