The lectionary reading for today is once again about Ruth. And, I am glad because I didn’t get to post yesterday about Ruth being a Moabite, which is part of the today’s reading in Ruth 2.2. I discussed Moab once before in a previous post I did about Moses’ death. However, the the origins of Moab are once again important here. According to the Book of Genesis, the Moabites are the descendants of Lot through an incestuous relationship with one of his daughters. Again, only the staunchest of literalists would likely insist that this is actually how this group of people came into being. As I cited in that previous post, Amy Jill-Levine (in an audio course from the Teaching Company) says this was the Ancient Israelite way of saying that the Moabites were “incestuous bastards.”
So, today we get another unexpected twist. Yesterday I said that it was unexpected that one would find exemplary behavior like that of Ruth and Boaz during the time of the Judges when people were “doing right in their own eyes.” Today’s unexpected twist is that one would not expect exemplary behavior from a Moabite, one of the offspring of the illicit sexual encounter between Lot and his daughter. In this way, the story of Ruth is a lot like the story of Jonah. No one would expect to see an exemplary act of repentance from the inhabitants of Nineveh or expect pagan sailors to do all that they could to save Jonah’s life as well as make sacrifices to YHWH.
This has lead many like myself to believe that stories like Ruth and Jonah were written later when Israel was under foreign rule and dealing with issues of how to relate to foreigners. The stories help to answer questions about how the people should view outsiders, even detested outsiders like the Assyrians and Moabites, though this view is not the only view in the Old Testament (e.g. the Canaanites can be exterminated, Nahum rejoices over the destruction of the Assyrians, etc.). Let us hope that the views set forth by books like Ruth and Jonah are the ones that endure.