Blood brothers without blood

When Jack Donovan was working with Nathan Miller to put together Blood Brotherhood and Other Rites of Male Alliance, he asked me to give him some help with the Christian tradition, which I was happy to do. What I forgot to do was to reference David and Jonathan. It is a story in the Hebrew Bible, of course, in the books of Samuel, but because Christianity was created by Jews, their scriptures have been integral* to the daughter religion since the beginning. I took my task too literally and narrowly.

Due to the Hebrew taboos about blood, I guess, there is no cutting and sharing between the two warriors. But their passionate connection, their expressed covenant and its forms of enactment and consequence put them squarely within the archetypal territory that Miller (who did the research) and Donovan (who did the presentation) so beautifully map out.

I remember feeling as if I had been struck by lightning when, as an adolescent and unknowingly in love for the first time*, with my best friend, I read David's lament on Jonathan's death in battle. The language sounds formal in Bible English, but the emotion is unmistakeable:

I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: 

very pleasant hast thou been unto me: 

thy love to me was wonderful, 

passing the love of women.

The nature of their relationship has become a matter of contention in these days of gayness. The Hebrew rejection of male-male sex would argue strongly against it being such. When Jonathan's father, Saul, insults his son because of his attachment to David --the rival to their throne-- he uses language ("to the shame of your mother's nakedness") which could mean that he suspected them of this, however. On the other side, interpreters anxious to remove any hint of homo-eros, understand the phrase "passing the love of women" to mean that Jonathan loved David even more than women love their children and husbands!

In any case, it is a powerful and moving story of the elevation of unbloody blood brotherhood over status and power and even family, although, typically, when David came to the throne, he sought out Jonathan's crippled son and took care of him for the rest of his life. One of the great male friendships in Western culture.

I am sorry that I forgot to mention it for the book.

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*The only serious challenge to the Old-plus-New Testament Bible came from a second-century bishop, Marcion, who found the Jewish writings and their complicated God incompatible with his view of Jesus as purely good and benevolent. He not only rejected the whole Old Testament but reduced the New to St Paul's letters and a single Gospel, a shorter St Luke. It didn't fly. But if Christianity had, like Islam, asserted its own holy book uniquely and rejected its predecessor, the world would be a quite different place, I think, and Christianity a very very different religion. Alternative history speculation to follow at some other time.

And while I'm at it, let me once more smack the highminded and uninformed who accuse Christianity of "appropriating" the Hebrew scriptures. The first Christians were all Jews and the Jewish scriptures were imposed, if you want to be adolescent about it, on the first Gentile converts.  Saint Paul's battle was to liberate Gentile converts from the burdens of accepting the whole Mosaic Law in order to accept Christ. They were all "Jews for Jesus." The first Church Council was about precisely this.
That Council continued, in a way, Jesus' own freedom in radically re-interpreting a holy text while leaving the words on the sacred page.


**In those days "the love that dare not speak its name" often did not even recognize itself in the mirror!