Did Same-Sex Marriage Exist in the Biblical World?

7:07

Preston Sprinkle’s arguments about same-sex relationships

Preston Sprinkle

The second author whose arguments I want to consider is Preston Sprinkle. In his book People to Be Loved, Sprinkle argues that loving, committed same-sex relationships and even marriages existed in the biblical world, and that these relationships are similar to what “affirming Christians are arguing for today.”¹¹

7:33

Parmenides and Zeno

Sprinkle begins by citing, along with N.T. Wright, Agathon and Pausanias and Achilles and Patroclus, both of which we’ve discussed. He then refers to Plato’s dialogue Parmenides and says this: “A Greek philosopher named Parmenides (age sixty-five) was in a same-sex relationship with Zenon. Although Parmenides was much older the relationship wasn’t mere pederasty. Zenon, his lover, was forty years old.”

But that isn’t actually what Plato’s text says. What it says is that Parmenides was “about 65 years old, very white with age, but well favoured. Zeno [an alternative translation to Zenon] was nearly 40 years of age, tall and fair to look upon; in the days of his youth he was reported to have been beloved by Parmenides” (emphasis added).¹² Plato does not say that they were still in a relationship, just that they once were when Zeno was a youth.

This is simply a misreading of the text.

8:30

Hippothous and Hyperanthes

Next, Sprinkle cites Xenophon’s 2nd-century AD novel An Ephesian Tale, saying that it “depicts a young man named Hippothous who falls in love with another man of the same age named Hyperanthes.” This is true, but the young men were teenagers, and the details of this story are critical. The relevant passage of the novel quotes Hippothous describing his relationship like this: “Our first steps in lovemaking were kisses and caresses, while I shed floods of tears. And at last we were able to take our opportunity to be alone with each other; we were both the same age, and no one was suspicious. For a long time we were together, passionately in love, until some evil spirit envied us.”¹³

“We were both the same age, and no one was suspicious.” That is, no one suspected that they were in a relationship specifically because they were the same age. They had to keep their relationship a secret because their ages meant that it wouldn’t have been accepted. Classics scholar Alan Cameron has written that this line is “a clear allusion to the familiar pattern of older erastes and younger eromenos;” “since he and his lover had been much the same age,” he wrote, “no one suspected the nature of their relationship.”¹⁴

Indeed, that interpretation is confirmed by what happens next in the story. A wealthy businessman from another town arrives, is captivated by Hyperanthes’ beauty, and persuades the boy’s father to let him take Hyperanthes back to his city with him as his beloved. Hippothous is extremely jealous, so he follows them, kills the older businessman while he is in bed with Hyperanthes, and he then flees with Hyperanthes back to their hometown. But on their way, their ship capsizes and Hyperanthes drowns. By the time Hippothous is recounting this story, several years have passed and he is in his early twenties. The message is clear: while a pederastic relationship is possible and accepted, an equal-status same-sex relationship isn’t. Even someone who wants and seeks one will ultimately be thwarted, if not by society then by nature itself.

After this, Preston Sprinkle says that “another novel by Achilles Tatius written around the same time depicts male lovers who are roughly the same age.” But Sprinkle himself acknowledges in an endnote that this relationship is “still pederastic.”¹⁵ The age differences in pederastic relationships could sometimes be fairly small—in this case, in Achilles Tatius’ novel Leucippe and Clitophon, the lover and beloved were 20 and 16, respectively.¹⁶ But this was still a hierarchical relationship, as Sprinkle himself acknowledges, and the younger partner was about to be married off to a woman, so it wasn’t going to last long.

11:24

Encolpius and Ascyltos

People to Be Loved by Preston Sprinkle

In his final reference to male same-sex relationships in ancient literature, Sprinkle cites Petronius’s first-century novel the Satyricon. He says: “In it, the author portrays two male lovers, Encolpius and Ascyltos, who are equal in age and status. Strikingly, the author doesn’t make a big stink about their relationship—as if it’s some weird, crazy, abnormal thing. It appears that their consensual, nonexploitative, mutual love-relationship may have been more common than some scholars think.”

