Revering Law While Adapting or Even Ignoring It
Ruth is an incredibly touching love story, making it one of the better-known books of the Bible. Some have even noticed that it fits well into the soteriological narratives that seem to be critical foci of writings from Genesis to Jesus. It could actually be considered one of the most important books for what is probably the most important connecting theme of virtually all biblical literature, a story which we’ll flesh out later. But for now I want to focus on how Ruth patterns its structure on and reveres the laws of Deuteronomy 24:16-25:10, with Ruth introducing each in the order that they are listed.[1]
For a foundation on the nature of biblical law, and how Bible books expand on and harmonize the Torah, see this article first. That article is especially critical for understanding how biblical narratives sometimes pattern themselves on law lists in the Torah, a fascinating phenomenon. And I believe Ruth is the most amazing example of this.
Note how the details in Deuteronomy align with sequence of events in Ruth. Deuteronomy 24:16 says that fathers will die for their own sins, and children for theirs; Ruth begins with the detail that father and sons die. Some scholars have concluded that the narrator is suggesting that the cause is that they have left the land of promise and taken foreign wives, not unlike the story of the death of Judah’s sons for failing to produce offspring, at a time when there was no delay in God’s smiting justice.[2] Deuteronomy 24, beginning in verse 17, emphasizes the requirement to care for sojourners/foreigners, widows, and orphans—with a significant fivefold repetition; in Ruth, we see Naomi is a widow, and that Ruth is a foreigner, a widow, and possibly an orphan, since the narrative may be suggesting that she has no other family other than Naomi. And the people of Bethlehem, in contrast to Boaz, do not assist them as required by the law. In fact, the nearer kinsman removes his sandal in full acknowledgement of the law that he is not keeping. Deuteronomy 24:19 establishes the right of the poor to glean in fields for their sustenance; Boaz goes beyond his duty in the law by allowing them to glean even among the sheaves (beginning in 2:3). For the modern reader, note that sheaves are the gathered grain, not what is left after the harvesters: Boaz is letting Ruth take directly from the gathered crop, rather than what’s left, so he is going well beyond his Mosaic duty to the poor. Deuteronomy 25:3, consistent with the previous chapter’s commands to show care for the unfortunate, commands that a man who is punished is not to be degraded in your sight; likewise, Boaz is careful to ensure that Ruth, whose calamity is from God,[3] be respected and not shamed, both in the instruction he gives his men to help her (beginning in 2:9), and later when he has her leave before daybreak before anyone sees her when she comes to him at night to request his mantle. And finally, Deuteronomy 25:5-10 covers the rules regarding levirate marriage, where the brother/kinsman is to take the wife of the deceased and produce offspring to keep his name alive: this occurs in Ruth 4.
The careful reader, however, will begin to notice some differences in Ruth from the laws of the Torah. For instance, in Deuteronomy 25, it was the woman who was to take the sandal off of the man’s foot who would not fulfill his levirate duty, as well as spit in his face. In Ruth, the man simply takes off his sandal and extends it to Boaz, and the narrator explains that this was how deals in general were concluded in those days; if this was the case, why does it seem to bear connection to the law of Deuteronomy 25? And why does the narrator have to explain to the reader that this is how it was done, as if his readers no longer had any such custom? Interestingly, the Deuteronomy 25 levirate law speaks only of brothers who live together, while Ruth seems to take the “nearest-kinsman” details of the rights of land redemption of Leviticus 25 and applies them to levirate marriage!
But the differences in Ruth from the Torah are not just incidental historical changes in the law, like the detail of what is to be done with a sandal. Nor are they mere conflations of similar law details which would differ from a strict interpretation yet seem to preserve their spirit, by allowing a near kinsman (not a brother) to perform the duty of levirate marriage to both help a woman and preserve the name of her first husband in Israel.
Rather, some differences between Ruth and the Torah’s laws seem quite consequential. For instance, how can Boaz marry a Moabitess, who was prohibited from entering the assembly? Other biblical authors will continue this odd seeming disregard for Torah law by having her descendent David and his sons approach God and even officiate as priests.[4] What are these authors doing?
Some scholars have argued that they were trying to adapt the law while seeming to pay homage to it, since it was widely revered. Picture a preacher who teaches from the Bible as if he views it as carved-in-stone truth, yet glosses over or even twists its harder messages to fit more modern sensibilities, as often happens today.[5] Bernard Levinson argues that alterations to the law like those found in Ruth were adeptly woven into texts which on their face revered the Torah, yet employed literary devices to try to mask the changes.[6] At first glance, this may appear to be the case. However, I believe it is quite possible that they in fact revered the Torah, and perhaps believed that they taught its true spirit, as with the example of the five daughters who requested a reinterpreted “addendum” to the inheritance laws that we’ve already examined. Furthermore, I do not believe the ancients would have seen contradiction in many of these changes, at least until after the Hellenistic period brought differing concepts of what divine law must look like.
We noted that Ruth parallels Deuteronomy 24 and 25, but those aren’t all. The evidence for a good-faith reinterpretation of Deuteronomy’s laws is seen in Ruth’s inversion of details in Deuteronomy 23. In the time of Moses, the Moabites were excluded from the assembly because they did not meet Israel with bread and water? Well in Ruth, the Moabites accepted Elimelech’s family when they had no bread and water.
It has even been argued that Ruth intended to convey a reversal of the curse of the Moabites by these changes.[7] The Moabites’ crops did not fail while Israel’s God let theirs fail. When the two widows go to Israel, they do not receive the same treatment as required by the Torah itself. As God finally again “visits” his people with food (1:6), we see that it is the Moabitess through whom the Israelite Naomi is fed again after her great losses, not just from what Ruth gleaned, but from Ruth’s own meal (2:18); Ruth is rewarded in turn, as Boaz heaps yet more “food and water” on Ruth (vv. 9, 14); and it should not be forgotten that the setting is in Bethlehem, which means “house of bread.” Thus Ruth 1:6 is fulfilled: YHVH did look after them and give them bread. And there is only one Israelite man willing to preserve the inheritance of the dead, which is Deuteronomy’s concern.
But so far we’ve only focused on details that seem to reverse the curse on Moab based on their failure to meet Israel with food and water, but what about their inciting of Balaam to curse Israel? Recall that God turned the curse that Balaam wanted to pronounce into blessing,[8] after he had already lifted their curse of Egyptian bondage and blessed them. Similarly, the book of Ruth is an Exodus from a curse to blessing. Note the repetition of the phrase “on the journey when you came out of Egypt” and “remember that you were a slave in Egypt” from its basis text of Deuteronomy 23 to 25.[9] For a much more extensive intertextual analysis of Ruth’s many allusions to both Deuteronomy and Exodus, I refer you to Braulik’s article, cited above.
It is not difficult to imagine ancient biblical authors and interpreters viewing Ruth’s reversal of the Moabite curse as no more anti-Torah than all the times that God withdrew his blessing—promised in the Torah—and brought down curses on Israel for their disobedience, also promised in the Torah. Or when God withdrew his curse and again blessed Israel. Nor is this the first time we see the Torah’s laws as seeming to no longer have effect, or at least to be suspended. As we’ve already noted, when the Israelites returned from Babylonian captivity, they no longer saw it as their duty to slaughter the inhabitants of the land as had been commanded under Joshua. And although they kept the commandment not to marry the people of the land, they altered the list of what people groups were forbidden. Things had changed.
The biggest difficulty for the fundamentalist may actually be that Nehemiah 13 and Ezra 9 uphold the prohibition on marrying Moabites, while Ruth is supposed to be set hundreds of years before, and seems to remove the law. But I will argue in subsequent chapters that the biblical authors are doing something greater than merely telling us when certain laws were in effect; understanding the text via some sort of dispensationalism misses the point. As a hint of this, Ruth even places that illicit union right in the line of David himself, as already noted. Rather than Boaz’ levirate marriage merely building up the house of the dead man (see Deuteronomy 25:9), Ruth 4:11’s language is dynastic: Boaz and Ruth’s union will be like that of Rachel and Lea, “who together built up the house of Israel”.
