Ruth in the Days of the Judges: Women, Foreignness and Violence

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_full_journalsubtitle: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches _full_abbrevjournaltitle: BI _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 0927-2569 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1568-5152 (online version) _full_issue: 4-5 _full_issuetitle: Migration, Foreignness and the Hebrew Bible _full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien J2 voor dit article en vul alleen 0 in hierna): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (rechter kopregel - mag alles zijn): Ruth in the Days of the Judges _full_is_advance_article: 0 _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0

528 Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 528-543 Shepherd

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Ruth in the Days of the Judges: Women, Foreignness and Violence

David J. Shepherd Trinity College Ireland [email protected]

Abstract

The basic premise that Ruth 2 depicts the threat of violence against Ruth has been increasingly recognised by commentators, even if not all take sufficiently seriously the nature of this violence as potentially lethal and almost certainly sexual. What is less clear, however, is the extent to which the narrative implies that part of Ruth’s vulnerability to (sexual) violence in the fields of Bethlehem relates to the fact that she is not a Bethlehemite but a migrant recently arrived from Moab. Taking seriously Ruth’s own situating of itself ‘in the days of the Judges’, this study begins by exploring the way in which the gendered violence of Judges 19-21 flows from the account of an act of sexual violence against a woman who is treated as ‘foreign’ (Judges 19). Such a context is shown to resonate with Ruth 2 where – as is often case even today – Ruth’s vulnerability to violence turns out to be intimately bound up with her multiple identities as woman, worker and foreigner.

Keywords

migration – violence – Ruth – Judges 19 – foreigner – refugee – Levite … Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

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Ruth in the Days of the Judges 529

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn.1 ⸪ If for Keats, Ruth’s tears ‘amid alien corn’ are caused by nothing more than an acute case of homesickness for Moab, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that a succession of English translations of Ruth (e.g., kjv, rsv, nrsv) have sought to preserve the reputation of those men working in the fields of Bethlehem as harmless Judahite lads out for a bit of fun. Persuaded by neither Keats nor the King James Version, I argued some years ago that Ruth 2 wishes to impress upon its readers (in Hebrew, at least) that there is something decidedly less than bucolic about the fields of Bethlehem in which Ruth finds herself at this point in the narrative.2 Encouraged by the fact that Michael Carasik suggested something similar in a brief note on Ruth 2.7,3 most (though not all)4 subsequent commentators have endorsed the basic premise that Ruth 2 depicts the threat of violence against Ruth, even if not all take sufficiently seriously the nature of this violence as potentially lethal and almost certainly sexual.5 One question my earlier article largely begged, however, is to what extent the narrative implies that part of Ruth’s vulnerability to (sexual) violence in the fields of Bethlehem relates to the fact that she is not a Bethlehemite but a migrant recently arrived from Moab.

1 Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) ll. 61-67. 2 D. Shepherd, ‘Violence in the Fields? Translating, Reading and Revising in Ruth 2’, CBQ 63 (2001), pp. 444-63. 3 M. Carasik, ‘Ruth 2,7: Why the Overseer Was Embarrassed’, ZAW 107 (1995), pp. 493-94. 4 The translation of Ruth 2 and the introduction and notes offered by R. Alter, Strong as Death is Love: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah and Daniel (New York: Norton, 2015), pp. 57-84 attest to the way in which perceptions of Ruth as bucolic and idyllic continue to bewitch some, despite the textual evidence to the contrary. 5 The threat of violence is now noted in passing by V. Matthews, Judges and Ruth, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 230 n. 33; and T. Giles and W. Doan, The Story of Naomi – The Book of Ruth: From Politics to Gender (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016), p. 140 n. 47. While J. Koosed (Gleaning Ruth: A Biblical heroine and her Afterlives [Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011], p. x n. 19) recognises the threat of sexual harassment in Ruth 2, she perhaps lets the potential perpetrators off rather too lightly as a ‘rowdy bunch’. The threat is taken more seriously by P.H.W. Lau (Identity and Ethics in the Book of Ruth: A Social Identity Approach [BZAW, 416; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011], p. 98 n. 45) and by J. Schipper (Ruth: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary [AYB; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016] pp. xx), who seems aware of Carasik’s contribution.

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Before returning to the fields of Ruth 2, I wish to take seriously the very first words of the book itself, ‘in the days of the Judges’ – and so the context in which the book of Ruth, as we have it, situates itself. In particular, I am inter- ested in what if any light these last days/chapters of Judges might shed on the potential connection between Ruth’s vulnerability to violence and her status as outsider.

Gendered Violence in Judges 20-21

Judges 17-21 offers a tale or rather a series of tales and traditions bound together by the refrain which opens and concludes them: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel, each man did what was right in his own eyes’ (Judg. 17:6, 21:25). While for previous generations of scholarship, interest in this observation of moral libertinism has been largely framed by and limited to its relationship to the monarchy (or its absence) as depicted in the books of Judges, Samuel and Kings,6 recent feminist scholarship has illuminated the ways in which these chapters offer heightened examples of the kind of gendered violence found elsewhere in Judges.7 did what was right in (איש) The suggestion that the final refrain, ‘each man his own eyes’ (21.25), might have resonances specifically with a violence which is gendered is made all the more likely by the episode with which the book concludes, in which the ‘sons’ (so nab) of the tribe of Benjamin who lay in wait (Judg. 21.23 ;וישאו נשים) ’in the vineyards outside Shiloh ‘took women/wives from those who came out to dance.8 Unfortunately, the typical rendering of with ‘carrying them off’ (rsv, esv, niv, jps) gives the impression גזלו Hebrew that this ‘taking’ of the women might be trivial or even positively romantic, despite the fact that when Jacob fears his daughters will be taken from him by Laban (Gen. 31.31), the same verb is usually rendered as ‘take by force’ (so all the translations above), as it should be here in Judges.9 In ‘taking’ the women