This description bears very little resemblance to the actual text of the Satyricon.¹⁷ In the novel, Encolpius and Ascyltos are not depicted as being in a “love relationship.” Instead, they are friends turned enemies competing aggressively for the affections of a 16-year-old boy who is Encolpius’s slave. They both walk in on each other in bed with this boy at different points in the story. When Ascyltos finds Encolpius in bed with the boy, he angrily asks why he wasn’t included, saying, “Aren’t friends supposed to hold all things in common?” Later, when Encolpius discovers that Ascyltos has slept with the boy himself, he is enraged, saying, “Since you’ve broken faith and raped our friendship, get your things now, and find someplace else to pollute!”¹⁸

In his anger, Encolpius accuses Ascyltos of being a “whore” who had played “the woman’s role” in sex, and Ascyltos turns the tables by claiming that he himself had once penetrated Encolpius.¹⁹ As Marilyn Skinner has written of these characters, “their sexual dealings with each other are in fact cold-blooded and unsentimental.”²⁰ A mutual love relationship this is not, much less lifelong or monogamous.

13:18

Female Same-Sex Relationships

Preston Sprinkle closes this section of his book by citing six different texts or artifacts to claim that female same-sex marriages existed around the time of Paul. Admittedly, we are getting a bit into the weeds here, but this is important, so I want to round out this discussion by unpacking each of his claims and assessing their validity.

This is the relevant paragraph from his book People to Be Loved:

Consensual, same-sex love—even marriages—can be found among women around the time of Paul. A second-century writer named Iamblichos talks about the marriage between two women named Berenike and Mesopotamia. Lucian of Samosata also mentions the marriage of two wealthy women named Megilla and Demonassa. The early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria refers to women-women marriage. And Ptolemy of Alexandria, a famous second-century scholar of many trades, refers to women taking other women as “lawful wives.” Two Jewish documents that were written shortly after the New Testament refer to (and forbid) female marriages that were happening in their day. Several archaeological discoveries depict mutual love between women, including a funeral relief that dates back to the time of Caesar Augustus, where two women are holding hands in a way that resembles “the classic gesture of ancient Roman married couples.”²¹

Just as with Sprinkle’s earlier claims, if you just read that paragraph and didn’t investigate any further, you would assume that female same-sex marriages were common and even legally recognized in the time of the Bible. But also as with his earlier claims, when we look into these, the description and the reality are not the same.

15:02

Bernadette Brooten’s Work

Sprinkle’s primary source for all of these claims is a 1996 book by Bernadette Brooten called Love Between Women.²² In that book, Brooten did argue based on these texts that same-sex marriages between women existed in the ancient world. Now, to be clear, Brooten is a serious scholar who I respect and her book made a significant contribution to the literature on this topic. But her book also received criticism from other scholars specifically for her interpretations of these texts, and Brooten herself has responded to those critiques by significantly qualifying her claims about them.

In a 2020 lecture on this topic (“Did Women Marry Other Women in the Roman World? Jewish and Christian Sources”), Brooten considered the critiques she had received and outlined what she now regards as four plausible interpretive options for these texts, none of which are as bold as Preston Sprinkle’s characterizations of them. Here are the four possible options she presented:

1. The texts provide evidence of informal, long-term relationships that were called “marriages” by the partners, but were not legally recognized. Brooten explains that “in this first interpretive option, adult women found a way to live together in a long-term relationship that they privately call a marriage and a few people around them accepted the arrangement—maybe just three. I’m not arguing for widespread toleration.” But even that is just one of Brooten’s four possible interpretations.
2. Her second interpretive option is that these texts describe marriages in which one partner has ambiguous genitalia.
3. Third, Brooten says that these texts could be an early precedent for the economic-social institution of woman-woman marriage in several African countries, which doesn’t even imply a sexual relationship.
4. And finally, Brooten argues that these texts could simply present a dystopian vision or be purely polemical rather than descriptive of reality.

