Song of Songs: The Bible's Gay Love Poem?

In light of a recent comment left in response to this previous Wild Reed post, I’d like to share the following review by Jim Kepner of Dr. Paul R. Johnson’s (regrettably out-of-print) book, The Song of Songs, A Gay Love Poem (Fidelity Press, 1995).


8/26/14 Update: Debunking Paul Johnson's Gay Reading of Song of Songs.


According to Johnson, the highly charged love poem that we now call the Song of Songs was originally addressed by Asher, one of Solomon’s sons, to Caleh, a shepherd-soldier.

I hear my love, see how he comes
leaping on the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
My love is like a gazelle,
like a young stag.

– Song of Songs

Of course, much has been written about the close friendship between Solomon’s father, David, and Jonathan. (Regular Wild Reed visitors would be aware, I’m sure, of Tom Horner’s book, Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times.) Accordingly, various artistic representations of David and Jonathan accompany this posting of Kepner’s review of Johnson’s book - a review that first appeared in the International Gay and Lesbian Review in 1995.

_____________________________

[The Song of Songs, a Gay Love Poem] gives an amazing new turn to the highly erotic Old Testament love poem in the Bible, inaccurately called “The Song of Solomon,” which has been a mystery and often a scandal to Jews and Christians alike. Homophobic religious writers have, among other things, wiggled about trying to explain a supposed woman with male parts and male roles. First, the poem, seeming out of place in the Bible, has no religious content, though theologians have argued unconvincingly that its love passages, some explicitly sexual, don’t really describe human lovers at all, but symbolize the love of Jahveh for Jewish men, or the love of Christ for his bride, the church. Extremely confusing is the fact that the speaker seems constantly to change, and the beloved is sometimes male, sometimes female, and often of uncertain gender.

Dr. Paul R. Johnson, an evangelical minister who has written extensively about fundamentalists and gays, and who has long been involved in the Southern California gay movement, has labored for twenty years with the original Hebrew, finally producing a translation aided by fragmentary pre-Masoretic texts which clear up the mystery. His 144 page book discusses how the text, originally written about 920 B.C.E., evolved from a frankly homophilic love poem sung in homes and taverns at a time when the Hebrews were not yet publicly homophobic (such poems were found in many ancient Near Eastern cultures), to the editing millenia later by Masorete scribes, who produced the presently confused text. By hiding the name of the true author and changing the gender of the lover or the beloved in many passages, they made The Canticle (its more proper name) appear to be a heterosexual love poem, with an uncertain number of speakers.

A more accurate version appeared in several earlier scraps of the song found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumram cave #4. The cover-up began in the first line, when the name Asher, one of Solomon’s many sons, apparently black, was read as a preposition instead of a proper name. In the second verse, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible notes that the pronouns for the beloved, given as neuter in the text, are really masculine. Most Hebrew scholars admit parenthetically, that the speaker-lover in 85% of the poem is clearly male, as is the beloved. Yet all modern versions except that by Rev. Dr. Johnson make it appear as a heterosexual love drama. Direct quotes show otherwise: 4:10,11:

How delightful you are Caleh,
My lover-man, my other half.
Your pleasing masculine love is better than wine.
The smell of your body is better than perfume.
Your moustache is waxed with honeycomb.
Honey and milk are under your tongue.
The scent of your clothing is like the smell of Lebanon.

As Johnson points out in this revolutionary booklet, this highly charged love poem was addressed by Asher to Caleh, a shepherd-soldier. It gets to the heart of the question of whether the Hebrews and early Christians were fundamentally homophobic, or whether, as John Boswell has maintained, homophobia was a later addition. Johnson has consulted with many Hebrew scholars, who reluctantly concede the validity of his revolutionary word-for-word translation. The Masoretes did not, happily, produce a homophobic text. They merely made a gay love poem appear to be hetero. And that was done to many ancient poems and stories. As this writer, as well as Dr. Johnson and others have noted, there are many wife-purchase stories in the Bible, but the only true love stories are same-gender.

The Song of Songs now stands as the most explicit homoerotic love poem in the Bible, with clear naming of this thing going into that thing. Johnson’s small book is a must for all Jewish or Christian gays, though many might be too timid to abandon conventional hetero mistranslations. This book is also very useful for gays who wish to answer religious homophobes.


8/26/14 Update: Debunking Paul Johnson's Gay Reading of Song of Songs.



Above: “David and Jonathan” (2004) by Adi Nes.

Writes Susan Chevlowe of Nes’ evocative photograph: “The renewed importance of biblical mythology in Israeli culture in the wake of the 1967 War was instrumental in nurturing Nes’s identity and in shaping his work. . . . Israel’s triumph over its enemies has often been read through the victory of David over Goliath, understood in accord with the Zionist adaptation of biblical narratives to validate contemporary national and political ones. Yet in this photograph, rather than the heroism of David in his defeat of Goliath, Nes chooses to represent David with Jonathan – the beautiful youth whose relationship has figured in art and literature as a homoerotic trope. In Nes’s oeuvre, homoeroticism plays a role as a mechanism that exposes the ambivalence in a national narrative grounded in a mythos of heroic masculinity. The moment that Nes represents does not have an exact parallel in the Bible, but it suggests both their parting at which they ‘kissed one another, and they wept with one another, until David [wept] greatly’ (1 Sam. 20:41) and their rendezvous in the Wilderness at Ziph (1 Sam. 23:16-18), when they made a covenant with God and it was understood that Jonathan had put aside his ambitions for David’s sake. The young man playing the red-haired David looks directly yet cautiously into the camera, while sheltering the younger boy, Jonathan, who leans into him for support. The pose alludes to the way in which David held his harp, so that he appears to be plucking or playing Jonathan, releasing a silent yet soothing music.”

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,
for your love-making is sweeter than wine.
In his delightful shade I sit,
and his fruit is sweet to my taste.
My love is mine and I am his.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Bible and Homosexuality
• On Civil Unions and Christian Tradition
• The Non-Negotiables of Human Sex
• Just Love
• The Many Manifestations of God’s Loving Embrace
• Charis
• Alexander’s Great Love
• Hypocrisy, Ignorance, Promiscuity, and the Love that is “the Center of Catholic Christianity”
• Joan Timmerman on the “Wisdom of the Body”
• The Archangel Michael as Gay Icon
• St. Francis of Assisi and Human Sexuality
• The Sexuality of Jesus

Recommended Off-site Links:
The Song of Songs Through Gay Eyes – Tom Yeshua.
David and Jonathan: Biblical Homosexual Relationship? – The Arab Observer, January 25, 2007.