6 For a useful, relatively, recent canvassing of scholarship on the refrain in this vein see T.C. Butler, Judges (WBC, 8; Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2009), pp. 468-475. 7 See, for instance, the essays in A. Brenner (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Judges (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993). 8 For the gendered resonance of the refrain in the context of Judges 21 see, for instance, A.J. Bledstein, ‘Is Judges a Woman’s Satire on Men who Play God?’, in A. Brenner (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Judges (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993), p. 52. ,in Judg. 21.23 with ‘abducted’ in the nrsv (1990) is a welcome exception גזלו The rendering of 9 but the more recent romanticising translation of the esv (2007) suggests that predominantly male translational reluctance to recognise the full force of violence against women in the text may be as much of a problem at the end of Judges as it is in Ruth.

Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com10/01/2021 (2018) 528-543 06:16:18PM via free access Ruth in the Days of the Judges 531 of Shiloh by force, the sons of Benjamin are of course doing nothing more than what they have been encouraged to do by the Israelites in Judg. 21.21, where the /Each [man] seize‘) וחטפתם לכם איש אשתו :latter say to the sons of Benjamin snatch [cf. Ps. 10.9] his woman/wife [from the daughters of Shiloh]’. That taking איש women by force for the purposes of possessing them is done by Hebrew (‘each/man’) here suggests this ‘forceful taking’ as the most apposite example of ‘each man’ doing what is right in his own eyes – the sentiment with which the book ends, as we have seen, four verses later. In narrative terms, these are of course not the first women to be taken for the men of Benjamin, but a second tranche of women, required by the fact that the original group of women given to them was insufficiently large (Judg. 21.14) to allow each man of Benjamin to have (at least) one. This original group of ‘400 young virgins who had never slept with a man’ (Judg. 21.12) – lest there be any doubt as to their virginity and their children’s paternity – had themselves been taken from the city of Jabesh Gilead, though not this time taken from their fathers, for the simple reason that the Israelites had already killed them (along with the married men of that city, those women unlucky enough to be married to them and the children). Israel’s fulfillment of a vow to destroy any (including the city of Jabesh Gilead) who did not join them in their initial mil- itary action against the Benjaminites is the claimed justification for this de- struction of Jabesh Gilead (Judg. 21.5). This, however, has the feeling of a pretense given that this follows hard on the heels of the Israelites’ recognition that their earlier and short-sighted vow to further punish the Benjaminites by not ‘giving them’ their daughters might lead to the tribe’s extinction if women could not be supplied from elsewhere.10 If the catalogue of women being forcibly ‘taken’ (in the fullest sense of that word) in these chapters is causally linked, however implausibly, to the near elimination of the Benjaminites, the narrative is equally clear that the precipitating cause of this action against the tribe and the consequent violence against women is the reporting at the beginning of Judges 20 of the infamous episode of another, especially egregious case of violence against a woman. The ,פילגש episode itself is narrated in graphic detail in Judges 19, where a Levite’s sometimes rendered ‘concubine’ or ‘second wife’, is raped to death. While the Levite’s reporting of this incident makes it clear that he feels vic- timized as well (esp. Judg. 20.5), his subsequent dismemberment of the woman

10 S. Niditch (Judges: A Commentary [OTL; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008], p. 201) evaluates the ban as a means of freeing up virgins, while D. Block (Judges, Ruth [New American Commentary; Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1999], p. 585) sees this as seeking ‘loopholes in the law’.

Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 528-543 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 06:16:18PM via free access 532 Shepherd and dispersal of her body parts throughout Israel and his reporting of it to those who gather confirms that it is the killing of the unnamed woman which is the ‘evil’ which must be purged from Israel by the death of those Benjami- nites responsible.

Gender, Violence and Foreignness in Judges 1911

While multiple ambiguities and ambivalences lurk beneath the surface of Judges 19, not least in relation to the role played by the Levite, our specific interest is in the narrative circumstances which lead up to and frame the reader’s expectation and indeed interpretation of the incident. These circumstances it seems are tolerably clear: the Levite is from Ephraim, the woman originally from Bethlehem, where she returns to her father’s house (Judg. 19.2) for some four months before the Levite then arrives from Ephraim to persuade her to return with him (Judg. 19.3). It is at this point that the narrative slows apprecia- bly to allow the woman’s father to entertain the visiting Levite for a three-day period, which appears to represent a customary and perhaps almost obligatory extension of hospitality to a guest (cf. 1 Chron. 12.39). When in verse 5, the Lev- ite rises early on the fourth day to leave for home, and is persuaded by his Bethlehemite host to eat and drink before departing, and when he is then im- plored as the day wanes to stay on for a further night and does so, the narrative’s emphasis on Bethlehemite/Judahite/indigenous Israelite hospitality begins to become clear. When on the fifth day, Bethlehemite hospitality de- tains him yet again and threatens to delay his departure until the following morning, the Levite finally manages to prise himself, his servant and his concubine/secondary wife free to begin their return journey to Ephraim. If such hospitality seems excessive to the modern reader, it is difficult to be sure that it would have been perceived as such by an ancient one. Moreover, while it is not impossible to suggest ulterior motives for the Bethlehemite’s ‘excess’ of hospitality, the text offers no suggestion that such an excess was anything more than a welcome sign of the tight weave of Israel’s social fabric.12 Having thus underlined the exemplary quality of Judahite and Bethlehemite

