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17 • 2 • A G R I C U LT U R A L I N T E R L U D E N O . 1 There are no famines in northeastern Ohio; want comes from other circumstances , not climate or soil. The plum trees came down first, infected by black knot. Then the pear trees had to go too. We abandoned the apples and the cherries to the worms. I spent most summer afternoons in the branches of the cherry tree behind the great evergreen, at the edge of the apple orchard. I hid books up in its branches. I would eat, slowly opening up the cherry first to look for bugs, carefully examining the sweet flesh before putting it in my mouth. No one ate the apples. Only one of the peach trees would produce—one perfect peach, every other year. The grapes grew with wild abandon, never pruned, seemingly impervious to blight and pest. The blueberries were subject only to the birds in the morning. The vegetable gardens had many enemies—deer, groundhog, rabbit. And yet there are no famines in northeastern Ohio; the land always produces. The plot of Ruth is motivated by the absence of food and ends with its abundance . But the agricultural setting is not just a backdrop, and food is more than what is eaten by hungry Moabites and Israelites. Food sustains the body, and it is linked intimately with such aspects of the body as sexuality and reproduction. The interplay between emptiness and fullness in Ruth is the interplay between empty and full bellies with empty and full wombs. The plot plays with the interconnections of food, sex, and reproduction throughout. Food also defines ethnicity, and the family’s movements from famine to fullness are also movements that cross national borders and ethnic identities. Although the biblical story focuses on Ruth, both Ruth and Naomi are border crossers. Whereas most readers focus on Ruth’s crossing (sometimes called conversion) in terms of her vow to Naomi or her marriage to Boaz, underlying the story is a more elemental crossing, the transfer of systems of food, a journey into different foodways. I In the opening words of L. P . Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”1 The journey begins for Ruth’s readers by GLEANING RUTH 18 traveling back into the past, to a time without presidents or prime ministers, to a past even before there were kings. The story of Ruth is set in the period of the judges, when the people of Israel were a loosely configured confederacy of tribes, probably even less organized than the biblical books of Joshua and Judges suggest. The opening words of Ruth take the reader back to this time, but the syntax of the opening phrase is unusual.2 It reads woodenly but literally: “And it was [vayhi] in the days of the judging of the judges, and there was [vayhi] a famine in the land . . . “ (Ruth 1:1ab). Many biblical books begin with the word vayhi (“and it / there was”), sometimes as a reference to time and sometimes as a reference to an event,3 but only Ruth opens with its repetition. The next phrase, “the judging of the judges,” also is unusual. It contains, as Jack M. Sasson points out, “a noun in masculine plural ‘constructed ’ to an infinitive that, itself, is dependent on the word following.”4 If the explanation of the grammatical construct sounds confusing, it is. Common Hebrew redundancies often sound strange in English and are routinely altered in translation .5 But these two repetitions (the double “and it was” and the “judging of the judges”) even sound strange in Hebrew. The writer encodes the doubling motif, twice, in the first five words of the story. The text takes us to a time of even greater specificity, not just a time of judges but also a time of famine. The second “and it / there was” [vayhi] introduces the famine that will plague the people of Bethlehem and compel the family of Elimelech to leave their home and sojourn in the land of Moab. The irony of the situation is lost in English but painfully evident in Hebrew—there is a famine in Bethlehem, a famine in the “House of Bread.” The doubling motif continues at the level of binary opposition and what Linafelt calls “the dialectic between emptiness and fullness.”6 II The contemporary food...

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