40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Ruth 1:1-18 (Episode 220)

Episode Date: June 12, 2020

Chad and Daniel begin the book of Ruth in this episode. A famine hits Judah so a man takes his wife, Naomi, and two sons to Moab. He dies, and his sons marry Moabite women. The sons also die, and Naomi hears the famine is over decides to travel back to Bethlehem. She tells her daughters-in-law to go to their homes but Ruth refuses to leave her. Have a listen. 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast, check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. Speaking of podcasts, when this releases, the new Outlaw God podcast will be out. It actually comes out the day that we're recording this. So for sure, it's going to be out by the time you're listening to this. So if you haven't subscribed to the Outlaw God podcast with Stephen Paulson, you should do that.

Give it a listen. See if that's something that interests you. It interests me. It interests Chad. So, I mean, just type in Outlaw God into whatever podcast app you use. Chad, what's going on, man? Well, gradually, day by day, week by week, getting back to something close to normal life. There you go.

My wife's back to work full time, so it's quiet here at the house. And everything else is, at least in Texas anyway, everything else is kind of getting back to normal. But everything going well? You're neck of the woods? Everything's all right, man. We were just talking before this, right before we started recording, I went and got a COVID test. uh don't worry i don't have any covid symptoms just had to get one because uh i had a doctor's visit and then they had to do a covid test before i could go so got that it's not the greatest thing ever feels like they're scrubbing your brain when they stick that thing in your in your nose

besides that it's quite enjoyable yeah it's great uh it feels like it's kind of like getting punched in the nose a little bit uh as far as the after effects you're you feel like a baby your eyes are watering uncontrollably so i'm just saying if you haven't got one it's yourself it's an experience yeah sounds like it yeah oh fun times yeah but but i was able to get through it because i knew we were starting a brand new book so i just had to that's right i had to get through it so i can get back here and and uh get this thing fired up because we are we're in ruth chapter one today I know. Yeah, it felt good.

I started preparing this morning, looking over some of the material that I had gathered together. And I was like, man, this is like coming out of a really nasty, dark cave into some sunlight. Yeah, and this is a thing. It's a huge change. You know Judges is dark when you start looking at the first chapter of Ruth and think, well, this is better. And it's all about multiple deaths. yeah yeah famine all these people dying like yeah but it's not as bad as judges yeah at least they're not murdering entire civilization civilizations and uh you know kidnapping

virgins and at least that's not happening you know you this is yeah you look at almost all the characters in ruth and you're like you know what these are at least from what we know about them from the story they're pretty decent people yeah you know yeah i'm not saying they're perfect of course but uh nobody's going out like you know slaughtering a bunch of people or raping or pillaging or any of that other stuff that we at least covered in the last few chapters of uh of judges so yeah i mean everyone here uh they had kind of you you get to a feel for their unique personalities and yeah they seem like they'd be pretty decent neighbors neighbors to have if you know falling on some hard times but uh that's kind of the story of ruth i mean one of

the main themes of ruth as we'll see is this move from emptiness to fullness yeah and you know you have the uh the theme of divine providence too which of course i mean that you could say that of any any of the biblical books but it really emerges as a pretty major theme here because god is mentioned it's not like an esther uh where you know mention of god is basically this nil god is mentioned but he's kind of like it's kind of like the joseph narrative when we're back when we're back in uh in genesis there's not a whole lot of god talk in the joseph narrative but you can just see of course how between the lines behind the scenes the divine hand of providence is just working things out putting joseph exactly where he wants him to be so that

he eventually will end up at the right hand of pharaoh it's kind of like this here i mean you start out as we already mentioned where it's like ah you know you got a famine you got a husband dying a husband and father dying you got these two sons dying and now you have a widow and have these two daughters-in-law that are widow widows as widows as well you know what's gonna what's gonna happen here but you can see uh immediately after that how providence is kind of working to manipulate events to place people where he where he wants them to be so yeah i mean you got that well ruth ruth is a lot of ways like the ultimate uh old testament story of uh god working all things together for good yeah it is it's kind of a romans 828 kind of book for sure