11 For an alternative treatment of the vulnerability of migrants in this chapter in light of Genesis 19 and 34, see the article by Southwood in this issue. 12 So, Block (Judges and Ruth, p. 527), who suggests that the father-in-law is ‘portrayed as a model of hospitality’. See also K.L. Younger (Judges, Ruth [NIV Application Commentary; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002], p. 353), who argues that the ‘excess’ of hospitality ‘con- veys the potentially endless hospitality that the Levite may have enjoyed had he chosen to remain in Bethlehem’; and S. Niditch (‘The “Sodomite” theme in Judges 19-20: Family,

Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com10/01/2021 (2018) 528-543 06:16:18PM via free access Ruth in the Days of the Judges 533 hospitality, the narrative further emphasises the peculiarly Israelite quality of hospitality by having the Levite resist his servant’s suggestion, as the light fades, that they spend the night with the Jebusites (Judg. 19.11). The narrative signals its resumption of the theme of ‘hospitality’ by making clear the need for overnight lodgings (Judg. 19.13) and underlines the Levite’s perception and expectation of Israelite (in this case Benjamite) hospitality by comparing it unfavourably with that which might be expected from a ‘city of a -whose status as ‘other’ is emphasised by the further quali ,(עיר נכרי) ’foreigner fication that the inhabitants of the city don’t belong to the people of Israel (Judg. 19.12).13 While the Levite does not elaborate on how ‘foreign’ hospitality might be expected to differ from Israelite hospitality, the degree to which the latter is preferable to the former is signaled by the insistence on pressing on to Gibeah despite the day being already ‘nearly over’ (Judg. 19.11) as they are passing Jebus.14 With Levite and readerly expectations of Israelite hospitality thus raised to a fever pitch,15 the news that ‘no one took them in’ (Judg. 19.15) upon their arrival in Gibeah is carefully calculated to shock. That the man who does eventually take them in is ‘old’ (and thus associated/acquainted with age-old Israelite traditions) and ‘from Ephraim’ (where the Levite sojourns) only en- hances the expectation that he will treat the Levite and his party as kin, height- ening the contrast with the Benjaminite inhabitants of Gibeah who have inexplicably and inexcusably left the visitors ‘out in the cold’,16 ironically treat- ing the Levite and his secondary wife as ‘foreigners’ despite their impeccable Israelite credentials.17 Indeed, rather than breaking with convention, the old Ephraimite’s polite enquiries regarding the Levite’s travels and destination (Judg. 19.17) serve to re-emphasise these ‘Israelite’ credentials, while the Levite’s insistence that his

Community, and Social Disintegration’, CBQ 44 [1982], pp. 365-78 [366]), who notes that the emphasis on the father-in-law’s hospitality will be contrasted with events to follow. 13 So too Niditch, ‘The “Sodomite” theme’, p. 367. 14 The suggestion of Butler (Judges, p. 422) that the ‘Levite fears for his life among the foreigners of Jerusalem’ seems an anticipation of the text to come rather than an interpretation of these verses. 15 So Younger (Judges, Ruth, p. 354), who notes that the ‘non-event [of staying amongst the Jebusites] furnishes the grounds for the evaluation of the event and action in Gibeah’. 16 The contrast between the Levite’s claimed piety in going to the ‘house of the Lord’ (Judg. 19.18) and the fact that no one has provided the Levite shelter underlines again the Ben- jaminites’ impiety. 17 So D. Olson (‘Judges’, New Interpreter’s Bible [Nashville: Abingdon, 1998], vol. 2, p. 876), who notes the hospitality which might be expected by a Levite but mistakes the Levite for a ‘sojourner’, rather than a ‘foreigner’, which is surely the more apposite category. As noted by Block (Judges and Ruth, p. 531): ‘The people of one tribe sense no obligation to the members of another. There is no sense of community.’

Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 528-543 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 06:16:18PM via free access 534 Shepherd party is well-supplied and will be no burden is further evidence of either his own decorum or perhaps merely his urgent need for protection first and fore- most from the dangers of the night.18 The old Ephraimite then underlines his own commitment to Israelite hospitality by ignoring the Levite’s rhetoric of self-sufficiency and offering room and board to both the visitors and their beasts. It is thus all the more shocking when the initially passive inhospitableness of the Benjaminite residents of Gibeah reasserts itself in a much more aggressive fashion in their demand that their male visitor be handed over to them to be raped and thus shamed. Indeed, the narrator’s characterisation of these Benjaminites as ‘sons of Belial’ and the old Ephraimite’s condemnation רעע – of the proposed treatment of their visitor (Judg. 19.22-23) in moral terms this disgraceful thing’) – confirms that such‘) הנבלה הזאת to be wicked’) and‘) an action constitutes the utter antithesis of hospitality.19 The extent to which such treatment is abhorred by the Ephraimite is signaled by his otherwise in- comprehensible offering of his own daughter and the Levite’s wife to the mob to spare his male visitor as the lesser of two evils.20 While the old Ephraimite seems oblivious to the irony, his further suggestion in Judg. 19.24 that the mob them and do to them what seems good/right in your (ענו) of men ‘violate/rape eyes [aut. transl.)’ is telling.21 The resonance of this phrase with the refrain which punctuates these narratives and with which the book of Judges (Judg. 21.25) ends is, of course, unmistakable and inextricably links the subsequent violence against women with this initial act of obscene inhospitableness,22 when the mob does to the woman precisely as the Ephraimite sojourner suggests, and the Levite’s secondary wife is raped to death.23

