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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.
The Book of Ruth. It's a fascinating book. It's a short little book. It's only four chapters, probably depending on how quickly or how either how quickly you read through it or how quickly you get to where you stop and you're like, wait a minute, hey, I got to read, what's going on? It could take fifteen to twenty minutes or if you're preparing for a class, I think I've read it at least a 100 times over the last six months or more, just getting ready for it.
Mark Lloret:But I've entitled it A Candle in a Dark Mess. There are some beautiful things coming out of the book of Ruth and there are so many different themes that emerge and Steve in his prior discussions has talked about the Old Testament and how it's more of a narrative. You get into the New Testament, Pauline epistles, and it's very kind of almost a legal brief about how everything fits together. The Old Testament is more of a narrative. When you get a narrative, you have to look for themes and what are themes that are popping up over and over in the midst of those narratives?
Mark Lloret:So, to begin with, we're going to create a biblical timeline just so that we know where the book of Ruth fits in in the overall scriptural narrative. Now, Steve has been working. He had the unenviable task of taking the book of Genesis, which is about, what, 50 chapters, and the book of Exodus, which is about forty, forty five, I forget exactly, and cramming those into a total of about, what, eight weeks, nine, ten weeks, something along those lines. I, on the other hand, get to take a four chapter book and cram it into four Sundays. So, I'm at a significant advantage here already.
Mark Lloret:If you keep in mind what's going on in the lower section there is what's happening with the nation of Israel. And at the time of Genesis and Exodus, it's not even really a nation. It's a big chunk of people who are under some quasi theocracy, we would call it a theocracy, but you kind of have to have a nation in order for it to be theocracy. And so it's not even a theocracy, but it's being led strictly by God. Now, here's the part where I don't want you to get overwhelmed.
Mark Lloret:This is why it's a handout. Because we're going to take a look inside here in the book of Judges, but this is the beginnings of everything that's coming down the road all the way to the end of the Old Testament. And a couple of things to keep in mind here that as far as the nation of Israel is concerned, it doesn't become a nation, an actual nation, until sometime around, what, about a thousand BC, give or take? And interestingly, as a nation, it only lasts two generations. And before you know it, they're getting mad at each other and they're splitting up between the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom.
Mark Lloret:Northern Kingdom has 10 tribes and a whole series of absolutely horrible, despicable, no good, very bad kings. Judah, on the other hand and by the way, it ends sometime around 06/5700, and then it's conquered and it's assimilated by the Assyrians. And that's pretty much the end of the Northern tribe. There are references to it. You'll remember in the Gospels the story of Jesus visiting with a Samaritan woman.
Mark Lloret:The Samaritans, if you recall, were despised. They were despised because they intermarried with all of the Assyrians that came in, took them over, and in effect, they're not really the real thing. They're just a bunch of they're just a big mix. And we have the Southern Kingdom, which doesn't last a whole lot longer, and eventually it's taken over by the Babylonians. They're carried away in captivity.
Mark Lloret:The Babylonians have a different way of ruling, and they allow them to come back, and then the nation of Israel comes back to Judah, the land of Judah, and serves as a vassal state for the rest of its time until seventy AD when it's sacked by the book of Rome. Again, we're looking at this tiny little section here in the book of Ruth which takes place historically roughly in the same time period as the book of Judges. So we don't know exactly when it's coming about, but the book of Judges precedes the book of Ruth. Steve, are we doing Judges? No, next is what?
Mark Lloret:For me? Yeah. Leviticus and Numbers. Okay, so we're going forward to Ruth, then we'll go back to Leviticus and Numbers. It's kind of like trying to keep up with Daily Office Lectionary or the BCP because it's all over the place and nobody really knows what comes next and you have to find some sort of a reference to keep track of it.
Mark Lloret:So we're doing a little better in the Episcopal tradition. So geographically, this is just one little thing. Told you I'm a little weird on maps. I gave you the map there, but to put it the size of what we're talking about in perspective, I've kind of superimposed DFW and Israel next to each other and they're on the same, what do they call it, scale, thank you. And so you'll notice like down here from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, it's kind of like walking from here to North Park.
Mark Lloret:It's very, very close. And we'll going into the movement of things that are taking place here and there, but just keep in mind it's a pretty small, it's a very small location and the population is tiny. So Bethlehem at the time of the book of Ruth, probably around 300 to 500 people, the most I saw was maybe seven fifty, and even Jerusalem was only a town of about 2,000. So these are really small and then just kind of picture the way word travels in a small town. So everybody knows everybody's business and it's all very, very it's either for better or for worse.
