Ruth and David
Apr. 18th, 2018 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cincinnatus_c
I guess how it works in Ruth with Boaz and the mystery brother (MB) who renounces his right to marry Ruth is like this: Boaz and MB are half brothers, sharing a mother (which I learned yesterday would make them "uterine brothers"); MB and Elimelech are full brothers, which is why MB is a closer relative(-in-law) to Ruth than Boaz is and so has first dibs on her. But MB is in the same position as Onan: if he marries Ruth, the first-born's right to the estate of his father (FMB) is transferred from MB to MB's first-born son with Ruth. (Previously it would have resided with whichever of Elimelech's sons with Naomi was the first-born and married Ruth; surprisingly this is not specified.) This assumes that MB was not the first-born of FMB--presumably Elimelech was--but is the oldest surviving son of FMB. It also assumes that FMB is still alive, because otherwise the estate of FMB would already have been passed on and there would be no apparent issue about MB's inheritance.
So the whole thing follows the same logic as Genesis 38 but is even more complicated. A major difference between Genesis 38 and Ruth is that God is entirely offstage in Ruth. So, for one thing, there is no question of God being mad with MB for renouncing his right--which is here framed as a right and not an obligation--to marry Ruth. As with the Jephthah story vis-a-vis Abraham and Isaac, God's being offstage is probably the essential difference. (Naomi's saying she is too old to have more sons, and that, in contrast to the case of Sarah, being simply a fact, also seems to emphasize the absence of God.) But whereas God's being offstage makes things go much worse for Jephthah than they go for Abraham, it might make things go better in Ruth than in Genesis 38: God's temper tantrum about Onan (not to mention his killing Er for whatever reason) makes a big mess for everyone, but in Ruth everyone works things out satisfactorily among themselves, by themselves, for themselves.
One last thing about Ruth. Frymer-Kensky's Jewish Women's Archive encyclopedia article about Tamar concludes with this:
Tamar was assertive of her rights and subversive of convention. She was also deeply loyal to Judah’s family. These qualities also show up in Ruth, who appears later in the lineage of Perez and preserves Boaz’s part of that line. The blessing at Ruth’s wedding underscores the similarity in its hope that Boaz’s house “be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah” (Ruth 4:12). Tamar’s (and Ruth’s) traits of assertiveness in action, willingness to be unconventional, and deep loyalty to family are the very qualities that distinguish their descendant, King David.
Reading the David stories, I'm struck by the tendency so many people have of making everyone in the bible out to be a hero or a villain. (But this is just one example of the black-or-white, all-or-nothing judgments that so many people make about everything.) Saul is a villain, David is a hero. Well, David is the war hero who slew Goliath and so on. But David is also a mass-murdering, marauding crazy person. (Naturally these David stories keep bringing Kings to mind for me. David in that show is far more thoroughly decent and stable a character (though maybe that would have changed if the show had been allowed to continue) than he is in the bible.) He is also unreasonably loyal to Saul, although this is framed in the narrative as loyalty to God, whose anointed king Saul remains even though God withdraws his favour and his presence from him.[1] So, Ruth: as I pointed out before, Ruth is celebrated for her loyalty to Naomi (and the loyalty to Yahweh that comes along with it) while her disloyalty to her homeland and her own people and gods is ignored. (Of course, Ruth's disloyalty to them can't be condemned on terms internal to the narrative, and so adopted by uncritical[2] readers, because the Israelites and not the Moabites are God's chosen people, and the Moabite gods are false gods or at least enemies of Yahweh, and so Israelites and their god are deserving of loyalty and Moab and its gods are not.) Another thing that is ignored is the fact that Ruth's material interests are served by what she does, just like Tamar's were. If Ruth or Tamar accepts her life as a widow, then (as Frymer-Kensky points out) her life is effectively over; there is no meaningful role for her to play in life and no guaranteed means of subsistence; she is at the mercy of others who have no particular obligation to look after her. Marrying Boaz and having children by him, Ruth gains a husband who was wealthy to begin with, has now inherited the entire estate of Elimelech, and will pass his wealth on to Ruth's children. All that can be said for Ruth's innocence in this matter, in comparison to Tamar, is that it's not clear that Ruth was scheming to make this happen when she insisted on going back to Bethlehem with Naomi.