18 For the latter point, see I. Müllner, ‘Lethal Differences: Sexual Violence as Violence against Others in Judges 19’, in A. Brenner (ed.), Judges: A Feminist Companion to the Bible (2nd series; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999), p. 135. The suggestion of Matthews (Judges and Ruth, p. 184) that both the questions and the expression of self-sufficiency are viola- tions of the conventional hospitality script/code lacks truly ancient evidence and de- pends on parallels drawn from Arab traditions of late antiquity. 19 So Niditch, ‘The “Sodomite” theme’, p. 369 20 As the subsequent chapter will make clear, if the murder of the Levite’s wife is the lesser of two evils from his perspective, it is nevertheless a sufficient evil to prompt the condemnation of all Israel and their willingness to nearly destroy an entire tribe in prosecuting ‘justice’. 21 S. Lasine, ‘Guest and Host in Judges 19: Lot’s Hospitality in an Inverted World’, JSOT 29 (1984), pp. 37-59 (41). 22 This link is not merely in terms of narrative causality (M. Brettler, The Book of Judges, [Old Testament Readings; London: Routledge, 2002], p. 81) but in terms of moral judgment. 23 While the text does not explicitly confirm the woman is dead, this omission is unlikely to be intentionally vague. The impression given to the reader is that the woman’s lack of response indicates her death (agreeing with S. Lasine, ‘Guest and Host’, p. 45 contra

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While the desire of the Levite to save face and perhaps his life makes him an accessory to his wife’s murder,24 the clear and direct culpability of the Ben- jaminite mob and the dynamics of the wider narrative confirm the primary cause of her death: an utter and intentional perversion of the hospitality owed to a fellow Israelite. What the Levite and his wife were owed – the hospitality they should have been shown – is made clear by the text’s repeated underlin- ing of their Israelite credentials. What they do receive instead – the fatal sexual violence inflicted on the woman – suggests that they have been treated as anything but Israelite – they have been treated as profoundly ‘other’. In a recent reflection on violence and otherness in Judges 19, Ilsa Müllner notes that the otherness which leads to violence seems to be related to the Levite’s status as marginal ‘other’. She rightly points out that Levites are grouped with those of other marginal status – ‘widow, orphan and sojourner’ – in Deuteronomy (14.29; 16.14; 26.12) and that they are associated with a lack of land and the notion of displacement.25 Indeed, as Mark Brettler reminds us, for Judges 17 through 21 to ‘work’, a ‘landless person (Deut. 10.7 and 14.27) who can wander and has no close kin’ in the vicinity is essential.26 Moreover, if, as Albertz notes, the ‘Levites were not defined geographically or tribally but in- corporated individuals who removed themselves from their families in divine service’,27 it will be worth considering how such a description might well fit not just a Levite, but also the Moabitess Ruth. Ruth has no tribal links in Bethle- hem on arrival, having removed herself from her own family of origin in an act of service to Naomi and (according to Boaz) her God. Yet if the status of the man and his wife as ‘Levite’ undoubtedly contributes to the portrait of ‘otherness’ which leads to sexual violence, it is what else the Levite is or isn’t which provides the final and most crucial brushstrokes to this -to sojourn’) in Judg. 19.1, Müllner character‘) גור picture. Observing the use of ises the Levite as ‘stranger’ and considers the violence suffered by him and his as stranger.28 גר wife in Gibeah to be a reflection of the vulnerability of the Müllner then suggests that the Levite’s classification of Jebus and steering clear -foreign‘) נכרי of the Jebusites reflects his mistaken notion that it is merely the -the sojourner’), which Müllner as‘) גר er’) who is vulnerable rather than the

R. Polzin, Moses and the Deuteronomist [New York: Seabury, 1980] p. 200), and the Levite’s report of her murder confirms it. 24 Lasine, ‘Guest and Host’, p. 49. 25 Müllner, ‘Lethal Differences’, pp.135-36. 26 Brettler, The Book of Judges, p.84. 27 Brettler, The Book of Judges, p. 84. See further R. Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1994), p. 58. 28 Müllner, ‘Lethal Differences’, p.135

Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 528-543 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 06:16:18PM via free access 536 Shepherd sumes the Levite to be.29 The difficulty with Müllner’s suggestion is that the narrative wishes to emphasise that in Gibeah, the Levite does not enjoy, nor would expect to enjoy, the status of a ‘sojourner’ at all – a fact which is brought into relief by the narrative’s emphasis on the Ephraimite provenance of the host and his guest. Apart from establishing their solidarity, this detail serves to make visible the crucial difference between them: as Judg. 19.16 makes explicit, the old Ephraimite is a ‘sojourner’, a landed immigrant, in Gibeah, whereas the Levite is a sojourner in Ephraim, but does not enjoy this status as a newly arrived wayfarer in Gibeah.30 The practical consequence of this is that while the old Ephraimite’s honour is undoubtedly impugned in some way by the mob’s request and the savage death of his guest’s wife, at no point do the Benjami- nites seek to inflict sexual violence on him or his daughter. While it is not clear how long the Ephraimite has sojourned in Gibeah, or precisely how many of the rights and privileges granted to sojourners by the law he himself enjoys, the text makes it very clear that the old man’s status as sojourner affords him at least the right to work and to keep a house of his own.31 That the visitors are offered nothing but brutally violent sexual violation signifies the text’s inten- tion to portray them as not merely ‘other’, but profoundly and unprotectedly so. The parsing of this ‘otherness’ is facilitated proleptically by the Levite’s insis- a foreign city’), which Müllner‘) עיר נכרי ,tence on not staying the night in Jebus mistakenly thinks arises from the Levite’s misinterpretation of his own status. Indeed, while the wider tradition, visible in Deuteronomy (7.1; 20.17) and Josh- ua (e.g., 15.63), has its own notions of the dangers entailed by the presence of the foreign body of the Jebusites within Israel, here in Judges, the Levite’s reluctance to stay overnight in Jebus hints at his fear that by doing so, he and his wife will become foreign bodies within it, with the vulnerability that this entails. The significance of this otherwise superfluous emphasis within the narrative on the vulnerabilities of foreignness becomes clear when the unnamed fears of treatment as a foreign body are eventually realised that same night when the

29 Müllner, ‘Lethal Differences’, pp. 135-37. The man was from the hill[s] of Ephraim but/and he‘) והאיש מהר אפרים והוא־גר בגבעה 30 sojourned in Giveah’; Judg. 19.16). 31 The assumption of Matthews (Ruth and Judges, p. 186) that as a sojourner, the old Ephraimite has no right to offer hospitality/protection to the Levite seems difficult to sustain, given that, as Matthews himself admits, the Ephraimite asserts his right to protect his guest in his house, a right which the narrator in no way undermines and ultimately reinforces by characterising those who would deny him this right as ‘sons of Belial’ and perpetrators of wickedness.

Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com10/01/2021 (2018) 528-543 06:16:18PM via free access Ruth in the Days of the Judges 537 woman is raped to death, mistreated and unprotected as wholly ‘foreign’ in a place where she would least expect to be treated that way.32 Mindful of the refrain ‘each man did what was right in his own eyes’ and that the precipitating example of unconstrained male immorality (Judg. 19.24) in these days of the Judges (Judg. 19.1) is an act of sexual violence against a woman who is treated as ‘foreign’, we turn now to the second chapter of Ruth, a book which situates itself in these ‘days of the Judges’.

Foreignness and Gendered Violence in Ruth 2

That the threat of sexual violence against Ruth in the fields of Bethlehem is real in narrative terms is clear from a careful consideration of Ruth 2.8-9, where Boaz speaks to Ruth:

Then Boaz said to Ruth: ‘Now listen, my daughter, do not go to glean in another field or leave this one, but keep close to my female servants -Keep your eyes on the field that is being reaped, and follow be .(נערתי) not to (הנערים) I have ordered the male servants .(אחריהן) hind/after them nrsv: ‘bother you’). If you get thirsty, go to the vessels ;נגעך) touch you .’have drawn (הנערים) and drink from what the male servants

The undesirability of Ruth being ‘touched’ is signaled by Boaz’s report that he has prohibited his servants from doing so, but several other instances of the ,bring the prohibited act into sharper relief. For instance נגע use of the root when the Israelites have been hood-winked by the Gibeonites in Josh. 9.19-20, the leaders insist: ‘We have sworn to them by the Lord, the God of Israel, and them. This is what we will do to them, we will let (לנגע) now we must not touch them live’. In Gen. 20.6, after Abimelek has unwittingly taken Abraham’s wife Sarah for himself, God clarifies how he has been spared from any sexual impro- priety: ‘it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore, I did not let

32 T.R. Hobbs (‘Hospitality in the First Testament and the “Teleological Fallacy”’, JSOT 95 who has no ,גר pp. 3-30 [20-23]) recognises the important distinction between the ,[2001] need for hospitality per se given their protected status within the community, and the the foreigner’), who is not seen to be deserving of hospitality or likely to offer it‘) נכרי in גר hence the avoiding of Jebus). While Hobbs is right in noting that the Ephraimite) -but as Israelite kinsman, his con ,נכרי or גר Gibeah offers hospitality to the Levite not as clusion that it is ‘offered to one of the same tribe’ fails to recognise that the host is an Ephraimite while the guest is a Levite. Nevertheless, as Hobbs recognises, the Levite (as an Israelite) would have expected to be treated as a guest and was instead treated with a .in the Hebrew Bible are in fact treated נכרים hostility to which few if any

