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Our Christian formation classes are taught by the clergy of Church of the Incarnation (Dallas, TX). Journey with us as each season unfolds.
Their own eyes. And that's an understatement. We went into some really strange, strange stories, those last ones, and it includes everything from murder, pillaging, raping, mayhem, destruction. Horrible. But the point was that we really can't appreciate the book of Ruth without understanding the context in which that story took place.
Mark Lloret:Picture the worst Mad Max scenario movie where everyone's just trying to stay alive and whoever's got the power is the one that stays alive. If you've got the strength, you can take whatever you want, and you make up the rules as you go however it suits you at the time. And it was into that that the book of Ruth, we don't know exactly from a time standpoint what exact year it took place, but we know it took place during the time of the judges. And so today is quite a contrast to what we went through last week because we're going go into a beautiful story in the book of Ruth and I would venture to say I'm not a 100% about this, but I think it's one of the few if not the only Old Testament books that has a it's a happy story. I mean, if we look at all of the Old Testament, it is one mess after another.
Mark Lloret:Abraham, God promises him an inheritance through Sarah, they get impatient, so she gets him another woman and that starts a whole train wreck of its own. Jacob and Esau, the way they got together, the way they interacted, It is just one big dysfunctional, what we would call, the term wasn't around back then, but what we would call is just a dysfunctional situation one after the other. They end up in slavery in Egypt, they come out of Egypt, things are looking good, and then all of a sudden everyone's angry again, Hey, at least we could eat back in Egypt, and the whole process of coming out of the Exodus. Anyway, if you look through the Old Testament, it's not a really happy picture. And I kind of wanted to throw this out there as a freebie.
Mark Lloret:During a time in my life, I had taken a fifteen year break from church for various reasons. That's a multi margarita story. But one of the things, and I always struggled with, is this stuff for real? And I still, I don't know that there's anyone who just has no doubts whatsoever. It gets to the point where know where we're positive it's true and we have no doubts.
Mark Lloret:But one of my biggest fears was that the faith that we have today is an outgrowth of thousands of years of people refining the story and building the Scriptures and putting together the whole thing in a way that made sense. And that are we sure that this is God involved in here and it's not a man made thing that's been constructed over the millennia? I view the last week's story which is just horrific and the way the Old Testament narrative is built with all of the horrible stories that are included in it. I came away from that thinking if one were to build a religious system or a spiritual system that was based on human efforts, it would be much prettier. You would not base your self created religious system using the mess that's coming out of the Old Testament, which I think is a tribute to the believability of the Scriptures because it doesn't try to avoid the reality.
Mark Lloret:And the reality is that we are sinners, out of sin we started, it is a recurring theme. And even when you get into the New Testament, it's not like, Oh, the New Testament's here, now everything's pretty. It's not. It's just one mess after another. And to me it was just a reaffirmation.
Mark Lloret:Christianity is a believable thing. It makes sense and it's not trying to, you know, put something in there and ignore the reality of the difficulty and the darkness that often follows us in our life. So anyway, that's my 2¢ worth. There's nothing scriptural in there, there's no passage that says this way of thinking is correct, but it's something that I've observed and it's been helpful for me. So we're going to look quickly at the book of Ruth and we're gonna go through it fairly quickly.
Mark Lloret:There are parts of it that are really easy to understand. There are parts of it that get a little into the weeds and they're a little tricky to understand. We'll try to get through it, but at least come away with an understanding of the full narrative of what this story did. So at Act one, we can start with as the tragedy, and it starts out very similarly. There's a man named Elimelech who is married to Naomi and they have two sons, Malan and Killian.
Mark Lloret:There's a famine in the hometown of Bethlehem. Even that's a little confusing to me. Was it just in the area of Bethlehem or was it the entirety of Israel and so on and so forth? I don't know. But we know that they took a three to five, because of this famine, they took what I have estimated to be a three to five day migration trip to neighboring Moab.
Mark Lloret:Now, one thing you're going to want to keep in mind about the idea of someone from Bethlehem moving to Moab is it makes no sense. It doesn't flow culturally, historically. If you'll remember, the Moabites were a huge problem when the Israelites first came into the land during the book of Joshua. And there's all kinds of curses that are rained down on Moab. And furthermore, it is the area where Sodom and Gomorrah, the story in Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis took place.
