“In accordance with the creation pattern, God sovereignly took hold of Adam and put him to sleep. Then God divided Adam by removing flesh and bone from his side, and restructured humanity into male and female. When Adam awoke, God distributed the woman to him. Adam gazed upon her and gave her a positive evaluation . . . Finally Adam expressed that this condition would continue, that the situation was at rest.” (Jim Jordan, Through New Eyes, 135)
In his essay “Ruth and the Structure of Covenant History,” Harold Fisch shows that the story of Ruth is “the story of a single clan (that of Abraham and his nephew Lot) which separates (Gen. xiii 11) at an early stage and is then reunited in the persons of Ruth and Boaz.” As a story of separation and reunion, it is a story of death and resurrection, a story of new creation, what Fisch calls “the renewal of a line” and “a new birth of salvation.”
Since the Lot-Ruth narrative is a story of recreation through death and resurrection, we expect—or at least, I expected—that Jim Jordan’s five-fold pattern of God’s creative work should give structure to the overarching Lot-Ruth narrative. This essay tries out that hypothesis by retelling the story, selecting and arranging the details with an eye to God’s work pattern. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating (though here I offer only a taste: this essay is really an invitation to reread the story itself).
The story begins in Genesis 12 when the Lord takes hold of Abram by his word (“and the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go…’”), thrusting Abram out of his native land and sending him to Canaan, with “Sarai his wife, and Lot the son of his brother” (12:5).
Some time later, in Bethel—in an unexpected answer to Abram’s invocation of the Lord in Genesis 13:4—the Lord separates Lot from Abram (note the three-fold use of the Hebrew word p-r-d “separate” in Genesis 13:9, 11, and 14); Lot goes east of the land, and Abram remains west of the Jordan. Now that Lot has been broken off from Abram, the Lord begins restructuring them into nations: from Abram comes Israel, from Lot comes Moab and Ammon, nations that will all receive allotments of land from the Lord, Israel to the west, Moab and Ammon to the east.
In keeping with the biblical pattern of new creation, this time of restructuring is marked by death, in both branches of the separated family. The initial separation highlights and worsens the deathlike state Abram is in at the time of separation (Heb. 11:12): he is unable to produce an heir, and now he loses his nephew, his presumptive heir by adoption. More periods of death follow in Abram’s family, most notably the exile of Israel in Egypt, out of which the nation is reborn as “God’s son.”
Death comes to Lot, too, first in the destruction of Sodom and the loss of his wife; again when he engenders two sons, Moab and Ben-Ammi, in the shameful and death-like stupor of drunkenness. These are sons of a very different sort from God’s son Israel, and one doubts whether any kind of new birth awaits them.
As we read forward towards the book of Ruth, another death descends on Abraham’s people, the apostacies of the time of the Judges. It is during a famine, a death-dealing judgment, that the family of Elimelech separates from their land and brothers to go east and live with the Moabites, and there all the men die. In the wake of these deaths, Elimelech’s daughter-in-law Ruth, a daughter of Lot, leaves behind hearth and home, kin and cult, and binds herself to Elimelech’s widow Naomi, a daughter of Abraham.
When Ruth accompanies Naomi to the land of Judah, it is not just Naomi who is said to return (s-w-b); Ruth, too, has “returned” from the fields of Moab to the land (1:22). The centuries-long separation is being undone.
As we read forward, we find that the Lord has not brought Ruth back to Israel for Naomi’s sake alone. By God’s providence and Naomi’s Rebecca-like scheming, Ruth is presented twice to Boaz, an Abraham-like man of means. On the first occasion, she comes to him as a foreigner in need of food (chapter 2); on the second occasion as a sister-bride seeking redemption (chapter 3).
On both occasions, Boaz evaluates her, praising her loyalty to Naomi and invoking God’s blessing on her (2:11, 12; 3:10). Near the story’s end, the women of Bethlehem—a sort of chorus speaking for the people of Judah—again evaluate Ruth and declare that she is better to Naomi than seven sons (3:15).
The book of Ruth reaches its climax in the marriage of Ruth to Boaz and the birth of a son—a son of Lot and a son of Abraham. Now, settled in a home with husband and son, Ruth has found what Naomi was seeking for her from the beginning: rest (1:9; 3:1).
The book’s conclusion shifts the focus from a family in Bethlehem to a nation: the rest that comes to Lot’s descendant brings rest to all Israel by giving them David, a new Noah whose covenanted rest is not for himself alone.
The story of Ruth, then, is a story of new creation, the Lord God’s work of forming a new people through separation, death, and resurrection. It is no wonder, then, that Christians find themselves in the story of Ruth. The church is Elimelech’s redeemed and resurrected family, where those long separated are brought together into one body, where there is neither Jew nor gentile: a new creation. Rest has come.
Joshua Jensen translates and teaches the Bible in northeast Cambodia, where he lives with his wife, Amy, and their seven children.