A Long Post On Ruth

This is the introduction to my soon-to-be-published study guide on The Book of Ruth:

Ruth is one of the most beloved and recognizable books of the Bible. It is the paradigm of one of the ‘shorter books’ of scripture: a mere four chapters. The story is simple and straightforward, some would say sublime. As a piece of literature, it is just one of the best things ever produced by human hands. The characters are remarkably developed for such a short text, and one is easily pulled into the details of the story. It has the power to really ‘stick with you’ and it is one of those Biblical stories it is easy to tell to children (disregarding a few minor details). So many of us learn it early, and remember it.

The sophistication of the storytelling, and the verbiage used in the original Hebrew, betrays a relatively late period of writing. It was likely written down after the Babylonian Exile and during the time when Israel was a vassal state of Persia. But the setting for the story is much earlier, and as we will see, it is highly likely that the story itself existed in oral form long before it was written down. The reasons for this assertion will become apparent as we examine the text.

The historical setting for the written form of the book, however, betrays the fact that behind the simple storytelling there is a deep theological purpose behind the book. Israel often struggled with the question of ‘particularism’ and ‘universalism’ (this is small ‘u’ universalism, not to be confused with big ‘U’ Universalism, the idea that all people ultimately go to Heaven.) On the one hand, God repeatedly tells the Jews that He has a special relationship with them, and that the substance of His salvation centers around His covenant with THEM. Again and again the Jews are told “you will be my people, and I will be your God” (e.g. Jeremiah 32:20, Ezekiel 36:28). Moreover, there are Biblical passages that demarcate clearly the Jewish people from the other Canaanite tribes that surrounded them. The Jews were specifically warned not to intermarry with certain groups of Gentiles (see: Deuteronomy 7).

However, just as the Jews were said to be a special people, set apart from all others, and clear lines were drawn between them and other Canaanite groups, they were also called to a universal destiny, to act as priests of God for the rest of the world. They were told that they were to have a place in God’s reformation of the planet, and that God still had a special love for all human beings (Exodus 19). So while God’s concern for the Jews was particular, His plan for them was universal. Some prophets included in their vision of the Kingdom of God the reconciliation of all people under Yahweh (Isaiah 66:18-21).

In the actual history of Israel, this theological tension played out as a struggle between a tendency towards ethnocentrism and even racism, and a desire to see all people brought under Yahweh’s banner. And all the history of Israel is a wavering back and forth between these two poles: the exclusive and the universal.

Not long before Ruth was actually written down, the Israelites had just returned from exile in Babylon. Upon returning home, Nehemiah and Ezra began a long and hard struggle to rebuild the Jewish nation and rebuild the political and religious structure of the Israelite people. This included the literal rebuilding of Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple. There were many hardships, and one of the things that the leaders feared most was a reversion back to the idolatrous practices that had led to the exile in the first place. As a part of the attempt to avoid this pitfall, the leaders ordered Israelite men to put away all foreign wives and any children they may have from such a union (see: Ezra chapters 9 & 10). This decision was disastrous for those who were ‘put away’ and Israelites who resisted were violently punished.

It is within this context that the ancient story of Ruth was written down, along with several other stories and books that date from about the same period (520-400 BC). It was probably an attempt to remind the Israelite people that God’s own application of the laws regarding intermarriage with certain other groups was never hard and fast, and that foreign inter-marriage played an important part in their history. It is an important voice crying out against what the writer sees as racism and injustice in the Ezra/Nehemiah reforms.

The setting for the story itself is very different. Written down in the Persian period, the events it tells take place at least 500 years earlier. The Bible began with the ancient beginnings of the world and mankind, and moved to the story of the patriarchs, a familial group of Sumerians who moved to Canaanite at the behest of a God who had made them their special possession. After a few hundred years, they went into Egypt first as allies of the Egyptians, but later they were made slaves. God raised up a charismatic leader, Moses, who led them out of bondage and into the desert, where they wandered for almost 40 years.

Soon they were led by Joshua back to their ancestral home, and they captured large swaths of Canaan and made it their homeland, Israel. During this period, the various tribes of Israel would be led by charismatic leaders in the style of Moses. These leaders were called judges. It is important to understand that at this time Israel was not a ‘nation’ in the traditional sense. It was rather an area captured by Joshua within which the 12 tribes of Israel lived. Those tribes were semi-autonomous, bound together by a common language and history, but acting more or less independently of one another. This is before Saul and David gathered the tribes together and formed a real political nation-state.

It is at this time that the events Ruth accounts take place. And so there are themes in the book that relate both to the period when it was written (during the foreign purge under Ezra) and when the actual setting of the book took place (the chaos that reigned during the period of the Judges, when Israel was seeking a national identity).

But this is not all. There are universal themes in the book that transcend time and place. The book is  undoubtedly written by a woman. The writer could’ve chosen to emphasize any aspect of the original oral tradition, the tragedy of Naomi’s family, the love story between Ruth and Boaz, or the heroic actions of Boaz himself. But whoever wrote the book down chose to emphasize the relationship between Ruth and Naomi. Like the racist tendency in some parts of Jewish history, the Bible also has in many places the marks of misogyny. Whoever wrote Ruth decided to turn it, at least in part, into a commentary against that tendency. No book in the Old Testament so exalts a woman as the Book of Ruth does. There really is nothing else like it in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Another important aspect of Ruth illustrated in that moment is the theme of friendship. This is the first time in the Bible that a human friendship is elevated to the same level as, say, the parent/child or spousal relationship. There are Biblical friendships before this point, to be sure, but here we see friendship as the very embodiment of Divine Love, and this is the first time that happens.

There is also this sense in Ruth that God is not a particular actor within the story but the background for the story as a whole. There is no individual point in which God comes in. There is no theophany to move the story along, no miracle that gets people out of their problems and no prophet to reveal God's will. This is a simple, human story of people just trying to be the best people they can be. But the writer sees in that human drama a Revelation of the Divine as clear as any other. And that motif is repeated in Esther, in 1 Maccabees, in Judith, in Nehemiah and elsewhere.

So all in all, Ruth tells a rich and exciting story in a relatively short space, but it also covers a vast number of important theological issues, and reveals a lot about Israel both in the time when it takes place and in the time when it was written down. All of this will come to bear as we delve into the text itself.