Kings

Kings


One of the many reasons for the obsessive cleanliness laws about who couldn't touch what or who couldn't sit where, when, was because…

People didn't wear underwear. No, Jesus didn't wear underwear either (which means I need to correct a comment I made several entries ago except I won't because it's too time consuming but I'm stating here that I realize I made a mistake). Now, I've had it explained to me that what Jonathan actually took off was just his armor and some outer type garments, but if you are going to go around saying he stripped, then he would have been naked. Having him take off all his clothes except his non existent underwear is as strange as having them shake hands instead of kiss (which is what a couple of Bible translations have, despite the fact that shaking hands was not common in that time and place anyway. Plus it just comes off as such a blatant attempt at censorship because any idiot can pick up a good Bible and see that the translation is wrong).

I know that Sunday School teachers really want to make sure children can identify with the stories, which is why they often make David a child or young teen, and Jonathan the same age. There's a lot of value in that, teaching children about standing up to bullies, and little boys how to be a good friend. But out of neccesity, the whole story then has to be de sexualized, when sex is a major underlying theme in the original story. Not only that, but it means the story tellers have made the same mistake that a lot of overeager religious people do, which is to make a believable story, totally exaggerated to make a point, which is later taken literally and thus made much easier for skeptics to smugly debunk.

Would you be convinced that an eight year old boy killed a twenty foot giant with a rock the size of your fist?
Would you be convinced that a fairly strong, fairly athletic eighteen or twenty year old man knocked unconcsious a seven foot tall person with a rock the size of your head, and then chopped off his head with a sword while he was still down for the count?

Jonathan is also older than David. Not creepy old, but still older. So to portray David as someone barely hitting puberty , yet have their relationship be a romance, turns his older friend into a pedophile and nobody wants to see that. The fact that Jonathan is not a teenager kind of pulls the rug out from under the "okay, so they were sleeping together but it was just about typical teenage experimentation" argument. I'm also slightly annoyed by the "well, it's just their oriental temperment". Yeah... oriental temperment. That's it. Sure.

I'm wondering why it is that people are quite willing to admit that David did a lot of things he shouldn't have done, yet very conservative Christians and Jews can't stand the thought that he might have slept with a man. If you're the type of person who thinks there's something wrong with homosexaulity, and you can't entertain the idea that David might have been attracted to a man, how do you justify considering that to be worse than anything else he does?

There's also the interesting question of David and Saul- anything going on there?

I bought "David the King" by Gladys Schmidt, after finding it recced on a lj that hosts one of the few D/J fics I was able to find. The book starts out really neat, and seems to be building up both good steam as far as plot,and a lot of great sexual tension that you're hoping will explode. Except… it doesn't. Suddenly, inexplicably, Schmidt puts a rift between David and Jonathan- although they remain friends it is awkward and the progression towards something romantic is halted. The author uses social taboos as a reason why it takes David and Jonathan about six chapters to work up the nerve to hold hands before she inexplicably rips them apart. The teen angst is great, don’t misunderstand me, the description of David's dilemma- loving Jonathan but lusting after the sexually aggressive Michal. But I don't buy it that David would have allowed social taboos to keep him from Jonathan. When do we ever see the Biblical David paying attention to social taboos? Some of the things he does, such as dancing down the street half naked, would be considered pretty out there even today.

David then spends the rest of the book searching for the same love in other people and never finding it. Too much time is spent on his marriage to Michal, which is really only a rather dull footnote in the Bible, whereas half the Bible story is taken up with David's relationship with Jonathan. The air is let out of their relationship so much that in the beautiful, climactic scene (some say it contains more than one type of climax) where they are forced to part, the reader feels nothing. The author just parrots the Bible, with no added subtext or emotion and seemingly can't wait to get past it. Jonathan's death, instead of being this explosive moment of epiphany for David, (he died for me, he loved me, he was the best thing I've ever had and I never told him!) is treated like a rather unimportant side note. It's almost like she chickened out, afraid the book would meet with a negative reaction or even not be published otherwise.

The biggest problem in general with adaptations of Bible stories is the author who Doesn't Know When to Stop. Every story seems to contain a natural "cut off" point, but all too often authors just sail past it in their urge to tell the whole epic story. But the stories usually work better doled out in small, manageable portions that focus on the things most likely to interest the audience. People want to see Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt, people don't want to watch him standing around making laws. So the best place to stop the story is just after the escape- something "The Prince of Egypt" understood but "The Ten Commandments" didn't. If people would like to know what happens next, they're free to pick up an actual Bible.

http://epistle.us/hbarticles/davelament2.html
http://jot.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/30/2/171

There is no real Butch/Femme dichotomy here. I realize it's hard for a lot of people to comprehend, and it was probably totally puzzling for people in the ancient Middle East to conceive of a sexual relationship where no one plays the woman, but I don't think David and Jonathan were like that. I mean, there's definitely a delicate negotiation of power going on- Jonathan is David's prince and military commander. In a sense, David wouldn't even really be allowed to say no to Jonathan. David can't say "I love you" first, he's not even allowed to leave town without asking permission. But the entire relationship revolves around David, not Jonathan.

David is the one who will eventually be king, and Jonathan figures that out, and since his love for David is self less and self sacrificing, he does step aside, which might be taken by some readers to mean that he's chosen "the female role" but that just says a lot of disturbing stuff about how said readers view women. Jonathan behaves as the ideal Biblical husband, surrendering to God's will meant he had to give up all of his earthly power, so he did that. He is able to understand that this doesn't make him weak, or "the woman". It seems like hundreds of thousands of men who belong to the Abrahamic faiths have been unable to follow this example at all.

Saul seems to condone the friendship, until he starts to see that David has the potential to be king, which might mean he would be dominating Jonathan, therefore, in Saul's eyes, making Jonathan the girl. Before, Saul might have rationalized it as "my son sleeps with men, but at least he's on top in every way." Of course, like the author of the first essay says, we can't begin to know how they expressed their feelings when alone.



You know, the slash fic talk might have been innappropriate here. Duly deleted for now.

http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Belle-And-Sebastian/Jonathan-David.html