i mean if you like if you're preaching on that text and be like what'd be a good old testament story i could use as illustrative of this well here you go that's uh that's what ruth is all about yeah and ruth and so ruth takes place in the time of the judges but it's a little bit hard to place it right i mean we don't we don't know exactly we just went through the entire book of judges this is taking place at some point during that not sure exactly where this would slide in and also as we discovered as we were through judges judges and it isn't exactly chronological either yeah that's exactly right we especially in that last uh really terrible story that we read about uh they probably that probably happened early a lot earlier than a lot of the other

events and judges and as i think we mentioned sometime when we were covering uh the various judges you know some of these probably overlap too so we kind of sometimes get the impression okay you had you had this judge then you had this period of rest you had that judge and this pretty rest well most of the judges were more local you know they were working with this tribe or these couple of tribes you didn't really have like a judge who was traveling all around delivering you know this tribe and that tribe most of them just were in one small area so you could have had for instance a judge in the southern part of the 12 tribes you could have had another judge who was doing his thing at the same time in the northern parts of the tribe so yeah there's

not a lot of real strict chronology there so it's like that with Ruth we don't know when it happened And we do know, of course, from the opening words, that it does take place during the time of the judges, because that's the way it starts out. Now, it came about in the days when the judges governed, literally when the judges judged. So that's the reason that it's placed where it's at, at least in our English Bibles. So it follows judges because of the chronology. It also follows it because in some of the older translations like the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, it's the order of the books follows this particular order that we have in the English, or the English follows that particular order. So Ruth follows Judges in the Septuagint. Now, it's not like that in a lot of the Hebrew manuscripts, which is kind of interesting.

So you kind of have two different placements. The Ruth is considered in most Hebrew Bibles to be part of what's called the five megaloth. The megaloth just means scrolls. So you have these five scrolls or five megaloth. And these are shorter books. These are books like Esther and Song of Songs and Ruth and Lamentations. And each of these five scrolls or five megaloth were associated with different Jewish festivals. So, for instance, every year, and I guess they still do this in Jewish synagogues.

So every year on the festival of Passover, they read Song of Songs. and then every year on the festival of Shavuot, which we call Pentecost, is when they read Ruth. And sometimes you can kind of figure out why theologically. I think the reason that Ruth is placed at Pentecost is because a lot of it has to do with harvest, of course. And that's what Pentecost historically was all about. It was a celebration of the grain harvest. So it kind of makes sense to read Ruth at that particular festival. Anyway, Ruth was part of these five scrolls or the five megalode. And sometimes I find this particularly appropriate that in some of the Hebrew manuscripts, so Ruth would have been placed immediately after Proverbs. Now what's the

end of Proverbs? Proverbs 31, you have that section about the noble woman. And then that would immediately been followed by the book of Ruth. So it's very appropriate joining of those two together. But anyway, it's part of the kind of, I guess, an addendum, we might call it, to the Book of Judges, and a great way really to end our time of spending with the judges on a very positive note with this kind of a short story or novella or whatever you want to call it. You know, before we jump in, one thing that's very interesting, and you pick up on this pretty quickly in the story. Ruth is different than a lot of biblical books because a lot of the story is told by means of dialogue. I was looking at a commentary this morning,

and he says that if you count up just the words, so there's 1,294 Hebrew words in this book. Well, of those 1,294, 678 of them are words that are spoken by the characters, so that it comes out to about 52% of the book is dialogue. That's pretty unique in biblical storytelling. Most of the time you just have narrative. I mean, you have dialogue too, but that's one of the things that sets the book of Ruth apart is that it's composed, over half of the book is composed of kind of this back and forth. And say this one more thing before we jump into it. It's called Ruth, which is the only book in the Old Testament that is named after a non-Israelite. But the name itself is debatable as to whether it would be really the best thing to call it. Because as you're reading

through the story, I mean, Ruth is a central character. Don't get me wrong. But I think the book is more about Naomi than it is Ruth. Or you can maybe even make an argument that it's more about Boaz than it is about Ruth. But Ruth is a title that was chosen, which is pretty cool because this is a non-Israelite who gets her name chosen to be beyond this Old Testament book. Okay, well, that's enough preliminary stuff. We'll jump in here and see how much we can cover in our remaining time. Start out here, just kind of set in the context, read these first few verses. Now, it came about in the days when the judges governed that there was a famine in the land, and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the land of Moab with his wife and his

