🏳️‍🌈🏺🛐Bible 4 Jonathan and David

🏳️‍🌈🏺 2-GAY IN HISTORY🏺🏳️‍🌈

“your love to me was wonderful,

surpassing the love of women.”

(2 Samuel 1:26) (8:1:26)

There are queer people in the Bible hiding in plain sight in the text. None is written with more intensity, repetition, and emotional excess than the relationship between David and Jonathan, son of Saul.

When they first meet, the text tells us:

“The soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”

The Hebrew nefesh (soul/life/self) is “knit” or “bound,” followed immediately by a covenant and a dramatic exchange of clothing and weapons—royal symbols.

Samuel expounds on this love again and again:

“Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him, for he loved him as he loved his own soul.”

(1 Samuel 20:17)

When they part in secret, they share an ambiguous kiss:

“They kissed each other and wept together—David wept the more.”

(1 Samuel 20:41)

And when Jonathan dies, David’s grief becomes poetry:

“I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother;

very pleasant have you been to me;

your love to me was wonderful,

surpassing the love of women.”

(2 Samuel 1:26)

That last line has echoed for three thousand years.

Ancient interpreters did not avoid it. Rabbinic tradition held David and Jonathan up as the model of enduring love—“a love not dependent on anything” (Mishnah Avot 5:16). Early modern scholars were more cautious, but many agree on this much: the language is intentionally charged. As Martti Nissinen puts it, the narrative “leaves the possible homoerotic associations to the reader’s imagination.”

Is this a sexual relationship? The text never says so, but it is clearly homoerotic. It is more intimate, embodied, and emotionally elevated than nearly any other bond in the Bible.

For queer readers across centuries, David and Jonathan have functioned as a mirror: proof that the Bible knows same-sex love that is loyal, covenantal, public, and mourned without shame.