Gleaning Ruth: A Biblical Heroine and Her Afterlives

Notes

135 • N O T E S • Preface 1. Carol Meyers, “Returning Home: Ruth 1.8 and the Gendering of the Book of Ruth,” in Athalya Brenner, ed., A Feminist Companion to Ruth, 98–99; see also Meyers, “Everyday Life: Women in the Period of the Hebrew Bible,” in Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, eds., The Women’s Bible Commentary, 244–51. Chapter 1: Gleaning 1. Goethe uses the word idyllisch to describe the book of Ruth in Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständnis des West-östlischen Divans: Hebräer. Hermann Gunkel picks up Goethe’s description and suggests that the genre of Ruth is a novella. Gunkel, Reden und Aufsätze, 65. The romantic designations continue through today. For example, the book of Ruth is called a “charming narrative of gracious family behavior” in Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible, 253. 2. Tod Linafelt and Timothy K. Beal, Ruth and Esther, xiii. 3. Linafelt’s commentary presents “an unsettling interpretation.” Linafelt, Ruth, xiii. 4. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 5. Linafelt, Ruth, xiii. 6. Naomi also doubles herself when she gives herself another name in 1:20. 7. Jack M. Sasson, Ruth: A New Translation with a Philological Commentary and a Formalist-Folklorist Interpretation, 159. 8. Jacob M. Myers arranges Ruth 1:17–18 into six bicola. Myers, The Linguistic and Literary Form of the Book of Ruth as discussed in Edward Campbell, Ruth, 11–12. 9. Campbell, Ruth, 13. 10. Campbell, Ruth, 13. 11. Campbell’s translation. For the complete list, see Campbell, Ruth, 13. 12. Campbell, Ruth, 14. 13. Campbell, Ruth, 14. I explore other possible readings of such an oddity in chapter 3. 14. Campbell, Ruth, 24. 15. Judith A. Kates and Gail Twersky Reimer, eds., Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story, xviii. The number of essays in the volume that address issues of family and friendship also demonstrates the centrality of relationship in the book of Ruth. 16. Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., The Woman’s Bible. Stanton was not the first woman to engage the Bible. In every age women have read, discussed, and interpreted the scriptures. In NOTES TO PAGES 4–8 136 the nineteenth century Stanton was preceded by Maria Stewart, Sarah Grimké, and Anna Julia Cooper. See Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, 138–66; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, ed., Searching the Scriptures, 1; and Christiana de Groot and Marion Ann Taylor, eds., Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible. 17. Stanton, The Woman’s Bible, 2:39–40. 18. Stanton, The Woman’s Bible, 2:41. 19. Stanton, The Woman’s Bible, 2:43. 20. Stanton’s wish was to assemble a committee of female translators and scholars to work on The Woman’s Bible, but she was unable to get women from the academy to join her project because they feared such work would blemish their reputations. See Stanton, The Woman’s Bible, 1: 9. She was, however, able to form a committee of other interested women, although she still did most of the interpreting and writing herself. The other members of the committee were Rev. Phebe A. Hanaford, Clara Bewick Colby, Rev. Augusta Chapin, Ursula N. Gesterfeld, Mary Seymour Howell, Josephine K. Henry, Mrs. Robert G. Ingersoll, Sarah A. Underwood, Ellen Battelle Dietrick, Lillie Devereux Blake, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Rev. Olympia Brown, Frances Ellen Burr, Clara B. Neyman, Helen H. Gardener, Charlotte Beebe Wilbour, Lucinda B. Chandler, Catharine F . Stebbins, Lousia Southworth, Baroness Alexandra Gripenberg, Ursula M. Bright, Irma von Troll-Borostvani, Priscilla Bright McLaren, and Isabelle Bogelot. 21. Louise Pettibone Smith, The Book of Ruth, 832. Considering that Smith begins her work on Ruth with a warning about the dangers of eisegesis and imaginative interpretations, I suspect that she would not approve of many of the current feminist studies that foreground imagination as a tool for interpretation. 22. See also Kathryn Pfisterer Darr, Far More Precious than Jewels: Perspectives on Biblical Women, 72–76, for her analysis of feminism’s different treatments of Ruth. 23. Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 170. 24. Many commentators choose not to translate this word. I too will use the Hebrew transliteration instead of attempting a translation. See Gordon A. Clark, The Word Hesed in the Hebrew Bible. 25. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 173. 26. Esther Fuchs, “Status and Role of Female Heroines in the Biblical Narrative,” in Alice Bach, ed. Women in...