And biblical writers did not just leave off there. They would also pull into the savior-king’s lineage the stories of Rahab, a foreign prostitute who was required by the law to be killed, and Tamar, who produced her progeny by incestuous trickery and was also nearly executed for it; and Solomon, the son of David and prince of peace, would come from yet one more sexually scandalous union, as David committed adultery and murder when he took Bathsheba, who also should have been killed along with David, according to the law. By the time we get to Mary and Jesus, we’ve got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, which also could have been interpreted as a capital offense![10] And Matthew 1, quite significantly, lists all these women in what would have normally been an all-male lineage.
To fully explore how the Bible could say such things and still be taken as a divine message, we will continue this discussion when we get to the section on when God broke his own laws in chapter 7.
This chapter has covered a lot of ground. But we still have not sufficiently explained how the ancients could have these views of law that are not as comprehensive or seemingly as rigid as what we moderns believe law must be, as we try to understand the intent of the biblical authors. What about such passages as Deuteronomy 4:2, which prohibits any addition to or subtraction from the law of God? Some scholars have pointed out that such expressions refer to altering the words of the writings of the laws, just as the US Constitution is preserved for all time, despite the fact that it has repealed laws in it, such as slavery and prohibition.[11] This view at best, however, is incomplete. What about, for example, the rigid penalties for breaking such laws which “had” to be obeyed, yet often weren’t?[12] We still have a couple of more chapters before we have at least a firm beginning in understanding the nature of the Bible’s laws, from the view of its authors. You can find them in my book here.
[1] I am indebted to Joshua Berman, once again, for this analysis, found in his essay “Ancient Hermeneutics and the Legal Structure of the Book of Ruth” (see ZAW 119, 22-38).
[2] See chapter four. Also: Ruth, by Feivel Meltzer.
[3] 1:21
[4] Deuteronomy 23:3 prohibited admission of Moabites into Israel’s “assembly”; if you’re looking for an explicit application of this to intermarriage, you’ll only find it in Nehemiah 13’s (cf. also Ezra 9) intra-biblical interpretation of it, which we’ve already noted also amends Deuteronomy, e.g., adding Egyptians to the lists of groups they could not marry. Also, Deuteronomy does not appear to be consistent regarding why the Moabites are so cursed: it says here that part of the reason for their exclusion stemmed from their not meeting Israel with bread and water when they came out of Egypt, yet 2:28 and 29 clearly say that they did. Of course, there might have been different Moabite groups, one of which did offer bread and water, and another whose king was Balak, who hired Balaam to curse Israel.
[5] Very rarely anymore do you hear preachers mention, for instance, certain New Testament teachings on how women are to keep their mouth shut in the assembly. And when they do, it’s usually to explain them away. Even among the few who still hold to this view, you will often see that it is actually acceptable for women to speak in Bible classes, which might be interpreted as still “in the assembly”; cf. 1 Corinthians 14:34; 1 Timothy 2:12. Note that I even used the masculine pronoun for preachers, but that is only because it is only men who fall weak to misapplication of Scripture….
[6] “You Must Not Add Anything to What I Command You”, Paradoxes of Canon and Authorship in Ancient Israel. Numen 50, pp. 1-51.
[7] E.g., “The Book of Ruth as Intra-Biblical Critique on the Deuteronomic Law”, Acta Theologica, 1999, Vol 19, Issue 1, by Georg Braulik
[8] See the rather lengthy and therefore significant passage of Numbers 22 to 24.
[9] 23:4; 24:9, 18, 22; 25:17.
[10] Deuteronomy 22:13-24. This quite possibly is another example of a law that probably was seldom upheld. And recall that Joseph was commended for not even wanting to bring a bad name on Mary, with not even a mention of the fact that such an attitude totally disregarded the Torah’s required penalty.
[11] Inconsistency in the Torah, by Joshua Berman, ch. 10.
[12] E.g., recall that David himself should have been executed for his murder of Uriah, as there was no redemption for a murderer.