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Does Language Merely Express Our Thoughts—or Does It Help to Create Them?

Silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation. —Thomas Keating
Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. —Thomas Keating

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 22 August 2026.

Time heaved a gentle sigh as the wind swept through the willows. Punting in Oxford on a late summer evening. Can you hear it?

Communication does not require language, and many animals communicate effectively by other means. However, language is closely associated with symbolism, and so with conceptual thought, problem solving, and creativity. These unique assets make us by far the most adaptable of all animals and enable us to engage in highly abstract pursuits, such as philosophy, art, and science, that define us as human beings.

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine what it would be like to live without language—not without the ability to speak, but without language itself. Given the choice, would you rather lose the faculty of sight or the faculty of language? This is probably the first time that you have faced this question: The faculty of language is so fundamental to what it means to be human that, unlike the faculty of sight, we take it completely for granted. ‘Monkeys’ quipped Kenneth Grahame, ‘very sensibly refrain from speech, lest they should be set to earn their livings.’ Monks, too, are the same.

If rhetoric, the beauty of language, can so bend us, how about language itself? In other words, how does the language you speak influence the way you think? The ostensible purpose of language is to transmit thoughts from one mind to another. Language represents thought, that’s for sure, but does it also determine thought, as claimed by Sapir and Whorf?

Does Language Determine Thought?

Wittgenstein famously wrote that ‘the limits of my language stand for the limits of my world’. Taken at face value, that seems too strong a claim. There are over seven thousand languages in the world—with, by some estimates, one dying out every two weeks or so. The number of basic colour terms varies quite considerably from one language to another. Dani, spoken in New Guinea, and Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, each have no more than two colour terms, one for dark/cool colours and the other for light/warm colours. But, obviously, speakers of Dani and Bassa are able to perceive and think about more than just two colours.

More subtly, there is no English equivalent for the German word Sehnsucht, which denotes dissatisfaction with reality and yearning for a richer, ‘realer’ ideal. But despite lacking the word, the American poet Walt Whitman (d. 1892) was able, quite successfully, to conjure both the concept and the emotion: Is it a dream? Nay, but the lack of it the dream, And, failing it, life’s lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream.

The English language has a word for children who have lost their parents (‘orphan’), and a word for people who have lost their spouse (‘widow’ or ‘widower’), but no word for parents who have lost a child. This may mean that parents who have lost a child are less likely to enter our minds, but not that they cannot enter our minds or that we cannot conceive of them. We often think about or remember things that cannot be put into words, such as the smell and taste of a mango, the dawn chorus of the birds, or the contours of a lover’s face or other part of their anatomy. Animals and pre-linguistic babies surely have thoughts, even though they have no language.

How Does Language Interact with Thought?

If language does not determine thought, how, if at all, does it interact with thought? Russian, Greek, and many other languages have two words for blue, one for lighter shades and the other for darker shades—goluboy and siniy in Russian, and ghalazio and ble in Greek. A study found that, compared to English speakers, Russian speakers were quicker to discriminate between shades of goluboy and siniy, but not shades of goluboy or shades of siniy. Conversely, another study found that Greek speakers who had lived in the UK for a long time see ghalazio and ble as more similar than Greek speakers living in Greece. By creating categories, by carving up the world, language supports and enhances cognition.

In contrast to modern Greek, Ancient Greek, in common with many ancient languages, has no specific word for blue, leaving Homer to speak of ‘the wine-dark sea’. But the Ancient Greeks did have several words for ‘love’, including philia, eros, storge, and agape, each one referring to a different type or concept of love, respectively, friendship, sexual love, familial love, and universal or charitable love. This means that the Ancient Greeks could speak more precisely about love, but does it also mean that they could think more precisely about love, and, as a result, lead more fulfilled love lives? Or perhaps they had more words for love because they led more fulfilled love lives in the first place, or, more prosaically, because their culture and society placed more emphasis on the different bonds that can exist between people, and on the various duties and expectations that attend, or attended, to those bonds.

Philosophers and academics sometimes make up words to help them talk and think about an issue. In the Phaedrus, Plato coined the word psychagogia, the art of leading souls, while discussing rhetoric—which, it turns out, is another word that he invented. Every field of human endeavour invariably evolves its own specialised jargon. There seems to be an important relationship between language and thought: I often speak—or write, as I am doing right now—to define or refine my thinking on a particular topic, and language is the scaffolding by which I arrive at my more subtle or syncretic thoughts.

While we’re talking dead languages, it may come as a surprise that Latin has no direct translations for ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Instead, one either echoes the verb in the question (in affirmative or negative) or expresses one’s feelings about the truth value of the proposition with adverbs such as certe, fortasse, nimirum, plane, vero, etiam, sane, minime… This may have led to more nuanced thinking, as well as greater interpersonal engagement, though it must have been a nightmare for teens—if they even had teens in those days.

More than a century before Sapir and Whorf, Humboldt (Wilhelm, not Alexander) arrived at a similar insight: every language embodies a particular Weltansicht, or view of the world. Language is not simply a system of labels for an already divided reality, but a way of dividing and organising reality.