Mark Lloret:So, there's no love lost between Israel and the Moabites. So, it's a little odd to begin with that they would run into some hard times in Bethlehem and decide, Hey, let's go to Moab. It's not normal, or it doesn't seem normal to me anyway, and I don't have an answer for why they chose it. There is one verse in there that they heard that the Lord had visited His people with bread in Moab, which tells me they didn't there were other Israelites who had also gone to Moab in the first place. So, I don't think they were just going completely on their own into a land in which they knew no one.
Mark Lloret:There appears to be it would seem to me that there was something there that would have caused them to go there. But clearly in the Old Testament narrative the idea of leaving your home, your home tribe and going into a foreign tribe was not something that God had ordained. It's not something that was ideal, certainly at minimum. So I just Googled, I went on to maps, it's a twenty cent of an hour walk from Jerusalem to and I just picked a spot kind of in the middle of what was then Moab. We don't know exactly where they went, but it's a three to five day journey depending on, I don't know how much stuff they had, I don't know if they had a bunch of sheep and they had to kind of do all this, but it's a you know it's a good walk.
Mark Lloret:It's a reasonable amount of time to get there. So they make their migration, they stay there for ten years. So if you look at the idea of how God had made it very clear to the Israelites, Don't be going into the side lands. Don't be going out into the other places next to you. Stick within Israel is really the main thing.
Mark Lloret:On top of that, both sons marry Moabite women. One was Ruth, the other one was Orpah. This was clearly not what they were supposed to be doing as Israelites. We call them Israelis now we don't call them Israelites anymore do we? It's kind of another one of those odd things, meaningless.
Mark Lloret:But they marry Moabites which and when you read through the other passages within the Old Testament that talk about don't marry the surrounding area women, it's not because they're racist or anything like that. The core reason is because you don't want to start absorbing all of their pagan gods. So in many, many places we see examples of people marrying non Jewish women, and what it ends up with is all of their pagan gods, the many that they have, soon begin to kind of make a mess of everything. It's true by the way with Solomon. Remember Solomon?
Mark Lloret:He was how many? 500 wives or something like that? And many of them were not and there was an influx of all of these Canaanite gods and belief systems that were contrary because the primary command to the Israelites was, You will love the Lord your God and the Lord your God only. And that was the primary directive which was influencing them don't get involved with other cultures women. Now, but they do, they stay for ten years, they marry, Elimelech dies, and both sons die.
Mark Lloret:Yes? They were not. Ruth and Orpah were Moabite women, so it's definitely it is an inter we call it interracial it was not interracial back I mean everyone very very interconnected, but it's definitely intercultural marriage. Both sons die. Sorry, I went backwards.
Mark Lloret:And what I found myself was reading through this goes, okay this happened, this happened, he died, both sons die, and it just I found it easy to skip over the reality of what the implications there are. I mean I found myself not noticing the human experience that Naomi went through. She's out of her home, her husband's dead, her two children are dead and so forth. It's a tragic tragic story and as we had discussed last week when we were seeing how if you don't have a good solid tribe with you, you were highly vulnerable to anybody coming over and wanting to do whatever they want to do. It was just a very dangerous time to live.
Mark Lloret:So, the next time we go to the next piece which is a Humble Return' and she decides, Naomi decides, she's going to go back home to Bethlehem because she heard that the famine was over and she was going to head back. So, both stepdaughters went with her for at least a short while. Not very long into it oh, thank you, daughter-in-law, that's correct. Both of them yeah, what did I say, stepdaughters? Daughters in law, sorry chose to go with her and she stops somewhere along the way and says, This is not good for you all.
Mark Lloret:You all need to go back to your homeland, find a new husband, get on with your life, don't let me drag you into this mess. And because at this point later on she has a grand state, a pretty bold statement when she tells people when she gets back she's like don't call me Naomi anymore. She used another, Oh, man, I can't remember the name anymore. Did anyone remember the name that she gave herself? Mara.
Mark Lloret:Which basically means, God has abandoned me. I'm in a horrible situation. So, I felt that when I was reading the passage, she's clearly looking out for their best interest and trying to get them to go back to their hometown. Orpah decides she encourages them to stay, neither want to separate initially. They're both crying.
