Not only is the image of God under contention in the Hebrew Scriptures, but the meaning of what it means to be a Jew, and the two issues are very much interconnected. There is a Judaism focused on pure blood lines, linguistic purity, ritual obligation, and which presumes transgression in any of these areas results in God’s punishment. In this understanding the constant refrain is reform, separation, reinforced endogamy, rebuilding walls, sabbath keeping, protecting, purifying and preserving Jewish identity, and both the reform and the God who demands it are violent and retributive. On the other hand, there is a Judaism which presumes all people are invited into God’s family, in which God takes on the image of a servant, “the son of man,” and which names even foreign women as the truly faithful. We know these alien women (e.g., Ruth and Rahab) are the ideal through their identity as “kinsmen redeemers,” who are not only in the lineage of David and Jesus, but portions of the canon are dedicated to explaining their decisive inclusion in Jewish universalism. In this understanding foreigners can join themselves to the Lord (Is 56:6) and the temple is for all people: “For My house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples” (Is 56:7). In this alternative literature there are nonviolent martyrs, who are either slaughtered, miraculously delivered, or as with Ruth and Tamar are kinsmen redeemers through birth and new creation. It is in this context that there is development of the possibility of new life, resurrection, and a non-retributive, restorative God. This alternative Israel makes the work of Christ comprehensible, and it explains his crucifixion as the end point of two competing conceptions of God and Israel.
So, the contrast is between an exclusive, violent, God, focused on a human remnant, and an inclusive, peaceful, God, focused on all people and the cosmos. The point in setting up a clear contrast is to avoid papering over very different understandings of Jews and God. According to some readings, the violent, exclusive, and retributive understanding is to be incorporated into its opposite, which may miss that God is not on the side of those who killed Jesus (as in some doctrines of the atonement). By showing there is a long lineage of two understandings, the point is not to meld them but to make it clear that true Jews, true faithfulness, and a correct understanding of God are what is under contention and what is being worked out in the Bible.
The Tradition of Nehemiah and Ezra
Nehemiah would not only rebuild the physical walls of Jerusalem, but would reestablish the uniqueness of Jewish identity, as Hebrew children are failing to learn Hebrew and the people and priests are not maintaining markers of separation in marriage. So, Nehemiah takes it upon himself to try to curb or stop Jews from marrying the women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab so he “contended with them and cursed them and struck some of them and pulled out their hair, and made them swear by God, ‘You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor take of their daughters for your sons or for yourselves’” (Ne 13:25). For Nehemiah this is “great evil” and “treachery” against God (13:27). He prays for divine retribution against the Levites for having “defiled the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood” (13:29). He also locks the city gates at night, to keep out foreign traders on the sabbath and when the non-Jews camp outside the city he threatens violence: “Why do you spend the night in front of the wall? If you do so again, I will use force against you” (13:21). According to Nehemiah, this sort of transgression is why calamity came upon the Jews in the first place: “Did not your fathers do the same, so that our God brought on us and on this city all this trouble? Yet you are adding to the wrath on Israel by profaning the sabbath” (13:18).
Ezra is so appalled by this situation that he pulls out his hair: “When I heard about this matter, I tore my garment and my robe, and pulled some of the hair from my head and my beard, and sat down appalled” (Ezra 9:3). After sitting “appalled” all day he says, “I arose from my humiliation, even with my garment and my robe torn, and I fell on my knees and stretched out my hands to the Lord my God; and I said, ‘O my God, I am ashamed and embarrassed to lift up my face to You, my God, for our iniquities have risen above our heads and our guilt has grown even to the heavens” (Ezra 9:5–6). He too presumes it is intermarrying with foreign women that has caused God’s punishment: “Since the days of our fathers to this day we have been in great guilt, and on account of our iniquities we, our kings and our priests have been given into the hand of the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity and to plunder and to open shame, as it is this day” (Ezra 9:7).
At Ezra’s prompting and approval Sheceniah proposes a retroactive solution: “So now let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives and their children, according to the counsel of my lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God; and let it be done according to the law” (Ezra 10:3). The God of Ezra and Nehemiah is not concerned he might be creating widows and orphans (let alone care for them). Nehemiah would create an exclusive political space and Ezra an exclusive religious space, and the concern is not with the vast majority who fail these tests of exclusion, but only with those who are included. Exclusive holiness is the means to salvation, as God is that sort of Other. On this basis, Nehemiah can approach God with confidence of reward: “Thus I purified them from everything foreign and appointed duties for the priests and the Levites, each in his task, and I arranged for the supply of wood at appointed times and for the first fruits. Remember me, O my God, for good” (Ne 13:30–31).
The Alternative Posed by Ruth
Ruth, the Moabite widow, represents the opposite attitude to foreign wives found in Ezra and Nehemiah. Ruth is of the Moabites, the product of Lot’s incestuous relations (Gen 19:36-37), condemned by both Ezra and Nehemiah as a forbidden source for wives. Ruth accompanies Naomi, her Jewish mother-in-law, back to Bethlehem when her husband, Naomi’s son, dies. Naomi’s other foreign daughter-in-law returns to Moab, but Ruth insists on continuing to serve Naomi in her struggle for survival. According to Anthony Bartlett, she is described with two key terms: hesed, (with a range of meanings from “loving kindness, to mercy, steadfast love, loyalty and faithfulness”) and go’el (the kinsman redeemer) both of which are associated with the character of God.[1]
The God of Israel is full of steadfast love (hesed): “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love (hesed) and faithfulness keeping steadfast love (hesed) for thousands of generations. . .” (Exod 34:6-7). God is also redeemer, and it is the shape go’el takes in this story that marks it as messianic. Redemption may be from out of slavery, from out of debt, or the redemption of property (Lev. 25:25ff), and in the case of murder the go’el “redeems” by covering the spilled blood of the victim with that of the killer (Num 35:9-21). In Ruth, however, redemption is linked specifically with sex and marriage (as in Dt 25). The kinsman marries the widow of his brother in order to preserve her place in Israel, and where he refuses, there is a dereliction of duty: “his brother’s wife shall come to him in the sight of the elders, and pull his sandal off his foot and spit in his face; and she shall declare, ‘Thus it is done to the man who does not build up his brother’s house’” (Dt 25:9). The goal is that the widow give birth to a new family, and in this procreative act (life in the place of desolation and death), is redemption. So with Ruth: “It is a story of covenant kindness bringing new life, effected by the life of a woman who is a Moabite.”[2] Through Ruth there will arise the line of David and the ancestry of Jesus, but in the immediate context it is love and life in place of alienation and death which creates this messianic possibility.
Naomi blesses her daughters-in-law invoking the blessing of God’s hesed, and indicating they too have done hesed. In doing so “she is telling us in no uncertain terms that these Moabite women are capable of the core Israelite covenant virtue. Ruth, in refusing to leave Naomi, goes beyond Orpah and begins to manifest the deep radicalism and generative power of divine hesed.”[3] “But Ruth said, ‘Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried’” (Ruth 1:16–17). Ruth’s deep commitment to Naomi reveals her divine-like character. Rather than understanding God in abstract legal terms, the divine realm in Ruth overlaps with loving kindness experienced in personal relationship, through which Ruth transforms the world around her.
Under Naomi’s guidance, Ruth begins the elaborate wooing of Boaz a potential kinsmen redeemer, of great wealth. Boaz sees her gleaning the left-over harvest, and instructs his servants to care for her, and he tells Ruth to stay with the maids of his house and to only glean from his field. “Then she fell on her face, bowing to the ground and said to him, ‘Why have I found favor in your sight that you should take notice of me, since I am a foreigner?’” (Ruth 2:10). She refers to herself as nokri, not only a foreigner but a “harlot” or “adulterous woman” (as the term is used in Proverbs 2:16; 5:20). She is the corrupting foreign other, warned against by Ezra, Nehemiah and Proverbs, who puts Israel in danger through her alluring power. Idolatry after all, is equated with harlotry and adultery. The “corrupting other” whose rejection is often equated with acceptance by God, is equated in Ruth, with the divine character and redemption. “The irony could not be more marked: the very figure dreaded for her power to adulterate Israel in every sense, until it is no longer Israel, becomes an unsubstitutable source of Israel’s life.”[4] It is precisely this switching of one sort of Israel for another that forms the messianic link, and it is pointedly a scene of seduction that accomplishes this swap.
