A Queer Reading of Qohelet 4:9-12

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To answer the question which partners we need in order not to be alone or to be able to survive, a text of the Hebrew Bible like Eccl 4:9–12 suggests also other models than an exclusive man-woman relationship. It can be argued from a queer perspective that a sexual relation between men is mentioned in Eccl 4:11: That two men warm each other while lying, can imply that they sexually arouse each other. Within the framework of a queer reading, this may also trigger associations about other, diverse, queer companions, who sexually arouse each other while lying. Various things can be associated with the threefold thread that is not so easily torn apart mentioned in Eccl 4:12. Not only future children, as asserted in Ecclesiastes Rabbah, may form a basis for partnership – perhaps also queer – but affection and sexual desire also play an important role. It follows from later rabbinic interpretations in Mishnah Qiddushin (“Betrothal”, “Engagement”) 4:14 and parallel passages in the tractate Qiddushin both of the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmud, that Jewish sages had not previously forbidden that two unmarried men sleep together under the same cloak. At the time of the rabbis, the famous love affair between Alcibiades and Socrates in Plato’s Symposium may have been well-known, according to which Alcibiades slips at night under the cloak of Socrates, whom he admired so much, with the intent to seduce him sexually.

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