Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT usa.net>]

> Date: (No, or invalid, date.)
> From: "Steve Oren" <soren AT enteract.com>

> In the course of doing reseach on the Book of Ruth, I have realized
> that Pseudo-Philo apparently did not have access to that work or did
> not consider it authoritative for although he (re)tells, with
> considerable expansion the Biblical history including the period of
> the Judges and the Kings, that story is not included.  Yet,
> according to Harrington (in the Charlesworth Pseudo-Epigrapha
> volume] Pseudo-Philo's dates are somewhere between 135 BCE and 100CE
> with the consensus seeming to be in the generation before 70CE. Yet,
> Josephus knows of RUth (although his story is very different from
> ours), the author of Matthew knows of Ruth, and there are fragments
> of Ruth from Qumran (pre-70 CE--and one fragment is supposed to be
> 1st century BCE).  Under these circumstances, I am asking for
> Bibliographic and other suggestions which might help ex[plain why
> Ruth is apparently unknown to Pseudo-Philo

I don't really know anything about "pseudo-Philo", but I do know that
it's doubtful that Ruth was ever regarded as being quite on a level
with Judges, since in the Jewish traditional classification scheme,
Judges is classified among the "former prophets", while Ruth is a mere
"writing".  If you amalgamate things from different parts of the Bible
that seem to have historical relevance, then Ruth seems to go together
with Judges (and this is what Josephus does), but such a juxtaposition
might not necessarily have seemed so inevitable to others with
different (perhaps less Greek-history-influenced) viewpoints...

--
Henry Churchyard   churchh AT usa.net   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/