“In many places, the Torah warns against [oppressing] gerim [strangers], for they are naturally evil [and can return to their ways],” – Rashi on “You shall not oppress the stranger” (Exodus 23:9).
Rabbis made rich biblical characters into plain vanilla saints.
The story of Ruth, a model proselyte, is fraught with oddities. Tanakh denigrates Jews often: the forefathers committed unsavory acts, Rachel stole idols, Moshe failed to circumcise his son, the Hebrews in Sinai rebelled against God time and again, and fell into idolatry as soon as they entered the Promised Land. In line with this exceedingly strange attitude, Ruth’s grandson David essentially murdered his military chief to take his wife, and was forbidden to build the Temple because he had shed too much blood in wars of expansion beyond the Promised Land. Even in biblical times, racketeering, though typical of Bedouin, hardly won David admiration among settled Jews, especially given his murderous behavior (1Sam25:22).
Rabbis, of course, offered ingenious explanations for each of these incidents. They assert that Batsheva was destined to marry David, and the blood in question was that of sacrifices rather than people, though the Psalms show David to be a rather bloodthirsty ruler. I prefer the literal reading.
Ruth’s father-in-law Elimelech left his people during a drought, though the climate could only have been worse in Moab (modern Jordan). Seeing that Naomi did not rush to meet her relatives upon their return, we can imagine her family had some serious problems in Israel.
The problem with Ruth’s account is that the Torah explicitly forbids Jews to marry Moabites. In every country kings cleansed their birth myths, but the most important Jewish king is a product of a prohibited marriage, essentially a bastard ineligible to join “the assembly of the Lord.” Whether the account of his Moabitan descent represents the king’s astonishing honesty, the chronicler’s surprising independence, or the king’s detractors’ attempt to smear him is unknown. According to the psalms, David had a lot of internal enemies, and it is perfectly plausible that they spat on his grave by proclaiming him a Moabitan bastard.
The Sadducees, the Temple priests, did not include the Deuteronomy in the canon. They would accept that the prohibition against marrying the Moabites was inserted there specifically as a slap at David. The reasoning is decidedly odd: the Moabites are proscribed because they did not meet the invading Jews with bread.
The Rabbis solved the problem by reading “Moabites” as “Moabite males.” That is nonsense, as Hebrew uses the male gender for neuter. Indeed, the rabbis try to explain why mitzri means all Egyptian people, while moavi means only Moabite males. They note that the Moabites were cursed because they did not meet the Jews with “bread and water.” According to the rabbis, men rather than women were expected to offer bread to strangers. But in Judges 4, Sisera asked Yael for water and she gave him milk. Ezra apparently did not know of the rabbinical view that Moabite women might be taken for wives when he broke the interfaith families (Ezra 9:2).
Ruth never converted. Many believe that she did with her statement to Naomi, “Your people is my people, and your God is my God,” but later (2:10) she calls herself a foreigner. Why would Ruth have needed to convert before Naomi if she were supposed to convert ten years ago upon marrying Naomi’s son?
Upon returning to Beth Lehem, Naomi and Ruth set out to find a husband for the Moabitan. Ruth went out specifically to engage Boaz rather than glean, a gross immodesty. She asked Naomi, “Let me now go to the field, and glean among the ears of corn after him who would like me.” Adding to her bizarre behavior, Ruth “tarried a little in the house” during the harvest, closing herself with men. Only in the next verse the author rushes to correct himself, saying that she had been with maidens. Boaz’s injunction to his men not to touch Ruth (2:9) also suggests that they were touching each other before.
Ruth “fell on her face” before Boaz in a sexually provocative gesture. It is very rare for women in Tanakh to take such a position. Abigail fell thus before David, and he took her for his wife. Ruth bowed to the ground rather than prostrated herself, as women apparently did before the big shots (2Sam14:4).
