Lately, I’ve been thinking about and reviewing the Old Testament. I started with Genesis, and I’m up to Solomon. The story of David and Jonathan is not only striking in isolation, but it stands out in comparison to all the relationships that precede it. It’s true, there is no “smoking gun.” No verse explicitly indicates these two men were physically intimate, but I think you can interpret their relationship as romantic. It seems more romantic to me than almost any other up to that point. Besides, we all know that love between men isn’t merely about sex. If a man and a woman had an intense romantic relationship that never resulted in physical intimacy—to anyone’s knowledge—you wouldn’t have many running around insisting that they were “just friends.” And the text does leave room for interpretation.
I don’t think this is a story with one objective meaning. Fundamentalists insist that there is one cohesive understanding of the entire Bible—namely theirs—but it seems to me that many of these stories are functioning in the same way other examples of literature do. The reader brings something to these stories.
For instance, much of the story of David and Bathsheba is open to interpretation. In the movies, Bathsheba is portrayed as a seductress, but in the Bible, her character is ambiguous. Did she know David would see her bathing? Was she deliberately displaying herself? That’s up to you to decide. When David summoned her and had sex with her, did she have a choice? Did she want to have sex with David? Or was she raped? The text doesn’t make that clear in my opinion. When she tells David that she’s pregnant, what does she want him to do about it? The Bible doesn’t spell it out. We’re allowed to fill in the blanks.
There are a few things that are spelled out. David, one of the heroes of the Bible, is an adulterer and a murderer, and it’s not surprising. It is interesting that the heroes in the Old Testament tend not to be plaster saints. We’re introduced to one flawed character after another. Abraham allows his wife to be taken into the households of other men twice. Once would have been bad enough, but he does it twice, and each time, he profits from it. Abraham and Sarah almost come across as a couple of con artists. Jacob tricks his older brother out of his birthright. These aren’t goody-goodies who never do anything wrong. So the idea that David would never do anything with Jonathan that would shock the sensibilities of his countrymen or offend God seems absurd.
You also have other instances of major figures violating Leviticus. Abraham marries his sister, and Jacob marries two sisters. Both of these things are forbidden by Leviticus. That might be because some of these elaborate law codes were developed at a later date. Maybe hundreds of years later. Even though they’re laid out in the Pentateuch, even the stories about David might be older.
Despite those nasty bits in Leviticus, I don’t see ancient Biblical authors or the final editor going out of their way to emphasize that this was considered the sin of all sins. They seem much more concerned with idolatry and general disobedience. Even in the story of Sodom, you don’t get human men engaging in consensual sex. They don’t spend a lot of time driving home the idea that it’s awful for men to diddle one another or fall in love, and they must have known that it happened, or it wouldn’t have been mentioned in the story of Sodom or in Leviticus.
I don’t see anything wrong with reading the story of David and Jonathan as a romantic love story. You can’t prove that they were in love, but so what? You often can’t prove an interpretation of a work of art.
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