[1] Something I've been puzzling over is what makes a king a king, and in particular what makes the king of the Israelites a king. What, for instance, is the difference between the judges who preceded the kings and the kings? The narrative itself gives an answer: when there was no king, each man did what was right in his own eyes. The best example of this the idols of Micah in Judges 17-18, which are plundered by the Danites and set up in the temple of Yahweh (who doesn't knock them over or anything like he does later when the Philistines steal the ark and set it near the statue of their god). But then the last story in Judges is apparently supposed to be the kicker about the need for a king: the concubine of a travelling Levite is gang-raped and murdered by some Benjamites who, echoing the Lot story, had initially demanded that the Levite himself be handed over for them to rape and then had been offered the Levite's host's daughter and his concubine instead. (And this is another echo-story where things go differently because God is absent where he had been present in the original.) The Levite cuts up the body of his murdered concubine and sends it to the lands of all the other tribes so that they are enraged against the Benjamites and, with God on their side, go to war against them. All the Benjamites are slaughtered except 600 men who flee to the hills. The rest of the Israelites had sworn never to give their daughters over to the Benjamites in marriage; now they see that if they keep that vow, the Benjamites are condemned to extinction--and they're upset with God about this! But then they figure out that the men of a certain town hadn't come to the place where they had massed for war against the Benjamites and sworn never to give them any woman. So they go to that town, kill all the men, and give the women to the Benjamites. But that's still not enough women, so they decide that the Benjamites will be allowed to carry off any women of Shiloh (where the temple is) they see dancing in an annual festival there. (I guess, but I'm not sure, that this is OK because the women of Shiloh are presumably Levites, whose men would not have been expected to go to war against the Benjamites or to have taken part in the vow not to give them any women.)
I suppose you'd have to say that if God withdrew his favour from a judge, the judge would no longer be a judge. But this is not spelled out explicitly. The king is also commander-in-chief, which a judge apparently is not. Come to think of it, it's interesting to think of the roles of Moses, Joshua, and Aaron in relation to the question of kingship. Joshua is the military leader and Aaron is the religious leader. But ultimately Moses (who was also the sole judge of the Israelites before his father-in-law encouraged him to delegate judging to others) outranks both of them in their respective spheres. Moses's role is greater than that of a king.
[2] This word makes me cringe because I hate the self-congratulatory way the words "critical" and "uncritical" get used in uses like this one, but I dunno what other word to use.
And now, your word of the day (I mean, my word of the day) from etymonline.com!
lionize: "to treat (someone) as a celebrity," 1809 (Scott), a hybrid from lion + -ize. It preserves lion in the sense of "person of note who is much sought-after" (1715), a sense said to have been extended from the lions formerly kept in the Tower of London (proverbial from late 16c.) that were objects of general curiosity that every visitor in town was taken to see.
Currently at Peterborough airport: 2.2. High today: 4.3.
So the whole thing follows the same logic as Genesis 38 but is even more complicated. A major difference between Genesis 38 and Ruth is that God is entirely offstage in Ruth. So, for one thing, there is no question of God being mad with MB for renouncing his right--which is here framed as a right and not an obligation--to marry Ruth. As with the Jephthah story vis-a-vis Abraham and Isaac, God's being offstage is probably the essential difference. (Naomi's saying she is too old to have more sons, and that, in contrast to the case of Sarah, being simply a fact, also seems to emphasize the absence of God.) But whereas God's being offstage makes things go much worse for Jephthah than they go for Abraham, it might make things go better in Ruth than in Genesis 38: God's temper tantrum about Onan (not to mention his killing Er for whatever reason) makes a big mess for everyone, but in Ruth everyone works things out satisfactorily among themselves, by themselves, for themselves.
One last thing about Ruth. Frymer-Kensky's Jewish Women's Archive encyclopedia article about Tamar concludes with this:
Tamar was assertive of her rights and subversive of convention. She was also deeply loyal to Judah’s family. These qualities also show up in Ruth, who appears later in the lineage of Perez and preserves Boaz’s part of that line. The blessing at Ruth’s wedding underscores the similarity in its hope that Boaz’s house “be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah” (Ruth 4:12). Tamar’s (and Ruth’s) traits of assertiveness in action, willingness to be unconventional, and deep loyalty to family are the very qualities that distinguish their descendant, King David.
