Ruth (1997)

A Commentary

Kirsten Nielsen

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 1997
• Print ISBN: 9780664227302
• eBook ISBN: 9781611645064
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Kirsten Nielsen's comments on the book of Ruth paint a rich and subtle portrait of its characters, carefully tracing the many connections between this story and other biblical passages, such as the stories of Judah and Tamar. This volume is a powerful addition to this critically acclaimed Old Testament Library series.

The Old Testament Library provides fresh and authoritative treatments of important aspects of Old Testament study through commentaries and general surveys. The contributors are scholars of international standing.

RUTH

I. THE HUSBANDS DIE IN MOAB, AND RUTH AND NAOMI RETURN HOME TO JUDAH

Ruth 1:1–5

After living in Moab ten years, Elimelech and his sons die

1:1 Once during the time of the Judges there was famine in the land, and a man traveled from Bethlehem in Judah to the land of Moab in order to live there as a foreigner with his wife and his two sons. 2 The man was called Elimelech, his wife was called Naomi, and his two sons were called Mahlon and Chilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah, and they came to the land of Moab and stayed there. 3 Then Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left alone with her two sons. 4 They married Moabite women; one was called Orpah, the other was called Ruth. They lived there for about ten years; 5 but then both Mahlon and Chilion died, and the woman was left alone without her two boys and without her husband.

[1:1] Chapter 1 consists of three parts: vv. 1–5, vv. 6–18, vv. 19–22. The first part introduces the misfortune: famine and death, and forms a contrast with the happy ending in chapter 4, where Ruth marries Boaz and through her son becomes the ancestress of the family of David. The second part describes the journey from Moab to Bethlehem with Ruth’s confession to Naomi’s God as its climax. The third part deals with the homecoming to Bethlehem and Naomi’s lament. Through this the misfortune motif is maintained, and vv. 19–22 therefore form a contrast to the women’s joy in 4:14–17.⁶³

The book of Ruth begins by placing the story at a specific period in time (for a detailed discussion of the importance of time indications for the book’s structure and tempo see the Introduction, pp. 2–5). From the start the reader is given to understand that the following story deals with events from the past, events that took place “once during the time of the Judges.” The author makes no mention of any particular judge, so the purpose of the time indication can hardly be to identify a precise point in a chronological span, but is rather to place Ruth within a certain group of texts. Through the immediate placing of the story in time the reader is led into a network of stories to which Ruth also belongs, namely the narratives found in Judges.

The tale of Ruth and Naomi must be read in the light of the traditions from the time when the God of Israel called heroes forth to deeds of war and helped the tribes to conquer and retain the land. We are dealing with the tremendous events that led to the creation of the people of Israel, as well as to the rape and abuse of innocent people, to the abduction of women and to general lawlessness (Judges 19–21). For at that time there was no king in Israel, and every man did as he pleased (Judges 21:25). The reader’s curiosity is stimulated. Are we about to hear a tale of injustice and lawlessness or about God’s intervention on behalf of his people through the creation of something new?

It is not only the introductory dating of the book that signifies the context into which it is to be read. Also the LXX’s placing of Ruth immediately after Judges underlines this. In this canonical context the story of Naomi and Ruth comes to form a dialogue with the last chapters of Judges. Chapters 19–21 depict the impotence of women, whereas Ruth tells of how even a foreign woman such as the Moabitess Ruth can be chosen by Yahweh to save the family of David. Through this foreigner the new institution of monarchy is created in Israel.

On the other hand the reference to a famine that forces the main characters out of Judah does not point to traditions from the period of Judges, and Judges itself offers no example whatsoever of famine. However, the traditions of the patriarchs and their wanderings do (Gen. 12:10; 26:1; 41:54). Of particular interest are the Abram traditions, which speak not only of famine but also of childlessness, two themes that are inextricably linked in Ruth. But where the problem in Ruth is that the husbands are dead, it is formulated differently in the Abram traditions.

