“The Hebrew Bible: Ruth” (translated by Robert Alter)

The provenance of this short book of the Bible is somewhat disputed. Alter weighs in in his introduction, “Is Ruth in fact a Late Biblical book? Although this is the consensus of biblical scholars, there are some vocal dissenters. These tend to take at face value the assertion of the opening verse that we are reading a story that goes back to the period of the Judges…. But style is actually the clearest evidence of the lateness of Ruth. The writer took pains to create a narrative prose redolent of the early centuries of Israelite history, but it is very difficult to execute such a project of archaizing without occasional telltale slips…. There are at least a dozen terms that reflect distinctive Late Biblical usage…. The other strong sign of Ruth’s composition in the period after the return from Babylonian exile in the fifth century B.C.E. is its genre…. Harvesting and agriculture are a palpable presence in the story. Unlike the narratives from Genesis to Kings, where even pastoral settings are riven with tensions and often punctuated with violence, the world of Ruth is a placid bucolic world, where landowner and workers greet each other decorously with blessings in the name of the Lord.” Alter also throws in a bit of history, “Ruth’s Moabite origins have led many interpreters—convincingly, in my view—to see this story as a quiet polemic against the opposition of Ezra and Nehemiah to intermarriage with the surrounding peoples when the Judahites returned to their land in the fifth century B.C.E.”

In Ruth 1:1, Alter details the historic setting for the book and thus the dispute of its provenance, “when the judges ruled. The “judges” (shoftim) are tribal chieftains, as in the Book of Judges. This initial notice led the Septuagint and the Christian canon afterward, to place the Book of Ruth in the Former Prophets, after Judges.” In Ruth 1:17, Alter describes a common Biblical literary technique, “Wherever you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. Ruth’s moving speech, with its fine resonance of parallel clauses, appropriately ends on the note of death: she will always remain with Naomi in the trajectory of a whole life until death. The procedure of biblical narrative of defining character by his or her initial speech is vividly deployed here, showing Ruth as the perfect embodiment of loyalty for her mother-in-law.”

Alter details another striking literary detail in relating Ruth 2:11, “you left your mother and your father and the land of your birth. These words are the most significant literary allusion in the book. They explicitly echo God’s first words to Abraham in Genesis 12:1, “Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house.” Now it is a woman, and a Moabite, who reenacts Abraham’s long trek from the east to Canaan. She will become the founding mother of the nation as he was the founding father.” Finally in Ruth 4:18, Alter again reflects on Ruth’s future progeny, “And this is the lineage of Perez. In careful emulation of the Book of Genesis, the writer weaves together narration with genealogy to pointed thematic purpose. Here he aligns the son Ruth bears both back to Judah’s son, Perez, and forward to the founder of the divinely authorized dynasty, David.”