Saul Olyan of Brown University has written a perceptive and intelligent study of friendship in the Hebrew Bible. Olyan carefully notes that as a window into the details of actual life in ancient Israel, the Bible offers at best a glass frosted by its authors’ “literary and ideological needs,” though he acknowledges that the Bible's depiction of the past “was not generated in a vacuum and must resonate in some way with its intended audience” (119). This caveat aside, Olyan's presentation has the ring of authentic testimony about a feature of ancient and contemporary life.
Throughout Olyan is attentive to the ambiguities in delimiting the boundaries of friendship's field. On one side, friendship abuts the realm of family bonds; on the other, instrumental and provisional social partnerships were formalized through covenants and treaties. Friendship is situated between these natal and cultural arrangements, with which it often shares common terms and obligations.
Olyan begins his detailed analysis of this neglected topic with an examination of the Hebrew Bible's vocabulary and idioms for friendship. The lexicon of friendship in the Hebrew Bible includes nouns such as “intimate” (meyudda’), “dear one” (ʼallup), “man of good relations” (ʼîš šalôm), “friend” (rea’), “loved one” (ʼōhēb), and verbs such as “cling to” (√dbq), “trust” (√bṭḥ), “reciprocate/offer good to” (√šlm/śym ṭôb), and “maintain sweet fellowship” (√himtîq sôd) (4–5). He defines friendship as “a relationship between people who choose to associate or affiliate with one another and [which] involves positive feelings described in texts as ‘love’” (5). Friendship is voluntary and reciprocal. It transcends differences in age, economic class, social caste, and ethnicity, but, based on the biblical evidence, not gender. The Hebrew Bible does not record or allude to friendship between women and men.
Chapter 1, “Friends and Family” (11–37), compares and contrasts these respective social bonds. The paradigm for friendship is familial love. Exceptional friends match or surpass the quality of blood relations: “There is a friend who clings more closely than a brother” (Proverbs 18:24), there is “a friend who is as yourself” (Deuternomy 13:7). Normally, however, there are limits to the obligations of friendship. It is family members, not friends, who bear funerary responsibility. In mourning rites, family members join the bereaved in common ritual, sharing the loss as a unit; by contrast, friends “comfort” (√nḥm), that is, support the bereaved through the ritual and emotional aspects of the ordeal. Ultimately, friends part from each other, while family members sleep through ‘olam together in the bosom of their ancestors. Male family members are expected to fulfill the levir function when a brother dies without producing an heir; friendship does not extend to postmortem situations. The language of friendship and family both overlap with the rhetoric of covenant. The difference, Olyan notes, is that the reciprocal “love” between friends and family members has emotional and behavioral components, while that between covenant partners has only the latter.
Chapter 2, “Failed Friendship” (38–60), observes details about friendship that only emerge in the shadows, in narratives and laments about betrayal, indifference, and lack of reciprocity. The quality of friendship is tested under stress. Passivity in the face of a friend in need is such a failure—“to stand at a distance” (‘ amad neged), “be far from” (√rḥq), “forget” (√škḥ), or “abandon” (√‘zb). Even worse is the active rejection of a friend, hostile actions such as “to hate” (√śn’), “pursue” (or “stalk”) (√rdp), “prosecute” (√śṭn), or “abominate” (√t‘b), that is, treat a former friend as socially toxic. In Olyan's analysis of cases of failed friendship, another distinction between family and friends surfaces: family ties are never terminated, but friendship can be.
In chapter 3, “Friendship in Narrative” (61–86), Olyan sketches in-depth portraits of the classic female and male friendships in the Hebrew Bible—Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan. Both relationships present different analytic ambiguities. Are Ruth and Naomi family or friends? Are David and Jonathan friends or covenant partners? Those ambiguities aside, both relationships as presented by Olyan are extraordinary.
For Olyan, Naomi's farewell speech to Ruth and Orpah in Ruth 1:8–9 makes it clear that the latter had fulfilled whatever obligations they had to their Judahite in-laws. Thus, Ruth's subsequent “clinging” to Naomi represents the voluntary commitment of friendship rather than the obligation of daughtership. By any terms, it is a relationship that transcends generations and nationalities, and Ruth's ultimate commitment to Naomi (“Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried,” Ruth 1:17) embodies the kind of exceptional friendship that rivals familial love (Proverbs 18:24).
David and Jonathan are bound to each other by covenant, though the various strands of the braided text in 1 Samuel do not consistently portray the structure of their formal relationship: Is David lord and Jonathan vassal (e.g., 1 Samuel 23:14–18) or vice versa (e.g., 1 Samuel 20:1–10)? But there is, as Olyan demonstrates, an emotional bond between them that goes way beyond the rhetoric of covenant's fictive kinship. It is captured in the narrator's comment that the self or life (nepeš) of Jonathan was “bound” to the nepeš of David (1 Samuel 18:1–4), embodied in the description of their mutual affection in the scene of 1 Samuel 20:41, where they kiss each other and weep together, and attested in the words of David's lament: “Your love for me was wondrous, surpassing the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26). In passing, Olyan also comments on Job and his “friends,” Jephthah's daughter and her companions, and the curious case of Jonadab in 2 Samuel 13, a manipulator of friendship, the narrative realization of the false friend described in the psalms of lament.
In chapter 4, “Friendship in Ben Sira” (86–103), Olyan caps his study by looking at the treatment of friendship in this Second Temple–era Wisdom text in order to chart possible diachronic and cross-cultural factors. That Ben Sira devotes considerable attention to the topic may itself be due to Greek influence, but it is impossible to know whether any of this author's ideas about friendship previously unattested in the biblical tradition represent anything new, or whether they are Hellenistic in origin. The fact that ideas such as “the fighting friend” and generosity toward friends appear in Ben Sira and Greek sources but not in the Tanakh does not rule out the strong possibility that friendship in Israel included these features too, but it may not be visible in the Tanakh because friendship is never discussed in depth.
Olyan has given us a meticulous and exhaustive treatment of a significant topic that is a model of clarity and simplicity in expression.
