At least a thousand years separate the stories of the ancient Mesopotamian King Gilgamesh and the ancient Israelite King David, or at least a thousand years separate the earliest forms of the stories of Gilgamesh and David that have come down to us.1 At least a thousand miles, moreover, separate Gilgamesh’s ancient city-state fiefdom of Uruk and David’s ancient capital city of Jerusalem, or at least a thousand miles separated these two cities for any traveler in antiquity, who could hardly journey as the crow flies, across the Arabian desert, but instead had to follow the more roundabout route that tracked the waterways of the Orontes and Euphrates Rivers. Everything we know about the historical Gilgamesh in addition suggests that Gilgamesh was of Sumerian stock and not of the Semitic ethnos of which David was a part.
Nevertheless, scholars have frequently been drawn to compare these two great kings’ tales,2 for despite the fact that the earliest forms of the Gilgamesh and David stories that have come down to us are separated by at least a thousand years, the final and most elaborate versions of these narratives—and the ones with which students of ancient Mesopotamian and Israelite literature are most familiar today—are basically contemporaneous, dating from the seventh and sixth centuries BCE.3 It is also the case that, despite the distances that separated them, the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia and the peoples of ancient Israel were closely associated with one another during the period in which the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of David came into their final forms; indeed, the ancient Mesopotamian empires of Assyria and Babylonia conquered and established themselves as overlords of the ancient Israelite Northern and Southern Kingdoms (Israel and Judah) in the eighth through the sixth centuries BCE. Furthermore, whatever we might claim regarding the historical Gilgamesh’s Sumerian origins, the ancient Mesopotamian poem that recounts his tale is a Semitic composition, the creation of the Akkadian people who supplanted the Sumerians of southern Mesopotamia in the late third and early second millennia BCE.
Kings Gilgamesh and David are also both celebrated in their stories as particularly valiant warriors, in fact, as warriors whose heroic abilities are really larger than life. Gilgamesh is lauded in his Epic as “the greatest among kings,” whose bravery and might surpass any other’s;4 thus he is able to kill fearsome monsters that the Epic implies would otherwise never have been defeated. David, likewise, is portrayed as an extraordinarily powerful combatant, said to have killed tens of thousands in battle before he even assumes his throne, while to Saul, who was king at the time and so more plausibly would have been represented as David’s superior, is ascribed the killing of only thousands. Similarly, in the descriptions of the wars he undertakes after he becomes king, David is said to triumph over a phenomenal number of enemy soldiers, killing twenty-two thousand from the troops of the Aramaeans of Damascus and taking another twenty-thousand soldiers and seventeen hundred horsemen from the Aramaean state of Zobah. David furthermore, like Gilgamesh, is able to defeat a particularly fearsome foe that no others had even dared to approach: the enormous Philistine champion Goliath.5
Gilgamesh and David are, in addition, both depicted by the ancient world’s storytellers as wanderer kings, kings, that is, who are separated from their royal fiefdoms (or, in David’s case, from his royal fiefdom to be) for long periods while they journey in the wilderness. As W. T. H. Jackson has pointed out, this is a relatively distinctive feature in the traditional literatures of, at least, Western cultures; more typically, in the Western literary corpus, the king is a sedentary figure who stays at home, while nonroyal heroes go forth from the royal court to undertake great adventures (as in, for example, the British stories of King Arthur, who resides in Camelot while the knights of his Round Table ride forth to act on his behalf).6 Another feature also relatively distinctive in the stories of both Gilgamesh and David is the fact that each of these hero-kings has a particularly close relationship with a heroic companion, Gilgamesh with a comrade, Enkidu, who was specially created for Gilgamesh by the gods, and David with Jonathan, the son of his royal predecessor, King Saul. Enkidu and Jonathan, moreover, both die tragic and untimely deaths, and Gilgamesh and David, both devastated by these losses, lament them bitterly. The terms of these lament are strikingly similar. Toward the end of the Epic of Gilgamesh Gilgamesh bewails the death of Enkidu by describing him as “my friend, whom I loved dearly.”7 Similarly, toward the end of the narratives that describe his ascent to the combined throne of Israel and Judah, the king-to-be David mourns deeply the death of Jonathan, whose “love to me was wonderful,” David states, indeed, “greater,” to David, “than the love of women.”8
Commentators have puzzled over these two expressions of heroic love. For some, the comparison between Jonathan’s love and the love of women that David offers, along with the Bible’s use of other emotionally charged language and images of physical intimacy in its descriptions of David’s and Jonathan’s interactions, suggests that these two heroes’ relationship must be understood as erotic and perhaps even sexual in nature. Likewise, in the Epic of Gilgamesh the loving relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu is at several points portrayed using language and imagery that many scholars have analyzed as eroticized and perhaps sexual as well. Others, however, would not describe either the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu or the relationship of David and Jonathan using the categories of eroticism or sex, claiming instead that the relationships represent only a kind of intense male bonding that these interpreters take to be typical of heroic friendships in the ancient world. As I hope to show in some of the discussion that follows, there are compelling arguments to be made in favor of both these positions, in large part, I will argue, because of the exceptionally ambiguous ways in which erotic and potentially sexual language and imagery are deployed in both the Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of David and Jonathan. In fact, so ambiguous is the erotic and potentially sexual language and imagery used in the Gilgamesh tradition and in the David story that it might seem that the scholarly argument I have just sketched in nuce is one that is doomed to continue without resolution for at least the foreseeable future, the lack of straightforward evidence in the texts of the Gilgamesh Epic and the David story regarding the nature of their heroes’ relationships precluding, for now at any rate, our ability to offer a definitive interpretation.