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (c. 1897).
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (c. 1897).

Built-in Bias and Prejudice

As I argue in Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, much of the particularity of a language is extra-lexical, built into the syntax and grammar of the language and virtually invisible to native speakers. English, for instance, restricts the use of the present perfect tense (‘has been’, ‘has read’) to subjects who are still alive, marking a sharp grammatical divide between the living and the dead, and, by extension, between life and death. But of course, as an English speaker, you already knew that—or, at least, subconsciously.

Language is full of built-in assumptions and prejudices of this kind. Here’s another, more substantial example. When describing accidental events, English speakers tend to emphasise the agent (‘I fired the gun’) more than, say, speakers of Spanish or Japanese, who prefer to omit the agent (‘the gun went off’). One study found that, as a result, English speakers are more likely to remember the agents of accidental events—and, I surmise, to attach blame.

Some languages seem more egocentric than others. Many languages forgo the explicit use of the personal pronoun, which is instead built into the verb. For example, ‘I want’ in Spanish is simply quiero. English in contrast requires the explicit use of the personal pronoun in all cases, as does French. Unlike Spanish and Italian, French has lost many of the spoken distinctions between its verb endings, making the personal pronoun necessary: je parle, tu parles, il parle… all sound essentially the same. What’s more, French speakers often double up on the first-person personal pronoun, as in Moi, je pense que… [Me, I think that] with the stress on the moi. Sometimes, they also redouble on other personal pronouns, Et toi, qu’en penses-tu? [And you, what do you think about it?]. But redoubling on the first-person personal pronoun is much more common: Bon allez, moi j’en ai marre [Whatever, I’m fed up me]. Because je is obligatory, French calls for the additional moi to place special emphasis on the speaker. This redoubling, this pleonasm, is more a feature of the spoken than the written word, and, depending on the context, can serve to emphasise or simply acknowledge a difference of opinion. Equivalent forms in English are more strained and recondite, and less commonly used, for example, ‘Well, as for me, I think that…’ The redoubling, in French, on the first-person personal pronoun seems to inject drama into a conversation, as though the speaker were acting out her own part, or playing up her difference and separateness.

In English, verbs express tense, that is, the time relative to the moment of speaking. In Turkish, they also express the source of the information (evidentiality), that is, whether the information has been acquired directly through sense perception, or only indirectly by testimony or inference. In Russian, verbs include information about completion, with (to simplify a bit) the perfective aspect used for completed actions and the imperfective aspect for ongoing or habitual actions. Spanish, on the other hand, emphasises modes of being, with two verbs for ‘to be’—ser, to indicate permanent or lasting attributes, and estar, to indicate temporary states and locations. Like many languages, Spanish has more than one mode of second-person address: tú for intimates and social inferiors, and usted for strangers and social superiors, equivalent to tu and vous in French, and tu and lei in Italian. There used to be a similar distinction in English, with ‘thou’ used to express intimacy, familiarity, or downright rudeness—but because it is archaic, many people now think of it as more formal than ‘you’: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate… It stands to reason that, compared to English speakers, Turkish speakers have to pay more attention to evidentiality, Russian speakers to completion, and Spanish speakers to modes of being and social relations. In the words of Jakobson, ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.’ Language may not prevent us from thinking certain thoughts, but it may make those thoughts more unlikely, and compel us, every time we speak, to notice certain features of the world.

In many languages, nouns are divided into masculine and feminine. In German, there is a third, neutral class of nouns. In Dyribal, an Aboriginal language, there are four noun classes, including one for women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals—or, as Lakoff put it, ‘women, fire, and dangerous things’. Researchers asked German speakers and Spanish speakers to describe objects with opposite gender assignments in German and Spanish and found that their descriptions conformed to gender stereotypes, even when the testing took place in English. For example, teutophones tended to describe bridges (feminine in German, die Brücke) as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender, whereas hispanophones tended to describe bridges (masculine in Spanish, el puente) as big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, and towering.

Another study looking at the personification in art of abstract concepts such as love, justice, and time found that, in 78% of cases, the gender of the concept in the artist’s language predicted the gender of the personification, and that this pattern held even for uncommon allegories such as geometry, necessity, and silence. Compared to a French or Spanish artist, a German artist is far more likely to paint death [der Tod, la mort, la muerte] or victory [der Sieg, la victoire, la victoria] as a man—though all artists, or at least all Western artists, tend to paint death in skeletal form. So grammar, it seems, can directly and radically influence thought, perception, and action.

It is often said that, by de-emphasising them, language perpetuates biases against women. For example, many writers in English continue to use ‘mankind’ to talk about humankind, and ‘he’ for ‘he or she’. Similarly, many languages use masculine plural pronouns to refer to groups of people with at least one man. If a hundred women turn up with a baby in a pram, and that baby happens to have a penis, French grammar dictates the use of the masculine plural ils: ils sont arrivés, ‘they have arrived’.

Language changes as attitudes change, and sometimes politicians, pressure groups, and others attempt to change the language to change the attitudes—but, on the whole, language, or at least grammar, serves to preserve the status quo, to crystallise and perpetuate the order and culture that gave rise to it. It’s quite a thought: many of the words in our mouths are thousands of years old, or built from shorter words that are. They are by far the oldest thing about us.

