Ruth is about three-quarters barking mad.
Let me back up. ?Ruth, the eighth book of the Old Testament, is our text for the next several weeks of Sunday school. ?I’ve taught Ruth in churches and at UGA, and one of the things that I make a point of when I teach it is to note the Job-like qualities of the opening chapter. ?(I’m not teaching this series, BTW, which makes participating without hijacking the lesson a hard thing to do.) ?Because the King James Bible is still the gold standard for translations, and because the King James Bible transliterates rather than translates the characters’ names in the opening chapter, an English-language reader is likely to miss the places’ and characters’ names and their resemblance to a medieval allegory or a Renaissance comedy. ?For the sake of bringing those names forth, I often render my own paraphrase of the first five verses of the book to read to the class, and it goes something like this:
Now in the days before there were kings, there was no bread in the land. ?A man who lived in Breadtown in Judah went to Moab with his two sons. ?The man’s name was God-is-my-king, and his wife was named My-delight, and his sons were named Sickly and Puny, all of them of the Plenty-of-food tribe from Breadtown in Judah. ?And they left Breadtown (having no bread) for Moab and stayed there. ?And God-is-my-king, the husband of My-delight, died, and she was left with her two sons. ?And there they took wives from among the Moabites, one named Runaway and the other Friendship, and they lived there ten years, after which time Sickly and Puny died. ?My-delight was left without husband or sons.
The parallels with Job are obvious: the names in the opening verses (like that of Job, “the hated one,” signal a narrative in which the characters are going to have allegorical (or whatever the analogue is for ancient Hebrew texts) weight, and the setup is one in which the narrative’s central living character (though not the book’s namesake)?loses everything she has–land, food, family–and, in subsequent verses, calls out against?Heaven for stretching out a plaguing hand against her,?going so far as insisting that the people of Bethlehem (or Breadtown above) call her not Naomi (My-delight) but Mara (bitterness), an obvious analogue of Job/The-hated-one. ?Now as a former scholar of things biblical (I’ve since moved on to be a wannabe Shakespearean and halfway-competent Miltonist), I do enjoy wondering whether Ruth is a modification of the Job narrative, Job a radicalization of the Ruth narrative, or whether both grew, unaware of each other, out of the same fabric of Psalmic lament and wisdom sayings, but whichever way one slices that up, the real joy is the stark difference between Eliphaz on one hand and Ruth (Friendship above) on the other.
Eliphaz and Bildad, of course, have no real part in Job’s story–They’re stage props so that Job has someone to fight, and their arguments from mystical vision and traditionalism don’t inspire much confidence, especially given that the book’s narrator has already declared Job righteous. ?Ruth and Orpah, on the other hand, have everything to lose. ?Young Moabite widows, they have every reason to return to Moab’s cities when Naomi releases them. ?Not surprising, the one named after the gazelle makes like a runaway bride and heads back. ?But Ruth, as I said, is nuts.?
I never thought of her famous plea to her mother-in-law this way before yesterday morning, but now I wonder how it never occurred to me. ?What Ruth knows about Naomi’s deity is basically what anyone could learn about Elohim?by looking at Job: this is a divine being who destroys people’s crops, kills people’s families, and leaves people alone and suffering in the world. ?
And Ruth’s reaction? ?”Sign me up!”
I use the figure three-quarters because I think that Abraham is about half nuts, and I figure Ruth is somewhere between there and all gone. ?With old Dishonest Abe, at least he could claim that his biggest lapse of judgment was ignoring those grade school safety videos that told him never to go traveling with strange deities. ?He didn’t know anything at all about the voice that appeared to him in the land of Haran, so at the very most he was dropping his cash on lottery tickets. ?But Ruth? ?She’s what would happen if a complete stranger had happened upon Job, abandoned and dying on the ash heap, and decided that whatever invisible power was taking care of him must be a real wing-dinger. ?
Now if you’re offended but still reading at this point, let me note that I realize that Abraham and Job and Ruth are exemplaries within the Abrahamic traditions precisely because they reacted unconventionally in the faces of such circumstances. ?And I know that eventually Ruth becomes the great-great of David and Jesus. ?I’m just trying to bring to light some of the insanity of her situation that so often gets rushed over so that we can get to the passed-out Boaz and the Davidic genealogy. ?And if you claim really to believe that such faith-unto-insanity is exemplary, you shouldn’t have any problem with someone’s honestly naming the insanity.
Oh, and I realize that my paraphrase of Ruth 1 above plays fast and loose with the Hebrew. ?That’s how I roll, man.
