Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Stoney Breyer" <Stoney AT touchwood.net>]

At 09:39 AM 11/8/00 -0500, Liz Fried wrote:
> I, for one, fail to see what is so
> benign or benevolent about a society
> that forces a woman to find a man so that she can obtain rights to
> property that is rightfully hers.  Naomi cannot inherit her
> husband's
> property. She has to find his (male) next of kin, then use some kind
> of
> strategy so that he will marry her daughter-in-law. That is the only
> way
> to prevent Naomi and her daughter-in-law from falling onto the public
> dole, 

"rightfully"?  "public dole"?  -- I think
we can sympathize with Naomi's helplessness without squeezing it into

modern Western legal or sociological categories.  

> even with all the property Naomi's
> husband owned.

But how much property had Elimelech held? -- not enough, apparently, to
support his family in a bad year, or to induce Whozit the
redeemer-recusant to undertake the expense of supporting the two women in
the style to which contemporary standards entitled them. 

Is it possible that there's a missing term in this story?  I get the
sense that in the final chapter Boaz and Ruth are pulling a fast one --
that what's involved in the marriage is not only the estate in Bethlehem
but also some sort of rights in Moab.  I have not one scintilla
of positive evidence; but the parallel stories of Judah and Tamar and
David and Abigail, and David's sending his parents to refuge in Moab,
seem to me to point to a territorial as well as a genealogical element:
the House of David accumulating property through irregular marriages with
resourceful heiresses.