Language is also made up of all sorts of metaphors. In English and Swedish, people tend to speak of time in terms of distance: ‘I won’t be long’; ‘let’s look at the weather for the week ahead’; ‘his drinking finally caught up with him’. But in Spanish or Greek, people tend to speak of time in terms of size or volume—for example, in Spanish, hacemos una pequeña pausa [let’s have a small break] rather than corta pausa [short break]. More generally, mucho tiempo [much time] is preferred to largo tiempo [long time], and, in Greek, poli ora to makry kroniko diastima. And guess what… According to a study of bilingual Spanish-Swedish speakers, the language used to estimate the duration of events alters the speaker’s perception of the relative passage of time.

But all in all, with a few exceptions, European languages, or even Indo-European languages, do not differ dramatically from one another. In contrast, to talk about space, speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal language, use sixteen words for absolute cardinal directions instead of relative references such as ‘right in front of you’, ‘to the right’, and ‘over there’. As a result, even their children are always aware of the exact direction in which they are facing. When asked to arrange a sequence of picture cards in temporal order, English speakers arrange the cards from left to right, whereas Hebrew or Arabic speakers tend to arrange them from right to left. But speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre consistently arrange them from east to west, which is left to right if they are facing south, and right to left if they are facing north. Thinking differently about space, they seem to think differently about time as well.

Language may not determine thought, but it focuses perception and attention on particular aspects of reality, structures and thereby enhances cognitive processes, and even to some extent regulates social relationships. Our language reflects and at the same time shapes our thoughts and, ultimately, our culture, which in turn shapes our thoughts and language. There is no equivalent in English of the Portuguese word saudade, which refers to the love and longing for someone or something that has been lost and may never be regained. The rise of saudade coincided with the decline of Portugal and the yen for its imperial heyday, a yen so strong and so bitter as to have written itself into the national anthem: Levantai hoje de novo o esplendor de Portugal [Let us once again lift up the splendour of Portugal]. The three strands of language, thought, and culture are so tightly woven that they cannot be prised apart.

It has been said that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. But when a language dies, it is a whole world that crumbles into the sea.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

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References

  • Winawer J et al (2007): Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104(19):7780-5.
  • Fausey CM et al. (2010): Constructing Agency: The Role of Language. Front Psychol 1:162.
  • Boroditsky L et al. (2003): Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition, ed. Genter D & Goldin-Meadow S, pp. 61-80. Cambridge University Press.
  • Segel E & Boroditsky L (2010): Grammar in Art. Front Psychol. 1:244.
  • Bylund E & Athanasopoulos P (2017): The Whorfian Time Warp: Representing Duration Through the Language Hourglass. J Exp Psychol Gen. 146(7):911-916.
  • Gaby A (2012): The Thaayorre Think of Time Like They Talk of Space. Front Psychol 3:300.

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Wine lovers know that wine is so much more than a drink, but how to explain the love of wine to those who do not already share it?

When you uncork a bottle of mature fine wine, what you are drinking is the product of a particular culture and tradition, a particular soil and exposure, a particular climate, the weather in that year, and the love and labour and life of people who may since have died. If you know how to read it, the wine, like a book, will speak to you of all those things and more.

The wine is still changing, still evolving, so much so that no two bottles can ever be quite the same. By now, the stuff has become incredibly complex, almost ethereal. Without seeking to blaspheme, it has become something like the smell and taste of God. This moving mirror, this transdimensional distillate, will send shivers down your spine. It will make you burst into laughter. It will knock you right out of yourself, release you from the abstract and self-absorbed prison of the mind and redeliver you into the magic and mystery of the world as though you had just been reborn. Remarkably, every wine that can do this does it in its own way, meaning that there can be no end to your journey.

To get the most out of wine, you will need to sharpen your senses, and you will need to deepen your knowledge. By wine, we become more aware of our senses, and we begin to develop them, especially the neglected, almost vestigial, senses of smell and taste. By awakening our faculties, we begin to experience the world more intensely. We also begin to experience it in a different way, almost as though we were a different kind of animal. Through wine, I have learnt a great deal about geography, geology, agriculture, biology, chemistry, gastronomy, history, languages, literature, psychology, philosophy, religion… By wine, I have communed with, and actually visited, many parts of the world—and should add that wine regions, with their gardened slopes and goldilocks climates, make for the most agreeable destinations. Blind tasting has accelerated my development. It has also taught me about the methods of the mind, and, in the process, made me less bigoted, less dogmatic. On so many levels, wine offers a medium and motivation to apprehend the world. It is, ultimately, a kind of homecoming, a way of feeling at home in the world.