Reading the David stories, I'm struck by the tendency so many people have of making everyone in the bible out to be a hero or a villain. (But this is just one example of the black-or-white, all-or-nothing judgments that so many people make about everything.) Saul is a villain, David is a hero. Well, David is the war hero who slew Goliath and so on. But David is also a mass-murdering, marauding crazy person. (Naturally these David stories keep bringing Kings to mind for me. David in that show is far more thoroughly decent and stable a character (though maybe that would have changed if the show had been allowed to continue) than he is in the bible.) He is also unreasonably loyal to Saul, although this is framed in the narrative as loyalty to God, whose anointed king Saul remains even though God withdraws his favour and his presence from him.[1] So, Ruth: as I pointed out before, Ruth is celebrated for her loyalty to Naomi (and the loyalty to Yahweh that comes along with it) while her disloyalty to her homeland and her own people and gods is ignored. (Of course, Ruth's disloyalty to them can't be condemned on terms internal to the narrative, and so adopted by uncritical[2] readers, because the Israelites and not the Moabites are God's chosen people, and the Moabite gods are false gods or at least enemies of Yahweh, and so Israelites and their god are deserving of loyalty and Moab and its gods are not.) Another thing that is ignored is the fact that Ruth's material interests are served by what she does, just like Tamar's were. If Ruth or Tamar accepts her life as a widow, then (as Frymer-Kensky points out) her life is effectively over; there is no meaningful role for her to play in life and no guaranteed means of subsistence; she is at the mercy of others who have no particular obligation to look after her. Marrying Boaz and having children by him, Ruth gains a husband who was wealthy to begin with, has now inherited the entire estate of Elimelech, and will pass his wealth on to Ruth's children. All that can be said for Ruth's innocence in this matter, in comparison to Tamar, is that it's not clear that Ruth was scheming to make this happen when she insisted on going back to Bethlehem with Naomi.
[1] Something I've been puzzling over is what makes a king a king, and in particular what makes the king of the Israelites a king. What, for instance, is the difference between the judges who preceded the kings and the kings? The narrative itself gives an answer: when there was no king, each man did what was right in his own eyes. The best example of this the idols of Micah in Judges 17-18, which are plundered by the Danites and set up in the temple of Yahweh (who doesn't knock them over or anything like he does later when the Philistines steal the ark and set it near the statue of their god). But then the last story in Judges is apparently supposed to be the kicker about the need for a king: the concubine of a travelling Levite is gang-raped and murdered by some Benjamites who, echoing the Lot story, had initially demanded that the Levite himself be handed over for them to rape and then had been offered the Levite's host's daughter and his concubine instead. (And this is another echo-story where things go differently because God is absent where he had been present in the original.) The Levite cuts up the body of his murdered concubine and sends it to the lands of all the other tribes so that they are enraged against the Benjamites and, with God on their side, go to war against them. All the Benjamites are slaughtered except 600 men who flee to the hills. The rest of the Israelites had sworn never to give their daughters over to the Benjamites in marriage; now they see that if they keep that vow, the Benjamites are condemned to extinction--and they're upset with God about this! But then they figure out that the men of a certain town hadn't come to the place where they had massed for war against the Benjamites and sworn never to give them any woman. So they go to that town, kill all the men, and give the women to the Benjamites. But that's still not enough women, so they decide that the Benjamites will be allowed to carry off any women of Shiloh (where the temple is) they see dancing in an annual festival there. (I guess, but I'm not sure, that this is OK because the women of Shiloh are presumably Levites, whose men would not have been expected to go to war against the Benjamites or to have taken part in the vow not to give them any women.)
I suppose you'd have to say that if God withdrew his favour from a judge, the judge would no longer be a judge. But this is not spelled out explicitly. The king is also commander-in-chief, which a judge apparently is not. Come to think of it, it's interesting to think of the roles of Moses, Joshua, and Aaron in relation to the question of kingship. Joshua is the military leader and Aaron is the religious leader. But ultimately Moses (who was also the sole judge of the Israelites before his father-in-law encouraged him to delegate judging to others) outranks both of them in their respective spheres. Moses's role is greater than that of a king.
[2] This word makes me cringe because I hate the self-congratulatory way the words "critical" and "uncritical" get used in uses like this one, but I dunno what other word to use.
And now, your word of the day (I mean, my word of the day) from etymonline.com!
lionize: "to treat (someone) as a celebrity," 1809 (Scott), a hybrid from lion + -ize. It preserves lion in the sense of "person of note who is much sought-after" (1715), a sense said to have been extended from the lions formerly kept in the Tower of London (proverbial from late 16c.) that were objects of general curiosity that every visitor in town was taken to see.
Currently at Peterborough airport: 2.2. High today: 4.3.