two sons and the name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi and the names of his two sons were Malon and Kilion, Ephrathites of Bethlehem in Judah. Now they entered the land of Moab and remained there. Then Elimelech, Naomi's husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. And they took for themselves Moabite women as wives. The name of the one was Orpah, and the name of the other Ruth. And they lived there about 10 years. Then Malone and Kilion also died, and the woman was bereft of her two children and her husband. Now right away there's some there's some uh language that's introduced here which is going to be picked up it's going to be picked up later on and there's also some language here that kind of sends us backward in

time so that we can make some connections and some expectations based upon what was said here in these these opening verses one of these is in the very first verse it says there was there was a famine in the land interestingly that hebrew phrase for there was there was a famine that particular Hebrew phrase is only found in two places, and they're both in the book of Judges, and they're both in the patriarchal narratives about, for instance, when there was a famine in the days of Abraham, and then later there's a famine in the days of Isaac. Now, the reason this is significant is because, okay, if you know your Bible, you know, you're a podcast listener, you know what happened in Genesis, and you're thinking, okay, so, and say you didn't know

anything about the book of Ruth, you're thinking, all right, well, this is going to work out well, because, you know, there was a famine in the days of Abraham and he went down into Egypt and yeah, he got into trouble there. But look, when he, when he came back after the famine was over, he was rich, right? I mean, he, he left on this exile because of famine, but when he returned, he returned full, he returned rich. He had all this stuff that he didn't have when he, when he left. So maybe when you're reading these opening words to the book of Ruth, you're thinking, oh okay well you know there's a famine all right they're gonna leave they're gonna go not to egypt they're gonna go to moab but everything's gonna be okay because when they come back they're gonna

come back full this is one of those expectations that's kind of built into the narrative that ends up leading to a surprise and disappointment because as we will see later on ruth or naomi does not come back full she comes back in her own words exactly the opposite that she left full and then she came back empty. So things are not going to be simply a replica of the patriarchal story. There's going to be a surprise here. And another thing that jumped out at me in verse one is that this is another Bethlehem story. I hadn't really thought about that until this morning. So in the last two main stories of Judges, both of those had things happening to them or people in these stories that were connected with Bethlehem. So this is like the third Bethlehem

story in a row the first bethlehem story in the book of judges i think was chapter 17 was where you had that levite for hire remember the guy that you know he was a levite from bethlehem and he's traveling around he's basically looking for a patron who's going to hire him to serve at his private sanctuary and he finds that guy so that guy that levite was from bethlehem that didn't go so well and then the second story the last story of the book of judges the concubine who ended up being murdered gang raped murdered cut up into 12 pieces she was from Bethlehem well now we have another Bethlehem story of course this one is going to be a much different kind of story but I do find that interesting just the way this is all set up canonically you got three Bethlehem

stories in a row two very bad stories and then this one in which you're going to have this light of hope and dawn beginning to emerge. Now, they end up, as I was reading, they end up going to Moab. Now, if you're familiar with everything that went before this, you're thinking, man, Moab, that's not a very safe place for an Israelite to end up. Because first of all, Moab has this pretty sketchy history. If you remember what happened after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah Moab is a result of the incestuous union between Lot and one of his daughters so that's where the nation came from not a real heritage that you want to boast over and then when the Israelites were journeying through the wilderness the Moabites were against

them and you remember the the whole terrible incident where the Moabite women were I don't want to say they were seducing the Israelite men because that makes it sound like it was the fault of the Moabite women. I suspect this was a two-way relationship. Anyway, let's just say the Moabite women and the Israelite men were hooking up and they weren't supposed to. And this led to this huge massacre and plague.