Wine is also an ideal vehicle for alcoholic intoxication, serving to loosen the mind and dissolve the ego. Wine brings people together, helps them be together, and be inventive together, as in the Greek symposia and Roman convivia, in which measured drinking could lead to expansive elation and creative conversation and the voicing of disruptive ideas and perspectives. Wine also played a central role in the secret rites of Greek mystery cults such as the Dionysian Mysteries and the Cult of Cybele, which aimed above all at ecstatic union with the divine—an idea that has survived to this day in the sacramental blood of Christ. Dionysus, who, like Jesus, died and was reborn, was the god of wine, regeneration, fertility, theatre, and religious ecstasy. He was an important god—no doubt, in certain periods and places, the most important—and most fervently celebrated around the time of the vernal equinox.

Let me paint a picture of a Dionysian orgy. The procession begins at sunset, led by torchbearers and followed by wine and fruit bearers, musicians, and a throng of revellers wearing masks and, well, not much else. Closing the parade is a giant phallus representing the resurrection of the twice-born god. Everyone is pushing and shoving, singing and dancing, and shouting the name of the god stirred in with ribaldry and obscenity. Having arrived at a clearing in the woods, the crowd goes wild with drinking, dancing, and every imaginable manner of sex. The god is in the wine, and to imbibe it is to be possessed by his spirit—although in the bull’s horn the booze may have been interlaced with other entheogens (substances that ‘generate the divine from within’). Animals, which stand in for the god, are hunted down, ripped apart with bare hands, and consumed raw with the blood still warm and dripping.

The Dionysian cult spread through the Greek colonies to Rome. In 186 BC, the Senate severely restricted it through the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus (‘senatorial decree concerning the Bacchanalia’). According to the Roman historian Livy, the decree led to more executions than imprisonments, with many committing suicide to avoid indictment. Illicit Bacchanalia persisted but gradually folded into the much tamer Liberalia in honour of Liber Pater (‘Free Father’), the Roman god of wine and fertility who so resembled Bacchus/Dionysus as, eventually, to merge into him. The 4th century reign of Constantius II marked the beginning of the formal persecution of paganism by the Christian Roman Empire. But the springtime fertility orgy survived through the centuries, albeit in attenuated forms. At last, unable to suppress it, the Church integrated it into its calendar as Carnival.

The Dionysian impulse for irrationality and chaos can be understood as a natural inversion of, and release from, the habitual Apollonian order and restraint imposed by the state and state religion—and blind tasting, with its emphasis on reason and deduction, as an attempt to unite the Apollonian and Dionysian and attain to the ever receding dream of civilization. In the Birth of Tragedy (1872), the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche recognizes the Dionysian impulse as a primal and universal force:

Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak, or through the powerful coming on of spring, which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.

By diverting the Dionysian impulse into special rites on special days, the orgy kept it under control, preventing it from surfacing in more insidious and perfidious ways. More than that, it transformed it into an invigorating and liberating—and, in that much, profoundly religious—celebration of life and the life force. It permitted people to escape from their artificial and restricted social roles and regress into a more authentic state of nature, which modern psychologists have associated with the Freudian id or unconscious. It appealed most to marginal groups, since it set aside the usual hierarchies of man over woman, master over slave, patrician over commoner, rich over poor, and citizen over foreigner. In short, it gave people a much-needed break—like modern holidays, but cheaper and more effective.

‘Ecstasy’ literally means ‘to be or stand outside oneself’. It is a trance-like state in which consciousness of an object is so heightened that the subject dissolves or merges into the object. Einstein called it the ‘mystic emotion’ and spoke of it as ‘the finest emotion of which we are capable’, ‘the germ of all art and true science’, and ‘the core of the true religious sentiment’. More than ever before, modern society emphasizes the sovereign supremacy of the ego and the ultimate separateness and responsibility of each and every one of us. From a young age, we are taught to remain in tight control of our ego or persona with the aim of projecting it as far out as possible. As a result, we have lost the art of letting go—and, indeed, no longer even recognize the possibility—leading to a poverty or monotony of conscious experience. Letting go can threaten the life that we have built or even the person that we have become, but it can also free us from our modern narrowness and neediness, and deliver, or re-deliver, us into a bigger and brighter world. Little children have a quiescent or merged ego, which is why they brim with joy and wonder. Youth and ecstasy are the echoes of a primordial wisdom.

Neel Burton is author of The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting

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Wittgenstein famously claimed that games could not be defined. But in 1978, Bernard Suits more or less successfully defined a game as ‘a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’.

In that much, sports resemble games. They also resemble games in that they take place outside of ‘real life’, and in that they have no tangible product: when they do have a tangible product, such as fish in angling, then this is largely incidental, and the fish are returned to the river.

There are games like scrabble or monopoly that are clearly not sports. But are all sports games, as Suits claimed? While many sports like football and golf are also games, some sports like running, skiing, and rock climbing are not so obviously games other than in that they are voluntary and unnecessary. In ordinary language, we speak of ‘playing football’ or ‘playing a round of golf’, but not of ‘playing running’ or ‘playing skiing’. But if we are running from a lion, our running is neither a game nor a sport.

Culture and politics aside, what is it that makes a sport a sport? If scrabble and monopoly are not sports, then this is surely because they do not involve any physical activity, or because physical activity is not their primary purpose and any physical activity incurred is merely secondary or incidental.