Still, in this book it will be my contention that, however ambiguous, we need not be doomed to argue inconclusively about the nature of the relationships of either Gilgamesh and Enkidu or David and Jonathan. Rather, I will propose we can develop explanations that satisfactorily account for the Gilgamesh Epic’s and the David story’s eroticized and perhaps even sexualized language and images. Indeed, it will be my contention that although a seeming point of frustration for interpreters, the ambiguity of the texts’ erotic and sexual language and images needs to be understood as an integral and even critical feature of the tales their ancient narrators are trying to tell and the conclusions these narrators hope to promote. Which is to say: it will be my contention in this book that the use of erotic and sexual ambiguity in both the stories of Gilgamesh and David is ultimately not an impediment but a key—perhaps even the key—to the interpretation of these texts.
It will further be my contention, though, that, if we are to unpack and eventually to understand the ways in which ambiguously erotic and sexual language and imagery are integral to the Gilgamesh and David narratives, we will need to be far more attentive than have commentators previously to several features of the ancient Near Eastern world of which Mesopotamia and Israel were a part. First, I believe we must attend more to the nature of sex in the ancient Near Eastern world, or, to be more specific, attend more to the dynamics of sexual relationships in the ancient Near Eastern world, by which I mean both the ways in which sexual roles in the ancient Near East were conceptualized by the peoples of that region and the hierarchical means by which the ancient Near East’s sexual relations were structured. Second, I believe we must attend more to issues of gender, which is to say, both the gendered language and imagery that can be used by the Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of David to describe their heroes (what does it mean, for example, for David to compare Jonathan’s love for him to the love of women?) and also the ways in which the Gilgamesh Epic and the David story each represent their heroes’ erotic and sexual interactions with members of the opposite sex. Finally, and most important, I believe we must pay careful attention to issues of literary construction: what is it about each story’s compositional framework and thematic objectives that leads the Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of David to depict their heroes using arguably eroticized and sexualized representations? David M. Halperin has raised doubts about the interpretive strategies that have conventionally been used to analyze the heroic relationships described in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of David: the appreciative (how beautifully within each text the heroes’ relationship is portrayed) and the documentary (what each text might tell us about the nature of heroic interactions within the culture and the era it purports to describe).9 This is a concern I share, and in this study I aim to eschew these appreciative and documentary approaches in favor of an analysis that considers foremost each story’s narrative agenda.
My ultimate goal, then, in the chapters that follow is to explain the eroticized and sexualized depictions of the heroic relationships of the Mesopotamian King Gilgamesh and his comrade Enkidu and the biblical King David and his companion Jonathan within the context of ancient Near Eastern conceptions of sex and sexuality; within the context of the Gilgamesh Epic’s and the David story’s depictions of gender roles and gender relationships; and, most important, within the context of the Gilgamesh Epic’s and the David story’s literary structures. I will begin in chapter 1 by considering the ways in which sexual interactions were construed generally in the ancient Near Eastern world and, more broadly speaking, in the ancient world of the Eastern Mediterranean. Then, in chapter 2, I will briefly introduce the Epic of Gilgamesh before turning, in chapter 3, to describe the language and imagery of the Epic that suggest eroticism and even the sexual. In chapters 4 and 5 I will explore in detail my interpretation of the erotic, sexual, and also gender imagery of the Gilgamesh Epic, before turning to introduce, in chapter 6, the biblical story of David and Jonathan. Then, in chapters 7 and 8, I will offer the same sort of detailed reading of the erotic and sexual imagery found in the David and Jonathan story that I earlier advanced regarding the erotic and sexual imagery of the Gilgamesh Epic. I will further consider, in chapter 8, gender imagery within the David and Jonathan story, imagery that I will comment on briefly in the epilogue as well. Throughout, I have tried, in addition to introducing my own interpretations, to make reference to the most up-to-date bibliography, but I regret to say that A. R. George’s two-volume critical edition of the Gilgamesh Epic did not appear in print in time for me to make use of it before this book went to press.10
I have been helped by many in my work on this volume, and it is a great joy to offer them my thanks here: first, Dartmouth College, whose award of a Senior Faculty Grant during the academic year 2001–2002 gave me the time away from the classroom I needed in order to complete my manuscript’s initial draft; second, the librarians at Dartmouth’s Baker-Berry Library, in particular Patricia Carter of the Interlibrary Loan Office and William Fontaine in the Reference Department, both of whom have been tireless in their efforts to procure for me the often obscure materials I have required for the execution of my project; third, the many students who have discussed with me my interpretations of the Gilgamesh Epic and the David story in classes on ancient Near Eastern mythology and on the Hebrew Bible that I have taught over the years; and fourth, my family and many friends at Dartmouth and elsewhere, who have been beyond generous in providing me with good counsel, good cheer, and good wine. These include George and Peggy Ackerman, Michael Bronski, Andrew Corbin, Sheila Culbert, William Dever, Mona Domosh, Steve and Elizabeth Dycus, Susannah Heschel, Amy Hollywood, Michael Lowenthal, Reed Lowrie, Jim McQuillan, Peter Machinist, Frank Magilligan, Carol Meyers, Susan Niditch, Saul Olyan, William Propp, Laura Smoller, Richard Voos, Neal Walls, and Richard Wright. Finally, I must extend my thanks to the members of the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College, both past and present, who in reading chapters 4 and 5 will immediately recognize the enormous debt I owe to them and to the comparative analysis of hero stories that we have jointly undertaken in our team-taught introductory course Patterns of Religious Experience. It is with deep pleasure that I express my gratitude to them for this as well as for the many other good ideas and good times we have been able to share during the fifteen years I have spent as their colleague.