Gleaning Ruth: A Biblical Heroine and Her Afterlives

3. Ruth and Orpah

28 • 3 • R U T H A N D O R PA H Naomi and her family cross the border into Moab looking for food.1 While there her two sons find Moabite women to marry. Ruth and Orpah are introduced together and remain undifferentiated through the deaths of their husbands and the beginning of their journey with Naomi back to Judah. The pair divide only in their different responses to Naomi’s advice to return to their own mothers. In an otherwise dialogue-laden text Orpah simply weeps and turns toward home. Because of her lack of articulate voice commentators have used her as a cipher for all sorts of concerns. In many traditional interpretations she serves as the negative foil for Ruth’s faithfulness. Many contemporary commentators “mimic the biblical text by leaving her to return home unattended, both literally and critically.”2 Feminist interpreters seem divided between regarding Orpah’s decision as “sound” or “dangerous .”3 Postcolonial readings regard her as a symbol of resistance against imperialism .4 In tune with the book of Ruth’s employ of various doubling motifs, Orpah functions as Ruth’s doppelganger, her counterpart. But how exactly we are supposed to read the doubling is an open question—if Orpah’s decision is “sound,” is Ruth’s “dangerous,” or vice versa? If Ruth demonstrates hesed and loyalty, is Orpah selfish and cowardly? If Orpah is a symbol of resistance, is Ruth the betrayer of her people? While probing Orpah’s character and her relationship with and to Ruth, I became increasingly weary of one common understanding of Ruth’s purpose and meaning—that the book provides a testimony in Israel against societal antipathy toward Moabites. I became not only weary but troubled by certain postcolonial readings that assumed the Israelite oppression of Moabites and then drew analogies between Israelites and white European colonial powers. In these readings Moabites are Botswanian, Maori, Asian immigrants to America, foreign guest workers in Israel, Native Americans . . . there is hardly a group whose suffering has not been equated to the supposed suffering of the Moabites at the hands of the Israelites. I read Ruth, carefully watching the dynamic between Israelite and Moabite, looking for the shock, horror, disgust expressed whenever Israelite encountered Moabite, the prejudice that commentators assured me was there. I did not, however, find it. Instead I found that the literary presentation of Moabites in the scripture RUTH AND ORPAH 29 is complex, ambivalent, sometimes unequivocally negative but just as often open to interpretation; and certain types of postcolonial engagements with Ruth are dependent on an equation between modern European colonization of Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas with ancient Israelite contact with Moab. An imperialism based on racial hierarchy is read back into Ruth, a time and place where, historically , neither exist. Moabites The book of Ruth opens with a situation that is common in biblical narrative as well as in human history—a privation that compels migration. In the face of famine Elimelech and his family travel to Moab in search of food.5 In sparse biblical narrative details are not incidental and repetitions are never gratuitous. The fact that the family sojourns in Moab, along with the repetition of Ruth and Orpah’s ethnic identity throughout the narrative, invites reflection and interpretation. Since the narrative of Ruth fails to explain the significance of Moab, biblical scholars have turned to other scriptural texts to illuminate Israel’s attitudes toward its neighbor. Genesis 19 is the first text ushered in to explain Ruth and Orpah’s status. Fleeing a burning Sodom, Abraham’s nephew Lot and his two daughters seek shelter in a cave. Believing themselves to be the only people left on earth, Lot’s unnamed daughters take on the responsibility of reproduction. They get Lot drunk and, on successive nights, rape him. One daughter gives birth to Ben-Ami and the other to Moab, the eponymous ancestors of the Ammonites and Moabites, respectively (Gen. 19:30–38). The pericope can be read in several different ways. On the one hand Lot’s daughters were almost subjected to gang rape at their own father’s urging (Gen. 19:7–8), thus their rape of him can be read as either a result of trauma or as poetic justice, in either case, justified. On the other hand their progeny are the product of deceptive , drunken incest. Incest insults are common throughout the world (even in our own society), and many...