When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David.

AuthorFoster, Benjamin R.
PositionBook review

When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David. By SUSAN ACKERMAN. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005. Pp. xvi + 353. $45.

In this provocative study, Susan Ackerman examines the stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and David and Jonathan for what each ancient narrative tells of the heroes' relationships and how they can be understood using both ancient and modern concepts of friendship, eroticism, and sexuality. Ackerman is expert in religion and modern studies of gender and sexuality, including those focused on the ancient Near East, and has read widely in anthropology. Moreover, she can work with the original Akkadian and Hebrew texts. She is blessed with superior reflective capacity and has cultivated enviable expository skills. This is a serious, close reading of two quite different ancient compositions; this review will give attention only to the Mesopotamian half of the study.

Ackerman's first task is to achieve a definition of same-sex relationships to avoid the trap of interpreting the ancient evidence uncritically in modern terms (homo- versus heterosexual). In the choice between the "essentialist" approach (homosexuality, as understood in modern Judeo-Christian cultures, is found in all cultures) versus a "constructionalist" approach (homosexuality, as understood in modern Judeo-Christian cultures, is a socially conditioned phenomenon not necessarily applicable to other cultures), Ackerman chooses the constructionalist approach, and explains why. This will no doubt nettle those who want to see in these narratives early portrayals of gay love. I found this first chapter slow going and too personal and autobiographical; the author's decision to use a greeting card as a take-off point for a scholarly discussion was not, in my opinion, a happy one. Perhaps the cited authors' institutional affiliations (for some reason she relentlessly gives these for figures in religious studies, but not in other disciplines) could have been transferred to the footnotes, as they give the exposition a ponderous tone. I would greatly have preferred an issue-and-evidence approach to the kind of glossa ordinaria presented here.

The Assyriologist can only feel gratified to see a major Akkadian poem read critically as a work of world literature, even if he finds the author's judgment that it is worth all the rest of Akkadian literature combined rather rash (p. 35). Ackerman is aware of the complicated history of this text and has a sense of how difficult it can be to build a viable interpretation when the plain sense of the original wording may be unclear. An Assyriologist could have helped her avoid some elementary mistakes, such as Akkadians overrunning Sumer in the early second millennium B.C.E. (p. 34), and could have corrected her misunderstanding of what "Standard" means in "Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh" (p. 38). Her knowledge of relevant literature can be spotty; for example, she has overlooked Yitschak Sefati's fundamental study of Sumerian love poetry, Love Songs in Sumerian Literature (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan Univ. Press, 1998), so uses outdated editions. Julia Assante's head-on attack on the modern concept of prostitution in Mesopotamia ("The kar.kid / harimtu, Prostitute or Single Woman? A Reconstruction of the Evidence," Ugarit-Forschungen 30 [1998]: 5-96) would also have been useful to her. Yet there is a nugget or two hidden away here to intrigue the specialist, such as Moran's classroom suggestion of summukunimma (p. 254) in Old Babylonian Gilgamesh Pennsylvania Tablet i 6, which was new...

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