BOOK REVIEW:

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2007.10.46
ALSO SEEN: Susan Ackerman, When Heroes Love. The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Pp. xviii, 353; ills. 58. ISBN 0-231-13260-3. $47.50.

Reviewed by Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, Université de Provence (jnardellis36@numericable.fr)

If one epithet holds true about the bonding of Gilgamesh with Enkidu in the Gilgamesh and David with Jonathan in Samuel, it is 'ambiguous'. While those students of ancient sexuality and Semitic scholars who consider that it would do violence to the texts to exclude a lustful dimension in the dealings of either couple have never proved their case convincingly enough to make it mainstream, the advocates of the conservative Christian viewpoint, on the other hand, have failed to demonstrate once and for all that these dealings are nothing more than friendly, and possibly homosocial. This is due to the fact that the textual evidence lacks clarity, and affords material for both views.

Rather than trying to elaborate an interpretation and then attempting to explain away as many of the loose ends as possible, A(ckerman) focuses on this fundamental ambiguity of the male-male affect in the primary documents. She envisions this ambiguity as the key to the meaning of the relationships of both Gilgamesh / Enkidu and David / Jonathan. Her interpretive touchstone is the rites-of-passage model, specifically the liminal version, in which crises are 'redressed' by a period of ambiguity, a limbo characterized for the main protagonists with blurred social status and a cycle of exploits and hardships functioning as the steps of an initiation, by the end of which the hero of the narrative comes back into society with a whole new status.

[...]

This is a brilliant book, learned, moderate, sensible, which could have been a tremendous one had not the adherence to liminality loomed so large and had the author contrived to look more closely at what it entailed, between 2000 and 1000 B.C in the Semitic world, for two men of the warrior class to bond. Gender studies still have much light to shed on Semitic homosexuality.