Now, do we really care if the biblical David was either gay or bi? Some may, but I certainly don't. What I do care about is the absence of a single translation into English that gives us the correct, literal meaning of the Hebrew words, So far I've checked the KJV, NASB,RSV, NIV, NWT, and JB (Koren Publishers 1997), as well as the Latin of St. Jerome's Vulgate.
What we have, instead, are all sorts of fanciful renderings, such as "until David exceeded," "but David wept more," "until he exerted himself," "but David did it the most," "until he recovered himself," "until David regained control of himself."
These little tap dances around the Hebrew words are all intended to avoid one central fact: the biblical David, King David, the slayer of Goliath and the hero of Israel, also supposedly a royal ancestor of Jesus, was either gay or bi. He clearly had a homosexual relationship with Jonathan, which Jonathan's father, King Saul, condemned in the strongest terms and which became the motive for Saul's attempts to kill David.
What is important, though, is not that David, to whom some of the world's oldest and best poetry is attributed, was gay. What is important is that I have not been able to find a single version of the Bible that translates 1 Samuel 20.41 correctly and literally.
I don't claim to be a great Hebraist. If I know what those Biblical Hebrew words mean, then others do, too. But they are maintaining a silence that has now lasted almost two thousand years. This is something that we need to think about.
[to be continued]
Text © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler
