Moabite Lives Matter (Ruth 1:1-17; 21st Sunday after Pentecost; October 18, 2015)

Moabite Lives Matter

Ruth 1:1-17
21^st Sunday after Pentecost
October 18, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Our story begins in Bethlehem, as a number of stories from the Bible do, a town whose name translates as "House of Bread." Ironically the story begins with a famine. Elimelech moved his family—Naomi his wife and his two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, to Moab—to escape the famine.

Then Elimelech died, leaving Naomi in the care of her two sons who both married local girls.

I say that as if it were no big deal, but that wasn't so. These young women, Orpah and Ruth, were Moabites. Israelites and Moabites were traditional enemies. Do you remember the story from a few weeks ago in which the daughters of Lot (whose wife had been turned into a column of salt) decided to seduce their father and bear his children? Remember that one of the sons of this incest was named Moab, the ancestor of the Moabites. This is a classic myth in function: it tells the story of Israel and Moab in such a way as to show just how much superior to those Moabites the Israelites really were. I'm sure that Moabites had similar stories about Israel. Marrying these foreigners can't have been easy for either Ruth or Orpah.

When Naomi and her daughters-in-law found themselves bereft of husbands and, since they were childless, deprived of male protection, the only safe course of action was for Naomi to go back to Bethlehem—after all she owned land there and had family connections—and for Ruth and Orpah to go back to their respective families. They were still young; they could take their dowries back with them; they could still be useful to their families for making alliances and so forth.

But Ruth refused to go. Maybe she knew what awaited a Moabite girl who married an Israelite man and then tried to go home again. Maybe she did genuinely love Naomi. In any event she sang a song to Naomi that is such an expression of self-denial, even of self-negation, that generations of patriarchal advice books have held Ruth up as a positive example for young women. This bit of poetry shows up uninvited at weddings even now, although, of course, it is a love song from a daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law, not a song from a bride to her groom.

Ruth seems determined by her example to ruin the lives of young women down through history. Not only is she devoted to her mother-in-law. She is the model of the good daughter when they arrive in Bethlehem.

It's harvest time. There is a law in ancient Israel that whatever falls to the ground during the harvest may not be picked up by the workers, but must be left for the poor. It belongs to them by law. Gleaning, as it is called, is work that is hard on the back, but Ruth volunteers to go do it.

When the owner of the field, one Boaz by name, sees Ruth and asks his servants who she is, they tell him that she is "that Moabite who came back with Naomi," but that she had been working since early morning without resting at all.

Devoted to her mother-in-law, hard-working, available for marriage: what more could anyone want? And it is clear that Boaz was taken with the young widow. He provided her with his protection and even instructed the reapers to be especially careless with the harvest when she was close so that she would have more to pick up.

Ruth had a good day. She took home an ephah of barley which is about... I don't know. But it was a lot. And she told Naomi her story. When Naomi found out whose field Ruth had been working in, she got really excited.

Now here the story becomes rather interesting for the way that it opens a window onto a couple of features of life in ancient Israel and how they might have worked in practice. Or maybe not. This book is not really a history, but a romance written centuries after the events it describes, after the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah's exile in Babylon. At least we see how these things worked in Judah's imagination.

Remember that property rights in ancient Israel did not mean that owners had the right to dispose of their land. They couldn't subdivide it or sell it outright to whomever they pleased. Land was a covenant inheritance. If a family became so poor that the only asset they had left was their land, they could lease it until the next Year of Jubilee. Even so, close family members were required to intervene and buy it back or "redeem" it. That way, the land stayed in the family.

What got Naomi so excited was that Boaz was a close relative, one who had the "right of redemption." Naomi saw the possibility of security and well-being for both Ruth and herself. All that was needed was to give Boaz a little nudge in the right direction.

Now, as it happened, it was the last day of the harvest and the harvest party would be that night. There would be eating and drinking (and doubtless a good deal of gratitude for the harvest and for fertility in general). Naomi instructed Ruth to note where Boaz was lying and, waiting until the party died down and all was quiet, to join him on the threshing floor with a view toward giving him the needed nudge. She did that.

