Queer Interpretations of the Hebrew Bible: The Context and Current Discussions

The lecture concerns the queer narratives and motifs and their interpretation both in the classical Jewish texts and external sources (The Avesta, The Book of the Dead, The Hittite laws, etc.) and in the research of the late 20^th – early 21^st century. The Hebrew Bible reveals a number of queer motives in religious prescriptions (Lev. 18:22) and in the biblical narrative corpus (the stories about Sodom and Gomorrah, Joseph and Potiphar, David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, Daniel and Ashpenaz, etc.). The traditional Judaic notion, e. g., on Lev. 18:22 refers to absolute prohibition of same-sex intercourse, and in the stories of David and Jonathan (as well as Ruth and Naomi) only homosocial relations are considered. However, the most of modern scholars assume that the intertextual and hermeneutic approaches allow us to look to these stories from a new angle, and to make a conclusion of an extremely high erotic (including homoerotic) register of the biblical language.