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her’. Finally, in Prov. 6.29, the sage warns of the guilt of him (לנגע) you touch ‘who sleeps with his neighbour’s wife’ and, in the following line, advises that her will go unpunished’. While such usage makes (הנגע) no one who touches‘ like the English verb ‘to touch’ which so often glosses it – may – נגע clear that function euphemistically to refer to ‘touching’ which is far from gentle, it also suggests the possibility of a physical contact which is sexual.33 That this threat is real and significant here in Ruth allows the reader to make sense of the re- mainder of Boaz’s instructions, which are evidently intended to facilitate Ruth’s protection. On one reading, Boaz’s insistence that Ruth not go to glean in a ‘different field or leave this one’ might imply that Boaz’s fields are safer for Ruth (אחר) than those of others (who are unwilling or unable to restrain their male servants/workers as Boaz does). If so, Boaz’s further suggestions that Ruth should follow ‘after’ (in the sense of ‘behind’)34 the male harvesters in his field and feel free to take water from the vessels filled by Boaz’s male servants invite the reader and Ruth to understand that the threat of sexual violence typical of the harvest fields (including that of Boaz?) has been neutralised by Boaz’s instructions to his male workers. Yet verses 8-9 also admit of a reading in which Boaz recognises that his instructions to his own male workers, in and of themselves, might prove insufficient to protect Ruth. On this alternative reading, it is conceivable field or leave this (אחר) that Boaz’s advice to Ruth not to glean in a ‘different one’ followed closely by his encouragement to stick close to the female servants may suggest that the female servants only glean in fields once the men are finished harvesting and have moved on to another field. If so, it might suggest that Boaz’s advice to Ruth is in fact to keep an eye on the field that the men are harvesting and to only go into the field, ‘after them’ in the temporal sense of ‘after they have finished’.35 On this reading, Boaz’s warning might then be that Ruth should get water (only) from the vessels which the male servants have filled (presumably) for the women, rather than from the vessels which the men have filled for themselves. Ultimately, whether Boaz’s guidance to Ruth should be understood as mere reassurance that his verbal warning of the men will be sufficient to protect her when in their vicinity or whether it implies his

33 I. Fischer (‘The Book of Ruth: A “Feminist” Commentary to the Torah?’, in Brenner [ed.], Judges, p. 28) hints that the potential violence may be sexual without arguing the case. In their co-authored JPS commentary (Ruth: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation [London: JPS, 2011], p. 33), Tikva Frymer-Kensky is reluctant to acknowledge the threat implied by the reference to ‘touch’ while Tamara Eskenazi rightly senses the danger it suggests. .see Ruth 3:10 ,אחר For the locative use of 34 .see Ruth 4:4 ,אחר For the temporal/ordinal use of 35

Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com10/01/2021 (2018) 528-543 06:16:18PM via free access Ruth in the Days of the Judges 539 concern that this warning might prove insufficient on its own, there can be little doubting the threat of sexual violence which Boaz’s words imply. That it is not merely Boaz, but also Naomi, another native of Bethlehem, who perceives those who work the local fields to represent a real threat of sexual violence is suggested in Ruth 2.21. There Ruth, having returned home to Naomi, recounts to her the day’s events, reporting (perhaps in general terms) without (הנערים) that Boaz instructed her to stay close to his male servants mentioning his actual advice in relation to the female servants. Naomi then, in verse 22, seemingly corrects her: ‘It is better, my daughter, that you go out with (ולא יפגעו־בך) that they (masc.) may not meet/strike ,(נערותיו) his young women may, again, be used to signal various פגע you in another field’.36 While the verb -is strong (בך) sorts of meetings or encounters, the presence of the preposition ly suggestive of a potentially hostile encounter here. Of the 16 times that this verb is used in the sense of a hostile meeting, only once is the object of this Indeed, the situating of Ruth 37.ב- aggression not prefaced with the preposition ‘in the days of the Judges’ suggests the particular relevance of the usage in Judg. 15.12-13, when the men of Judah have come to Samson to turn him over to the Philistines and he responds: ‘“Swear to me that you yourselves will not fall They said to him, “No, we will only bind you and give ”.(תפגעון בי) upon me .Similarly in Judg .’”(המת לא נמיתך) them into their hands; we will not kill you 8.21 we read: ‘Then Zebah and Zalmunna said, “You come and fall upon us (ויהרג)for as the man is so is his strength.” So Gideon arose and killed ;(פגע־בנו) with פגע and the explicit equating of ב- Zebah and Zalmunna’. The use of the verbs which denote lethal physical violence and execution, respectively, in Judges is strongly suggestive of a comparable connotation here in Ruth. In- here in Ruth 2.22 פגע deed, in light of Boaz’s caution in Ruth 2.9, the use of paints a disturbing picture of the expectation of potentially lethal and/or sexual violence in the harvest fields of Judah.38 That the threat of lethal violence in ‘another field’ is gendered and probably sexual is strongly suggested by Naomi’s insistence in Ruth 2.22 that Ruth remain with Boaz’s female servants

.in Ruth 2.22 פגע in Ruth 2.9 and נגע We are confronted with a striking assonance between 36 Beyond the similarities of reference and context, this assonance emphasises the linking of these two terms in Ruth 2 and may well be intentional. See E.F. Campbell, Ruth: A New Translation with Introduction, Notes and Commentary (AB, 7; Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), pp. 85-113. 37 See Josh. 2.16; Judg. 8.21, 15.12, 18.25; 1 Sam. 22.17, 18; 2 Sam. 1.15; 1 Kgs 2.25, 29, 31, 32, 34, 36. .is omitted ב- The one unequivocal exception is to be found in Exod. 5.3, where the 38 See M. Richardson’s translation of L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Ara- maic Lexicon of the Old Testament, Vols. I-III (Leiden: E.J. Brill 1994-96), p. 910, which provides Ruth 2.22 with its own sub-heading and gives the English translation as ‘to molest a woman’. Fischer (‘A “Feminist” Commentary’, p. 29) likewise recognises this threat.