Mark Lloret:Now, life during the time of Ruth, if you Google the book of Ruth, which I did, and then you click on the images part under Google, you'll get all of these beautiful, and they're quite bucolic, and it's the pictures of a very pretty woman, and it's beautiful. Pat Turpin gave me this book. It is fantastic. It is beautiful, and the Book of Ruth is a shining book. But look at the artistry inside this book, and it kind of serves to illustrate that our general understanding of the book of Ruth is that it's a positive story.
Mark Lloret:It's a beautiful story. Now, I just had a brief discussion coming in here, and again, it illustrates how any of these narratives can take on a whole different point of view. And some find it to be a very offensive book, and we can get into that when we go there a little farther. My favorite is this one, which is, I don't know, it's kind of a mix between a Harlequin novel and a Hallmark Christmas movie. And if you think about Hallmark, it's got all of the necessary characteristics of a Hallmark movie.
Mark Lloret:We've got a widow, we've got a rich silver fox, I mean, just by kind of the way they got going on. They get together, it's just, and it's all just this wonderful thing. I'm not a big fan of any of those portrayals because anyone who has lived beyond the age of four knows life doesn't work that way. And so today, rather than zeroing in immediately into the book of Ruth, we're going to kind of do a little bit of a prequel to the book of Ruth because what we want to know is what was going on in the surrounding area into which this beautiful story of the book of Ruth emerges. And we're going to start here with a story and if you've got your Bibles, you're Episcopalian, so you may or may not, There you are.
Mark Lloret:Alright. We got at least one, but we'll be starting in Judges 17, and I'm just going to go through a quick narrative of these four chapters. And I'm going to warn you ahead of time, they're disturbing. And here we go. In the area of Ephraim there's a guy named Micah.
Mark Lloret:He stole a thousand shekels from his mom. Now, how much is a shekel? Again, you're working on ancient times, no one's really sure, but it goes from either four days worth of labor up to a month's worth of labor. So 1,100 of those is, no matter how you look at it, it's a ton of money. He steals it from mom and she issues a curse on the thief.
Mark Lloret:Then he returned it and the first discordant thing that comes in here is mom's extremely proud of her boy. And she's like, may you be blessed by the Lord and she's just effusive in her praise of this son. I don't get it, I don't know that I'm supposed to. So she had consecrated all 1,100 of it, he takes 200 of it and he makes several idols and he builds a shrine and he sets up one of his sons as his personal priest. So Micah, he's got his own little, the word church wasn't even around back then, but he's got his own little thing going on here in terms of some sort of a religious something and there in verse six you'll see a theme that comes out throughout the book of Judges and elsewhere that in those days there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.
Mark Lloret:Now, this theme is going to carry us throughout the rest of this whole four part discussion and one of the things that we're going to be challenging ourselves to think of is to what extent are we here on McKinney Avenue doing what is right in our own eyes and we think we're doing great stuff and maybe, maybe not. And so it's always helpful. This is nothing new. It's an ancient reality that people do what they think is right, and they believe they're right, and they just go on their merry way, and they may or may not actually be doing it correct, doing what God wants them to do. Alright, Act two is a Levite.
Mark Lloret:Now if you recall the Levites, there were 12 tribes and Levites were each of the 12 tribes were assigned their little sections of the land of Judah. The Levites were the roaming priests, so they just kind of wandered, they moved around and they were kind of the national priesthood tribe. This guy's interesting. So he left for Bethlehem, we don't know why, it just says he left and headed north and he's looking for something and he finds Micah. Micah offers him, remember Micah's already got a priest, it's his son, but now comes along a Levi.
Mark Lloret:Now that's a varsity league priest. Son's probably a JV version. So he offers him 10 shekels a year and again depending on how much a shekel is worth, he either had a sweet deal or an okay deal because it did cover all of his expenses. And look at this in verse 13 what Micah says to himself, Tuck that into the back of your mind. This is gonna come back to haunt him.
Mark Lloret:Alright, now we have the Danites And if you'll notice, I don't think yeah. I'm not the Danites are right down here. My little pointer thing's not working. So the Danites are right next Ephraim is right here where Micah has built his little world. The Danites are here and they're gonna head, they're about to head east.
