It’s About Masculinity, Not Homosexuality

Martti Nissinen, Homoerotiikka Raamatun maailmassa (Helsinki: Yliopistopaino, 1994); idem, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998).

E.g., D. Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1955); Tom Horner, Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978); John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; 35th anniversary edition 2015); Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality: Contextual Background for Contemporary Debate (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983); Jeffrey S. Siker, ed., Homosexuality in the Chutch: Both Sides of the Debate (Louisville, KY, Westminster John Knox, 1994); Choon-Leong Seow, ed., Homosexuality and Christian Community (Louisville, KY, Westminster John Knox, 1996); Robert L. Brawley, Biblical Ethics and Homosexuality: Listening to the Scripture (Louisville, KY, Westminster John Knox, 1996); Walter Wink, ed., Homosexuality and Christian Faith; Questions of Conscience for the Churches (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999); Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001); Dan O. Via and Robert A. J. Gagnon, Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Steven Greenberg, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Rachel Shapiro Safran, A Multidimensional Assessment of Orthodox Jewish Attitudes Toward Homosexuality (PhD Diss., Seton Hall University, 2012); Innocent Himbaza, Adrian Schenker, and Jean-Baptiste Edart, The Bible on the Question of Homosexuality (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012); Kjeld Renato Lings, Love Lost in Translation: Homosexuality and the Bible (Bloomington, IN: Trafford, 2013); Matthew Vines, God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships (New York: Convergent Books, 2014).

The recognition of this diversity has profoundly challenged not only the homo/hetero dichotomy but even the binary construct of human gender—a development that has triggered fierce, often Bible-based countermovements against sexual and gender minorities in different parts of the world.

The use of anachronistic categories based on modern concerns and strictly binary understanding of gender and sexual identity has been criticized for quite some time, first by the pioneers of (biblical) queer studies; see, e.g., Ken Stone, ed., Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001); Stephen D. Moore, God’s Beauty Parlor and Other Queer Spaces in and around the Bible (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Ken Stone, Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex, and Bible in Queer Perspective (London: T & T Clark, 2005); Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone, eds., Bible Trouble: Queer Reading st the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011); Stuart Macwilliam, Queer Theory and the Prophetic Marriage Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible (London: Routledge, 2011); Amy Kalmanofsky, Gender-Play in the Hebrew Bible: The Ways the Bible Challenges Its Gender Norms (London: Routledge, 2017); Mona West and Robert E. Shore-Goss, The Queer Bible Commentary, 2nd ed. (London: SCK, 2022).

These issues have also been raised by ancient Near Eastern scholars; see, e.g., Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean MacIntosh Turfa, eds., Women in Antiquity: Real Women across the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2016); Ilona Zsolnay, ed., Being a Man: Negotiating Ancient Constructs of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2017); Stephanie Lynn Budin, Megan Cifarelli, Agnès Garcia Ventura, and Adelina Millet Albà, eds., Gender and Methodology in the Ancient Near East: Approaches from Assyriology and Beyond (Barcelona: Institut del Pròxim Orient Antic, 2018); Saana Svärd and Agnès Garcia Ventura, eds., Studying Gender in the Ancient Near East (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2018).

The newly emerged study of ancient masculinities has turned out to be of special relevance for the study of male encounters, traditionally labelled as homosexual or homoerotic. E.g., Ovidiu Creangă, ed., Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2010); Ovidiu Creangă and Peter-Ben Smit, eds., Biblical Masculinities Foregrounded (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014); Ilan Peled, Masculinities and the Third Gender: The Origins and Nature of an Institutionalized Gender Otherness in the Ancient Near East (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2016); Ovidiu Creangă, ed., Biblical Masculinities Anew (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2019).

See Ann K. Guinan, “Auguries of Hegemony: The Sex Omens of Mesopotamia,” Gender & History 9 (1997): 462–479; Ann K. Guinan and Peter Morris, “Mesopotamia Before and After Sodom: Colleagues, Crack Troops, Comrades-in-Arms,” in Zsolnay, Being a Man, 150–175. The title is short for Šumma ālu ina melê šakin, “if a city is set on a height,” the first line of the first tablet in the series.