Mark Lloret:They're all crying. It's a very sad moment, but ultimately Orba decides that she's gonna stay in the land of Moab, and Ruth makes the choice, I'm going with you. Now, what occurs to me here is this to me is a reflection of Naomi's character. Like, what did this say about Naomi? That her daughters in law were having a difficult time not going back with her and that one of them went so far as to absorb Naomi's God.
Mark Lloret:Basically she converted to Judaism. And this is an exception to the rule where when Israelites married outside of Israel, usually they got sucked into the idolatry that was going on in the other cultures, but in this case Ruth appears to have completely bought into Judaism through the influence of Naomi. So, I think Naomi was quite a remarkable woman that in the midst of all of this and there's a recurring term if you read through the story the kindness comes up over and over and over again. The kindness that Naomi showed her, the kindness that this person showed them. And again, I want to draw the contrast.
Mark Lloret:You have a lot of kindness going on here which results in Ruth saying, I think I'm going to stay with you and your belief system, in contrast to the surrounding reality that's going on in the book of Judges, is anything but kindness. It's the the reign of the strength of the strong and it's if you're weak you got nothing going on. So Act Three comes along and we find safety and hope. Ruth strikes out. They get back to Bethlehem and by the way, the folks in Bethlehem are thrilled to see Naomi, which is really kind of another interesting thing.
Mark Lloret:They didn't forget her and again it kind of speaks to Naomi's character that there was something about this woman that people were happy to have her back. Ruth, because they're poor, they have nothing, and Ruth strikes out to do some gleaning. And most of you all may know what this is, but the idea of gleaning comes out again in Old Testament, earlier Old Testament books, where God's instructions to the landowners and the farmers were, When you're doing your harvesting, harvest everything but leave a whole bunch left over for people who are poor and who don't have anything. So again that contrast, it's the survival of the fittest versus what the intention of the Old Testament law and the Jewish culture was that you show kindness and you watch out for the vulnerable. You don't just let people drop off and perish.
Mark Lloret:So she starts to do some gleaning and she ends up in Boaz's field. Boaz is a for all everything we can tell, was a fairly wealthy farmer. Things had gone well for him and he was also a relative of Naomi's. This will be important in the coming story. But she ends up in Boaz's field.
Mark Lloret:He takes notice, and he offers protection. And we won't read it here, but it's a beautiful set of verses, a beautiful phrase where Boaz sees this young woman and says, it's almost like Boaz knows how bad it is out there. And he's like, Don't go anywhere else. Stay right here. Do your work here.
Mark Lloret:Do the gleaning here. And he tells his servants, Don't lay a hand on her. So again, the implication is even within this story, life is not happy and carefree. There's a lot of danger going on, but he takes a very specific interest and concern in watching out over this young woman from Moab. Again, a Moabite, not one of his own, a foreigner.
Mark Lloret:And she takes home an of barley. Now, how much is an eefah? It's a gallon more than your Home Depot bucket, all right? It's a pretty good take. I mean this is not your standard one day's yield from gleaning out in the barley field.
Mark Lloret:But he loads her up and sends her home with more than enough. Somewhere I read it's enough for two people to eat for two weeks.
Mark Lloret:All
Mark Lloret:right, so it's a pretty good haul. Ruth gets home and the feeling you get in reading the passage is Naomi's like, Wait a minute here. Something's not normal here. This is not what we would have expected. She does realize that Boaz is a relative, but she's kind of thinking and again, I think she is looking out for Ruth.
Mark Lloret:Remember, Ruth has come from Moab into this new country and she is taking a very careful, she's taking a lot of care for Ruth. We get into the next story of the Redemption and the Restoration. All right, this is where it gets How many of y'all have read the book of Ruth within the last, I don't know, year or so? So you got some familiarity with It gets a little complicated because it's very culturally there's a lot of cultural things that are ingrained, some of which come out of the book of Deuteronomy, some of which don't. So, there's a little bit of mixture of Old Testament Law with how they may have adjusted it a little bit within their own cultural surroundings.