Boaz is the potential go’el of Ruth and Naomi, but he does nothing to enact his redeeming role, until Naomi instructs Ruth how to illicit loving action from Boaz: “Wash yourself therefore, and anoint yourself and put on your best clothes, and go down to the threshing floor; but do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. It shall be when he lies down, that you shall notice the place where he lies, and you shall go and uncover his feet and lie down; then he will tell you what you shall do” (3:3-4). It is a seduction, but the point is not to entice Boaz away from but into being a true Israelite. He will fulfill his duties as a kinsman redeemer, first by making love, and then by loving and marrying Ruth. “May you be blessed of the LORD, my daughter. You have shown your last kindness to be better than the first by not going after young men, whether poor or rich. Now, my daughter, do not fear. I will do for you whatever you ask, for all my people in the city know that you are a woman of excellence” (Ruth 3:10-11).
Before redeeming her, Boaz must first make sure that another kinsman, closer in relation, will not choose to redeem her, but then he consummates his duties before all the people: “All the people who were in the court, and the elders, said, ‘We are witnesses. May the LORD make the woman who is coming into your home like Rachel and Leah, both of whom built the house of Israel; and may you achieve wealth in Ephrathah and become famous in Bethlehem’” (4:11). Ruth is compared to the mothers of the Jews, and with the birth of Obed, Ruth and Boaz’s son, she becomes the mother of the Davidic line. The whole city, the elders, and eventually all of Israel and the world will hear this story, not as one of God disqualifying a foreigner, but as one in which a faithful Moabite acts as model Israelite.
Yet it is Ruth’s steadfast and redeeming love which is valued above all else, as the town folk explain to Naomi: “your daughter-in-law, who loves you and is better to you than seven sons, has given birth to him” (4:15). Ruth is more the redeemer than Boaz, and even more than Obed, in her steadfast love, giving new life in the midst of possible death. Rather than an impurity in Israel, she reenacts the origins of Israel as hapiru, a dispossessed non-people as chosen by God for redemption. As Bartlett puts it, “Ruth is a generative woman who creates possibility for those around her. She is a mother of Israel precisely in her situation of outsider and contaminant, because in this situation she is able to reproduce Israel’s origins and give the purest – the most selfless and generous – version of hesed.”[5] Her unconditional love and steadfastness is life-giving and redemptive and this, as much as her giving birth to the line of David, marks her as in the line of the final go’el, Jesus Christ.
Conclusion
Ezra and Nehemiah do not have the last word in the Hebrew Scriptures, as Ruth presents a diametrically opposed understanding. One might consider Ezra and Nehemiah over Ruth, were it not for the lineage traced in Mathew, which signals the resolution to this contradiction: “Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab, Boaz was the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse. Jesse was the father of David the king” (Mt 1:5–6). Rahab and Ruth in a single sentence indicate the gospel marks the demise of the Jew and God as conceived by Ezra and Nehemiah. Jesus did not come as a reformer of Israel but as one who marks the telos of Israel, in the fulfillment of a meaning beyond law, temple, and the politics and institutions of an earthly kingdom. The Redeemer is not retributive but restorative through life-giving faithfulness and steadfast love, and this is the resolution to the contested identity of God and Israel.
(To be Continued)
[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 91-93. I am following Bartlett throughout, and have been inspired by his teaching with PBI.
[2] Ibid, 93.
[3] Ibid, 91.
[4] Ibid, 93.
[5] Ibid, 98.
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