In weighing these options, Brooten concluded that “I have to live with the uncertainty of my hypotheses, for I can hardly prove anything.”²³ So that’s the big picture for all of the texts that Sprinkle cites. But now, let’s look at each of them in turn.

17:20

Berenike and Mesopotamia in Iamblichos

First, Sprinkle says that, “A second-century writer named Iamblichos talks about the marriage between two women named Berenike and Mesopotamia.” But even in her book, Brooten was more equivocal than this sentence suggests, writing that this “may have been” a marriage but noting that “scholars differ on whether to read [the key phrases] as referring to sexual love between women.”²⁴ The Greek phrase in this text could either mean “to marry” or “to celebrate someone else’s marriage,” and Brooten herself said in her lecture that “the phrase for the marriage of Mesopotamia is ambiguous” and “could either mean Berenike married Mesopotamia or Berenike held the wedding feast for Mesopotamia.” Brooten concluded, “We don’t know.”

18:12

Megilla and Demonassa in Lucian of Samosata’s Dialogues of the Courtesans

Next, Sprinkle says that “Lucian of Samosata also mentions the marriage of two wealthy women named Megilla and Demonassa.” He concedes in an endnote that “this lesbian couple, however, ends up seducing a woman named Leaena into a sexual relationship,” so this is clearly not a monogamous relationship.²⁵ But is it even a marriage?

In this text, called the Dialogues of the Courtesans, two women are trying to persuade a flute girl named Leaena to have sex with them. But Leaena is confused and can’t even wrap her mind around what it is they’re trying to get her to do, so one of the women, Megilla, tries to explain it by telling Leaena to think of her as a man instead of a woman. She says, “Don’t treat me like a woman; my name is Megillos.” To further illustrate what it is that Megilla wants Leaena to do, she then says, “I have been married to Demonassa here for ever so long, and she is my wife.”²⁶

But as classicist Alan Cameron has argued, this statement—in a satirical work, no less—was not meant literally. Instead, it was simply intended to communicate that Megilla “has been playing the male role in bed with Demonassa.” She has been taking the active, dominant role in sex, just as husbands were seen as doing with their wives. As Cameron explains, “Megilla does not love Leaena, who is no more than a prostitute hired for the evening. She just wants to get her in bed. She has failed so far because Leaena is unworldly enough not to understand what is being asked of her. There would be no point in introducing the idea of marriage at this stage of the negotiations. If Leaena cannot grasp the idea of sex between women, she is only going to be further confused by talk of marriage between women. But if Megilla is to stand any chance of getting through to Leaena, it is not the permanence of her relationship with Demonassa that needs to be spelled out, but its sexual nature.”

Indeed, even after Megilla refers to Demonassa as her wife, Leaena still doesn’t understand what she means. Instead, she just laughs in response, showing that the very idea of sex between women—much less marriage between women—wasn’t even conceivable to her. As Cameron concludes, “From start to finish Megilla has been trying to persuade Leaena to go to bed with her and Leaena has been trying to understand why…. Leaena simply cannot grasp either the point or the mechanics of sex between women. Mention of marriage would have hindered rather than helped in the laborious story of her enlightenment.”²⁷

21:01

Clement of Alexandria and Ptolemy of Alexandria

After this example, Sprinkle cites two more. He says, “The early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria refers to women-women marriage. And Ptolemy of Alexandria, a famous second-century scholar of many trades, refers to women taking other women as ‘lawful wives.’” But as Alan Cameron has argued and as Bernadette Brooten has acknowledged, the word Clement of Alexandria used in this line of his book Paidagogos can either mean “to marry” or simply “to have sex with.”²⁸ And either way, Brooten has argued that Clement’s comment may simply be “part of a broader dystopian view of the debauched other,” not a description of his actual social context.²⁹

