Jewish heterosexuality, queer celibacy? Ælfric translates the Old Testament priesthood

This essay argues that Ælfric’s discussion of priestly marriage demonstrates an Anglo-Saxon articulation of the difference between Jews and Christians as sexual difference. Ælfric represents temporally distant Biblical Jews as embodying a kinship-based heterosexuality that has been superseded by and is now opposed by Christian chastity and asexual reproduction. This supersession operates through linguistic as well as temporal translation; Ælfric transmutes ritual Jewish purity into Christian sexual purity by translating the Vulgate’s mundus and immundus, which gloss Old Testament טָהוֹר and טָמֵא [‘ritually pure’ and ‘impure’], into Old English clæne and unclæne [in Ælfric’s context, generally ‘chaste’ and ‘unchaste’]. Terms from the Hebrew Bible that, when translated into Greek and Latin, assume equivalence to New Testament terms for spiritual purity thus undergo a further conversion in the work of Ælfric, who diverges from other Old English writers in linking the word clæne not only with the Old Testament but also, specifically, with Jewish sexuality. Ælfric’s linguistic choices forge a largely fictive continuity between Jewish and Christian sexual purity systems, while also authorizing Christianity’s break from Jewish mores.