In 2015, the English Bridge Union (EBU) challenged a decision by Sport England not to recognize bridge as a sport, a decision with consequences since it would deprive bridge from government and lottery funding. The EBU lost their High Court battle on the grounds that bridge does not involve physical activity any more than, as Sport England argued, ‘sitting at home, reading a book’.

But physical activity on its own is not enough. The primary purpose of working out on a cross-trainer is physical activity, but this is classed as exercise rather than sport. What is needed for sport is not physical activity per se, but skill in the exercise of physical activity, with some athletes going so far as to test the limits of human performance.

In 2005, Sport England recognized darts as a sport, presumably because darts involves skill as well as physical activity. By that account, video gaming, although targeted at a representational world rather than the real world, might also make the cut. Chess on the other hand is probably not a sport because, although it involves some physical activity, this physical activity is not particularly skilled, and, in any case, is not the primary purpose of chess. It is perfectly possible to get someone to move our chess pieces for us and still be counted as playing chess: in that much, the physical activity associated with playing chess is not central or even secondary but merely incidental.

If I, as an amateur, decide to go skiing for a couple of days, is my skiing exercise or sport? The answer depends on my own attitude, whether I am skiing primarily to keep fit, or for the sheer thrill of pushing myself or simply being in the world: and I think that this potential for thrill, for exaltation, for a certain kind of joy—rather than just panting and sweating—is an important part of what makes a sport a sport.

Well what if I meet a friend and we race each other down the mountainside? Does this competitive dimension make my skiing more of a game and therefore more of a sport? A person who develops a certain skill, whether in skiing or in baking or in any field of human endeavour, naturally wishes to measure that skill in competition with others who also lay claim to that skill. It is this competitive aspect that makes many sports so compelling to watch, although competition is by no means essential to popular spectator sports such as gymnastics and figure skating. What’s more, a sport need not make compelling watching to be counted as a sport: angling, cricket, golf, canoeing, and weight lifting are probably not the most exciting to watch, but are nonetheless sports.

Wine blind tasting is one of my favourite pastimes. Fiercely fought competitions are popping up all around the world, and some of these competitions even have audiences. So can blind tasting be counted as a sport? Scrabble and monopoly are not sports because they do not involve any physical activity, but blind tasting clearly does involve some kind of physical activity, namely, tasting, and, as the name suggests, tasting is its primary purpose and not merely secondary or incidental. Moreover, this physical activity is highly skilled, and, in some cases, can be said to test the limits of the human body.

It might be objected that the physical activity involved in blind tasting is not locomotor but gustatory, involving not the musculoskeletal system in tandem with the cardiovascular system but ‘passive’ senses such as olfaction, taste, and touch. It might further be objected, and this is an argument that I myself have made, that the real limitation in blind tasting is not in the tasting apparatus as such but in the cognitive appraisal of the wine, and thus that blind tasting is more like chess than snooker or darts—although it must be said that snooker and darts also involve an important cognitive element. Finally, it might be added that the thrill or joy in blind tasting lies more with the cognitive aspect than the tasting aspect, although that does depend on the wine.

But unlike with chess, with blind tasting it is not possible to delegate the physical component: you cannot get someone to do the tasting for you and still be counted as blind tasting. In that much, blind tasting is more of a sport than chess, which the International Olympics Committee already recognizes as a sport.

As any athlete will attest, cognition is an important part of any sport: why create arbitrary distinctions between the primarily physical and the primarily mental, or between the musculoskeletal system and the specialized senses? Are the nose and the tongue and the brain not also part of the body? And are they not also trainable, fatiguable, fallible, mortal? Chess, bridge, and maths have their associations, players, teams, training, rules, competitions, professionals, spectators, drama, and tears—everything, in fact, but a skilled, primary physical activity. And blind tasting even has that.

Now pass me a napkin.

Neel Burton is author of The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting

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ruthnaomi

It may come as a surprise that there is quite a lot of polygamy in the Bible. Some of the better-known polygamists, each with several wives or concubines, include Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Esau, Moses, David, and Solomon. That said, biblical polygamy usually had a bitter ending. According to the Book of Kings, Solomon had ‘seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines’, but ‘his wives turned away his heart’. ‘For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God…’ (1 Kings 11:3-4).

Incest, bestiality, and prostitution

The Bible also features a fair bit of incest. Lot’s daughters both became pregnant by inebriating their father and raping him (Genesis 19:30). Ham ‘saw the nakedness’ of his father Noah. When Noah ‘awoke from his wine’, he ‘knew what his younger son had done unto him’ (Genesis 9:22,24). Tamar dressed up as a harlot and had sex with her unsuspecting father-in-law Judah in exchange for a goat. ‘And it came to pass about three months after, that it was told Judah, saying, Tamar thy daughter in law hath played the harlot; and also, behold, she is with child by whoredom. And Judah said, Bring her forth, and let her be burnt (Genesis 38:34).’

Leviticus prohibits incest: ‘None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness… (18:6).’ It also prohibits bestiality: ‘Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion (18:23).’ Deuteronomy condemns prostitution: ‘There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel (Deuteronomy 23:17).’ St Paul also condemns prostitution: ‘Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid (1 Corinthians 6:15).’

