Book of Ruth

Ruth: what an odd book! Among Christians, the major use of the book (as far as I know) is at weddings. Ruth’s pledges of fidelity are beautiful, thorough, impressive: your home will be my home, your people will be my people, your God will be my God, your cemetery will be my cemetery. Sounds like a happy wedding! But there is a twist: Ruth was not talking to her husband or prospective husband. She was talking to Naomi, her mother-in-law, and in fact her dead husband’s mom. That’s not usually the person at the top of your loyalty list. Naomi is special, but (1) that’s a strange story, and (2) that’s not the plot of this story.

So what’s it about? The book is not just about King David’s ancestors. If the reason for the book was to explore royal genealogy, we should hear about a lot of other people before we get to David’s Moabite great-grandmother.

The beauty of this little gem lies, I think, in the relationship between Naomi and Ruth on one hand, and the Jewish community on the other. When three men in a single peripatetic family all drop dead, one widow returns to her roots in Bethlehem, one returns to her roots on Moab, and the third, Ruth, opts to tag along to Bethlehem. We lose track of one widow right away. But amongst the Jews, the two widows find hospitality, which grows from pity to respect to generosity to tender protection to committed love. The reader sympathizes with the two, wants them to make it, and is pleased when they do.

The story is about love, but it is more specific than that. It is about love for two widows -- including one Jewish widow and one adopted foreigner. The Jewish community -- Boaz in particular, of course, but the community -- feeds them, cares about them, gathers them in, enfolds them, embraces them. The story offers a picture of how God’s people care for widows, in accord with the Lord’s oft-repeated commands in the Law and the Prophets. Over and over, Scripture demands that we offer hospitality to several protected classes, including the fatherless and widows.* The Book of Ruth shows what this hospitality looks like.


　
　
*OOPS! Widows & orphans AND STRANGERS -- the list in Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Ezequiel, Zachariah, and the Psalms always includes these three. Ruth was an immigrant as well as a widow.