In This Issue
Volume 64 Number 2 April 2010
The Book of Ruth 115
EDITORIAL
117
NARRATIVE AND POETIC ART IN THE BOOK OF RUTH • TOD LINAFELT Although the Book of Ruth is in many respects a classic example of biblical Hebrew narrative, there are two examples of formal poetry in the book (1:16–17 and 1:20–21). Biblical poetry works with a very different set of literary conventions than narrative, and by taking note of those conventions, we can see the distinctive contributions made by these poems to the book as a whole.
130
THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE BOOK OF RUTH • MARTIN O’KANE Although absent from early Christian iconography, Ruth has been a popular figure in both Christian and Jewish art from the medieval period onward. In depicting scenes from the Book of Ruth, artists have been sensitive to the nuances and subtleties of the biblical narrative and have interpreted her story visually in many original and distinctive ways.
146
MORE THAN THE LOVE OF MEN: RUTH AND NAOMI’S STORY IN MUSIC • HELEN LENEMAN This essay introduces and discusses four musical works that extensively treat Ruth and Naomi’s relationship: two late nineteenth-century oratorios, and two twentieth-century operas. Both music and librettos are treated as midrash—a creative retelling through both altered text and in the language of music.
162
FROM RUTH TO THE “GLOBAL WOMAN”: SOCIAL AND LEGAL ASPECTS • ATHALYA BRENNER In this short study, the Scroll of Ruth, and especially Ruth’s undisclosed motives for following her mother-in-law, are read alongside the situation of foreign, female migrant workers in contemporary Israel—and vice versa. This allows a bi-directional reading that supplies a possible context both for the biblical text and for the evaluation of today's issues. BETWEEN TEXT & SERMON
Major Book Reviews 182
170
Ruth 1:6–22
– Christine Roy Yoder
– Jessica Tate 174
Ruth 2
186
Ruth 4
Luke by Richard B. Vinson – Sharon H. Ringe
– Martha Moore-Keish 178
The Sword and the Stylus: An Introduction to Wisdom in the Age of Empires by Leo G. Perdue
188
– Thomas W. Mann
Christian Worship: 100,000 Sundays of Symbols and Rituals by Gail Ramshaw – Paul Galbreath
190
No Ordinary Angel: Celestial Spirits and Christian Claims about Jesus by Susan R. Garrett – Jeffrey L. Sumney
194
The Child in the Bible edited by Marcia Bunge, Terence E. Fretheim & Beverly Roberts Gaventa and The Vocation of the Child edited by Patrick McKinley Brennan – Karen-Marie Yust
198
Short Book Reviews and Notes
O F F I C E S TA F F
DEBRA REAGAN Managing Editor WILLA JACOB Subscription Manager NAROLA AO MCFAYDEN Editorial Fellow & Office Assistant
INDEXED BY
Academic Abstractions Arts & Humanities Citation Index Arts & Humanities Search ATLA Religion Database Book Review Index Current Contents/Arts and Humanities Guide to Social Science and Religion in Periodical Literature Humanities Index Index of Articles on Jewish Studies Index to Book Reviews in Religion International Bibliography of Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature on the Humanities and Social Sciences International Bibliography of Periodical Literature on the Humanities and Social Sciences Internationale Zeitschriftenschau für Bibelwissenschaft und Grenzgebiete New Testament Abstracts Old Testament Abstracts Theologische Literaturzeitung
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Interpretation 115
Editorial “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). For many readers, this single verse summarizes the plot and the meaning of the Book of Ruth. Yet, as this issue demonstrates, Ruth’s story is both more complex and therefore more generative of theological reflection than any simple summary can convey. Tod Linafelt examines the narrative artistry of Ruth, noting that its economical prose seldom gives readers access to the interior thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the characters. Why was Ruth committed to Naomi? Why did Naomi fail to understand Ruth's commitment? Linafelt discerns answers to these questions in two brief, easily overlooked, pieces of poetry (1:16–17; 1:20–21) that are crucial to the book’s plot. Martin O’Kane notes that the “iconic aspects of the literary narrative” have inspired artists of different periods to paint pivotal aspects of the text in order “to convey quite specific theological thoughts.” With careful exegesis of illustrations from the medieval (Bible Moralisée), Renaissance (e.g., Poussin’s The Four Seasons), and contemporary periods (e.g., William Blake and Marc Chagall), O’Kane shows how artists provide interpretive insights that enable us to “engage afresh the text.” “What