It was a terrible, terrible incident in the life of Israel's past. But that's where these Israelites are going. So they're going to Moab And these two sons end up taking two Moabite women, which was, strictly speaking, was forbidden by the Torah. But I suppose, you know, you're there 10 years, and the boys aren't getting any younger. And so I guess mom and dad were like, well, you know, we're here, and you need to marry. And we're not going to go back to Bethlehem so you can, you know, marry somebody from your family tree.

so I guess you're going to marry some Moabite women instead. Well, what happens is they escape famine, and they run right into the jaws of death. So Naomi's husband, Elimelech, dies, and then it says that either her two sons died at different times, or the language there is possible that they actually died together. Who knows? It might have been some accident. Of course, we're not told what happened but once we get to the fifth verse we know that uh naomi's in a situation where she's basically bereft of everything she left full she left for their husband she had two sons and no doubt they thought they might have a future and a hope in moab but it turns out that everything that happened to them was not what they expected and so now she's she's in that situation where you know

we've all been at one time or another of course probably not exactly like like Naomi but man you have high hopes and you're thinking uh this is the best choice that you can make maybe it's a move maybe it's a new relationship maybe it's a new job whatever and then everything just kind of begins to crumble around you and before you know it it's just like one thing after another hits and you're left like Naomi is here thinking that basically your life is over I mean when you of course we haven't gotten to that yet it's verses six and following but you can really you can really empathize with naomi if you've been in that situation before you know where she's like don't even call me naomi call me mara call me bitter because the lord has dealt very bitterly

with me and she uh she just really she's she's struggling with trying to make sense of a life in which she, as a believer, is suffering through all of this pain and loss and heartache. And that's a really, really tough, tough place to be. And this is an extremely desperate situation to be in in this time. For your husband to die and your two sons to die, now you've got an older woman and two younger women, and they've got nobody. That would be pretty tragic now. uh it puts you in a in a real bad situation then yeah it's tragic on a whole whole other level then

because you know there's no as we talked about before with the widows there's no there's no uh social uh net to catch you you know there's really nothing you can rely on except your family and she's not with her family that's you know that's one of the reasons she goes back i'm sure She hears that God has blessed Bethlehem with food again, so she goes back. But she's not among her people. It's not like she became a Moabite when she was there. And now I'm sure she feels responsible for these two daughters-in-law. What are they going to do?

And then you kind of, even though it's not really, it's not brought out here explicitly, but you also have kind of the patriarchal theme of barrenness, right? because we don't know how long they were married but we do know they were in the land for 10 years so i'm assuming that they were married for you know quite a few of those years and there are no children so you've got you've got that got kind of that in the background as well there's just a lot going on with naomi that that helps to explain why she speaks the way she does, why she makes the decisions that she does. And we get to where, you know, we can't help but feel sorry for everything that she's not only gone through, but probably will go through

into the future. So verse six, what's she going to do? It says she arose with her daughters-in-law that she might return from the land of Moab. So she's returning from exile. She's going home. Why? Because she heard in the land of Moab that the Lord had visited his people in giving them food. So it's kind of an irony built into this story too. Bethlehem, as most people know, comes from two Hebrew words, beit lechem, which means house of bread. And the house of bread was where there was a famine. Not what you would expect, but that's what happened. And now she hears basically that God has, as it were, restocked the shells of the house of bread. So there's once more, there is the blessing of good crops in Bethlehem.

So, of course, she goes home. And there's also the introduction here of the idea of God actively working to bless his people. It says the Lord had visited his people. So how did he visit them? Well, he visited them specifically in giving them once more rain and fruitful crops. And so she decides it's time, it's time to go home. There's nothing really keeping her in Moab as well. This seems, coming out of Judges, if you start thinking about, okay, so there was this span of quite a while, many years, where you got a famine in Bethlehem.

Okay. And then it seems as though, almost as though God has been like, yeah, hands off. and then she hears that oh it looks like god has visited his people again i mean this is if this is not the theme of judges i don't know what is uh i mean it's not if you put yourself back in judges it's not hard to imagine like well i wonder what could be going on all these years that god has sort of taken his hand off that off of you know off of his people well this is probably doing what was right in their own eyes uh probably got famine probably got you know oppression all this stuff this works in concert with judges pretty well yeah it does it does made it if you go back and read

the ending of leviticus and deuteronomy i think it's leviticus 26 and deuteronomy 28 that's where you had the whole list of covenant blessings and curses but one of the one of the curses that god threatens to live against israel should they rebel against the torah is i think the exact language is something like he will he will make the heavens as bronze and the earth is iron In other words, there's going to be nothing coming down from above and there's nothing growing below. So drought, famine, lack of food, all of that kind of fits in with the covenantal curses. And yeah, that also fits in with what was happening in the book of Judges, where you have God kind of letting the people figure out that when they have their own way, when they do what's right in their own eyes, it does not turn out well. You know, we are the worst at solving our own problems, humanity that is, because we typically end up making things a whole lot worse. Because, yeah, we're doing whatever we think is right, whatever is right in our own eyes. And nine times out of ten, that is not what is right in the eyes of God.