Mark Lloret:But Naomi coaches Ruth and is like, Okay, here's how you handle this situation under Jewish law. And Ruth executes it perfectly. So I'm going to give it just a real quick preview. Back in Deuteronomy 25, there's this thing introduced it's called levirate marriage. And the idea is that if Virginia's married to me and I die, my brother is supposed to take care of Virginia.
Mark Lloret:Now, depending on who my brother is, that might be a good thing, it might not be a good thing. But nonetheless, the theme again is watching out for the vulnerable. Someone should be taking care of my newly widowed wife. She's not to be left enthroned to the wolves. It's a really beautiful concept and it can get kind of hard to follow if we take today's cultural understandings and try to overlay that into Old Testament times, but when you take it for what it is within the context of what life was like in those days, it's quite a beautiful thing and it is surrounded by the protection of the vulnerable.
Mark Lloret:Later on we're going to get into the whole concept of poverty, but poverty is a multifaceted term. There's the poverty, there's the poor, there's the immigrant, there's the widow, and the orphan. And in effect, it's this concept that anybody who is vulnerable is our responsibility to be taken care of. And the story that's going on here between Naomi and Ruth and Boaz is a reflection of that concern for the vulnerable and taking care of someone. So Ruth executed, Boaz responds positively, he sends back even more barley, even more than the first time, six measures, I forget exactly.
Mark Lloret:A six measure so six measures, again, it's about the same, it's the bucket. He sends her back home with another bucket. Now, I think I'd like to actually read this one passage out of the book of Ruth just because it's not that long and it does a better job of explaining this whole story and what took place when Naomi coached Ruth on the on the the norms of how it all worked out. So if we look at verse three, So Naomi, her mother-in-law, said to her, my daughter, shall I not seek security for you that it may be well with you? You hear that?
Mark Lloret:She's the concern is for Ruth. Now Boaz, whose young women you were with, is he not our relative? In fact, he is winnowing barley tonight at the threshing floor. Therefore, wash yourself and anoint yourself, put on your best garment and go down to the threshing floor, but do not make yourself known to the man until he is finished eating and drinking. So, if you read back in Deuteronomy, waiting till he's finished eating and drinking is not part of the Deuteronomy law.
Mark Lloret:So this is where there's a little, you know, there's some things that are being floated along here in addition to. Then it shall be when he lies down that you shall notice the place where he lies and you shall go in So she went down to the threshing floor and did the Now it happened at midnight that the man was startled and turned himself and there was a woman lying at his feet. And he said, Who are you? And she answered, I am Ruth, your maidservant. Take your maidservant under your wing for you are a close relative.
Mark Lloret:Then he said, Blessed are you of the Lord, my daughter, for you have shown more kindness at the end than at the beginning in that you did not go after young men whether poor or rich. And now my daughter do not fear. I will do for you all that you request for all the people of my town know that you are a virtuous woman. Now it is true that I am a close relative, however there is a relative closer than I. Stay this night and in the morning it shall be that if he will perform the duty of a close relative for you, Let him do it.
Mark Lloret:But if he does not want to perform the duty for you, then I will perform the duty for you as the Lord lives, lie down until morning. And so she lay down at his feet until morning and she arose So, again, it's not modern dating, all right? So, there are some cultural things that are going in terms of lying down at your feet. They're quite symbolic. There are some references to something similar in the book of Ezekiel that again ties in the idea that the Lord will spread His wings over His people and provide them safety in the midst of very difficult times.
Mark Lloret:And so there's a lot of interplay within the story and with other Old Testament passages that reaffirms this concept that as a people we are not to leave the vulnerable vulnerable. We are to watch out for them. We are to be aware of their needs and we are to be very careful about how we treat them. And this whole process of the levirate marriage, which was written in law in the book of Deuteronomy, is being played out here. Now, the one little trick here, resolve, the one legal hurdle that Boaz needed was there was another relative who had a higher priority than Boaz.
Mark Lloret:So, by definition, in the way the law worked, his brother, I think it was his brother, right of first refusal, I guess we could put it, in modern legal terms. So, he goes to the city gate and there's this other passage. It's really quite enjoyable to read and it's back and forth between Boaz and his brother. He says, Hey, Naomi's back and you have a right to her land. He's like, Okay, I'll buy it back.
Mark Lloret:And then Boaz says, Oh, and by the way, if you buy the land, you're gonna get Ruth as well. And at that point, the brother says, No, I'm not really that interested anymore. And so it's an interesting negotiating, I don't know if we can call it negotiation because I don't have a clear enough understanding of all the culture that's going on out there, but there is a little bit of back and forth. And ultimately, it works out that Boaz takes on the role of buying back Naomi's property, which she and her husband had given up when they left for Moab. He buys it back so that now he, Naomi, Ruth, they're all together, and most importantly, if I'm getting redundant, too bad.
Mark Lloret:There's this protection of the vulnerable. You don't leave people stranded out there on their own subject to whatever stuff is going on around you. So ultimately, he redeems Naomi's land and he marries Ruth. So a couple of cultural notes here. We talked about the levirate marriage rooted in Deuteronomy 20 five:five.
Mark Lloret:It clearly spells out this whole process is supposed to work, again, with the goal of protecting the vulnerable. A protected position as, and by the way, many of the provisions in the book of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, there are a lot of them and they seem, in our minds, kind of like, Oh, that's a lot of work. It's a lot of this. But a lot of them are designed specifically to protect the vulnerable. One thing that's going to be really important is avoid the temptation to oversimplify all of these cultural activities by overlaying our current culture onto a culture that existed three thousand years ago.
Mark Lloret:I'm going to give you one example of that, and I'm admitting that this just, it just, this one throws me because I was reading through all of these and I'm getting through the levirate marriage and it's like, okay, that sounds good. I can even get past the reality that a man could end up with more than one wife in order to preserve and not leave another woman vulnerable. That's a tough one to adjust. I'll get through that, but now right after the levirate marriage description, lest you think, Okay, well this is easy. All this makes perfect sense.
Mark Lloret:Here's the next law. If two men fight together and the wife of one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of the one attacking him and puts her hand and seizes him by the genitals, then you shall cut off her hand, your eye shall not pity her. Okay. So, do you need more? I mean So, I don't know the answer to this.
Mark Lloret:Next week, what we have off I think Cody just walked in, so he's volunteering that in the next class he's gonna resolve all of these things and so they make perfect sense. The reality is some of it I don't think is ever gonna make sense because we're living in 2026. We have insurance, we have retirement pension funds, we have this, we have that, we have all of these things, we've got laws that generally speaking protect, we've got all of this stuff going on and it just doesn't, it's gonna drive me crazy trying to superimpose my cultural assumptions onto a culture that took place three thousand years ago.
Mark Lloret:Which commandment is, Thou shalt not commit adultery? How does that square?
Mark Lloret:Well, that's what I mean by when you have to define how does that square. It's difficult. I don't believe that multiple wives was ever God's intention, ever. But at the same time, there are provisions, and when there's provisions and things look like they don't make sense, to what the best that I can tell as when I was reading these is that they are centered around that concept that you don't dump the vulnerable. Everything is centered around making sure that the vulnerable are not ignored.
Mark Lloret:Yeah.
Participant:My question is about Naomi. If she was a widow and it was her land, why was she not the one who would have been taken care of or belonged to the land? Did she give the land to Ruth at some point or would it automatically go to Ruth because it was her child?
Mark Lloret:I don't think the women owned property. Okay. So Okay,
Participant:well then by taking care of
Mark Lloret:Yes, yes. Now, if Ruth had not come back and it was just Naomi coming back, I don't really know how that would have worked. Presumably Boaz could have redeemed Naomi as well. I'm not positive. And I think that's an area of study that people spend a lifetime trying to understand all of these Old Testaments and I don't have enough time left in my life to figure it all out.
Mark Lloret:I keep saying it over and over again though that if you read it not under the lens of our sense of the way things should work and you read it under the lens of how cutthroat things were back then and how easy it was to become vulnerable and lose everything and be in a horrible, horrible situation, some of this does begin to make a little more sense. All right, couple themes. We've got four minutes left, which is great. One of the things, why is this book here? So, I was out with my friend Matt the other week and he posed this question and I revised my title here because his question was, Why is this book even here in the first place?
