In Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks’ 2015 novel, The Secret Chord, the Biblical account of King David is reimagined through the eyes of the prophet Natan. Through exposition and dramatization, along with more than a little extratextual interpretation, Brooks gives voice and vitality to the ancillary characters in David’s story, allowing them to spotlight the strengths and shortcomings (i.e. the humanity) of “a man after God’s own heart.” In this respect, The Secret Chord is a fictional tour de force; however, it is not without its controversies, the preeminent being the depiction of Jonathan and David as having had a sexual relationship. In this, the tale departs markedly from traditional exegetical understandings of the actual Biblical text by capitulating to the perennial, albeit erroneous, sense that deep relational intimacy requires sex, and while this departure might entice readers who would otherwise pass over the story of David, in adding sex to David and Jonathan’s relationship, more is lost than illuminated. In fact, in eroticizing the nature of David and Jonathan’s relationship, Brooks not only collapses love as a multivalent category but also, in an ironic twist, implicitly justifies David’s mistreatment of women and extends that same mistreatment to Jonathan. In this paper, I will provide a brief illustration along with an analysis of the long-standing cultural confusion surrounding relational intimacy and sex, argue that Brooks falls prey to it in her eroticization of Jonathan and David’s friendship, and further argue that readers’ understanding of both David’s wife Mikal and Jonathan suffer for this. In sum, I hope to present a defense for the position that David and Jonathan are best understood as friends, and far from being a lesser form of love for its platonic-ness, their love is all the more exalted because of it.

Geraldine Brooks’ decision to eroticize David and Jonathan’s relationship did not emerge in a vacuum. Frankly, there has long been a sense that deep relational intimacy, that is, love, and sex go hand in hand; however, if there is one recent cultural artifact that encapsulates their conflation it would be the 2019 Kygo remix of “Higher Love” by Whitney Houston. Right from the get, the first verse begins: “Think about it, there must be a higher love/ Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above/ Without it, life is wasted time/ Look inside your heart, and I’ll look inside mine.” At first glance, the lyrics give the impression that the song is about a quasi-transcendental, even divine, form of love, but the moment the accompanying music video is viewed (and it has been viewed over 155 million times) that impression must be swiftly given up. While Houston’s words might be directing listeners to look to the heavens or deep inside, in the video, it’s not hearts or stars that are being exalted but boobs and backsides. Indeed, the lofty audio and lewd video combine to make the message clear: the highest form of love is focused on posteriors. Diotima’s scala amoris was incorrect. Beautiful bodies and sex aren’t on the bottom rung of the ladder of love–they are on the summit. At least according to Kygo’s remix, and given that it has been viewed by roughly half of the United States’ population and actively liked by close to a million, it stands to reason that a sizable number of people agree with him. This is significant because if Kygo synthesis of high love and sex is correct, Geraldine Brooks’ depiction of Jonathan and David is not only logical but requisite because the Bible itself says David loved Jonathan more than anyone—including any woman. Therefore, if sex is the apotheosis of love, it must mean that he and Jonathan shared a sexual relationship. 

But is Kygo correct? Is it true that the highest form of love requires, indeed, is exemplified by, sex? Psychologists and social scientists would seem to think no, but for a more culturally relevant analysis, it is worth turning to rapper, singer, and armchair philosopher Post Malone. In 2019 (the same year that “Higher Love” was remixed by Kygo), Malone released  “Circles” wherein he serenades an ex-lover, crooning: “You thought that it was special—special/ But it was just the sex, though—the sex, though.” Clearly, in Malone’s estimation, sex is nothing special, which would imply that it is not representative of the highest love imaginable. And Malone isn’t alone. In the last decade, other significant cultural artifacts have seemed to echo this stance. 

Early on in award-winning 2012 film Silver Linings Playbook, sex is presented as not a higher love but merely instrumental when protagonist Pat (Bradley Cooper) is told by his therapist in reference to a neighbor (Jennifer Lawrence) who he thinks is stalking him, “Maybe she [Tiffany] just needs a friend, and she thought that if she offers you sex, it will be easier for you to become friends with her.” In this, Pat’s therapist presents Tiffany’s offer of sex as a tool to elicit a deeper and higher relationship. Sex is a means, not an end, which once again indicates that it is not the highest form of love there is. Indeed, we now have a contender for that very position in the form of friendship. In his 2015 novel Purity, National Book Award-winning writer Jonathan Franzen put an even finer point on this when his protagonist, Purity “Pip” encounters a man she hopes to know better, and Franzen describes her inner musings like this: “[S]he found herself at a crossroads: either risk friendship or retreat to the safety of casual sex.” For Pip, the risk is in pursuing friendship. That’s the more exalted, the riskier bid because it is more intimate, more involved, than a casual exchange of bodily fluids. Thus, even amidst the Kygorian equivocation of love and sex, there has persisted a sense that sex is not the highest love there is, and yet, as evidenced by Brooks’ decision to eroticize Jonathan and David’s friendship, the confusion persists. In 2016, author and speaker Sam Allberry offered a poignant analysis of why he thinks this is:

In our culture we’ve really mashed intimacy and sex into one another, and so we can’t conceive of any intimacy that isn’t ultimately sexual intimacy. We hear previous generations talk about friendship and the depth of friendship, and we we roll our eyes and think, ‘Oh, they must have been gay or something.’ But the Bible shows us you can have a lot of sex in life and no intimacy. It also shows us you can have a lot of intimacy in your life and not be having sex.

Reading The Secret Chord in light of Allberry’s cultural analysis, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Brooks fell prey to the “Oh, they must have been gay” line of thought Allberry describes; however, she is not unique in that respect. Indeed, over sixty years ago, that kind of thinking was already on the rise. 

In his 1960 book The Four Loves, Oxford Don C.S. Lewis noted, “It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.” For Lewis, that troubling theoretical shift was indicative of the shifters’ insufficient personal experience with friendship: “Those who cannot conceive Friendship [Philia] as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.” Thus, in Lewis’ estimation, the eroticization of Jonathan and David’s relationship is symptomatic of an impoverished view of friendship, and for the sake of this paper, a discussion of its nature and substance is therefore warranted. 

What is a friend? In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle contends that a friend is an indispensable good without which “no one would choose to live.” Indeed, he writes that “in poverty and in other misfortunes… friends are the only refuge… for with friends, men are more able both to think and to act. David and Jonathan’s relationship coheres with this in both the Biblical account and in Brooks’ version, with Jonathan sheltering and assisting David when his father, King Saul, is making every effort to kill him. However, providing refuge and assistance do not capture the whole of friendship, and in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley builds on this description through narrator Captain Robert Walton who early on writes to his sister, saying, “I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine… I bitterly feel the want of a friend.” For Walton (and ostensibly Shelley, too), a friend is someone who not only acts as a refuge when their dad is trying to kill you but is also a companion who really and truly sees you, and once again, the Biblical account and Brooks’ representation of David and Jonathan’s relationship clears this bar, with both of them seeing each other as they really are. And yet, clear vision and understanding still fall short of what it means to be a friend. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine goes even further, saying, “Someone had well said of his friend, ‘He was half my soul.’” In Augustine’s view, friends are the people who help make us whole. In The Secret Chord, Mikal, David’s first wife, describes Jonathan (Yonatan) and David’s relationship like this: 

It was a different thing with Yonatan. [David] didn’t need a reason. He just loved. It was as if one soul had been sheared in half, breathed into two separate bodies and then cast adrift in the world, each half longing to find it another. That was how they came together, or so it seemed to me.

Mikal’s description of Yonatan and David’s relationship here aligns with Augustine’s view on friendship perfectly; however, Mikal (and Brooks) remains silent on what could impel this relational oneness. Augustine doesn’t. He writes, “[T]rue friendship… is not possible unless you bond together those who cleave to one another by the love which ‘is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us.’”

For Augustine, friendship is a supernatural event, one which requires Divine intervention and equipment in order to answer the question Ralph Waldo Emerson said must be asked of all friends: “Do [they] see the same truth I see?” Arguably, that Jonathan and David saw the same truth of God and trusted Him implicitly was their highest common denominator and the greatest source of their friendship and unity. Regardless, by all accounts, secular and spiritual alike, David and Jonathan had a friendship par excellence, so why add sex to it? Indeed, it is now worth asking, what does Brooks’ addition of sex do to it? To answer this, it is helpful to examine David’s other relationships.

In the Biblical account, David has a number of wives, and in The Secret Chord, Mikal, Avigail, Batsheva, all get some face time. Of the three, Mikal is the one who features most prominently, her testimony illuminating the tumultuousness and degradation of her relationship with David. Speaking to Natan about her marriage, Mikal says, “I loved him. You know that, I suppose?… The truth is, at that time, the other love [for Yonatan] consumed him. There was a little room for me…” Elsewhere, she reflects on how David’s treatment of her made her feel understandably less than when they had sex. As if she was a masturbatory vessel—a stand-in blow-up doll for Yonatan: “What young girl does not wish to be loved for herself. And not as some pale, soft version of her brother?” And yet, Mikal is made to say that at one point in time, that was A-okay, explaining, 

‘Yonatan had already given David everything… I was just one more gift, laid down upon the altar of that great love. And I was grateful. It was enough joy for me to share David with my brother. I was glad I could be a bond between them.’