On Naomi’s sly advice, Ruth “uncovered the legs” of drunk Boaz and lay down with him (3:4). The Torah sets no restrictions on the behavior of widows, implicitly recognizing their need for casual sex and even prostitution. Still, Ruth’s actions are less than commendable. Ruth directly offered Boaz sex (3:9) and called him her “goel.” In its standard meaning (“redeemer”) the term does not call for sex. In its strained reading as a “relative,” Ruth’s proposition lacks legal foundation: only her late husband’s brother must marry her, and certainly not in the barn.
Boaz praised Ruth for coming to her senses: she showed “more kindness in the end than in the beginning” when he allowed her to glean a bit extra. Even Boaz recognized the situation as highly indecent (3:14) because women were not expected at the threshing floor, where drunk males slept.
Elimelech is traditionally thought to be her uncle-in-law, and the Torah positively bans such relations. But the attempt to call Boaz Elimelech’s brother (4:3) runs contrary to all other mentions in which he is described as a remote relative at best. Indeed, if he were a brother, why would Naomi trick him into marrying Ruth instead of asking directly? The first mention of Boaz describes him as an acquaintance. Noting the incongruity, the author added in the same verse that he was a family member.
Boaz, for his part, tricked a closer relative who had a preferential claim to Naomi’s field. Boaz told the unsuspecting relative that the field only comes with Ruth, which is not congruent with the Torah’s law. We know too little of the actual legal system of the time, and can only guess what the relative meant when he refused the deal, “lest it destroy my own inheritance.” The destruction issue only surfaced when Boaz mentioned Ruth, and is therefore unrelated to the land plot itself. Plausibly, the relative was concerned about marrying a Moabitan woman, a prohibited relationship. Contemporaries did not consider her conversion valid.
The Torah’s law of halitza is built upon the story of Ruth. When Boaz’s relative refused to take Ruth into a Levirate marriage to restore his relative’s seed, he gave his shoe to Boaz as a sign that the land deal was confirmed. Later, taking off the objector’s shoe became a ritual way of punishing him. There is nothing wrong with the idea that Jewish law developed over centuries of national existence rather than having been preordained.
There was something fishy about the land plot to boot. Unlike the Arabs, who had communal ownership even in modern times, the Jews had a system of private ownership of land. Land plots could be mortgaged, sold, leased, and redeemed. Though the clan could have taken over Elimelech’s land during his leave, the plot was legally Naomi’s. Yet she claimed no profits from the clan upon returning, and sent her daughter-in-law for lowly gleaning.
In antiquity, a woman after ten years of marriage was hardly attractive. Boaz, an affluent landowner, certainly had better alternatives. It seems likely that he sought to marry Ruth in order to avoid returning Elimelech’s land plot to Naomi. The property was apparently considerable, since Boaz flouted the prohibition against marrying Moabites.
The elders also doubted the permissibility of the marriage. They blessed Boaz and Ruth to be like Judah and Tamar. Judah, of course, impregnated Tamar, mistaking her for a pagan prostitute. They also mentioned Leah and Rachel as the role models, a tongue-in-cheek reference to their problematic marriage and Rachel’s idolatry.
Rabbis, too, remained skeptical when they compared Boaz’s marriage to Ruth with Lot’s illicit relations with his daughters.
Tellingly, Naomi took Ruth’s child “into her bosom” (4:16). The rite harks back to Gen30:3, in which childless Rachel appropriated a concubine’s child by placing him on her knees. Ruth’s dubious conversion necessitated the child’s formal adoption by Naomi.
The child was named by neighbor women rather than by Boaz or Ruth. One possible reason is that Boaz’s relations with Ruth were limited to Levirate marriage, a single act of conception, and he wanted nothing to do with the Moabite afterwards. Rabbinical sources assert that Boaz died the day after the marriage, and rush to explain that he was not thus punished for marrying a Moabite, but that his years had actually been lengthened before so that he could meet Ruth and restore the line which would give birth to David. That explanation is way too twisted to pass the Occam Razor test.
Isaac and Jacob were not firstborns. Moses was not raised as a Jew. King David’s birth-narrative continues this puzzling line of contempt for the Jewish leaders.