000 Allen FMT (i-xxii) - The Presbyterian Leader

Proper 27 [32]/Year B 201
some in the community sought to rid the community of such compromises
with the culture and thereby to invoke God’s blessing on the
restoration of the land.
The book of Ruth offers an alternative viewpoint to Ezra-Nehemiah, but
does so in the form of a story. On Proper 26/Year B, we considered the
beginning of the story of the Jewish widow Naomi and the Moabite Ruth.
Ezra 9:1 refers to Moabites (and others) as people from whom Israel should
maintain separation (cf. Neh. 13:1). When the women returned to Israel,
Ruth encountered Boaz while she was gleaning. Boaz was kin to Naomi’s
husband and was responsible for family security. Boaz ensured that Ruth
would receive a generous portion of grain (Ruth 2:1–23), an action that
Naomi interpreted as a means through which God’s hesed was at work (2:20).
Naomi guided Ruth to meet Boaz on the threshing floor (3:5). While
Boaz was sleeping, Ruth lay at his feet and when he awoke asked him to
spread his cloak over her because she was kin, that is, she asked him to
marry her. Boaz, an exemplary Israelite, declared that Ruth was a “worthy
woman,” a woman on a par with Israelite women as a candidate for a
wife. Boaz’s own integrity is verified by the fact that he consulted with a
kin-protector who was more closely related to Ruth than is Boaz (3:1–18).
When the other kin-protector yielded his right to Ruth, Boaz married her.
Ruth gave birth to a child whom the women of the neighborhood named
Obed (4:1–17). The narrator concludes with the pointed fact that Ruth
was the grandmother of the great monarch David (4:18–22).
This story challenges the restriction on intermarriage mentioned in the
first part of this comment in two ways. First, it shows a Moabite woman
demonstrating hesed (covenantal loyalty) to the Jewish Naomi. Second, the
exemplary Israelite, Boaz, brings the Moabite into his own household as if
she were an Israelite. Throughout, Ruth manifests qualities of covenantal
behavior. How could the community forbid relationship with the people
of David’s grandparent? An indirect message is that just as God manifested
hesed through the relationship of Naomi and Ruth prior to Ruth’s marriage
to Boaz, so God will continue to manifest that quality through persons and
relationships that are not officially acknowledged by the Jewish leadership.
Jon L. Berquist points out that the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law
are the “relationship of highest significance” for much of the narrative, “a
relationship relatively unidentified within the culture and [that] would
not have been considered to be a family relationship that implied protection.”
As the story moves toward its conclusion, “the family includes Boaz
and Ruth, an absent father and a foreign mother, whose child nursed
at his grandmother’s breast” and who was named by the women of the