In Genesis 12 Sarai is assimilated into the Egyptian Pharaoh’s harem and can very easily become pregnant with the wrong man, with the result that it is not to the continuation of Abram’s family that she contributes. And in a later story Abram, on Sarai’s advice, becomes the father of Ishmael, but with the wrong woman, the Egyptian Hagar (Gen. 16:21). In the Abram traditions it is neither the foreign man nor the foreign woman who is to carry on the family; in Ruth by contrast it is precisely the foreign woman who is to be the ancestress of David.

According to Gillis Gerleman the famine is a literary motif that has nothing to do with reality. The climate was so similar in Moab and the Bethlehem area that there would hardly have been a serious crop failure in the one without it affecting the other. Christian Frevel by comparison⁶⁴ believes that there can be considerable differences in the amount of rainfall in Judah and Moab, making the description in 1:1 completely plausible for the reader.

Gerleman is right in thinking that famine is a literary motif in the Old Testament; but it is important that the mention of Moab as the place to which the family can flee to survive has seemed plausible when based on the experiences of the times. If the reader wonders why Elimelech chose Moab, the reason is not that the climate was similar. Rather, what the reader was being asked to consider was whether it was wise to mix with the Moabites at all (cf. Genesis 19; Numbers 25).

The reference to a famine serves to remind the reader of similar accounts elsewhere. Just as Abraham, Isaac, and the sons of Jacob had to go abroad to find the necessary food, so Elimelech and his family are forced away from their own country. Now they have to live as refugees in Moab and experience insecurity in foreign parts. The similarity between Elimelech’s fate and that of the patriarchs nonetheless gives the reader the hope that there are not only parallels in the misfortunes but also in the subsequent joys. Just as the patriarchs’ lives continued after the famine and left deep furrows in the history of the people, so will the destiny of Elimelech’s family form itself. What the reader still does not know is how this will come about.

The starting point is the town of Bethlehem in Judah. As the name the “House of Bread” suggests, it is well-known as a fertile area; but this selfsame place is struck by its opposite, a famine. Moreover, Bethlehem is a place to which a number of positive traditions are linked, including the stories of David, whose father was from Bethlehem (1 Sam. 16:1). And in Micah the messianic expectations are linked to precisely this town.

Whereas Judah and Bethlehem signify that Ruth belongs in a network of texts about the good king, the land of Moab in Israelite consciousness has a negative ring. According to Gen. 19:37 the Moabites were descended from Lot and his eldest daughter and are thus the result of an incestuous relationship. That anything good could come out of Moab therefore requires further explanation. From a literary perspective it is very much one of the purposes of the book to explain this more closely. The reference to Moab functions as a marker in the text, raising a question that requires an answer. But the marker contains its own answer, provided we include the intertextuality toward which it points.⁶⁵ Through the reference to Moab and thus indirectly to the tradition of Lot’s daughter, the reader is given the opportunity to consider the story of Ruth and Naomi as an ancestress story, which deals with two women’s surprising recourse to self-help in order to save the family from extinction.

Scholars who regard the mention of Moab as purely geographical information will see it as an expression of historical knowledge about actual circumstances. They will therefore refer to the tradition that at one point David brought his parents to safety with the king of Moab, which should testify to the fact that David’s family actually came from that area (1 Sam. 22:3–4).⁶⁶

In the course of the first few verses both time and space are created for the story. The travel motif is introduced and the reader now has two well-known places to relate to: Bethlehem in Judah and Moab abroad. But the prevalent view of the two places is no longer valid. The fertile “House of Bread” is struck by famine, while the foreign Moab has became a place of asylum. This inversion of the normal situation not only sets the action going but creates a tension in the text that makes us wonder whether Moab really is better than Bethlehem. Will Elimelech in fact settle there or is the outward journey merely a precondition for the real purpose: the homeward journey? (See Abram’s outward and homeward journeys in Gen. 12:10–20.)

