Reading: Ruth 1-4, Psalm 77

We’ve gotten through Judges! Hurrah. Hopefully we get to read something a little more hopeful now. I’ll forgive you if the first couple of lines of Ruth don’t excite you. In the days when the judges ruled… Uh oh. Is this just another story of the judges era, with everyone doing what is right in their own eyes? Sort of, but not quite in the way the book of Judges was. Remember that the author of the book of Judges had a point to make, and he made it rather well: judges, and to a lesser extent priests, have failed us. We need a king. That is not the point in Ruth, though it is related, as we shall see.

The story of Ruth is pretty straightforward, and we get the whole story in one gulp with today’s reading, which is helpful. Naomi and her husband Elimilech flee the famine and go to Moab, where their two sons marry Moabite women. Let’s hold up for a minute. What do we know about Moabites? These were the guys who wouldn’t let the people of Israel through their land on the way from Egypt, and later hired Balaam to curse Israel, and then later planned to seduce Israel away from the God of Israel through religious prostitutes. Deuteronomy 23 tells us that in consequence of this, no Moabite is to enter the assembly of the God of Israel for ten generations. Maybe not the best women for the sons of Elimilech to be marrying? We aren’t told how Naomi and Elimilech feel about their sons marrying local women, and pretty soon the guys all die, leaving Naomi in Moab with her two daughters-in-law.

Naomi hears that the famine has ended back home in Bethlehem, and decides it is time to return. She sends her daughters-in-law to their parent’s homes, but they refuse to go. Eventually she convinces one of them to go, but the other, Ruth, absolutely will not leave Naomi. But here is the deal: even if she goes with Naomi and has children in Bethlehem, they will be tainted as children of Moab. It will be ten generations before they are allowed into the worship of the God of Israel as laid out in the books of Moses. Naomi appears to understand that this is a really bad move for Ruth.

But pay attention to Ruth’s response: Where you go I will go. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. She repudiates her identity as a Moabite, and calls on the God of Israel to judge her if she abandons her mother-in-law Naomi. Ruth is another take on the story of Rahab, on the story of the Gibeonites. When people who would otherwise be rejected by God transfer their identity to who God says they should be, they are accepted, and in a pretty radical way, as we shall see.

Back in Bethlehem, several scenes ensue in which Ruth carries out her commitment to care for Naomi. She goes out to the fields of one of Naomi’s well off relatives Boaz to glean, which was a customary way for the poor to find food in the ancient world. Harvesting methods at the time left quite a bit of grain in the field on the first pass, and the people of Israel were instructed by God to leave the remainder for the poor. In this case, Boaz tells his harvesters to also deliberately leave some additional grain in the field, and tells her to drink the water his harvesters have for themselves. He also extends his protection to her against being harmed by the young men working for him.

Ruth responds in a way that shows she understands the life she was committing to when she came with Naomi: why be nice to me, I’m a foreigner? Boaz responds with his knowledge of her situation: all you have done for Naomi has been told to me. Boaz has heard how Ruth repudiated her life as a Moabite to come with Naomi, and he is going to treat her as well as he would an Israelite widow of his relatives. When Ruth tells Naomi what happened, she tells Ruth to stay in the fields of Boaz until the harvest is over, and she does.

There has been much made of the story of Ruth and Boaz at the threshing floor, and I’m not going to review everything that has been said. As I have mentioned before, “foot” is euphemistic in Hebrew, and to assume there is no sexual connotation to what Naomi tells Ruth to do is pretty naive. On the other hand, the story involves a great deal of what appears to be symbolic courtship behavior that may be a cultural way of Ruth expressing interest and Boaz responding that is in no way sexual, though it clearly references it. In any every, that is not the point of the story. The point is that Boaz accepts the levirite responsibility of having children for his relative, Ruth’s dead husband.

The next scene is an interesting glimpse into the daily life of judges era Israel. Boaz recognizes that he is not the first in line to marry Ruth according to levirite responsibility, so he goes to the city gate and lets the guy who is first in line know what his responsibility is. But this guy refuses, in order to not endanger his own inheritance. This is totally out of line with the covenant law, in which refusing to have children through a barren widow for the deceased was a very shameful thing to do. The woman was supposed to come and spit in the man’s face and pull off his shoe (again, the foot euphemism) in front of the whole town. In this case, the public shaming has degenerated into a commercial exchange. The unnamed relative takes off his own sandal and gives it to Boaz as a symbol that he has surrendered his rights to the property of Elimilech and the widow Ruth. The scene closes with Boaz declaring his redemption of Ruth and the family of Elimilech. Then the town elders give him a strange blessing: may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah. Remember that story from Genesis 38? It’s not really the kind of family history one wants to be reminded of.

As the book draws to a close, we are finally given the reason the author is writing it. The great-grandson of Ruth and Boaz is a pretty important figure in the story we are telling. In fact, he will be the single most important figure in the story between Abraham and Jesus, the Israelite paragon, King David. This is a royal origin story, and a very strange one. It was common for ancient kings to have elaborate and fanciful stories about their ancestries written upon taking the throne. This reads much like one of those, but it is hardly a story to make one think David is anyone special. Instead it calls out a whole bunch of problems with David being king. Judah and Tamar. We later learn that Salmon, who was Boaz’s father, married Rahab the prostitute of Jericho! Finally, Ruth herself is a Moabite. David appears to have had a royal family history written, and this is it. No miracles or godly origin story here, just the real life of people struggling to do right in the days of the judges.