Mark Lloret:They're scouting for more land. So the first thing that comes to mind is, wait a minute, they were given this land, this is part of their inheritance, evidently and again it doesn't give us a whole lot of explanation, but it wasn't enough and they didn't something about it they didn't like. I think part of it was they didn't do too good a job of dealing with the Philistines and some of the other tribes that were already there. So they head east into the land of Ephraim looking for more space and they come across none other than the Levite priest along and they they steal him, they steal all of Micah's idols and all of his carved images and all of his stuff and they grab it and they go. And they set up a new temple with the idols and images and they make the Levite a better offer.
Mark Lloret:And by the way, the offer if you read through it, it says, hey, you're a priest for this guy. Wouldn't it be better if you could be a priest for an entire tribe? And the Levite, as is, come on, let's face it, most of us is kind of like, that's a better offer, why not? So he takes him up on it and he was quick to accept the better offer and then, and again, I'm just throwing this in here, but that's the way the narrative works. They roll to the north and they violently take over Laish.
Mark Lloret:Now you notice here the town up here is called Dan. That didn't happen until after they wiped out the town of Laish or the area of Laish. And so, in effect, they kill everyone, they take over, and they're now set up. Now we're gonna come back to the Levite and if this is just feeling like it's going too fast and it's just like pinball machine, what, what, what, that's because that's how it's written and it took many many readings of this over and over to begin to get the full picture of what all was going on and then also putting it in the context of geographically who was doing what and where were they going and so forth. So now the Levites back.
Mark Lloret:In some ways not too surprisingly given what we know about the Levite, he takes himself a concubine. Seems like a reasonable idea. Nothing worse than a lonely Levite. And go figure, she cheated on him. And she goes back home to Bethlehem.
Mark Lloret:Now, four months later, again, in my mind, four months, so it took you four months to decide, what am I gonna do here? At any rate, four months later, he follows her back in order to try to win her back. Her dad, I'm not bringing it up here, but in the text, dad seems thrilled to see him, which makes you wonder, who is she? So, they stay there, he's like he's there one day and he's like, okay let's go and dad's like, no, no, no, stay a while. And he goes, Okay, I'll stay another night, and this happens four times.
Mark Lloret:And finally the fourth day he's like, No, we're heading out, we're going home. And against everyone's better advice, in the late afternoon they set off to return home. And in the story it starts to get a bit dark. He's like, I'll just camp out here in the town square of where it was. We don't know what town it was, we just know there was a town square.
Mark Lloret:And an old man wisely dissuades him and talked him into staying at his house for a while. Now is anyone is this ringing any bells for anyone as to another story earlier in the Old Testament? The story of Lot and the angels that visited him in Sodom and Gomorrah. You're gonna see this whole thing is kind of a replication. Now we get to the crime.
Mark Lloret:They're enjoying the evening with this man, I'm trying to remember I think they said they were were drinking but I'm actually I'm not positive but it let's we'll take a little bit of liberty here we'll assume they were drinking a little bit. They're enjoying the evening and a gang of men come up to the house and they're demanding the Levite. They want the Levite. They're not that interested in the two women. The old man, he negotiates and exchanges his concubine and his daughter in order to preserve the life of the Levite.
Mark Lloret:Again, don't try to make sense out of this. There is no sense. I mean, can delve into the culture of the time and this and all, but it's kind of like my wife and I love watching the ID discovery, know, the real crime shows and a constant is like who would I'm trying to understand who would do and the truth is you can't. You you with a non psychotic mind, you can't make sense of the things that people do. At any rate, he trades the two women for the Levite.
Mark Lloret:They take the concubine, it doesn't seem to indicate that they took his daughter, they only wanted the concubine, they raped and abused her all night and left her on the porch in the morning where she died. Are we all feeling uplifted so far? Because that's really what we're after is we a good feel good story. All right, now what's the response? You thought that was weird.
Mark Lloret:We'll go a little farther. So, the Levite cuts her body up into 12 different pieces and sends each of those 12 pieces out to the 12 tribes of Israel. And it's a statement like what he's asking the same the Levite of all people is finally What's going on here? How could this possibly have gone wrong? And as a result of that, the tribes unite, he sends out the body parts everywhere and all 12 of them agree to come back and we're gonna do something about what's happened down here with the Benjamites.
