Calling King David Gay Is Kind of Silly.

Although I’m a nonbeliever, I still enjoy reading the Bible. Why this is I don’t know. It may be the connection I feel with people whom I like to imagine are distant ancestors. It may be for the same reason that Simon Dubnov, the great historian of Russian Jewry and a nonbeliever like me, kept a Bible on his bedside table: as a talisman, a symbol. 

It may be just because it’s a cool text: a breathtakingly ambitious collection of old legends, half-remembered stories, snatches and bits and pieces of God only knows how many old tales and songs from forgotten kingdoms and families and people, all massaged into a more or less cohesive whole. How this book came to be is a fascinating story in and of itself. In recent years, I’ve enjoyed fewer books more than Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s Unearthing the Bible and David and Solomon, which compare the Biblical record with the archaeological one. Not surprisingly, there are some pretty serious discrepancies. But finding out that much of the Biblical record is baloney doesn’t lessen its import for me. Instead, it deepens my appreciation for the nameless writers and editors at the court of King Josiah who compiled the thing. As a writer of fiction, I appreciate the talents of other writers of fiction, and whatever else those guys (or possibly women) were, they were talented.

Or maybe it’s just that the Good Book, whether or not one believes in its divine origins, has some good stories.And the best of them is the David story. 

I'm not the only one who says so. The David story has inspired geniuses from Michelangelo to Joseph Heller to take a stab at it. The story has inspired artists in every generation, and so universal that everyone on earth can identify with some aspect of David.

I get this. People like to see, in stories and characters, aspects of themselves. It makes us feel less alone. But one thing that irritates me is when people claim that David was gay.

This is a pretty old and prevalent theory. Lots of people do this for lots of different reasons. Liberal Christians and Jews make the claim, most likely, to emphasize the welcoming, nonjudgmental, big-tent nature of their congregations. Biblical detractors, on the other hand, throw it like rocks at more traditional believers as an insult to one of the Bible's most sacred heroes. 

More serious thinkers also fall into the same trap. Jonathan Kirsch, the author of King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel, certainly thinks David and Jonathan had a thing, going so far as to cite homosexual relationships between bandits (as David became, after fleeing Saul) in other cultural contexts as an indicator of David’s own proclivities and behavior. 

But for whatever reason people do so, they’re wrong to do it. I don’t say this out of homophobia. Far from it. I don't care who’s gay, bisexual, or straight. Our society’s current obsession with the topic strikes me as nothing more than prurience, and an invasion of people’s, living or dead, privacy. I object to gayifying David because I believe, strongly, in historical accuracy and in respecting the text. 

First off, there is absolutely nothing in the text suggesting King David was gay. Yes, he was close friends with Saul’s son Jonathan. And okay, there is that one line in David’s famous elegy to Saul and Jonathan after their deaths (Saul’s by suicide) in battle: “Very pleasant has thy love been to me, Jonathan, surpassing the love of women”). Okay, sounds gay by our lights, but then again, we live in a post-Freudian age.

You could parse the whole David story, line by line, or scrutinize David’s own words, in search of evidence of his homosexuality. Maybe you could make a compelling or even convincing case for it, based on what’s written about, and purportedly by, him. 

But it would be a complete and utter waste of time, for one simple reason: the Good Book is, as I mentioned above, largely malarkey.

The fact is that we know precisely one fact about King David. One. One fact. That fact is that he existed.

We know this because of a stone fragment of a victory arch—the “Tel Dan Stele,” so named because it was found at an archaeological dig at Tel Dan in Israel—erected by the Aramaean king Hazael, boasting about his victory over “The House of David.”

That is the extent of extrabiblical documentation for David. (There’s another busted-up old piece of rock, from a victory arch erected by King Mesha of Moab, which may or may not refer to the House of David. So okay, there’s maybe two. But there’s only one concrete, universally-accepted piece of evidence that doesn’t occur in the Bible for David.) And it doesn’t even refer to him specifically, but rather to his descendants, his “House.”

