Desiring Men: Gender and Sexuality in 1 Samuel 18–23

Samuel - Rachelle Gilmour

Rhiannon Graybill [+-]
University of Richmond
Rhiannon Graybill is Marcus M. and Carole M. Weinstein and Gilbert M. and Fannie S. Rosenthal Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond. She is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible whose work brings together biblical texts and contemporary critical and cultural theory. Her research interests include prophecy, gender and sexuality, horror theory, speculative fiction, and the Bible as literature. She is the author of Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford, 2016) and Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 2021). She has also co-edited three books: Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (with Cooper Minister and Beatrice Lawrence, Lexington Books, 2019), The Bible, Gender, and Sexuality: Critical Readings (with Lynn R. Huber, Bloomsbury / T. & T. Clark, 2020), and “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”: The Bible and Margaret Atwood (with Peter J. Sabo, Gorgias Press, 2020). Her current projects include the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary on Jonah(with Steven L. McKenzie and John Kaltner) and an edited volume entitled Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion (with Kent L. Brintnall and Linn Tonstad).

Description

First Samuel 18–23 is a text filled with passion – passion of all sorts. Jonathan expresses his love to David, even stripping himself before him; Michal is likewise enamored. Saul has a different sort of obsession with David, shot through with paranoia and rage. And David himself demonstrates complicated and not always reciprocal relationships with each of these figures. This essay uses these chapters of 1 Samuel to focalize and explore gender and sexuality in the text, with particular attention to masculinity, queerness, and the usefulness of LGBTQ+ and queer approaches in reading an ancient text such as this. My aim is not simply to elucidate this section of text, but to demonstrate how these reading strategies can be deployed more broadly, across the books of Samuel and other biblical texts. The chapter also explores feminist reading, with attention both to Michal and to the rhetorics of masculinity that pervade the text.

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Citation

Graybill, Rhiannon. Desiring Men: Gender and Sexuality in 1 Samuel 18–23. Samuel. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. Jun 2027. ISBN 9781000000000. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=46900. Date accessed: 25 Apr 2025 doi: 10.1558/equinox.46900. Jun 2027

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