Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffC
The love for a brother need not necessarily mean anything untoward !!! But in those days moral stances differed from ours, anyway.
[assuming, somewhat uncharitably on my part, that the phrase has not been altered by jealous monks or scribes sometime during the Middle Ages, especially late at night and in candle-light]
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Certainly brotherly love doesn't of itself imply sexual attraction, but powerful men and powerful libidos have often gone hand in hand in rulers, and powerful libidos are not always discriminating about where they find fulfillment. One only has to consider the well-known bi-sexuality of Alexander the Great, or recall the words of the Elder Curio concerning Julius Caesar:
.....At ne cui dubium omnino sit et impudicitiae et adulteriorum flagrasse infamia, Curio pater quadam eum oratione omnium mulierum virum et omnium virorum mulierem appellat.
.....And to emphasize the bad name Caesar had won alike for unnatural and natural vice, I may here record that the Elder Curio referred to him in a speech as: "Every woman's man and every man's woman."
..........— Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c. 69 – c. 140), Roman biographer.
Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars, translated by Robert Graves (Harmondsworth, 1979).
The Bible doesn't always portray David as a saint; he committed many breeches of the Mosaic Law that would have resulted in the death penalty for one less connected to power, not the least of which were adultery and murder, and evidenced in the unpleasant business concerning Uriah the Hittite and Bathsheba. Whether David and Jonathan were lovers is unclear, but it isn't outside the realm of the possible, and it would go a long way toward explaining the words of King Saul to his son Jonathan in
I Samuel 20:30 (KJV):
.....Then Saul's anger was kindled against Jonathan, and he said unto him, Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman*, do not I know that thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thine own confusion, and unto the confusion of thy mother's nakedness?
"Confusion" was often a term Bible writers used to imply homosexual conduct, and this passage seems to imply that something more than mere friendship was going on between his son and the man who many consider the apple of God's eye. Perhaps the later scribes and monks you mentioned invented David's success with the ladies as a cover for their own embarrassment concerning David's natural inclinations. I don't believe they did that, but it's just as likely as postulating that they altered the text because they were "jealous" of David.
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*
An early edition of Kenneth Taylor's The Living Bible quotes Saul in this passage as referring to Jonathan as a "son of a bitch."