You are right, but if there is a way to reopen a post to correct things, I also have a couple of other minor slips to fix elsewhere too. Sorry.

Commentary by Larry Swinford
Posted on: 5/26/2009 14:47 pm

In para 4 of the post #1, it should be Naomi, and not ruth. Ruth was a Moabite and was not foreigner.

Commentary by Jayant Christian
Posted on: 5/24/2009 15:31 pm

Some expressions are not mentioned because they seem superfluous, unimportantly extra. If in the current American culture someone travelled a distance to another town or city, we would merely say “I went to [wherever that may be]”. I would usually not describe the conveyance by saying “I took a car to {wherever]” or “I took a bus” but I might say “I walked to [wherever]” or “rode my bicycle”. These latter two are noteworthy in our current culture because of the extraordinary feature. Americans usually go everywhere by automobile, or in some major cities by some bus or train. We don’t need to say this because it was implied.

In Ruth 1:6, the expressions “she might return from the country of Moab” and “she had heard in the country of Moab” perhaps say something else, something contextually implied that would be unimportant detail to the King James, and other, translators. In largely agrarian societies, hearing something “in the fields” was as common place as assuming that Americans travel by automobile. Ruth ‘returned from the fields of Moab’ because she heard ‘in the fields of Moab’ that God [YWH] had given the people of Israel food. The famine back home had ended.

Part of the importance is the need to place the setting more realistically in our minds. We have cause, good cause usually, to want to apply the messages and teachings of the Scripture to our lives. An urban dweller will be tempted to picture Naomi as a shop clerk with a cheap apartment nearby. For some aspects of the story, that indeed can be done and done appropriately. Part of the picture of Ruth, however, is still experienced by a substantial population of the earth today that are scattered about the globe outside the cities. The rural poor, often still today and definitely back in Ruth’s day, depended upon the fields for food. The fields were watched and tended as well, or perhaps better, than contemporary hobby gardens. An American of today may raise a few tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and beans, yet the produce of these gardens were a fun but inconsequential addition to the family diet. In Ruth’s day, one did not simply go into town and buy the week’s groceries as Americans travel to their supermarkets. The fields were the focus of life or starvation choices.

Ruth worked in the fields of Moab. In the fields of Moab she heard that the fields of Israel were once more producing. Ruth, then, could go home. Ruth was an outsider in Moab, a foreigner. Without the proper social and legal “covering” of her husband, because he was dead, there were things such as securing a dwelling that suddenly became very tenuous and complicated. For that Ruth got up to leave. Since her two daughters-in-law were also widows, they faced the same new complications in their living and social standing. They too got up to leave.

Picture a man contracting with a landowner to work a portion of his fields. He brings with him two sons, and his wife, to provide labor as part of the package. For that there is a simple dwelling for them to live in. The man dies, but the sons are still there. The sons marry so now the landowner has two young men and they have three women to work the fields. Then the sons die. No matter how competent and capable the women may be, the landowner, in those days, would want a man to contract with, a woman without a husband has no legal standing. In our world today it would be akin to a toddler walking into a bank and saying, “I want a job” or “I want a loan.”

These widows, then, have to leave. Ruth, however, has a hope—back home in Bethlehem.

Commentary by Larry Swinford
Posted on: 5/22/2009 14:57 pm