The Book of Ruth: A Love Song to the Law

So Boaz said to Ruth, “My daughter, listen to me. Don’t go and glean in another field and don’t go away from here. Stay here with the women who work for me. Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the women. I have told the men not to lay a hand on you. And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.” – Ruth 2.8,9 (NIV)

Ruth is a wonderful and wonderfully out of place love story, stuck between the dark and bloody pseudo-nihilism of Judges and the road toward a Kingdom in 1 Samuel.  It is short, sweet, and in its own archaic Hebrew way, romantic.  One can make the case that Ruth is the Harlequin Romance of the Hebrew Bible, though Song of Solomon might throw its pomegranates in the ring to be included in that conversation.  The inherent drama of the love story between Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi, and then between Ruth and Boaz seems to have a filmic quality to it, hewing closely to many of our own cultural romantic narratives.  And the Hollywood-ready happy ending is the icing on the cake.  You can just picture Ruth riding side saddle with Boaz behind her, his arms around her trotting into the sunset at the end.  I recently finished a 2 month Bible study on Ruth. In our discussions and debates I began to see another love story in the book float to the surface, one which I had never seen before, and one which I might suggest reveals some truly practical applications for the way those of us who endeavor to trust and follow Christ live out our faith.  This love story was one between the book’s author and the Hebrew law. 

Now that begs the question, is this an unrequited love story?  How can the Hebrew law love the author in return?  It’s a good question, and one I will table for the moment and return to in a bit.  I suppose a more immediate question is, “How is there anything in the law to love?”  Isn’t it just a bunch of do’s and don’ts that we don’t have to pay attention to anymore because Jesus fulfilled the law?  We don’t sacrifice bulls, or rams or goats anymore, so why should we pay attention to the rest of it?  I might suggest Ruth provides us with a partial answer to that question.  The part of the law that Ruth’s author reveals his or her (though given the circumstances most likely his) affection for concerns its concern for the marginalized, in this case the widow and the foreigner. This concern is the foundation on which the book is constructed.  So I suppose we should peel back the building and inspect this foundation a bit.

In Deuteronomy 10, after Moses received a second copy of the law (since he had destroyed the first copy on frustration), God shares the following with Moses and Israel, giving a glimpse into why God had acted on their behalf in Egypt, and what that meant for the manner in which they were to live their lives:

To the LORD your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it.  Yet the LORD set his affection on your ancestors and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all the nations—as it is today.  Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer.  For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.  He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.  And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt. – Deuteronomy 10.14-19 (NIV)

This is the heart of God’s actions on behalf of Israel, including God’s provision of the law.  In fact, I would suggest this is the heart that beats at the center of the Law because this is the heart of God.  God chooses to work through a vehicle that doesn’t yet exist (Israel) cultivating and maturing it through interactions with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  When it does begin to sprout it grows as a marginalized community of slaves in service to a political powerhouse in Egypt.  God’s choice of Israel here was entirely based in God’s absolute freedom, and God’s grace.  God goes on to suggest that Israel’s actions should mirror God’s in this way: that they value and love those on the margins of their culture and social structures, in this case the fatherless, the widow and the foreigner.  After they are freed from their slavery in Egypt and have a land of their own God concretizes this even further in Leviticus 19 and 23 where God shares this directive, “When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you.” (Leviticus 23.22 NIV)  These passages form the foundational scriptural and ethical assumptions on which Ruth was written.

You may ask why I think the author of Ruth loved this law.  The first clue to the author’s love of the Law is the story’s historical setting, “In the days when the Judges ruled.”  These days were practically lawless and tragically violent.  The book of Judges itself characterizes this era as a time where “everyone did what was right in their own eyes.”  Needless to say this is not an era characterized by a widespread love for or adherence to the Hebrew Law.  Yet here we have Boaz not only adhering to it, but going above and beyond the Law’s requirements.  He acts as if he is more concerned with the heart of the law than with the law itself.  He not only does what is right by its stated requirements, but does what is right by the widow (Naomi and Ruth) and the foreigner (Ruth) acting in accordance with the love of the God that loved Israel when they had done nothing to earn that love.  The law here is, in essence, the bare minimum of what is required to behave in a way which is consistent with the character of God.  To truly act in accordance with the heart of God one must go far beyond the bare minimum, which is what Boaz does.  This going above and beyond is the second clue toward revealing the author’s love of the law. 

As I asserted earlier Boaz lived in a time where the law was barely followed.  In fact, truth be told, the Hebrews had a tough time consistently following the law’s moral, social and ritualistic requirements through the whole of the Biblical narrative.  What we see in Boaz’s “above and beyond-ness” in Ruth is what the practice of the Law was supposed to look like.  It’s the ideal.  We get to see God’s intent for the law put into practice.  You not only have a widow, Naomi, who was at the margins of that patriarchal society because of her dependence on her husband and sons for her provision and survival (and she’s lost her husband and both of her sons), but you also have a widowed foreigner who was even further on the margins because of her lack of standing within the community.  The story places them at the mercy of the function of the law, and in this (I would suggest rare) instance the law works as it was intended.  When it does, we get to see, as if acted out on a stage, the glimpses of what the Hebrew culture could have been had they kept to the law, which would have been a place that rendered visible the loving heart of God.  (And I didn’t even get to the concept and practice the kinsman-redeemer)

So what does this mean for us?  So the author of Ruth loved the Hebrew Law, why should we?  I would suggest we should love the Law because it allows us to “see” the inside of God.  In this Law God rips open God’s chest to reveal the passion of God’s metaphorical heart.  God reveals a love for the humble, the inchoate, and the powerless.  God goes out of the way to reach out to them/us.  I would suggest that God’s heart has not changed in the years since either the giving of the Law or the writing or Ruth.  So if we’re to love what God loves, that must include those on the margins in our own culture.  At the beginning I acknowledged that the Law could not love the author back, but the God of the Law can and does, and I believe the recording of this story is part of the author’s recognition of and returning of that love, for all of posterity to see.  So I would suggest this is the/a practical application to be taken from Ruth: It’s up to us to allow that passionate love to seep into us and the experience of our relationship with God and then allow it to flow out of us as we learn to love and embrace with our actions that which God loves and embraces.  The more this becomes part of our experience of faith, the more we may find the hands of Boaz revealing themselves in our actions, and we can all agree, the world could use a few more Boaz’s couldn’t it?

***The picture above is a reproduction of a woodcut done by Margaret Adams Parker from the book Who are you My Daughter?: Reading Ruth Through Image and Text.  In it Theologian Ellen F. Davis provides her own translation of and commentary on the book of Ruth, inter-cut with Margaret Adams Parker’s wood cuts.  It is highly recommended.