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-confirming Boaz’s own concerns that this threat can only be mitigat ,(נערותיו) ed by an explicit warning to his men and instructions to Ruth. The implication that serious sexual violence is a real and present danger to a woman in the fields of Bethlehem in the days of the Judges is hardly surprising, given that the orgies of violence against women in Judges 20 and 21 are initiated by an act of sexual violence narrated in macabre detail in Judges 19 – an archetypal illustration of what happens when ‘each man does what seems right in his own eyes’. But what light, if any, does the picture offered in these last chapters of the book of Judges shed on the relationship between Ruth’s vulnerability to violence and her status as ‘foreigner’? Ruth’s own perception within the narrative is presented eventually in Ruth 2.10, following Boaz’s invitation to glean and provisions for her protection from the men of the fields:

Then she fell prostrate, with her face to the ground, and said to him, ‘Why that you should take notice of ,(בעיניך חן) have I found favor in your sight ’?(נכריה) when I am a foreigner ,(להכירני) me

foreigner’) seems unlikely to be incidental here, given how‘) נכריה Ruth’s use of infrequently it appears in the Hebrew Bible outside Proverbs and Ezra-Nehe- miah-Chronicles. Appearing only once in the books of Samuel, its sole occur- rence in Judges is in Judges 19 in the preamble to the Benjaminites’ sexual violence against the Levite’s concubine/second wife. The character of Ruth is not alone in viewing herself as ‘foreign’; so too does the narrator by referring to her regularly as ‘the Moabitess’ as she sets out for and then enters the fields of Bethlehem (Ruth 1.22; 2.2, 6, 21).39 Both Ruth’s act of obeisance and her words the nokriyah (להכירני) make clear her incredulity that Boaz has ‘noticed playing on the assonance of the words in Hebrew.40 Central to her ,’(נכריה) sense of surprise is her perception that this man, Boaz, has noticed her favour- ably, which of course suggests her expectation that if she is noticed at all, it is more likely to be for ill, which is precisely what Boaz’s words also assume.41

39 See B. Rebera, The Book of Ruth: Dialogue and Narrative (Ph.D. dissertation, Maquarrie University, 1981), pp. 156-69 amongst others. 40 For a reflection on the ‘seen-ness’ of the foreigner in relation to Ruth, see E. van Wolde, Ruth and Naomi (London: SCM, 1997), pp. 59-60. 41 Eskenazi and Frymer-Kensky see in this merely the implication that ‘preferential treatment of the foreigner is not to be expected’ (Ruth, p. 36). The observation of Southwood (‘Will Naomi’s Nation be Ruth’s Nation? Ethnic Translation as a Metaphor for Ruth’s As- similation within Judah’, Humanities 3 [2014], pp. 102-131 [114]) that Ruth’s Moabite ethnic identity is not relevant at this point seems to be sustainable only if by this she means that Ruth’s status as Moabite has not prevented Boaz from intervening on her behalf. In every

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Why is Ruth so incredulous at her finding of Boaz’s favour? Jack Sasson is persuaded that Ruth’s overwrought reaction is an attempt to encourage Boaz to greater generosity because Sasson interprets Boaz’s favour as very slight indeed: granting Ruth no more than the gleaning rights required of him.42 Butler rightly rejects this suggestion as improbable, in part because Boaz goes on to praise Ruth so effusively, but also because Butler recognises that Boaz has done more than would be normally expected of him. In this Butler appears to be correct, but his failure to recognise the threat of sexual interference and/or violence against Ruth intimated in Ruth 2.9 leads Butler to offer his own improbable suggestion that Boaz’s extraordinary graciousness lies in his permitting of Ruth to glean in a part of the field ‘normally off limit to gleaners’ – a suggestion which lacks any obvious warrant in the text.43 Instead, the concerns and context of Ruth 2.8-9 make it much more probable that the ‘grace’ which Ruth claims to have found in Boaz’s ‘eyes’ should be interpreted as precisely his protection from potentially fatal sexual violence in the fields of Bethlehem. More importantly for our purposes, Ruth’s surprise at receiving such protection arises from the fact that, she is, in her own words, ‘a foreign woman’.44 More specifically, Ruth’s extraordinary expression of surprise and gratitude to Boaz appears to reflect her realisation that it is only Boaz’s recognition of Ruth as a of Boaz which (בעיני) ’foreign woman and only her finding of favour ‘in the eyes has prevented the harvesters of Bethlehem from doing ‘what was right in their eyes’, a phrase which we have seen to be illustrated paradigmatically in the final chapters of Judges by the most horrific act of sexual violence against a woman imaginable.

other respect (and certainly from the perspective of Ruth as depicted within the narrative), we are arguing that Ruth’s Moabite ethnic identity seems very relevant indeed. 42 J.M. Sasson, Ruth: A New Translation with a Philological Commentary and a Formalist-Folk- lorist Interpretation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 49. 43 Butler, Judges, pp. 122-123. Sasson’s limiting of Boaz’s kindness to the preventing of his men from shooing her away from the water jars (Ruth, p. 50) reflects his misunderstand- -as connoting the ‘most innocuous’ sense of molestation and his unsubstantiat נגע ing of ed assessment of the improbability ‘that in the midst of the harvest, Ruth was to be pounced upon by crazed Bethlehemites’. 44 The interrogation of Ruth’s status as migrant by B. Honig (‘Ruth, the Model Emigrée: Mourning and the Symbolic Politics of Immigration’ in A. Brenner [ed.], Ruth and Esther: A Feminist Companion to the Bible [2nd series; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999], pp. 50-74) remains largely theoretical rather than exegetical and does not attend to the nexus of foreignness and (potential) violence. The imaginative reading of the book of Ruth offered by E. van Wolde – in Ruth and Naomi – rightly assumes that Ruth’s vulnerability to gendered violence is related to her foreignness (e.g., pp. 30, 34, 39) without, however, offering detailed literary analysis or arguments in support of this assumption.