Mark Lloret:The Benjamites are the ones and the Benjamin, tribe of Benjamin again, if you haven't seen it, it's right down in here. It contains Jerusalem, Jericho, and it's just to the East of Dan. So they gather a large army and they come down to the Tribe of Benjamin and they demand that these guilty men be turned over. The Benjamites refuse. Again, the scripture just, it just blows right through.
Mark Lloret:It's just like a, Yeah, they said no, we're not going turn them over. It doesn't give you any insight, any reason as to why. You just kind of have to dig a little and maybe Well, you can look through the rest of the scriptures and can find some hints and things, but it doesn't really have a whole lot of commentary going on here at all. At any rate, the Benjamites are destroyed with a total loss of 50,000 people, not only among the Benjamites, but also amongst the other Israelite tribes. Remember what I said the town of Bethlehem was 300 to 500, the city of Jerusalem is only about 2,000.
Mark Lloret:I mean 50,000 that's a significant loss of life. However, 600 Benjamite men escape and that's all that's left of the tribe of Benjamin. And now we're gonna get to the strangest of all epilogues to the story. The other tribes had sworn amongst themselves that no matter what happens, no one is allowed to let their daughters marry any Benjamite men. In effect, they're saying you're out.
Mark Lloret:So, there's a sworn oath, they all agree to it, and now all the things that have gone on, again, is just, again, don't make, try to make sense. Of all the things that have gone, the primary concern is, wow, these 600 remaining Benjamites don't have wives and that they won't be able to carry their names and their inheritance on through. This is the primary concern. So they found a loophole. Come to find out that up there in Jabesh Gilead, that area had not sent anyone to help fight against the Benjamites.
Mark Lloret:So, as would normally happen, they kill all of Jabesh Gilead except for 500 unwed virgins. But we got a problem. Anyone know what the problem is? Yeah, we got 600 men. We're still short a 100.
Mark Lloret:So evidently, in the area of Shiloh there was an annual feast and there was a lot of celebration, lot of dancing that was going on, and the dancing was done predominantly by unwed women, virgins. So, let's go get a 100 of them because we got a it's like, you know, it's like an accounting balancing journal entry. Got 600, you got to have gotta have 600 to balance things out. They kidnap all 100 of them, and the book ends and just says, And everyone returned to their cities and rebuilt their cities. The end.
Mark Lloret:With the exception that the last, the final verse is that recurring theme, There was no king in the land of Israel and everyone did what was right in their own eyes. So to summarize this mess there are four references to this the last one being the fourth one that I'm seeing here. Everyone doing what was right in his own eyes. What's hard for me to conceive of is, okay, I can understand you're turning away from God, you don't have a king, you don't have this, you don't have that, but the most rudimentary of even the most basic human senses don't allow, isn't, is this right in their eyes? I'm not sure.
Mark Lloret:Actually, I am sure. I think they saw that as being a reasonable approach. Lest we be too hard on them By the way, can we just give a shout out to God's chosen people? That's the other part of this that I find so strange. Looking back at the history of Abraham and the families and all of this is going along and all of the things that God had done with them and as God's chosen people, and here's what we have.
Mark Lloret:It's really quite a mess. So a few other things to summarize as we're discussing this and we'll open up for questions or comments. Don't try to make sense out of this. I don't think it was intended to make sense. It is descriptive, not prescriptive.
Mark Lloret:So you'll hear a lot of people talking about things in the Bible, well the Bible's, you know, it's just everybody killing everybody. This is an easy one to that issue because there is nothing in this passage that indicates that God had anything to do with what these people were choosing to do. Now that issue becomes more complex in the book of Joshua, and I assume Steve will handle that one, where God is in fact commanding them to destroy everything and kill everything and everyone, men, women and children. I think you raised that issue last week. It didn't get answered then, it's not going to get answered now, and it may not ever get it fully answered because there's some of these, it's just not an easy and there is an element of we're reading things into this time period from eyes that are used to what we're used to.
Mark Lloret:And I think often we don't we take for granted just how safe it is within our circles here and particularly in our circles and that safety and that sense of security is certainly not true across the globe and it's not even true across Interstate Highway 75, Central Expressway. The things that we take for granted over here, we walk up and down, we're playing pickleball till 10:00 at night, we're doing this It's not a given everywhere. It is into this culture that this story of Ruth is brought to us and it's almost as though it is a it's intended to be a contrast. Like we've got this complete mess that's going on here in the last four chapters of the book of Judges and it's not like it was a consecutive thing, know, these things happen in Judges and then comes Ruth. The book of Ruth takes place during the time of the Judges, so at some point within the time of the Judges is when this whole story is going to unfold, with Ruth, and it is intended to be a stark contrast of the world in which the world as it existed and this particular section of people that are found in the book of Ruth.