Monogamy

The idea of exclusive monogamy goes right back to Adam and Eve. In Genesis 1, God seems to have created man and woman at the same time: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.’ After blessing them, the first thing God tells them is to ‘be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth’. However, Genesis 2 finds Adam alone in Eden. God says that ‘it is not good that the man should be alone’, and creates Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. Adam seems to consider Eve as another self: ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh… Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.’ This pronouncement implies marriage and monogamy as the norm for man. Much later, the Apostle Paul advised that a bishop ‘must be blameless, the husband of one wife… (Timothy 3:2)’. The serpent that draws Eve, and through Eve Adam, to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is seductive, and phallic in form, and may represent sexual temptation or adultery. To punish Eve, God curses her to the pangs of childbirth, and to marital subservience. He clothes Adam and Eve in skins and tosses them out of Eden.

Romantic love

The concept of romantic love, which is, in fact, fairly modern, barely exists in the Bible. All love is directed at God, and the love for the spouse and more generally for the other is subsumed under the love of God. In the Binding of Isaac, Abraham’s love for God trumps his love for Isaac his own son, whom he is willing to sacrifice for no other reason than that God commands it.

Today, the most popular reading for weddings is Chapter 13 of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Here is a quick run-through:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way: it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things … When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways … And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

The problem in this context is that Paul is not referring to bleary-eyed romantic love, but to Christian love for our fellow men. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which is the source of the passage, gives the Greek agape as ‘love’, but the King James Bible prefers to render it as ‘charity’: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’ Faith, hope, and charity are called the three theological virtues—‘theological’ because they are born out of the grace of God, and because they have God for their object. Charity in particular is the love of man for God, and through God, for his fellow men.

Even the Song of Songs (the Song of Solomon), which appears to celebrate sexual love, is read by the Jewish tradition as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel, and by the Christian tradition as an allegory of the relationship between Christ and his ‘bride’, the Christian Church. ‘I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste (Solomon 2:1-3).’

David and Jonathan

So it is perhaps not entirely surprising that the two greatest love stories in the Bible are not of husband and wife, nor even man and woman, but of man and man, and woman and woman. David rivalled Jonathan, son of King Saul, for the throne of Israel. After slaying Goliath, he appeared before Saul with Goliath’s head in his hand: ‘And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul … And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle’ (1 Samuel 18).’ Much later, upon learning of Jonathan’s death on Mount Gilboa, David lamented: ‘I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women (2 Samuel 1:26).’ One evening, Saul rebuked Jonathan for favouring David over his own father and family: “Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman, do not I know that thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thine own confusion, and unto the confusion of thy mother’s nakedness?” David and Jonathan both had wives and children, and we are to believe that the love between them was homosocial rather than homosexual.

Ruth and Naomi

In the Book of Ruth, Naomi is married to Elimelech. A famine leads them and their two sons to move from Bethlehem to Moab. In time, Elimelech dies, as do their two sons, leaving Naomi and her two daughters-in-law destitute. Naomi returns to Bethlehem, entreating her daughters-in-law, who are Moabites and thus from a different ethnic group, not to follow in her barren footsteps. But Ruth insists upon following her, telling her: ‘Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried…’ This sounds more like a marriage vow than anything else. When the pair arrive in Bethlehem, Naomi tells the Bethlehemites: Do not call me Naomi, call me Mara (‘Bitter’), for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.’ Ruth takes to gleaning in the barley fields of Boaz, who it transpires, is a kinsman of Elimelech, Naomi’s late husband. With Naomi’s encouragement, Ruth marries Boaz, who bears Ruth a son, Obed. Interestingly, it is as if Obed is the son of Naomi: ‘And the women said unto Naomi, Blessed be the Lord, which hath not left thee this day without a kinsman, that his name may be famous in Israel. And he shall be unto thee a restorer of thy life, and a nourisher of thine old age, for thy daughter in law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons, hath born him. And Naomi took the child, and laid it in her bosom, and became nurse unto it. And the women her neighbours gave it a name, saying, There is a son born to Naomi…’ For the genealogy, Obed was the father of Jesse, and through Jesse, the grandfather of David.

Celibacy

Is married life better than celibacy? Jesus did not marry, and neither did Paul or most of the Prophets. Paul clearly favours celibacy and chastity, but accepts that most people ‘cannot abide even as I’ and that ‘it is better to marry than to burn’:

It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband … But I speak this by permission, and not of commandment. For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn … He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.

While Paul permits (but does not command) marriage, Solomon, the apocryphal author of Ecclesiastes, seems—despite, or because of, his 700 wives—to warn against it, as well as against lust, on the grounds that they detract from the path to God:

I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things, and to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness: And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands: whoso pleaseth God shall escape her; but the sinner shall be taken by her.

The early Church Fathers took their cue from Solomon and especially Paul in favouring the freedom of celibacy over the bondage of marriage and family. Noting that angels are single, St John Chrysostom argued that celibacy surpasses marriage inasmuch as angels surpass men (Homily 19 on First Corinthians). Writing in the third century, St Cyprian maintained that, although God had commanded Adam and Eve to multiply, the earth, by now, was full (Of the Discipline and Advantage of Chastity).

