Ancestresses of Jesus: Ruth

This post is part of a Christmas series on the female ancestors of Jesus as given by the Gospel of Matthew.

Ruth has her own brief book in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.  All the books of the Hebrew Bible are in the Christian Old Testament, but in a different order.  In the Christian ordering, it comes right after the Book of Judges, before the story of Samuel and Saul and David.  In the Hebrew Bible, it comes near the last, after the Song of Songs, in a grouping of books called the Five Megillot (Scrolls), which is part of the section known as the Ketuvim (Writings), which includes the Psalms.

Ruth is a Moabite woman, not an Israelite.  An Israelite family, Elimelech and Naomi and their sons Mahlon and Chilion, migrate to Moab because of a famine in Israel.  Mahlon and Chilion marry two local women, Ruth and Orpah.  When all three men in the family die, the three women are left widows, a particularly powerless position in that society at that time.  Hearing that conditions have improved in Israel, Naomi decides to go back home, and Ruth makes the surprising decision to accompany her to her homeland.

Interestinly enough, I have often heard a hymn used at weddings that includes part of the famous words of commitment that Ruth says to Naomi: "whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou ledgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God."  (King James Version)

In Israel, Ruth gathers the leavings of the harvest in the field of a wealthy landowner named Boaz.  Boaz takes a liking to Ruth, admires her for her dedication to Naomi and welcomes her to "glean" (gather the leftover harvest) in his fields.  After a while, Naomi advises Ruth to go lie down beside Boaz at night on the thresing floor and uncover his "feet".  Or rather, according to Jane Schaberg, that is often the prudish English translation, being used as a euphemism for his genitals.  She discreetly leaves before anyone can see her in the morning.

Boaz is a kinsman of Naomi, and following the customs of his time, he sought a nearer relative of Naomi's for Ruth to marry, evidently out of an obligation to "make an honest woman out of her," as the obsolescent American saying goes.  But the kinsman declines (I'm simplifying a bit here; there's a whole business about buying land that would have been involved), and Boaz marries her.  We are told that she conceives, presumably after the marriage, and that her child Obed became the grandfather of King David.

The elders of the town link their union with other great women of the Hebrew tradition:  "May the LORD make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel.  May you prosper in Ephrathah and be renowned in Bethlehem; and may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, because of the children that the LORD will give you by this young woman." (Revised Standard Version)

Schaberg observes:

In rabbinic tradition, Ruth alone among the four women of Matthew's geneology is free from a taint of immorality.  Rabbinic writings and later translations carefully expunged every reference to sexual activity between Ruth and Boaz on the threshing floor.  Such strenuous efforts to remove any hint of indelicacy implicitly acknowledge, however, that a different reading of Ruth's activities as scandalous was possible and even popular.  In any case, it is clear that Ruth, like Tamar, risked an accusation of harlotry and, in the end, was praised for taking the risk.

Eugen Drewermann thinks Ruth's story is a scandal.  But he's not referring to sexual scandal.  He thinks it is a scandal to the official guardians of religion, then and now.

What he means has to do with Ruth's conversion to worship the God of the Hewbrews.  In those days, and for long after, the Hebrews generally shared to notion common in the ancient Near East of gods being national.  It was thought that one could worship and god only in the homeland of his own people.

Drewermann talkes particular notice in the story of Ruth, which he notes is in the literary form of a saga, on the motive for her conversion to the religion of Yahweh.  She chooses to go to a new homeland and to adopt a new god out of love and concern for her mother-in-law.  "You God is my God" - if these words of Ruth's were true, then the direct encounter between people is the only true, the decisive place of the revelation of God." Ruth encounters and experiences the God of the Hebrews in her love for Noami.  "Then is God the end and the goal of a path which one can walk only on the common ground of love."

It is, says Drewermann, "A provocative faith, eternally scandalous for those who 'know God' [the official keepers of doctrine], but eternally comforting for those who seek God, for those who simply love."  Only love, he says, teaches us who God is.  Here in the saga of Ruth, "simple humanity triumphs over the complications of an authoritarian religion."

He also speculates that Noami suggested to Ruth that she go to Boaz' field, with the hope that something like what eventually occurs would unfold for them.

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The sources quoted in this post include:

Jane Schaberg, "Before Mary: the Ancestresses of Jesus" Bible Review Dec 2004

Eugen Drewermann, Das Matthäus-Evangelium: Bilder der Erfülling, Erster Teil (1992).  The English translations are mine.

Tags: christmas, eugen drewermann, jane schaberg, ruth