CT 39 44:13; 45:32, 33, 34; see Guinan, “Auguries of Hegemony,” 469. The sexual act in these four omens would thus involve both hegemonic and subordinated masculine agencies.

The omens consist of a protasis recording the event and the apodosis explaining its ominous value.

The omens always represent the masculine perspective, and they are based on strictly binary gender categories: “Woman is seen as what man is not.” Guinan, “Auguries of Hegemony,” 468.

The sex and gender performance of an assinnu were unconventional. They may play masculine roles in battle scenes, but they are also associated with sexual intercourse with male persons in omens, they are listed together with “men-women” (sinnišānu) in word-lists, and their masculinity is said to have been turned into femininity by the goddess Ištar in the Epic of Erra. See Saana Svärd and Martti Nissinen, “(Re)constructing the Image of the Assinnu,” in Svärd and Garcia Ventura, Studying Gender in the Ancient Near East, 373–411.

Ann K. Guinan, “Ancient Near Eastern Vagina Dialogs and the Sex Omens from Mesopotamia,” in In the Wake of Tikva Frymer-Kensky, ed. Steven Holloway, JoAnn Scurlock, and Richard H. Beal (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2009), 43–58, esp. 54–55.

Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1997), 155–176. The extensive section A of this collection includes cases concerning women, many of which address sexual offenses. The remaining two proscriptions (A §§19–20) have no female subject, but they nevertheless derive from A §18, extrapolating the case of a female victim to events where a male person assumes a passive sexual role.

^{MAL A ii 72–81} šumma aʾīlu ana tappāʾišu lu ina puzre lu ina ṣalte iqbi mā aššatka ittinikku mā anāku ubâr baʾura la ilaʾʾe la ubaʾʾer aʾīla šuātu 40 ina ḫaṭṭāte imaḫḫuṣuš iltēn uraḫ ūmāte šipar šarre eppaš igaddimuš u 1 bilat annaka iddan. (Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 159)

^{MAL A ii 82–92} šumma aʾīlu ina puzre ina muḫḫi tappāʾišu abata iškun mā ittinikkuš lu ina ṣalte ana pani ṣābē iqbiaššu mā ittinikkuka mā ubârka baʾura la ilaʾʾe la ubaʾʾer aʾīla šuātu 50 ina ḫaṭṭāte imaḫḫuṣuš iltēn uraḫ ūmāte šipar šarre eppaš igaddimuš u 1 bilat annaka iddan. (Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 159)

^{MAL A ii 93–97} šumma aʾīlu tappâšu inīk ubtaʾeruš uktaʾʾinuš inikkuš ana ša rēšēn utarruš. (Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 160)

Guinan and Morris, “Mesopotamia Before and After Sodom,” 166.

The laws in chapter 18 begin with a general command:

^{ויקרא יח:ו} אִישׁ אִישׁ אֶל כָּל שְׁאֵר בְּשָׂרוֹ לֹא תִקְרְבוּ לְגַלּוֹת עֶרְוָה אֲנִי יְ־הוָה.

^{Lev 18:6} None of you shall come near anyone of his own flesh to uncover nakedness: I am YHWH.

The phrase שְׁאֵר בְּשָׂרוֹ, “of his own flesh,” refers to the persons mentioned in verses 7–23. All the women listed as prohibited sexual partners are members of the extended family, and the bestiality-related verses (18:23 and 20:15–16) most naturally refer to a domestic animal. On the relationship between chapters 18 and 20, see Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 3A (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 1765–1768. Biblical translations follow NJPS, with modifications.

Cf. Hilary Lipka, Sexual Transgression in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2006), 49–62.

The prohibition also appears in chapter 20:

^{ויקרא כ:יג} וְאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר יִשְׁכַּב אֶת זָכָר מִשְׁכְּבֵי אִשָּׁה תּוֹעֵבָה עָשׂוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם מוֹת יוּמָתוּ דְּמֵיהֶם בָּם.

^{Lev 20:13} If a man lies with a male as one lies with a woman, the two of them have done an abhorrent thing; they shall be put to death—their bloodguilt is upon them.

