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  • From: "Stoney Breyer" <Stoney AT touchwood.net>
  • To: <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: RE: The Gospel of Ruth
  • Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2000 09:38:33 -0600

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.



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