can music add to our understanding of the book of Ruth?” Helen Leneman tracks the answer to this question by analyzing four musical works that deal extensively with the relationship between Ruth and Naomi (Otto Goldschmidt, Ruth, A Sacred Pastoral; Georg Schumann, Ruth; Joseph Rumshinsky, Ruth: A Biblical Opera; and Sir Lennox Berkeley, Ruth, Opera in Three Scenes). With clear exposition of the librettos, Leneman demonstrates that “music has the power not only to read between the lines and fill in the gaps, but also to create an inner world of the heart and mind.” More intense and more immediate than merely reading a text, music “offers us new and unfamiliar lenses through which to read a familiar story.” Interpreters often romanticize Ruth’s relationship to Naomi, Athalya Brenner argues, but Ruth is “a dead man’s wife”; there is nothing romantic about being a fugitive who must seek economic asylum in a foreign country. Brenner reads Ruth’s story alongside the situation of foreign female workers migrant workers in contemporary Israel. Careful attention to governmental data makes clear that the legal and social status of migrant workers in Israel is precarious at best. Modern Israel’s situation is but a parable for thinking carefully about human rights globally. “Look around you and ask,” Brenner says, “What do we do concerning migrants? How do we treat them? What are our terms for accepting or rejecting them?” Her final question is an apt conclusion to this issue, one we trust will return our readers to the Book of Ruth with renewed focus: “Will it not be beneficial . . . not only to read the Bible as an exemplum of our own ‘reality,’ whatever that might be, but also to read our reality as a guide for reading the Bible?”
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CONTRIBUTORS TOD LINAFELT is Professor of Biblical Literature in the Theology Department at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a recent holder of the Cardin Chair in the Humanities in the English Department at Loyola College in Maryland. He holds graduate degrees from Emory University, the University of Oxford, and Columbia Theological Seminary. His work focuses on the literary resources and the cultural influence of the Bible. Current projects include a commentary on the Song of Songs for the Abingdon Old Testament Series and a volume on reading the Bible as literature for Oxford University Press’ series of Very Short Introductions. MARTIN O’KANE is Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He is a graduate of the L’École biblique et archéologique française, Jérusalem, and gained his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. In addition to teaching a number of courses on the Old Testament, he is also director of the research center, The Bible and the Visual Imagination (www.imagingthebible.org). He is author of Painting the Text: The Artist as Biblical Interpreter (Sheffield Phoenix, 2008) and Biblical Art from Wales (Sheffield Phoenix, 2010). HELEN LENEMAN has written and lectured extensively in the United States and Europe on musical interpretations of biblical women's narratives. Her book, The Performed Bible: The Story of Ruth in Opera and Oratorio (Sheffield Phoenix), was published in 2007. Other recent publications include essays on the biblical and musical representations of Ruth, Ruth and Boaz, and Deborah and Jael. In addition to her professional cantorial training at Hebrew Union College, Leneman completed her Ph.D. at the University of Amsterdam with Prof. Athalya Brenner. Leneman has worked for many years as a professional singer and pianist and has offered concerts with commentary, such as “Finding their Voices: Musical Settings of Biblical Women,” both in the United States and Europe. She is fluent in several languages and
since 2001 has lived in England, Italy, and Switzerland. Leneman is currently writing another book for Sheffield Phoenix about musical works based on the books of Samuel. ATHALYA BRENNER (Ph.D., Manchester University, England) is Emeritus Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at the University of Amsterdam, and currently teaches at Tel Aviv University. She is the editor of the Feminist Companion to the Bible Series 1 and 2 (1993–2001, to be reprinted by Continuum). Brenner is currently editing, along with Archie Lee and Gale Yee, the Hebrew Bible portion of a major new series called Texts@Contexts (Fortress). Brenner’s main teaching and research interests are Hebrew semantics, feminist biblical criticism, reception history, and the Bible as a cultural force in contemporary cultures. She lives in Haifa and in Amsterdam.