Yeah. Okay, so she departs from the place where she was. and she takes it it seems at first like i kind of get the picture like all three are starting on this journey right because it says that she departs from her place where she was and her two daughters-in-law with her so i don't know if like you know we're kind of starting out on this journey together and they're heading back to the land of judah and then all of a sudden naomi stops and it's like she's finally come to a decision we don't i don't know but that's kind of the impression that i get from this is that maybe they were maybe they were uh they traveled a

certain distance and they were nearer to the these girls hometown yeah that's always possible too right and she's like and then she this is where this is where you stop this is where you stop yeah this is where naomi adopts a kind of a tough love posture right uh she says picking up with verse eight she says to the two of them go return each of you to your mother's house may the lord deal kindly with you as you have dealt with the dead and with me. May the Lord grant that you may find rest each in the house of her husband. And then she kissed them and they lifted up their voices and wept. And they said to her, so they both said to her, no, but we will surely return with you to your people. But Naomi said, return my daughters. Why should you go with me? Have I

yet sons in my womb that they may be your husbands return my daughters go for i am too old to have a husband and if i said i have hope if i should even have a husband tonight and also bear sons would you therefore wait until they were grown would you therefore refrain from marrying no my daughters for it is harder for me or that could be translated more bitter for me than for you for the hand of Lord has gone forth against me. And they lifted up their voices and wept again. And Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her. So this is basically Naomi freeing them from any kind of commitment that they thought they needed to have with her so that they could go back home and basically start their lives over again. Saying, look, I have nothing to offer you. I mean, it's

not like i have other sons that you can marry and she kind of gives this kind of crazy scenario like listen you know what if i get married tonight and i and i conceive uh twins i have two sons in my womb and they're born oh what are you gonna do you know wait 18 years yeah to marry them in other words she's like she's like pushing the envelope here with the example but she's basically saying look i have zero to offer you there's nothing that i can do for you the best thing you're you're you're both presumably still young uh so just go back home go back to your to your parents house and find some some good men and remarry and and start a family over over with them because there's nothing there's nothing that i can offer you for the future that's going to

provide any kind of any kind of hope for you and it's interesting the way she ends this because She says, no, my daughters for it is, it is harder, or as I said, more bitter for me than for you because, and I think this is significant to kind of get into the Israelite mindset. She says, she doesn't say because all of this misfortune has befallen me, or she doesn't say because we've had just this terrible string of bad luck or the universe has turned against us you know in typical israelite fashion or just or even just the practical part it's it's more bitter for me than it is for you because you lost husbands i lost a husband and sons so right yeah on the bitterness scale i'm i've got a lot got a lot more no she says i would i would

paraphrase this it says the fact for the hand of the lord has gone forth against me i would paraphrase this is because God has attacked me. The Hebrew phrase there, this idea in Hebrew of a hand being against you, that's pretty common. But usually the way this works in Hebrew is the hand will just be against someone or in front of someone, kind of like holding them back. Maybe if I'm trying to prevent someone from going somewhere and I stand in front of them, I put my hands against them and hold them back. That's one thing. It's quite another thing if I'm trying to prevent them from going somewhere and I hit them in the face. That's the image to choose here. When it says the hand of the Lord has gone forth against me, this is the image of striking, of attacking.

So Naomi is using kind of a superlative here. I mean, the image that she is going for here is not that of kind of this this soft standing against someone but she is picturing god as someone who has actually attacked her actively gone gone against her i mean i mean i suppose it's possible i mean it's not in the text but as you're saying uh moab is a is a strange place for for them to go in the first place uh and as she heads back obviously because she hears that the the famine has ended in Bethlehem, but one of the reasons certainly that she could be thinking this is that, man, God really is really displeased with us going to Moab, marrying our sons off to these Moabite women.