Arranged marriages

From the Old Testament, it seems that marriages could be arranged, and that the virginity of the bride was paramount. In Genesis 24, Abraham makes his eldest servant swear to pick a wife for his son, not from the Canaanites but from his own kin. According to Deuteronomy, if a newly wed is found not to have been a virgin, she should be stoned to death in front of the door to her father’s house ‘because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house (22:21).’

Gender and marital subservience

Once married, should a wife be subservient to her husband? Used by God to introduce Eve in Genesis 2:18, the word ‘help’, ‘helper’, ‘helpmeet’, or ‘helpmate’, though possibly a mistranslation, suggests that Eve’s subservience predated the fall and God’s curse of marital subservience. According to St Peter, Sara obeyed her husband Abraham, ‘calling him lord’ (Peter 3:6). In Ephesians, St Paul compares marriage to the relation between Christ and the Church: ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church … Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing (5:22-24).’ In Corinthians, he establishes a clear chain of authority: ‘But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God (1 Corinthians 11:3).’

In the Middle Ages, the word ‘obey’ was introduced into marriage vows, but, even so, a wife’s subservience to her husband is not understood to be unconditional. In Galatians, St Paul says that faith levels the field: ‘But after the faith is come… There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:25,28). In his 1880 encyclical Arcanum, Pope Leo XIII states that ‘The woman… must be subject to her husband and obey him; not indeed, as a servant, but as a companion, so that her obedience shall be wanting in neither honour nor dignity.’

Recreational sex

Is recreational sex permissible within marriage? Certainly, lust should not form the basis of a marriage (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5). But once married, sex should not be withheld: ‘Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love (Proverbs 5:18-19).’ St Paul seems to agree, albeit it with less grace and poetry: ‘Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband; and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife (1 Corinthians 7:3-4).’

Levirate marriage, contraception, and masturbation

The practice of levirate marriage is set out in Deuteronomy 25:5-6. A childless widow should not re-marry with a stranger, but with her late husband’s brother; and their firstborn son will succeed in the name and estate of the late husband. This could concern the brother-in-law, who, by fathering a son in his brother’s line, would be creating a claimant on the larger part of his inheritance. When God killed Er, Er’s father Judah told his second son Onan to marry Er’s widow Tamar and ‘raise up seed’ to his brother. But when he lied with Tamar, Onan, who ‘knew that the seed should not be his’, spilled his semen on the ground: ‘And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore he slew him also (Genesis 38:10).’ This episode is largely responsible for the ban on contraception and masturbation.

Adultery

Adultery is forbidden in several places. It is, of course, the subject of one of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. David famously lusted after the bathing Bathsheba and impregnated her, leading, ultimately, to the death of Bathsheba’s husband Uriah the Hittite, the death of Bathsheba’s first child by David, and the revolt of David’s son Absalom. St Paul inveighs against adultery in more than one place, and St Matthew goes so far as to equate it with a lustful thought: ‘But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart (Matthew 5:28).’ According to Deuteronomy, an illegitimate child and his descendants cannot be admitted into the Church: ‘A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 23:2).’

Divorce

In Old Testament times, a husband could easily divorce his wife (Deuteronomy 24). Jesus, however, forbids it: ‘But I say unto you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication (Gk. porneia), causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery (Matthew 5:32, and echoed in Mark and Luke). Jesus refers back to Genesis 1 and 2 when discussing the indissolubility of marriage: ‘Have ye not read, that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, for this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder (Matthew 19:4-6).’ By referring back to Genesis 1, Jesus may be implying that marriage ought to be between a man and a woman. Jesus performed his first public miracle at the marriage at Cana, saving the day by turning water into wine. This story has been upheld as evidence that he supported marriage, and also as an argument against teetotalism! St Paul commands: ‘Let not the wife depart from her husband: But and if she depart, let her remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband: and let not the husband put away his wife (1 Corinthians 7:10-11).

Homosexuality

Marriage and sex are strictly between a man and woman. Leviticus clearly condemns homosexual acts, as well as touching pork, eating shellfish, and getting a tattoo or a round haircut: ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination (Leviticus 18:22).’ The punishment is harsh: ‘they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them (Leviticus 20:13).’ St Paul seems to echo Leviticus in condemning the ‘abusers of themselves with mankind’ and the ‘soft’ or ‘effeminate’ (1 Corinthians 6:9), and again ‘them that defile themselves with mankind (1 Timothy 1:10)—although, given the original Greek, it could be that he is simply condemning male prostitution.

What of Sodom, destroyed by fire and brimstone? In Genesis 19, Lot gives shelter to two beautiful angels. The Sodomites threaten to force themselves upon Lot’s guests, and such is Lot’s idea of hospitality that he offers up his daughters instead: ‘Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof (Genesis 19:9).’ It is not clear whether the sin of Sodom was homosexual rape, lack of hospitality, or both or other.