What happened next? The story uses suggestive language, but does not say explicitly what happened underneath Boaz's cloak on the threshing floor. By the time morning arrived, Ruth and Boaz had reached an understanding. But the story is discrete as was Boaz who sent Ruth home in the pre-dawn darkness with a bride price of six "measures" of barley, which is... I don't know, but Ruth carried it in her cloak.

Ruth told Naomi what had happened. Now matters were in Boaz's hands.

There is, in turns out, another complication. Boaz is not the next of kin; there is another who would come before Boaz. The next of kin is not named, but that doesn't matter. Boaz has a plan.

The next day, there is a meeting of the "elders at the gate." This was an institution not unlike the "retired guys' table at Java John's." The main difference was that whereas the retired guys talk a great deal but don't actually decide anything, the elders at the gate judged the minor disputes of the village and their decisions were binding.

So Boaz brought his case to the elders at the gate. The next-of-kin was there. Boaz said to him, "As you know, Naomi has this parcel of land of Elimelech her husband. She'd like to sell it. If you'd like the land, you have the right to buy it from her." Of course, the next-of-kin wanted to buy it and said so.

Now there was another law in ancient Israel that provided that if a married man died before he had a son to inherit his land, his brother was required to marry the man's widow. This ensured that there would be an heir to maintain the inheritance. That law didn't necessarily go with the redemption of land, but the logic was rather obvious and Boaz made a point of it.

"Oh, I almost forgot," Boaz added, springing his trap. "If you buy the land, Ruth goes with it. You know, the Moabite."

"The Moabite?" said the next-of-kin. "Um, never mind. You buy the land." And so Boaz did that. And took Ruth as his wife (and probably even let Naomi move in with them). And in due course she bore a son.

To this point the story has been a romance worthy of Jane Austen of how an unfortunate young woman—unfortunate in both senses of the word: unlucky and having no fortune of her own—arrived at a happy ending, safely married and the mother of a son.

But what comes next tells us that the writer had another motive than the desire to tell a happily-ever-after story about a sweet girl. For it is in this way that Boaz became the father of Obed. Obed in his turn became the father of Jesse. And—here's the punch line—Jesse became the father of David.

The book of Ruth was written in a time when Jews who had returned from exile in Babylon were trying to figure out who they were. Were Jews called to be a separate ethnic group, carefully preserving their purity by religiously avoiding marriages with non-Jews (pun intended). In the books of Ezra and Nehemiah this view is put forward.

Or were Jews a "light to the nations", called by God to live in such a way as to attract non-Jews to its way of life? III Isaiah, who penned the phrase "light to the nations," falls into this column. To "accept" outsiders into the covenant relationship or not is an unsettled question in the Bible.

The book of Ruth's contribution to this intra-biblical debate is the news that David, King David, the hero-king, was not only one-eighth non-Jewish. He was one-eighth Moabite, descended from one of those incest-begotten descendants of greedy Lot, Abraham's no-good nephew. David was partly Moabite. So, therefore, were all of David's heirs. So is the Son of David, the Messiah, to whom nationalist Jews looked for deliverance. So, incidentally, is Jesus, if we take his davidic descent literally.

So much for the ethnic purity of the people of the covenant. That's the point of the book of Ruth as it's found in our Bible.

Now we Americans can hardly help but read this story as it's found in our Bible through our own cultural lenses. Racism, which is the peculiarly American version and perversion of the commonly found fear of outsiders, colors our reading. White people don't, but probably should, portray Ruth as an African. David therefore—in the old but somehow constantly renewing language of Jim Crow—was what used to be called an "octoroon," one who was one-eighth "negro." The story would be more faithfully translated into our thought world if we did that.

And of course the rule of American racism is that any African ancestry renders a person—regardless of appearance—no longer white. Hence Jesus was not white.

What would it mean, I wonder, for white folks (like me) to have to re-imagine Jesus as black, to have to re-imagine the gospel as news that comes to them rather than starting with them, to have to re-imagine strangers as those who bring us salvation? This is the work that the romance of Ruth invites us to do.

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