For example, when the Israelites defeat the Midianites, they spare and presumably take captive only young virgin women, whom they can be certain are not carrying a Midianite child:

^{במדבר לא:יז} וְעַתָּה הִרְגוּ כָל זָכָר בַּטָּף וְכָל אִשָּׁה יֹדַעַת אִישׁ לְמִשְׁכַּב זָכָר הֲרֹגוּ. ^לא:יח וְכֹל הַטַּף בַּנָּשִׁים אֲשֶׁר לֹא יָדְעוּ מִשְׁכַּב זָכָר הַחֲיוּ לָכֶם.

^{Num 31:17} Now, therefore, slay every male among the children, and slay also every woman who has known a man carnally; ^31:18 but spare every young woman who has not had carnal relations with a man.

Cf. Judges 21:11–12. See, e.g. Saul M. Olyan, “‘And with a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman’: On the Meaning and Significance of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1994): 179–206; Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, 37–44.

Note that it has recently been suggested that this law is about two men having sex with one woman. Thus Joanna Töyräänvuori, “Homosexuality, the Holiness Code, and Ritual Pollution: A Case of Mistaken Identity,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 45 (2020): 236–267.

The male-to-male penetration changes dramatically the status of both parties’ masculinity. The passive partner’s male body is degraded both physically and socially, while the active, hegemonic partner has transgressed the divinely sanctioned familial limits of acceptable sexual performance. Most fatally, the act of penetration destroys incorrigibly both parties’ cosmic body—that is, the body before God—causing their ultimate marginalization from both the social and the theological point of view. (I owe the concept of cosmic body to Dale Launderville, Celibacy in the Ancient World: Its Ideal and Practice in Pre-Hellenistic Israel, Mesopotamia, and Greece [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010], 252.)

For the text and literary history of the poem, which developed over the course of more than a millennium, see Andrew R. George, The Epic of Gilgamesh, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2019).

Cf. Susan Ackerman, When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

Cf. Neal Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death: Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Myth (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2001), 9–92.

Shamhat, an independent woman is usually, but probably wrongly, designated as a prostitute. See, e.g., Julia Assante, “The kar.kid/ḫarimtu: Prostitute or Single Woman?” Ugarit-Forschungen 30 (1998): 5–96; Nicole Brisch, “Šamḫat: Deconstructing Temple Prostitution One Woman at a Time,” in Powerful Women in the Ancient World: Perception and (Self-)Presentation, ed. Kerstin Droß-Krüpe and Sebastian Fink (Münster: Zaphon, 2021), 77–90.

Shamhat describes Gilgamesh as a beautiful, seductive man, but Enkidu only wants to challenge him to a duel.

Editor’s note: For an example of jus primae noctis, “right of the first night,” in midrash, see Rachel Adelman, “Channah, Daughter of Mattathias: Instigator of the Maccabean Rebellion,” TheTorah (2019).

Enraged by the insolent response of Gilgamesh, Ishtar asks her father Anu to send the Bull of Heaven to finish him off, but Gilgamesh eventually kills the bull and throws its penis or testicles (literally “one of its haunches”) at the goddess’s face, donating its horns to his father Lugalbanda. Even the episode can be read as a masculine encounter. Ishtar’s straightforward proposal makes her appear in a conspicuously masculine role, but Gilgamesh’s aggressive reaction clearly outweighs the goddess’s masculine capacity.

Enkidu’s death changes Gilgamesh, who spends the rest of his life looking for a means to overcome death.

See, e.g., Ackerman, When Heroes Love; Anthony Heacock, Jonathan Loved David: Manly Love in the Bible and the Hermeneutics of Sex (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011); James E. Harding, The Love of David and Jonathan: Ideology, Text, Reception (Sheffield and Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2013).

This expression appears only here and in Genesis, where it describes Jacob’s love for his son, Benjamin: וְנַפְשׁוֹ קְשׁוּרָה בְנַפְשׁוֹ, “his own life is bound up with his” (Gen 44:30).

The kiss need not be viewed as sexual (cf. Moses greeting his father-in-law, וַיִּשְׁתַּחוּ וַיִּשַּׁק לוֹ, “he bowed low and kissed him” [Exod 18:7], though the phrasing is not the same).

See Heacock, Jonathan Loved David, 100–118.

Female-to-female sexual encounters are all but absent from the sources.