[2] Just as geographical information can point to the network of texts through which a story is to be understood, so personal names can also give information that helps to a better understanding of the narrative. Thus they can anticipate the course of events: Nomen est omen. The name Elimelech means “God is king” or “My God is king.”⁶⁷ The name thus sets out the king theme, which is the end point of the book: David. Elimelech’s wife is called Naomi, i.e. “my joy” or just “sweetness,” but she refers to herself later as Mara, i.e. “bitterness” (1:20). This double naming reflects the development through which the action moves, from Naomi lamenting her suffering before the women in Bethlehem to the point where she again stands among them with the newborn child in her arms.

Elimelech and Naomi have two sons. Stories about two sons are widespread and often have as their point the success of the one and failure of the other, and thus a rivalry in their relationship. (See Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob.) In this case, however, the reader’s expectation of a drama between brothers is swiftly disappointed. Both sons die without heirs, and thus they must both be assumed to be out of the story (see 4:10, however).

Their names immediately create the same impression. Mahlon can be translated as “sickness” or “infertility,” while Chilion means “consumptive.”⁶⁸ It is striking that neither of these names is found elsewhere in the Old Testament,⁶⁹ which could suggest that the author has specifically named Elimelech and his family with a view to the story about to be told. The LXX renders Elimelech’s name as Abimelech, possibly because this name is better known. Whatever the reason, this version takes the reader of the LXX back to the patriarchal narratives. Here we are told how both Abraham and Isaac come into contact with the Philistine king, Abimelech (Genesis 20–21; 26). The Elimelech family belong to the Ephrathah family in Bethlehem (cf. Micah 5:2, “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, … you are small among the clans of Judah”; 1 Sam. 17:12 and Ps. 132:6).

Thus Ruth begins with the essential information about the family that the reader is soon to meet, just as it closes with a series of family particulars in the form of a genealogy. Such a circular composition creates a roundedness and a continuity that is also familiar from the patriarchal narratives. The Abraham story begins in similar fashion, with Abram’s departure from his homeland and the sparse information about his closest family. Then comes an account of a number of events, and regularly throughout Genesis details are given in the form of genealogies as to how the family is progressing.

[3–5] Like many other stories Ruth takes as its starting point a situation of want, in this case the famine that forces the family into exile. The want increases when the head of the family, Elimelech, dies—leaving his wife and sons to fend for themselves. Hunger and death thus become the negative conditions for a significant leitmotif in Ruth: bread and life. No mention is made of the cause of Elimelech’s death. Later traditions could not allow such an event to remain unexplained, however, and have interpreted his death as a just punishment for leaving his homeland and failing to show solidarity during the famine (see Introduction, p. 18).

Life for widows, orphans, and foreigners was regarded in the Old Testament as extremely insecure; this is mirrored among other things in the repeated requests to look after these groups. In Ex. 22:20ff, for example, there is a prohibition against the exploitation of foreigners, and the threat of divine punishment is made if the widow and the fatherless are abused. The same thing happens in prophetic exhortations, as in Isa. I: 17, 23, where the prophet prescribes that his contemporaries look after the cause of the widow and the orphan. Unable to imagine better conditions in Moab than in Israel the reader will therefore draw the conclusion that the situation for Naomi and her two sons is now the worst possible: living alone in a foreign country.

Whereas Elimelech in vv. 1–2 is the central figure (a man traveled … with his wife and his sons), now it is Naomi who assumes the main role (Elimelech is described as Naomi’s husband and the two sons as her sons), hinting at the importance of women in the following events. Not until chapter 4 does the focus move back to a man, Boaz.

The sons’ marriage to Moabite women involves both a stabilizing of the situation in Moab but also the risk of a crisis. On the one hand the family now has a chance of surviving; on the other hand it may be lost to Israel forever (cf. the story of Abram and Sarai at the court of the Egyptian king (Gen. 12:10ff) or the parallel stories in Genesis 20; 26).⁷⁰

The text itself contains no evaluation of the sons’ marriage; it simply states it as a fact, leaving the reader to consider whether the following events are a consequence of their marrying foreigners. The names of the two Moabite women are difficult to interpret. According to rabbinic tradition Orpah gets her name fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Select Bibliography
• Introduction
• Ruth
• Scripture Index
• General Index