Mark Lloret:And you're going to find that theme as we go farther along in the discussion and we've got coming up the next week, then March 8, and then March 22, but we're gonna be examining this theme over and over and that is Steve, you mentioned it last week I believe it was, we were talking about the nation of Israel, it was God's chosen people. And ultimately that plan of God's chosen people throughout history was fulfilled in the life of Jesus and his death on the cross and the ensuing church that comes out of it. So we're gonna pursue that theme not only from the book of Ruth, but we're gonna translate that into our current time of what does the church look like. The church is supposed to be extremely distinctive from the culture in which it lives and I will just state upfront that as a general rule I'm not sure it is in The United States and there are reasons we might get into as to what happens when a nation is predominantly wealthy and everything is running really, really well. How it turn out that when things are going great the church tends to become less distinguishable from the culture whereas in a culture where it's extremely against Christianity, those churches often are completely distinct and that their love for each other and their care for the world around them is something that is noticed that is completely different.
Mark Lloret:And again, if you go back here to what we're talking about here with Ruth, the story of Ruth, which in effect is someone who falls on very hard times and finds redemption through the kindness and the compassion of people around her. There are two completely stark and different environments that we're going to be discussing. Any questions or comments? It's a bit of a downer but I think it's supposed to be and I don't think we do the book of Ruth justice by just looking at it as a really beautiful story. It reminds me of first Corinthians, the love chapter.
Mark Lloret:It is a beautiful and I mean how many weddings have the love, but why is that love chapter there? I'm not going to answer that, but you might want to consider reading what precedes it in the book of first Corinthians, what causes that love chapter to be necessary, it's a mess too. So anyway, comments, you had your hand raised. Yes, yes they were. Yes.
Mark Lloret:Again, don't try to make too much sense of it. It doesn't make sense. Scottie, you have your hand up. That's the entire book of Judges. I mean, that's the entire book of Joshua that comes in and takes over the land and then establishes the 12 tribes, sort of.
Mark Lloret:Map, by the way, the concept of that map is very western to begin with. There weren't any borders. It's very loose. You already see it's got the tribe of Dan nice and conveniently located down there off the coast, when in fact, in a short order, it's way up there up in the North. I mean, the whole it's just a it's huge mix up.
Mark Lloret:As far as where the tabernacle ends up, should I leave that to you? We'll cover that in when we get into Joshua, whenever that is. Jim? Exactly, exactly, from the people And of that's why it's jarring to read through it. I'll tell you, it took me three or four readings to begin finally seeing the picture and then you know that's why I gave you the maps because it just helps to visualize you know what's going on and I think I listed all the 12 tribes on the handout because when you're reading the prophets and that they're way down the road, but if you're reading the prophets and other things they're talking about well that woe unto such and such and it's like well is that one of the tribes or is that somebody else he's talking about?
Mark Lloret:Mean because I can't keep track of all 12 tribes all the time so I went ahead and put them out there. Yes. In the same areas? Well, you do have to remember that Abraham came over into the land of Canaan and then they went down to Egypt for four hundred years, Steve covered that in about five minutes, and so in meantime in the land of Canaan all of these different other groups, you know, the ites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, we're going to get to the Moabites, and so on and so forth. So the Canaan is just a there were Canaanites, and again, don't get too confused because all these ites words, sometimes the Canaanites refer to the whole area, like us, like me saying well it happened in The Americas.
Mark Lloret:So, yeah, be a little more specific, so yeah. Ruth was described as a Canaanite? She was a Moabite. She was not an Israeli, she was not an Israelite, she was a Moabite. That'll be next week.
Mark Lloret:That could be an understatement. Alright. No, we're gonna get to that and then but again that actually we're not gonna come back to this again, we're gonna set this aside, but you raise a very good point that the underlying issue is, in the book of Ruth in my opinion is the vulnerable. What are either the old, the Jewish tribes or what is the church? How are we treating the vulnerable?
Mark Lloret:And this is a huge contrast to what is supposed to be, and the Old Testament is filled with reasons why that's not supposed to happen. So, no, not a great Levite. Alright, it's after 11:00, time to go to church. Thank you all.