5 - Conclusion: The Influence of Oscar Wilde on 1 and 2 Samuel

Summary

Why have biblical scholars and other interested parties come to ask whether David and Jonathan were engaged in a homosexual relationship? There are three main reasons, which doubtless cloak a myriad minor ones: an affirmation or denial of a homosexual relationship between the two men serves ideological agendas that have come to the fore in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, though their roots are much earlier; the work in which David and Jonathan first appear together, 1 and 2 Samuel, is so constructed as to invite the reader to co-operate actively in the production of meaning, in its actualization as a text, and contains a range of words and phrases that, in certain contexts, can be construed as erotically suggestive; and there exists a reading convention that sees “David and Jonathan” as a reference to a gay relationship, a convention that evolved under the influence of a very complex network of ideological struggles and reading strategies in the nineteenth century. The twist in the tale is that, because their relationship had come by the nineteenth century to be customarily cited as part of a tradition of male friendships of various kinds, David and Jonathan were part of the process by which the modern idea of homosexuality itself came into existence. The question of whether their relationship was homosexual is, then, a decidedly back-to-front one.