the two-sex system is a relatively new way to negotiate and essentialize sexual difference. in it, there is male and there is female, two distinct categories with ontological grippage and no spill-over (this is hegemonic but, of course, a construct). we can think of the two-sex model as a horizontal one, with one sex besides its opposite. the ancient world, however, negotiated sexual difference in a one-sex system. there was male, in the hebrew bible, adam, and then there was a kind of non-male. or a lesser-male. female was not a distinct ontic identity but a deviation, a slippage, from the form. think of the one-sex model as a vertical one: male on top, everything else (queer bodies, matrixial ones, dis-eased, etc.) below it. understanding the one-sex model with our two-sex framework is difficult. this ancient world allowed for vertical movement (upwards and downwards) on sexual differentiation. it allowed for non-essentialist sex-talk. it allowed for instability. it did not allow, however, for terms we might use today like 'hetero' and 'homo'—these presuppose an opposite sex that the ancient world lacked.
laqueur's making sex is the book that first tracked this change in sex-systems. now, any theoretical book on the ancient world and its sensoriums, its bodies, its orifices, etc., will concede, or at least be self-conscious of, the fact that if we bring two-sexes into the ane, we are colonizing it (and all colonization is violence). primary texts like enki and ninmah and, of course, j-source genesis tell us much about the one-sex model. more theoretical contemporary works like neumann's handbook on senses, sonik's handbook on emotions, and graybill's work on queer prophets—these also work hard to step into the one-sex model without colonization