Mark Lloret:Well, there are a couple of answers to that and not the least of which is it provides the ancestral and historical and covenantal connection between Abraham and ultimately to the person of Jesus. So, we've got Abraham, Isaac, Judah, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, up to Salmon, which is Rahab's wife, and then we enter the book of Ruth, and at the end of the book of Ruth, it establishes that Boaz begat Obed, who begat Jesse, who begat David. And then the rest of that ancestral line is tracked through the rest of the Old Testament, and it's re summarized summarized in the book of Matthew and all of this, and so in effect it ties the ancestral line all the way together through Boaz. I mentioned it again, it's a contrast with the current culture. The reciprocal kindness between Naomi and her two daughters in law, it's really quite beautiful and the warm welcome that was received by Naomi when she got home.
Mark Lloret:We talked about the kindness between Boaz and the workers. When you read through the narrative you get the sense that Boaz, there's a lot of kindness between he and his workers themselves. They eat together, they do the harvest together, there's a lot of relationship there going on between the two of them. And that whole my favorite verse in the whole thing is when Boaz recognizes Ruth as being by herself and his comment which says, Stay close. Stay in this area.
Mark Lloret:And it is a beautiful expression of, safe here. Don't go anywhere else. Stay here because I know you're safe. And I have a friend of mine who, close to where they live, there was a young woman, maybe 15, and she was sitting out on the sidewalk. And you could tell she was homeless.
Mark Lloret:And he was like, Ugh, this is not good. So he and his wife, they walked up to her, How's it going? What's happening? And at first she's like, No, nothing, nothing. But ultimately it comes out, she's by herself, she has nowhere to stay and then they ask her, Can we take you somewhere so that you're going to be safe tonight?
Mark Lloret:And her answer was, Yes, that would be great. And they were able to find, it took them a while, they were able to find their agencies in the city of Dallas and kudos to QT. You can go to any QT gas station and tell them I have a person here who doesn't have a place to stay tonight. They will find a spot for them to stay. Nothing says the Book of Ruth than that story, that whole situation.
Mark Lloret:An organization, I don't know anything about QT as a corporate, but I do know they have instituted this and every one of them, their managers have connections with surrounding agencies and this young girl was, I don't know, 15? So homeless shelters won't take children. It's very difficult to find a place for a young teen to be housed safely, but they do it. And don't know, that comes to mind. It's a beautiful gesture of care and protection.
Mark Lloret:Yeah, I am. Do y'all remember who Rahab was? The prostitute in Jericho. So, prostitute in Jericho is a key person within the whole lineage all the way feeding to Christ. Then we have Ruth, a Moabite, who is part of the whole thing.
Mark Lloret:It's not just this clean Jewish line all the way from start to finish. Whole purpose in the Old Testament and once you what you just said, once you begin putting that into your brain, you can't unsee it in the Old Testament. In all of the stories, the Psalms, the prophets, and the level to which God is deeply interested towards the vulnerable is ubiquitous throughout the Old Testament. I think we as in our culture, well it's eleven zero two, so we're going to zip right through this. We're not going to do too much more on here.
Mark Lloret:But our culture is, it's very easy to look over that because we're so wealthy and because we live in relative safety. And there's an overemphasis on New Testament doctrine and theology, and for some reason there are many church organizations within American Christianity where the primary emphasis is get your doctrine right. And yes, it's important to have good doctrine, but it's wholly inadequate to the grander theme of the Scriptures, which is all of this is intended for the entire world and especially the vulnerable, the poor, the widow, and the orphan, and the book of Naomi. Okay, so we're gonna stop here. The interesting thing to discuss, was it a mistake for Elimelech to go in the first place?
Mark Lloret:I don't know. I think probably it was, but on the other hand, the entire nation of Israel went down to Egypt. And now it resulted in four hundred years of slavery, so you could question was that really the best move or not, I don't know. But again, time's up, and next week we will be looking into the connection between the book of Ruth and New Testament theology. And it's a direct line, and again, more good stuff to come.
Mark Lloret:Thank you. I'm sorry, no, no, no, we are not. Next week we have off wait. Is that right? Okay, we are not no, March 8.
Mark Lloret:We do meet next week. It's the week after that we're not on. Okay, thank you.