HistoricalChristian.Faith

Was the David–Jonathan bond a homoerotic relationship?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — on its best available form (Ackerman’s self-aware reading of the narrative’s eroticized rhetoric, not a historical romance) the interpretation does not hold against the covenant/loyalty idiom, David’s portrayed heterosexuality, and an unbroken non-erotic reception; the historical-relationship version is weaker still. Not unsupported — the textual hooks are real and serious scholars press them — but it fails on its merits · advanced by Tom Horner, Susan Ackerman, Theodore Jennings, Silvia Schroer & Thomas Staubli

Related arguments: the nature of the David–Jonathan bond — see also the David–Jonathan bond as a covenant friendship

The claim

I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

— 2 Samuel 1:26 (KJV), link.¹ A genuinely-advocated modern reading holds that the David–Jonathan narrative (1 Samuel 18–20; 2 Samuel 1:26) depicts a romantic or erotic bond, not merely covenant friendship: the two “knit” souls, the disrobing, the parting kiss, Saul’s furious rebuke, and above all David’s lament that Jonathan’s love “surpassed the love of women” are read as an eroticized register the narrator did not trouble to hide. The interpretation to weigh, in its strongest form: does the text’s language actually carry erotic force — whether reporting a historical relationship (the maximal version) or deploying eros rhetorically (the careful version) — or is every one of those hooks better explained by the covenant idiom of the ancient world?

Who advances it

The reading is a post-1970s development, and it comes in two strengths. The maximal, historical version — that David and Jonathan were lovers — was launched by Tom Horner’s Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times (1978), pressed further by Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli (“Saul, David and Jonathan — the Story of a Triangle?”), and taken to its speculative limit by Theodore Jennings’ Jacob’s Wound, which reads a David–Jonathan–Saul triangle.² The careful, literary version is Susan Ackerman’s When Heroes Love (2005), the strongest and most-cited academic entry — and the one to steelman. Ackerman does not claim to reconstruct a historical homosexual relationship between two real men; she argues that the narrative deploys eroticized, ambiguous language, and that this eros serves the narrators’ ends — an “erotic apologetic” that casts Jonathan in the culturally “feminine” role precisely to disqualify him and his line from the throne in David’s favor.³

The evidence for

The reading’s hooks are real, and the steelman should concede them fully before weighing.

The lament measures the love against women. The single strongest datum is 2 Samuel 1:26: David ranks Jonathan’s love as “passing the love of women.” The proponent asks: why invoke women’s love as the yardstick at all, unless the register being described is comparable in kind — that is, erotic?¹

The language is unusually intimate. The soul of Jonathan “was knit with the soul of David,” who loved him “as his own soul” (1 Samuel 18:1, 3; 20:17); Jonathan “delighted much in David” (19:1), a verb (ḥāpēṣ) used elsewhere of desire for a woman; Schroer and Staubli argue the loving “as one’s own nefesh” can carry erotic force.⁴

Gestures the reader can eroticize. Jonathan strips off his robe and clothing and gives them to David (18:4); the two kiss and weep at parting “until David exceeded” (20:41); Saul’s rage at Jonathan — “thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thine own confusion, and unto the confusion of thy mother’s nakedness” (20:30) — is read as a father’s recognition of a shameful liaison.¹

The heroic-lover comparanda. Ackerman sets the pair beside Gilgamesh and Enkidu and Achilles and Patroclus — ancient hero-pairs whose devotion later readers eroticized — and argues the David–Jonathan story belongs to the same literary type, drawing on the “liminal” status of heroes to license otherwise-taboo erotic language in the service of the narrator’s political and aesthetic aims.³

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The hooks are genuinely there: the language is warm and demonstrative, and Ackerman is right that the story belongs to a heroic-friendship type the ancient world told with unusual intensity. A reading that denies any affective heat in the text is over-sanitized (see the covenant-friendship page). The question the reading raises is legitimate.

What is overstated or fails. Point for point, the covenant idiom explains the same data better, and the reading’s own best form undercuts the romance it is cited to prove.

Every hook has a covenant sense that fits ancient usage better. “Love” is the treaty-allegiance vocabulary of these books (Hiram “loved David”; “all Israel and Judah loved David”); the robe and armor are dynastic investiture, matched by Jonathan’s explicit cession of the throne (23:17); the kiss is the customary greeting at parting; and “passing the love of women” ranks kinds of love — sworn covenant loyalty above the marriage-alliances that had cost David dearly — a reading anchored by the verse’s own covenant vocabulary (“my brother”). These are laid out on the covenant page.⁵

The text depicts no sexual acts, and both men are drawn as married. David is portrayed as emphatically heterosexual (Michal, Abigail, and later Bathsheba), and Jonathan married and fathered Mephibosheth; nothing in the narrative states or implies a sexual relationship. The maximal historical reading rests on contested philology (nefesh, ḥāpēṣ, the 20:30 insult) and on silence pressed as evidence.⁵

The categories are anachronistic — on the reading’s own terms. David Halperin’s framework, which the erotic camp invokes, holds that “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are modern identities alien to the ancient world; Martti Nissinen applies exactly this to conclude that the bond is homosocial, not homoerotic, because the ancient erotic script assumed an active/passive asymmetry that the equality of David and Jonathan lacks. The maximal reading helps itself to the theory’s prestige while ignoring its verdict.⁶

Even Ackerman’s careful version does not deliver the romance. Her thesis is about the narrator’s rhetoric, not a historical relationship, and its content is that the eroticized language feminizes Jonathan to bar his line from the throne — which is a claim in the register of dynastic politics, the very covenant/succession frame the friendship reading urges. So the strongest form of the interpretation, granted whole, still does not establish that David and Jonathan were lovers; it says the text uses erotic coloring for a political end — and it must still read eros where covenant language already suffices.³

The reception is unbroken and against it. No rabbinic, patristic, medieval, or Reformation interpreter read the bond erotically; the pre-modern tradition reads it as the paradigm of covenant friendship (Chrysostom, Ambrose, Bede, Aelred). The occasional claim that a Father “already noticed” homoeroticism — e.g. that Chrysostom detected it in Saul’s 20:30 insult — is an overreach: Chrysostom reads that verse as a slur on David’s low birth and supposed effeminacy that Jonathan proudly ignored, and takes the whole story as “a wonderful instance of friendship.” Noticing that Saul hurls an insult is not reading the pair as lovers. The erotic interpretation is a genuinely modern one.⁷

Assessment

Weak. On its best available form — Ackerman’s methodologically self-aware reading of the narrative’s eroticized rhetoric — the interpretation does not hold: it must read eros where the covenant idiom of these books already accounts for the language, it depends on an active/passive apparatus whose own logic (via Nissinen) yields “homosocial, not homoerotic,” and even granted whole it describes a rhetorical coloring in the service of dynastic politics, not the romance the popular reading wants. The maximal historical version (Horner, Jennings, Schroer/Staubli) is weaker still, resting on contested philology, anachronistic categories, and silence-as-evidence, and against an unbroken non-erotic reception. It is not unsupported — the textual hooks are real and serious scholars advance the literary form — but it fails on its merits. The covenant-friendship reading is the sound one.

Sources