That’s it. We know he existed. Period. We don’t know anything else. We don’t know if any of the Bible’s claims about him—that he was red-haired, that he was a shepherd, the son of a guy named Jesse, a crack-shot with a sling, or a songwriter of Bob Dylan-esque ability—are true or not. We don’t know if he actually killed a giant named Goliath (the Bible itself is a little confused on this score. There’s a verse claiming that someone named Elchonon killed Goliath. So much for Biblical inerrancy) in the service of King Saul. We don’t even know if there was a King Saul.

But we do know that a lot of what the Bible says about him is false. Thanks to archaeology, we know that there actually was no great United Empire under David. The region of Judah was, in David’s time, a sparsely-populated scrub country, inhabited by semi-nomadic tribespeople who lived in villages which rarely exceeded 50 people. Jerusalem, in the time of David and Solomon, was no magnificent capital of an empire the size of Maine. It was a tiny hamlet of no importance to anyone whatsoever. It barely existed.

In the absence, then, of any trustworthy evidence, we are forced to treat King David the same way we treat King Arthur: as a fictional character who may or may not have been based on a real person. Thus, in order to judge whether claims of David’s homosexuality have any merit, we need to consider the author’s intent.

I’m always half irritated and half amused by people who write long, scholarly essays purporting to have detected a homosexual subtext in Frodo and Sam’s relationship, or in that between Holmes and Watson, or that between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, because I have little to no doubt that neither J.R.R. Tolkien nor Arthur Conan Doyle nor Bob Kane intended their creations to be gay. Nor, for that matter, do I believe that the anonymous author(s), or compiler(s), or redactor(s), of the David story did. 

Finkelstein and Silberman make a convincing argument that the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, was largely slapped into its present configuration during the realm of King Josiah of Judah. And yes, there was definite authorial intent there. But it wasn’t sexual. It was political. The Bible was crafted to give legitimacy to, and justification for, Josiah’s territorial ambitions: he wanted all of Israel, northern and southern kingdoms both.  

Thus, Israel—the northern kingdom—is portrayed in the Bible as a renegade, rebel state, ruled over by asshats like Omri, Ahab and Jezebel, the descendents of the illegitimate dynasty of Jeroboam. Judah, the southern kingdom, on the other hand, was ruled by Josiah, a good and Godly man, the descendent of God’s own anointed king, to whom God had promised an everlasting kingdom.

Which pretty much worked out like all of God’s other promises. But that’s another topic.  

At any rate, in that light, the friendship between David and Jonathan takes on a completely different character. David also married Saul’s daughter Michal. And took over his kingdom. Which indicates that the authorial intent was not a homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan, but rather a progression of Saul losing everything to David: his daughter, the loyalty of his own son, and eventually, his kingdom.

Considering, moreover, that homosexuality was already considered an abomination punishable by death in Josiah’s time, it’s hard to believe that a gay relationship between David and Jonathan was really what the author intended.

Me personally, I could care less if David, the actual person, was gay or not. Wouldn’t bother me if he was.  He might also have been fat or thin, tall or short, hunchbacked or upright. He might also have had one eye, twelve fingers, a vestigial tail, or a twenty-two inch shmeckel. Sure, they all sound ridiculous, but there’s as much reason to believe any of those as there is to believe he was gay—which is none at all.

He may very well have been gay. Plenty of people have been, are, and will be. But to claim that he was on the basis of what’s written about him is nothing more than pushing an agenda, and an abuse of the text. The chances are that we’re never going to know anything more about the historical person of David than that he existed.

And frankly, it’s better that way. Pablo Picasso once said that “Art is a lie which tells the truth.” David’s story, even if it never took place (or did so in a fashion radically different from what the Good Book tells us) is a perfect example of this. As per what we know about Judah and its inhabitants in the time of David, he was, most likely, a minor tribal chieftain—just one of the innumerable, ten-for-a-dollar petty Bedouin sheikhs who’ve been crisscrossing that region since time immemorial. It’s the imaginary David, the legendary David, whose story moves us, inspires us, captivates us, and whose universality speaks to all of us. His story is one of courage, love, betrayal, tragedy, and redemption. It’s a testament to the power of fiction and of art.