Narrative and Poetic Art in the Book of Ruth TOD LINAFELT Professor of Biblical Literature Georgetown University Although the Book of Ruth is in many respects a classic example of biblical Hebrew narrative, with its stripped-down style and the opaqueness of its character's inner lives and motivations, there are two examples of formal poetry in the book (1:16–17 and 1:20–21). Biblical poetry works with a very different set of literary conventions than narrative, and by taking note of those conventions, we can see the distinctive contributions made by these poems to the book as a whole.
T
o speak about the literary art of the Bible is really to speak more specifically about its narrative art or its poetic art, since biblical narrative and biblical poetry each works with a very different set of conventions and techniques–—with different literary toolkits we might say. A literary approach to the Bible, then, means more than just close reading, as it is so often understood. It also means becoming familiar with and attending to the distinctive and specific workings of narrative texts and poetic texts. It seems clear that the ancient authors were very much aware of the differing conventions and possibilities associated with narrative and with poetry, respectively, and that their audiences would have responded differently to these two primary literary forms. The better we understand these forms, the better we are as readers. The book of Ruth is, of course, composed primarily of narrative: it tells a story. But there are two passages—Ruth’s speech to Naomi in 1:16–17 and then Naomi’s speech to the women of Bethlehem in 1:20–21—that are marked as poetry: they take the form of verse, and may be set off in lines. By keeping in mind the distinctive literary resources of biblical narrative and biblical poetry, then, we can appreciate not only the artfulness of the book of Ruth as a story, but also begin to discern the function of the two poems that the book employs in the first chapter.
N A R R AT I V E Perhaps the single most distinctive characteristic of biblical Hebrew narrative is its rigorous economy of style. That is, biblical narrative tends to evince a drastically stripped-down
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manner of storytelling, making use of a fairly limited vocabulary and pretty consistently avoiding metaphors and other sorts of figurative language. Indeed, biblical narrative tends to avoid description of any sort, metaphorical or otherwise. It is striking how rarely we are told what either people or objects in biblical stories look like. What do Adam and Eve look like? We do not know. Abraham? Sarah? Moses? We do not know. Occasionally, a certain quality is ascribed to some person or object: we are told that Eve perceives that the tree of knowledge is “a delight to the eyes” (Gen 3:6), and likewise we are told that Joseph is “handsome and good-looking” (Gen 39:6). But as a rule such minimal notations are given only when necessary to introduce some element that is important to the development of the plot. The attractiveness of the tree of knowledge leads, of course, to the eating of its fruit, and Joseph’s attractiveness leads, in the next verse, to the sexual aggression of Potiphar’s wife and thus indirectly to Joseph’s imprisonment. And even here we are not told what it is that makes the fruit lovely to look at or just what physical qualities make Joseph so attractive. Beyond a lack of physical description in the biblical stories, one notices, too, that descriptions of personal qualities are largely absent. Characterization in biblical narrative, in other words, is rarely explicit, but rather must be teased out of the narrative based on what characters do and what they say. We know Jacob is cunning and deceptive, for example, not because we are told so, but because we see him trick his brother, his father, and his brother-in-law Laban, and we hear him lie to them. As a rule, it is the actions and the dialogue of the characters that leads to the readers’ judgments about them, rather than explicit commentary or moral evaluation on the part of the narrator. The Book of Ruth exhibits this same sort of reticence in describing its characters. Although readers often assume that Boaz is an older man, for example, the fact is that we are never told his age. There is the hint, in Boaz’s words to Ruth in 3:10 (“you have not gone after the young men [9habbah9u=rîm], whether poor or rich”) that he does not consider himself a young man, but that still leaves us with a range of, say, twenty to seventy years old (although the average lifespan would have been closer to forty or fifty years). The only information that might count as a direct description of Boaz is his designation by the narrator in 2:1 as “a prominent rich man” ()is\h gibbo