David and Jonathan - Literature and Legacy

Literature and Legacy

Abraham Cowley's Davideis (1656) as an epic poem deals abundantly with the friendship motif. George Frederic Handel's oratorio Saul (1739) contains a setting of David's lament upon the death of Jonathan.

At his 1895 trial, Oscar Wilde cited the example of David and Jonathan in support of "the love that dare not speak its name": Such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare.

Contemporary American literature also show attempts at fictionalisation of the David narrative. Gladys Schmitt's 1946 novel David the King took a risk, especially for its time, in portraying David's relationship with Jonathan as overtly homoerotic, but was ultimately panned by critics as a bland rendition of the title character.

In Thomas Burnett Swann's Biblical fantasy novel How are the Mighty Fallen (1974) David and Jonathan are explicitly stated to be lovers. Moreover, Jonathan is a member of a winged semi-human race (possibly nephilim), one of several such races co-existing with humanity but often persecuted by it.

The erotics of the battle between David and Goliath feature in Richard Howard's poem ''The Giant on Giant Killing" in his book Fellow Feelings (1976).

Wallace Hamilton declared to be faithful to the Bible texts in his exploration of the love triangle between Saul, David and Jonathan (David at Olivet, 1979).

Allan Massie wrote "King David" (1995), a novel about David's career which portrays the king's relationship to Jonathan and others as openly homosexual.

In modern times, in his Lambeth essay of December 2007, James Jones the Bishop of Liverpool, drew particular attention to the relationship between David and Jonathan, describing their friendship as:

...emotional, spiritual and even physical. There was between them a deep emotional bond that left David grief-stricken when Jonathan died. But not only were they emotionally bound to each other they expressed their love physically. Jonathan stripped off his clothes and dressed David in his own robe and armour. With the candour of the Eastern World that exposes the reserve of Western culture they kissed each other and wept openly with each other. This intimate relationship was sealed before God - it was not just a spiritual bond it became covenantal. He concludes by affirming: Here is the Bible bearing witness to love between two people of the same gender

In 1993 a member of the Knesset in Israel, Yael Dayan, provoked controversy when she referred to David and Jonathan in a parliamentary debate in support of whether gay men and women could serve in the Israeli military.

Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series includes two Djinn named David and Jonathan. In flashback, the two are shown fighting in a battle as humans. When mortally wounded, Jonathan is transformed by the Earth into a Djinn, and he encompasses David in this transformation. At the beginning of the series, Jonathan is the more powerful of the two and the leader of the Djinn, with David as the second in command. This represents a reversal of their Biblical roles.

In the short-lived TV series Kings, a semi-modern update on David's story, Michelle (the equivalent of Michal) and David are in love, though Jonathan is explicitly homosexual and his feelings towards David are complicated.