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It is a measure of how strong the idyllic perception of the fields of Bethle- hem in the book of Ruth remains that the seminal feminist interpreter of the sexual violence against the Levite’s wife in Judges 19, Phyllis Trible, can con- clude that:

The absence of misogyny, violence, and vengeance in the two stories jux- taposed to the Benjaminite traditions [that is, the stories of Hannah in the Hebrew canon and Ruth in the Greek canon, following the terrible events of Judges 19-21] speaks a healing word in the days of the Judges.45

Given the threat of sexual interference and/or potentially fatal violence to which the narrative of Ruth 2 sees Ruth as being vulnerable, I would hope that Trible would agree that if a healing word is to be spoken by the book of Ruth ‘in the days of the Judges’, it is not spoken by the ‘absence’ of ‘misogyny’ or ‘violence’ but rather by the remarkable ‘escape’ from an all too real misogyny and violence within the world of the text which might otherwise have led the story of Ruth, the foreign woman, to end as tragically as did the story of the Levite’s wife in Judges 19. Of course, the presentation of Ruth as both foreign woman and foreign worker may imply that she is doubly vulnerable to exploitation. Boaz appears to derive neither any lasting or substantial direct economic benefit from the land he acquires with Ruth when he marries her (judging from the nearer re- deemer’s disinterest) nor anything other than social capital from Ruth’s initial gleanings in the field. However, the noting of her industriousness (Ruth 2.7) may be intended to imply that Boaz sees her as a productive addition to his household.46 Moreover, while Ruth is presented as benefiting from Naomi’s knowledge and connections as a return migrant,47 there can be little doubt that Naomi takes full advantage of her foreign daughter-in-law’s hard graft in the fields of Boaz.48

45 P. Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (London: SCM, 2002 [original, 1984]), p. 65. 46 For this last point, see G. Yee, ‘“She Stood in Tears Amid the Alien Corn”: Ruth, the Per- petual Foreigner and Model Minority’, in R.C. Bailey, T.B. Liew and F.F. Segovia (eds.), They Were All Together in One Place: Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (Atlanta: Society of Bibli- cal Literature, 2009), p. 131. 47 See Southwood, ‘Will Naomi’s Nation be Ruth’s Nation?’ 48 So, Yee, ‘She Stood in Tears Amid the Alien Corn’, p. 131. While it is in fact Ruth’s idea initially to go gleaning in the fields in search of the favour (Ruth 2.2) which she duly finds in the eyes of Boaz (Ruth 2.10), Yee rightly notes that Naomi hardly discourages Ruth from returning to the work (Ruth 2.22) once she sees how much has been brought home and,

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Indeed, in Athalya Brenner’s own contribution to the second volume of the Feminist Companion to the book of Ruth (edited by herself), she offers a welcome discussion of ‘Ruth as a foreign worker and the politics of exogamy’ in which she reads Ruth’s story against the background of single, female foreign workers in modern Israel.49 In doing so, Brenner offers a nuanced and illumi- nating view of both the similarities and differences between the ancient and modern situations.50 Of these, Brenner’s fourth point of comparison is that like modern female foreign workers, Ruth too is invisible to the dominant culture, a point which she illustrates by noting that neither Naomi nor the Bethle- hem women acknowledge Ruth’s existence in concrete terms. What we have suggested here is that while Ruth and other female foreign workers may well be invisible to other women in the dominant culture, they are often conspicuously and dangerously visible to men within the dominant culture – some of whom give them good reasons for wishing that they were not.51

indeed, there is more than a hint of exploitation if Ruth 2.18 implies [as it may] that Nao- mi gives Ruth the leftovers after she herself has first been satisfied. 49 A. Brenner, ‘Ruth as a Foreign Worker and the Politics of Exogamy’, in Brenner (ed.), Ruth and Esther, pp. 158-62. For another more recent effort to connect Ruth with the issue of contemporary immigration, see A. Rees, ‘The Boaz Solution: Reading Ruth in Light of Aus- tralian Asylum Seeker Discourse’, in J. Havea and P.H.W. Lau (eds.), Reading Ruth in Asia (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015), pp. 99-110. 50 Brenner, ‘Ruth as a Foreign Worker and the Politics of Exogamy’. Like many foreign woman workers: (1) Ruth may have had less choice than we imagine; (2) Ruth is required to take care of an older woman; (3) Ruth is invisible to the dominant culture; (4) Ruth is dependent on menial and seasonal labour; (5) Ruth makes herself visible by working harder; (6) Ruth works hard and is devoted but needs to do more in order to be accepted by the host society; (7) Ruth is integrated by means of marriage; (8) Ruth is required to be mindful of her image; (9) Ruth may not have been wholly integrated despite all the above; because (10) class is the decisive determinant. 51 For an example of the vulnerability of contemporary migrant women in the fields of America to sexual violence, see R. Rundge, ‘Failing to Address Sexual and Domestic Vio- lence at Work: The Case of Migrant Farmworker Women’, American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law 20 (2012), pp. 871-97.

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