There are things in the text that if you feel like God is against you, that you could point to and say, well, it's probably this and this and this. Now, I'm not saying that that is the case. that that is certainly not the case but it'd be an easy it'd be an easy um it would be easy to deduce that yes it would it would yeah i always when i when i go talk at churches or conferences about lament i almost always go to ruth chapter one and talk about naomi and the reason is because she really does give voice to the typical Israelite way of expressing, well, frustration is too mild a word, but we'll just say of expressing lament for the way that things are.

You know, and she speaks in a way that I don't think that we are entirely comfortable with, at least a lot of people aren't comfortable with. I mean, when someone says to us, you know, God has turned against me, or God has, the hand of the Lord has gone forth against me, that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. But that just happens to be the way that a lot of the Psalms speak. They are very blunt when they describe how God has turned against them or God is asleep or whatever it might be. Now, that might make us uncomfortable, but that is the biblical way of talking because it's simply an honest expression of what the person is going through. They don't believe that God is somehow absent and maybe watching from a distance and

sort of a hands-off kind of deity, just kind of letting the situation play out the way that it might. They see him as active in all things. And so it's not unusual for them to attribute things that we might attribute just to chance or to fate or to just evil in the world even. it's not unusual for them to attribute that directly directly to god that's what that's what naomi does does here well what's going to happen uh they're you know they're evidently all three all three of these women are evidently extremely close to each other this is a they've gone through they've gone through so much uh we don't know we don't know if the daughters-in-law were around when naomi's husband died but anyway they uh they've grieved with her they've

experienced her widowhood and then they themselves experienced widowhood so all of these just terrible emotional experiences have welded these three women together and so naturally when they're about to part there's crying there's there's there's uh lifting up of their voices so kind of wailing there it's an it's extremely emotional scene here but it says orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye but ruth did not ruth clung to her that the hebrew verb behind that word for clung is davak it's the word that is used a lot of times in the scriptures but the first time we encounter it is when is genesis chapter two where it says a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. It's the idea of being glued to another one, bonded to someone else. It can be

used positively, it can be used negatively, but it is this idea of something holding on to another one, sticking to another one. And so that's what Ruth is doing here. She's debauching, she's cleaving to her mother-in-law. Well, I will say this, before we get into the great words of Ruth, which are great and uh and we should like i mean they are they are worth extolling one of the things that the that bothers me uh when i hear people go through go through ruth is that they'll make this division between orpah and and ruth as if uh as if ruth did the the right thing and that orpah did some kind of evil here i even uh heard a guy say once uh that when talking about this passage that in this situation that orpah you know kisses her mother-in-law and ruth clings to

her and this is the difference between judas and john oh seriously oh yeah yeah now now and it's you know be a ruth don't be an orpah kind of thing right yeah i don't think orpah does anything wrong here no i don't think that she does either no uh in fact uh god's got a certain somebody in mind for ruth that's going to work all this this out we don't have any reason to believe there's like a second boaz out there you know uh yeah i think this goes exactly i mean if you want to talk about providence and this goes exactly the way that god desires it to go and that we shouldn't uh while it while rightfully extolling ruth for the words that she's about to say which are great words uh and great words for the church and i don't think that you have to then say

because ruth does this incredible thing uh and says these beautiful words this somehow means that orpah did something wrong i don't think she did i mean she just listened to her mother-in-law uh yeah you can't yeah there's there's nothing in the text to suggest that we should vilify her yeah so this this be a ruth don't be an orpah thing i think you can toss that out yeah yeah definitely can i mean yeah she's just doing what she's doing what her mother-in-law asked her to do yeah and she and comparing her to judas is absurd oh yeah that's like it's just there's no excuse for that whatsoever no there's no betrayal here no right there's nothing here whatsoever that suggests that orpah is somehow betraying ruth she's doing she's actually obeying her

