When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros
in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David
by Susan Ackerman
Columbia University Press
336 pages, $45.
“VERY PLEASANT hast thou been unto me,” David laments for his fallen friend and possible lover Jonathan at the opening of the Bible’s Second Book of Samuel; “thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” The feeling was mutual, for the biblical narrator also records that Jonathan’s soul “was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” When King Saul’s murderous jealousy causes his young rival David to flee the court, David and Jonathan suffer a poignant parting at which “they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded.”
The Mesopotamian hero Gilgamesh likewise grieved in an extravagantly poignant manner at the death of his companion Enkidu, who was created by the gods to serve as a check on Gilgamesh’s lawless sexual energies and who, in some traditions, died in place of his friend. Earlier in the narrative, before Enkidu’s arrival in the city of Uruk, a series of dreams foretold Along with Homer’s story of Achilles and Patroclus—in which a beloved warrior-companion likewise dies early, leaving the hero to mourn both extravagantly and eloquently—the stories of David and Jonathan and of Gilgamesh and Enkidu constitute the ancient world’s most moving narratives of heroic male love. By this I mean both love among men of the warrior class and love that models for later generations an emotional relationship that “exceeds” or “surpasses” (to use those two key words from the biblical narrative) existing conventions of what is appropriate between warriors, the power of their love making the men heroic in an additional sense. Susan Ackerman, a respected biblical scholar who currently chairs the religious studies department at Dartmouth College, brings to her study of the David and Gilgamesh narratives two important qualities: a knowledge of ancient languages that allows her to explore the emotional coloring and sexual associations of key words, and a thorough grounding in contemporary gender theory, which allows her to negotiate the essentialist-constructionist debate concerning the evolution of gay identity. She draws upon anthropologist Victor Turner’s theory of liminality as it applies to rites of passage in which a protagonist’s being “betwixt and between” two stages of development results in a confusion of all categories. The Epic of Gilgamesh, she concludes, is careful not to specify the exact nature of Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s relationship, “the ambiguity of eros” in their case being a deliberate part of that narrative’s representation of liminality. For Ackerman, conversely, the biblical author of the First and Second Books of Samuel uses homoerotic imagery to “feminize” Jonathan as David’s “wife,” thus achieving the political end of legitimizing a usurper’s rule by subordinating to David and his house all of the descendants of Saul. Ackerman’s monograph is valuable above all for its excellent codification of existing scholarship in several disciplines on the sexual values of the ancient world. (Who can penetrate whom, and under what circumstances? When does physical intimacy mark the sealing of a covenant bond? What is the nature of an emotionally intense relationship that does not include penetration?) What’s more, it offers a superb reading of The Epic of Gilgamesh as a series of initiation rites based upon the negotiation of liminal passages. The heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu are caught between their part-divine and part-human natures, between the forces of nature and those of civilization, and between the erotic pull of male and female partners. Ultimately, the poem is itself a heroic enterprise that bravely negotiates the space between life and death in order to reveal to a mortal audience the mysteries of the gods. I am left unpersuaded, however, by Ackerman’s reading of the David narrative. Granted, redactors who initially assembled the various oral tales surrounding David, Saul, and Samuel may have had the political purpose deduced by Ackerman. But she might just as logically have concluded that the relationship of David and Jonathan was so extraordinary that it was included among the sacred scrolls despite its trespassing against the code that forbade one adult male from relegating another to a subordinate role by penetrating him as one would a female. Heroic narratives are reserved for personages who model excess in some glorious way, and often are disruptive of the social values being espoused by the epic: the anger of Achilles, the wiliness of Odysseus, the intemperance of Æneas. David in Hebrew means “beloved.” His comeliness and poetic temperament make him the obsessive object of affection of a king (Saul), his son and heir (Jonathan), and his daughter (Michal, David’s wife). It is David’s ability to inspire love in men and women both that makes him the object of both adulation and narrative scrutiny. Raymond-Jean Frontain, author of Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture (second ed., 2003), is working on a study of Terrence McNally’s plays.
to Gilgamesh the emergence of a companion whom he would love “as a wife.” Upon Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh dressed the corpse as “a bride” and, in the violence of his grief, refused to allow its burial until a maggot emerged from its nose, confirming Enkidu’s decay.