This is the stuff of nightmares. That Mikal would be made to believe that she was, in this case, not a burnt but a sexual offering on the altar of her brother and her husband’s philandering, is utterly horrifying. And yet, at the same time, it is unsurprising. After all, David’s treatment of women within the Biblical narrative, especially when it comes to his sexual impulses, is infamous, the classic example being his rape of Bathesheba (Batsheva) and the subsequent murder of her husband. Given this, it is a wonder that Brooks’ wanted to spread David’s sexual attentions to Jonathan because we have no evidence that his sexual abuses would cease when presented with a different object. Truly, it is far more likely that Jonathan would have become a victim of David’s sexual selfishness. In fact, I would argue that a significant part of the reason why David and Jonathan were even able to have such a deep an intimate friendship was because sex was not part of the equation. 

Here, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles together provide a clear framework for the essential thrust of the argument because Proverbs 17:17 says, “a friend loves at all times,” and, in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, love is helpfully defined: 

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

David did not love Mikal. Not in the original text and certainly not in Brooks’ reimagining of it. No one, having read The Secret Chord, could argue otherwise. He was not kind. He did not honor her. He was not selfless on her behalf. He did not offer her protection. In failing to do all of that, David was failing to be her friend—not just occasionally—but habitually. Again and again. All, in no small part, because he supposedly preferred to have sex with her brother Jonathan. In Mikal’s words:

You know what he’s [David’s] like, he seeks love like food or warmth, and he doesn’t turn it away. But David was at the height of his passion for my brother when he took me in marriage. When we made love, he made no pretense. He asked me to do things in the dark that recalled my brother to him.’ 

Mikal’s description of David’s sexual appetite here is strikingly reminiscent of pre-redeemed Augustine’s:

My soul was in rotten health. In an ulcerous condition it thrust itself to outward things, miserably avid to be scratched by contact with the world of the senses. Yet physical things have no soul. Love lay outside their range. To me it was sweet to love and to be loved, the more so if I could also enjoy the body of the beloved. I therefore polluted the springwater of friendship with the filth of concupiscence. I muddied its clear stream by the hell of lust. 

In the cult-classic romcom When Harry Met Sally, Harry tells Sally,  “You realize of course that we could never be friends… men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” That “sex part,” as Harry says, is the typical encumbrance for clearing the Proverbs 17:17 and 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 hurdle in friendships because when it comes to sex, it is very easy to be unkind, to dishonor, to self-seek, and to put our desires over others’ protection and well-being. This is true between men and women but also true between any people who want to have sex. David and Jonathan are not exempt, and while the Bible gives us no sense of Jonathan’s sexual proclivities, David’s live on in infamy. Therefore, it is entirely unlikely that he could have been Jonathan’s friend if he was in any way sexually interested in him. He simply did not have the self-control or discipline. Thus, when the Nevi’im commentator says, “David’s statement that Jonathan’s love was wonderful to him more than the love of a woman (for him) does not hint at homosexual relations, but is an expression of deep friendship,” it can be understood as a defense of traditional teachings on sexual morality but it can also be read as an admittance that David did not have the capacity to really, truly love someone in whom he had sexual interest. From the Biblical text, David’s sexual attentions would be the stuff of nightmares to experience, leading to rape, murder, and a child’s death. In Geraldine Brooks’ The Secret Chord, they lead to objectification, abuse, and neglect. It is, therefore, incredibly strange that she decided to eroticize David and Jonathan’s relationship because, as Saint Augustine said, “[the] reign of inordinate desires savagely tyrannizes and batters a person’s whole life and mind with storms raging in all directions.” Jonathan would not have been spared David’s sexual inordinances, and Brooks’ failure to see this is difficult to account for but for the fact that culturally, we’ve long struggled to grasp that deep intimacy and love are not the same as sex. Indeed, so many have lost the ability to distinguish between “love’s serenity and lust’s darkness.” In eroticizing Jonathan and David’s relationship, Brooks not only forfeits the serenity of friendship between them, exchanging it for an erotic zeal, she excuses David for doing the same to Mikal and even Batsheva and Avigail, implying his wives’ less than stellar treatment could be contextualized, even justified, because Yonatan was the only one David really wanted to be warming his bed at night. And in my opinion, this is a serious interpretive and moral oversight.

Introduction to Jewish Civilization Spring 2022