And while Sprinkle says that Ptolemy refers to women taking other women as “lawful wives,” he leaves out a crucial word. To quote Cameron, “What Ptolemy actually said is ‘sometimes they refer to the women with whom they are on such terms as though they were actually their legal wives.’ That hosper [the Greek word translated as “as though”] makes all the difference. If these relationships could be compared to marriages, they were obviously not marriages.”³⁰ Moreover, Brooten has argued based on the broader context of this passage that even these relationships themselves may not have been between two women but rather unions in which one partner has ambiguous genitalia.³¹

22:34

The Sifra on Leviticus 18:3

Next, Sprinkle writes that “two Jewish documents that were written shortly after the New Testament refer to (and forbid) female marriages that were happening in their day,” and he argues in his endnote that this “would be superfluous if such marriages were unknown.” But the two documents that he cites—Sifra 9:8 and the Sifra on Leviticus 18:3—are actually just two different names for the same text, and they don’t refer to marriages that were happening in the writers’ own day.³²

The text is the Sifra, a commentary on the Book of Leviticus, and the specific passage comes from the commentary on Leviticus 18:3, which says, “You shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt… or the land of Canaan.” Among the practices that the writers of the Sifra attribute to Egypt and Canaan in the time of the ancient Israelites—more than a thousand years before their own day—were marriages between women, a man marrying both a woman and her daughter, and a woman marrying two men.³³

But this text is highly questionable as a source of historical fact, not only because it was written more than a millennium after the time it purportedly describes, but also because, in Brooten’s words, “like other highly developed legal systems, rabbinic law utilizes hypotheticals, and the forms of marriage mentioned here may be purely hypothetical.” Indeed, Brooten commends rabbinic scholar Laliv Clenman, who she says “persuasively reads” this text, not as a description of reality, but as a dystopian alternative universe “in which women are legal agents and able to marry in a way that renders men subservient or irrelevant.”³⁴

Clenman concludes that this text “should not be viewed as an historical source for the existence of lesbian marriages in antiquity.”³⁵ Classicist T. Corey Brennan agrees, writing that this text and the others we’ve discussed “seem simply to caricature egregiously ‘shameless’ behavior, and as such are no doubt quite exaggerated.”³⁶

24:38

Funeral relief from the time of Caesar Augustus

Finally—and we’re almost done—Sprinkle cites a funeral relief from the time of Caesar Augustus in which he says “two women are holding hands in a way that resembles ‘the classic gesture of ancient Roman married couples.’” This funerary relief can be found today at the British Museum in London, but while the British Museum’s own catalogue notes that some interpreters have seen the two women as lovers, it gives greater weight to other interpretations.³⁷ In particular, Susan Walker, an archaeologist who specializes in the study of Roman art, has argued that the women were more likely to have been mother and daughter than to have been lovers. Walker wrote that the woman on the left “appear[s] to be about a generation older than the woman on the right,” and she further observed that “…the deceased woman [is looking] vacantly into space,” in contrast to most married couples, who are shown looking at each other.³⁸ We can’t know for sure what the nature of these women’s relationship was; we can only make educated guesses.

25:42

Conclusions

Ultimately, there is no solid evidence that relationships equivalent to modern-day same-sex marriages existed in the ancient world.

And there’s a simple reason for that. As Craig Williams writes in his book Roman Homosexuality, marriage in the Roman world was fundamentally “a hierarchical institution that was aimed at creating legitimate offspring as well as a route for the transmission of property and that required the participation of a woman as subordinate partner.”³⁹ Indeed, that hierarchical nature, not just of Rome, but of all ancient societies, is why same-sex relationships could only be accepted when they were hierarchical as well.

Even non-affirming theologian Stephen Holmes in the book Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church concluded after reviewing the literature that “lifelong, exclusive, equal same-sex partnerships are virtually unknown to human history and anthropology outside the contemporary West. Same-sex sexual activity is common,” he wrote, “but it almost never takes this cultural form.”⁴⁰

So when we are talking today about lifelong, monogamous, equal-status same-sex relationships, we are talking about something categorically different than anything that we find in the biblical world. That’s critical to understand when it comes to interpreting the six biblical passages that refer to forms of same-sex behavior.