Mailbag: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Same-Sex Marriage
Posted by Kushana Torumekia at 1/4/2009 6:04 PM 
Categories: Women's History, Virgil, Judaism, Spinning, Classics, Weaving, Writing, Dead Sea Scrolls, Homosexuality, Ovid, Old Testament, Greek, Hebrew Bible, Reading, Roman
Categories: Women's History, Virgil, Judaism, Spinning, Classics, Weaving, Writing, Dead Sea Scrolls, Homosexuality, Ovid, Old Testament, Greek, Hebrew Bible, Reading, Roman
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My helper tells me that someone arrived at this website looking for information on 'the Dead Sea Scrolls and same-sex marriage'. First, I warmly recommend reading the Dead Sea Scrolls (any translation from a major publisher) for the wonderful and strange world in them. Second, I recognize this is neither light nor quick reading.The Dead Sea Scrolls make very little mention of domestic life, so little that specialists debate whether the people who wrote them married, at all (including Dominic Crossan in his most recent book). However, celibacy is very rare in the history of Judaism: it is a religion that celebrates family life, has a God that asks humanity wed and have children, and has little basis in its ideas and thought for not doing so.
(This does no mean that no Jews were ever celibate for religious reasons in all of the religion's history — but examples are rare.)
But for Jewish texts the Dead Sea Scrolls say very little about this side of life: references to children are almost non-existent, references to marriage (to women) are seldom, and references to homosexuality almost non-existent. There is a brief mention in discussion of the last war that will expel the Roman that boys are not permitted to enter the army's camp immediately before the battle. In similar references, elsewhere, it is women who are excluded — and the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament story of Gideon was sometime taken as a reason to think only of war on the eve of a battle. Presumably the boys are being excluded for the same reason women are, and the text has already considered who is an eligible soldier (so it is not discussing who might be trying to joining the army at the 11th hour.)
In general Hellenistic and Roman-era Jews thought of homosexuality as a foreign import that should be avoided — but there were also significant numbers of Jews who assimilated to Greek and Roman culture. The only mentions of homosexuality I can think of disparage it as a foreign practice* — but I can't think of any Jewish person criticized for having a same-sex relationship. (If something has slipped my mind, please jog my memory.)
* The Hebrew Bible mentions male homosexuality as a foreign practice in its day, encouraged the small and embattled tribes that revered it to have many children, and perhaps linked homosexuality to the worship of foreign gods (a practice it expressly forbids.) Some later Jews thought the same way about the Greeks and Romans; for example Paul quotes traditional Jewish 'vice lists' in his letters that seem to include male homosexuality — but the words he uses are not from the exact and explicit vocabulary of Greek on that subject ... indeed translators are not always certain what Paul's source is condemning. (In one passage the most natural reading is overly fluffy towels.)
The Jewish Dead Sea Scroll community was no friend to the Romans. (See the last war, mentioned above, in which the angels themselves would descend to help expel the impure idolatrous foreigners.) However, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain no fulminations against homosexuality — and nearly no mention of it, at all. We have a blank in the historical record. We can make likely guesses about it but we can't know for certain what the Dead Sea Scrolls would have said about the topic. (Remember that with the exception of the scrolls found in Cave 1 in their protective jars, most of the scrolls were fragments. On every topic we only know some of what they say.)
The Roman did have same-sex marriage, at least occasionally in the very top strata of society.* Also, male couples appeared among their gods and cultural heroes (read the Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses.) However, most people in Roman society were poor, most married the opposite sex in order to have an economically viable household — and to have children (who were important extra workers in that, and many, agricultural societies.) Most Roman-era graves for wives praised their thrift and industry: the amount of spinning and weaving necessary to clothe even two adults is a tremendous amount of work and one adult-sized garment takes at least a year of experienced labor, all by hand. We simply don't know how many ordinary Roman citizens were in same-sex marriages (or relationships) without newspapers, diaries, pictures, census records, regional or family marriage and birth records, or informative grave markers, so we are again left with gaps that must be filled with what evidence there is — and our best guesses.
* As with most history there is little information about people who could not read or write — and that was most people.
The Dead Sea Scrolls say nothing about same-sex marriage and nearly nothing about same-sex relationships. Like most books from the past they are full of their own interests, worries, and concerns and have little to say about ours.
(As with much of women's history we know even less about women than about men. One can nearly always assume that Classical same-sex relationships refer to men rather than women: women were not educated, could not write, and usually did not have the kinds of political power, wealth, or cultural achievement that men who wrote thought to mention. Most studies of Greek and Roman homosexuality have to scrabble for any mention of women.)
-Kushana
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