The only reference to same-sex love between women is in St Paul’s First Letter to the Romans. To punish the people for their idolatry, ‘God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural (physikos, ‘produced by nature’) use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly… (Romans 1:26-28).’ It could be that, rather than homosexual acts per se, St Paul is in fact condemning the prostitution and pederasty of the Romans, or the pagan practice of priests and priestesses prostituting themselves out of their temples, or simply those people who go against their nature, that is, against their heterosexual orientation.

Despite David and Jonathan, and Ruth and Naomi, the concept of homosexuality as a sexual orientation is relatively recent. The only possible mention of homosexuality as a sexual orientation is in Matthew 19:12, when Jesus speaks of ‘eunuchs which were so born from their mother’s womb’.

Closing remarks

Many traditional attitudes have come down from the Bible. But the Bible is not only or even primarily an instruction manual. It is not a unified work. It often contradicts itself. It lends itself to interpretation. It is open to misinterpretation. Choices made in style and translation can reflect the biases of the translator. Still, for better or worse, no single book has exerted a greater influence on the way we live and think.

By |

Three Tales of Same-Sex Love in Ancient Egypt

Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep touching noses, a gesture suggestive of kissing, in their shared tomb at Saqqara, c. 2400 BCE.
Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep touching noses in their shared tomb at Saqqara, c. 2400 BCE.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 8 September 2026.

Ancient Egyptian sources are largely silent on the subject of same-sex love. Our insights into the matter come from just three areas:

  • A myth about the gods Horus and Seth
  • A historical tale about Pharaoh Neferkare and his general Sasenet, and
  • The tomb of court officials Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep.

Horus and Seth

In the Contendings of Horus and Seth, a myth with several versions, Seth and his nephew Horus vie for the throne of Egypt. Seth keeps on trying to get the better of Horus. At last, uncle decides to subjugate nephew by inebriating, seducing, and inseminating him.

‘How beautiful are your buttocks, how vital!’ This line, used by Seth on his nephew, is without a doubt the oldest chat-up, gay or straight, in all of recorded history.

In the event, Horus is not all that drunk, and succeeds in catching Seth’s semen in his hand. The next day, he shows his manky hand to his mother Isis, before washing it in the Nile. Together, Horus and Isis plot their revenge over Seth…

Horus finds Seth’s lunch and masturbates into his lettuce. After enjoying his dressed salad, Seth puts his domination case before the tribunal of the gods—but, of course, Horus disputes his claim. When Thoth calls forth their semen, that of Seth rises from the Nile, while that of Horus pours out of Seth’s mouth.

The myth suggests that, in Ancient Egypt as in Ancient Rome, the sticking point, if you’ll forgive the pun, was not so much with same-sex love per se, as with a male playing a passive or receptive role.

In 46 BCE, Julius Cæsar was rumoured to have submitted to Nicomedes IV of Bithynia, and mocked as ‘Queen of Bithynia’. A popular quip ran: Gallias Cæsar subegit, Cæsarem Nicomedes (Cæsar subjugated Gaul, and Nicomedes Cæsar).

It is notable that Horus had no qualms about being seduced by Seth, or even with bedding him, but only with being penetrated or inseminated by him.

Pharaoh Neferkare and General Sasenet

From three extent fragments, it is possible to reconstruct the twenty-third century BCE story of Pharaoh Neferkare (the long-reigning Pepi II) and his secret nightly visits to General Sasenet.

One night, a spy observed Neferkare going, on his own, from the royal palace to Sasenet’s house. Having arrived at the house, Neferkare ‘threw a brick after stamping with his foot. Then a ladder was lowered to him (and) he climbed up.’ Neferkare spent four hours in the house with Sasenet, leaving only ‘after his majesty had done that which he had wanted to do with him’. One fragment specifies that there was no woman, or wife, in Sasenet’s house, and the same incomplete sentence also contains the word ‘love’. The story ends with the spy confirming to himself that ‘the rumours about [Neferkare] going out at night are true’.

Although the tale is censorious of Neferkare’s conduct, this is more because it does not befit a king and god than because it involves same-sex love.

Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep

In the twenty-fifth century BCE, Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep shared the title of ‘Overseer of the Manicurists’ at the court of Pharaoh Nyuserre Ini. As with the Gentleman of the Bedchamber at the royal court of England, the title was much more prestigious than it sounds, since the pair would have been granted the rare privilege of touching the person of the pharaoh and would have had unrivalled access to him.

When they died, Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were buried together in a mastaba tomb. In this tomb, they are severally depicted embracing and, in one instance, even touching noses, which in Egyptian culture generally signified kissing.

That their wives and children also feature in the tomb has led some to conclude that they were brothers rather than lovers—but having a family of their own need not have precluded them from being lovers, and in the tomb they are represented in the same mode as husband and wife.

So far as the written record goes, Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep are, I think, the oldest gays in history.

Like other ancient peoples, the Egyptians valued fertility and dominance, and disapproved of men who played a passive role. But they did not have a rigid convention of sexuality as either heterosexual or homosexual, and, at least in certain periods, and in certain strata, may have tolerated and even celebrated same-sex love.

I was interviewed on ‘the oldest gays in history’ by PRIDE:

Meet the Gays of Ancient Egypt

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