mother-in-law yes she's doing exactly what she asked her asked her to do now ruth is different which is which is great but as you say god is providence he had plans for orpah and who knows you know if she married an israelite man i would assume that she was exposed to the israelite faith so who knows what good she might have done when she returned to or to to her own land and uh took that faith along with her yeah okay no okay we can get into the words i just wanted i've just heard this numerous times and wanted to or if i needed a little bit of defense yeah like come on too many times come on man yeah don't yeah just please never ever compare her to judas there's no comparison there whatsoever okay so what what's ruth gonna do well ruth says uh don't 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 your god my god where you die i will die and there i will be buried. Thus may the Lord do to me, by the way, that's the only place in Ruth where the name of Yahweh is on the lips of Ruth. Thus may Yahweh the Lord do to me, and worse, if anything but death parts you and me. And when they saw that, when she saw, that is when Naomi saw that Ruth was determined to go with her, she said no more to her. Yeah, this is a great text. I mean, this is a famous wedding text of course uh if you're a fan of james avery jewelry uh texas texas jeweler you can buy a ring uh with these hebrew hebrew words inscribed on it i mean it really is it

is one of the most i think it's one of the most beautiful expressions of of a total commitment to another person that that you will find find in the scriptures because ruth is basically this is Ruth actively doing what in Hebrew is called chesed, right? This is her showing chesed, love, mercy, self-sacrifice, all of those things that are built into chesed. This is her showing that to her mother-in-law, because she is going to be the one who basically, well, she doesn't stand in the place of her sons and her lost husband, but she is like the one surviving family member that is gonna it's gonna stick with with uh naomi through whatever comes she's basically saying that i'm leaving behind my life everything that that defined who i was in the past so that i can be

where you are to to my dying day yeah there's a there's a fearlessness to uh that that sort of commitment that is admirable for sure because there's not a lot of practically good reasons to do this. If Ruth was an Israelite, it would still be an amazing statement. The fact that she's not and she's going to go with Naomi to Bethlehem is fairly incredible. There really isn't – she has no reason to think that there's much there for her. No, she could not have been doing this out of selfish interest because –

No. Exactly right. But I mean, everything like if if we had been talking to her, if we kind of knew the situation and we're looking at things just on a practical level, I probably would have told Ruth, listen, go back home. I mean, I know you're a widow, but you're young, you know, go back to the land that, you know, and your family and find another husband. yeah there's there's no reason for you to know at least no seemingly rational reason for you to simply leave everything behind and go with and go with naomi yeah i think that's one of the reasons this is often referred to as kind of a almost a a disciple kind of move right jesus disciples they leave the nets and left everything behind and they just they just follow christ and in many ways

that's what's happening here with ruth and yeah i mean it's one thing for naomi and her husband to take their sons and move to moab they grow up and then they take moabite wives this uh there's there's there's no reason to think this is going to work in the opposite direction that you're going to go that some moabite woman is going to go move into bethlehem and dudes are going to be lining up like that it doesn't work in that way like they're not there there's no reason to think this is going to happen you're at least you are at least potentially consigning yourself to widowdom from this point on yeah yeah yeah that's exactly that anyone who kind of didn't know you know the rest of the story how this unfolds would assume that was that would be what was going to happen

you know just have a case of these two women who Naomi's probably so old she's not going to remarry and then Ruth she's not going to find an eligible bachelor in in an Israelite town I mean not with the heritage between the bad blood between israel and moab that that that's just not going to happen that's what looking at it from a purely human perspective we would expect and that's kind of the way this is set up the way it is yeah because this is going to show well so it's a lot more than i'll go on this journey with you i guess that's what i'm saying it's not it's not that it's uh i'm going to live the rest of my life with you yeah yeah yeah this isn't like two people living in dallas saying you know what you're moving to denver i'm moving with you no this is much more

extreme than that so it's it's setting us up for what of course we're going to get to in the next episode where we we begin to see how every all these kind of puzzle pieces are gradually in unexpected sorts of ways going to start coming together into this composite picture so stay tuned all right yep that is it guys hey if you like the podcast uh you could rate and review it over on itunes that helps us out makes it more visible uh and also if you'd like to become a contributor you can help support the podcast by going to 1517.org and go to the donate page and you can become a contributor thank you so much to those of you who do that chad i will see you next week all right we'll see you

Thank you for watching.