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

Abstract

When Heroes Love: Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David, by Susan Ackerman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 353 pp. $47.50. Jonathan loved [David] as (1 Samuel 18:1), and the Davidic Succession Narrative (1 Samuel 18-2 Samuel 5) relates how this love led him to thwart the efforts of his father Saul to rid himself of his young rival. So, in recent years, scholars as well as other readers of the Hebrew Bible have begun to ask concerning David and Jonathan, Were they gay? same question has been posed about the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, protagonists of the longest narrative in Mesopotamian literature centering on human characters, a work customarily referred to by modern writers as The Epic of Gilgamesh. In When Heroes Love, religion professor Susan Ackerman considers the role of homoeroticism in these classics of ancient Near Eastern literature. She first prepares the reader by presenting a concise but useful summary of scholarship on homosexuality, concentrating on the recent debate concerning the phenomenology of same-sex love. This argument, which has obvious and political implications, pits the defenders of the essentialist position, who maintain that homosexuality is an inherent characteristic of a substantial fraction of humanity and as such has remained unchanged across the ages, against the social constructivists. Members of this latter group, with which the author sensibly identifies herself, do not dispute the central role played throughout history in the psyche and lives of many individuals by sexual attraction to members of their own sex. But they do hold that its expression, like that of many other functions of the human brain, is shaped by societal conditions. In particular, some people in Western societies before the mid-nineteenth century certainly engaged in homosexual acts, but it is anachronistic to consider them to have been gay, with all the associations this term conjures up in regard to personal affect, dress, political attitudes, etc. Applying the label gay to those belonging to other cultures is even more misleading. Having established that a gay identity is out of the question for our two pairs of heroes, Ackerman proceeds to analyze the nature of their relationships. She concludes that Gilgamesh and Enkidu on the one hand and Jonathan and David on the other are indeed depicted in their stories as sexual partners. Since she also demonstrates that homosexual relations were not generally acceptable in either Mesopotamian or Israelite society, she must then seek an explanation for the attribution of this characteristic to figures who were, after all, highly valued in their respective traditions. She finds the answer to her paradox in the concept of de passage, rite of passage. Developed early in the twentieth century by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep to describe a type of ritual marking a change in status (e.g., birth, marriage, death), this tool was applied by later scholars, particularly Victor Turner, to other experiences and to works of literature and art. For Ackerman, the relevant aspect of this conceptual framework is the identification within a or narrative of aliminal period during which norms are suspended or even reversed as a personage departs from one stage or position in life and becomes established in another. …