Intimate kissing only became prevalent in Ancient Israel after the Babylonian exile, or in the 6th century BCE, a recent study based on biblical textual analysis has suggested.
Published in the Journal of Biblical Literature in March, the study examines the contexts in which kissing appears in the Hebrew Bible, distinguishing between texts that scholars generally date to before the destruction of Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE and those composed afterward.
Its author, Dr. Rachelle Gilmour, an associate professor at Trinity College, University of Divinity in Parkville, Australia, was intrigued when she read a 2023 academic article challenging the long-held assumption that sexual kissing first appeared in ancient India around 1,500 BCE. The paper argued instead that such practices emerged much earlier in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
“I just found it fascinating that sexual kissing is not universal,” Gilmour told The Times of Israel in a video interview on the eve of Tu B’Av, the Jewish holiday of love, which falls on Saturday. “This immediately got me wondering when ancient Israelites started sexually kissing.”
Gilmour noted that while today — largely due to the influence of mass media — kissing is recognized and understood globally as an intimate act, this was not the case across all times and cultures.
In addition, not everyone in the past interpreted the act of kissing in the context of intimacy as mouth-to-mouth. In ancient Egypt, for example, kissing might have referred to the act of rubbing noses, as the word was written with the same sign as the term “smell.”
‘Isaac’s servant tying the bracelet on Rebecca’s arm,’ Benjamin West, 1775. (Wikipedia)
In the context of ancient Israel, the Hebrew Bible contains numerous references to kissing, though most occur outside of romantic settings. As in modern Hebrew, the term used for kissing is nashaq.
The clearest examples of passionate, romantic kissing appear in the Bible’s quintessential love poem, Song of Songs — a lyrical dialogue between two lovers that Jewish tradition has long interpreted as an allegory for the relationship between God and the People of Israel.
“Oh, give me of the kisses of your mouth, for your love is more delightful than wine,” reads the opening verse of the narrative (Song of Songs 1:2).
“Song of Songs is the obvious place to look for sexual kissing, as it contains several clear examples,” Gilmour said. “The surrounding imagery makes it evident that we’re dealing with mouth-to-mouth, sexually intimate kissing. This leads us to the question of its dating.”
Dr. Rachelle Gilmour, an associate professor at Trinity College, University of Divinity in Parkville, Australia. (Courtesy)
Although the opening verse attributes authorship to King Solomon in the 10th century BCE, most biblical scholars agree that the work was compiled much later.
“An early version of this love poetry may date as early as King Solomon, but the version of the book that we have now, based on its language, which uses many expressions of a later form of Hebrew, probably dates to the 5th century BCE: This is the earliest that we can be certain ancient Israelites were lip kissing,” Gilmour noted.
To shed light on what was happening in previous centuries, the researcher analyzed kissing in earlier biblical texts.
“The Bible describes many instances of kissing that are outside of a sexual context,” Gilmour said.
A first category includes kissing between family members.
Isaac asks his son Jacob to kiss him as he prepares to bless him, mistakenly believing he is his other son, Esau (Genesis 27:27). In another case, Jacob’s father-in-law Laban kisses his daughters as he parts from them (Genesis 32:1).
In other instances, kisses occur between allies or men as a sign of loyalty or friendship.
King David, for example, kisses Barzillai the Gileadite, a wealthy man who served him, as he bids farewell to him.
‘Judah and Tamar,’ Arent de Gelder, circa 1680. (Wikipedia)
At the same time, Gilmour noted that there are parts of the Bible where sexual kissing might have been expected to be included and did not appear, for example, in the scene described in Genesis 26:8, where King Abimelech sees Isaac “fondling” Rebekah and realizes they are married. However, kissing is not mentioned.
“There is also no sexual kissing in all of the book of Hosea, where you might expect kissing in the sexual imagery of the book,” she said.
The scholar acknowledges that it is difficult to make an argument from the absence of evidence. At the same time, she said some insights into the question of when lovers began to kiss in ancient Israel are offered by a different literary tool: the linguistic feature of taboo.
“In cultures where kissing is a sexual act, then the sexual connotations of the word ‘kiss’ tend to become dominant; and the language adapts so that kisses between friends or family members are not misconstrued,” Gilmour said.
“For example, in modern English, to kiss someone usually implies a sexual act; to clarify that something is a non-sexual kiss, we might say ‘kiss on the cheek’ or ‘peck,’” she added. “Even though kissing between family members and friends is socially acceptable, we tend to avoid stating plainly I kissed so-and-so because the first assumption when we hear the word ‘kiss’ is that it is sexual.”
According to the scholar, a shift in the meaning of kissing — from a non-intimate social gesture to one with sexual connotations — can be traced through biblical texts composed in different periods, as dated by scholars.
“In the books of Samuel and Kings, there are numerous examples of non-sexual kissing,” Gilmour noted. “Most of the stories in the books of Samuel and Kings are thought to date from before the Babylonian exile, and this includes the stories that feature non-sexual kissing.”
“However, Samuel and Kings can be compared with the book of Chronicles,” she added. “Chronicles covers very similar stories to Samuel and Kings, but it is thought to have been written much later, after the Babylonian exile. In the book of Chronicles, there is not one mention of non-sexual kissing.”
Painting of David anointed king by Samuel, wearing royal purple, from the Dura Europos Synagogue, Syria, 3rd century CE (public domain)
Gilmour said that this suggests that, in the meantime, kissing had become “a taboo.”
“The primary meaning of ‘kiss’ was now associated with sexual kissing,” she said. “It seems the narrative deliberately avoids mentioning that family members or friends kiss each other.”
For Gilmour, one of the clearest indications that kissing was not regarded as inherently sexual in biblical times is the episode in which Jacob meets Rachel for the first time.
“And when Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of his uncle Laban, and the flock of his uncle Laban, Jacob went up and rolled the stone off the mouth of the well, and watered the flock of his uncle Laban. Then Jacob kissed Rachel, and broke into tears. Jacob told Rachel that he was her father’s kinsman, that he was Rebekah’s son; and she ran and told her father,” reads Genesis (29:10-12).
Dead Sea Scroll fragment 4Q7 featuring the first chapter of Genesis. (Wikipedia)
“There were very strong social norms protecting unmarried women from interacting with men before marriage,” Gilmour explained. “If sexual kissing had been a known or common practice at the time, it’s hard to imagine the text would so casually describe an unmarried woman being kissed by a man in a patriarchal society.”
According to Gilmour, experts have long noted how kissing was introduced to new cultures through contact societies where the practice was already common.
“We have extensive evidence that mouth-to-mouth sexual kissing was practiced in Mesopotamia over a long period, from the Sumerians, to the Assyrians, to the Babylonians,” she said. “Therefore, it is very likely that kissing was introduced to the Ancient Israelites from their contact with Babylonian culture.”
“These findings contribute to our portrait of the extent of political and social upheaval that took place during the period of Babylonian imperialism in Judah in the 6th century BCE,” she added. “Kissing may seem a trivial part of life, but the introduction of kissing shows how the effects of foreign conquest reached into the most intimate parts of people’s lives.”
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