Ruth 1.14-18.
1.14 They lifted their voices and wept again, and Orpá kissed her mother-in-law farewell. Ruth clung to her, 15 so she said, “Look, your sister-in-law has returned to her people and god. Go after her.”
16 Ruth said, “Stop begging me to leave you and return: Where you go, I go. Where you stay, I stay. Your people are my people. Your God is my God. 17 Where you die, I die, and will be buried there. I swear to Yahweh that only death will separate us.”
18 Naómi, seeing that Ruth was determined to go with her, stopped begging her.
Regardless of Naomi’s reasons for asking her daughters-in-law to leave her, Ruth was having none of it. Here’s where she gives that speech that people tend to praise for its faith, which in the King James Version goes,
Whither thou goest, I will go;
and where thou lodgest, I will lodge:
Thy people [shall] be my people,
and thy God my God:
Where thou diest, will I die,
and there will I be buried:
The LORD do so to me, and more also,
[if ought] but death part thee and me.
Really, the repetition turns this into poetry. I don’t know if Ruth was trying to be poetic at the time, or whether the writer of Ruth thought this was the perfect place to stick this particular poem. This sounds like the sort of thing you’d say at a ceremony—a marriage ceremony, or a citizenship ceremony, or something where you’re swearing to stay with someone forever. It’s good stuff.
People like to contrast Ruth’s behavior with Orpa’s… and rip on Orpa a little bit for leaving Naomi and returning to Mo’av. First of all, let’s not do that. Naomi, you recall, was begging her daughters-in-law to leave her and go back to their homeland.
We could, and regularly do, assume that Naomi was manipulatively trying to gauge the loyalty of her daughters-in-law, and Orpa failed the test, and Ruth passed. If we interpret this story that way, it means we believe that Naomi was hugely dysfunctional. And who knows?—maybe she was. But there is no real “passing” of a test that a dysfunctional person puts together: You’re screwed either way. Either you leave, like Orpa, and regret it; or you stay, like Ruth, and regret it.
Me, I figure Naomi really did mean it; this wasn’t just a test of her daughters’ loyalty. She really did want Orpa and Ruth to go. She only stopped, the writer says, once Ruth stood her ground and said, “Stop it; I’m not going.” A manipulative person will back off fairly soon after she gets the result she’s looking for. An earnest person is a lot slower to do so, and Ruth swearing to God she wasn’t leaving is the sort of thing that would shut such a person up.
So since Naomi was sincere, I don’t fault Orpa for going back to Mo’av. We have no idea what became of her. Preachers are quick to assume she went back because she was just itching be a dirty pagan. For all we know, Orpa’s exposure to Naomi and her husband had made her a solid follower of Yahweh, and from that point on she proclaimed Him in a land where Khemósh was far more popular. For all we know, her family was David ben Jesse’s point of contact when he hid his parents there. (1Sa 22.3-4) We don’t know. So let’s not just assume Orpa went wrong.
Preachers likewise read a lot of piety into Ruth’s statement—as if it’s because of her massive faith in God that she decided to stay with Naomi. Again, we don’t know how much piety Ruth actually had. She swore to stay with Naomi in God’s name, so obviously she had some faith in God. Or she might just have been clever enough to recognize that if she was going to swear to God to stay with Naomi, it only made sense to swear to Naomi’s God, seeing as she had just promised to take Naomi’s God as her own. Either way, I don’t see Ruth’s faith in God so much as Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi—which isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it doesn’t automatically imply loyalty to God.
You see, Ruth is a book that’s clearly written by a God-follower, but it’s not necessarily about serious God-followers. Yeah, people make right, even honorable choices, but we have no clue about how close these folks’ personal relationship with God was. Notice that God doesn’t make any direct statements in the book. Notice that God doesn’t perform any supernatural miracles. None of Ruth’s or Naomi’s actions are faith-actions—nothing they did was done because God challenged them to go above and beyond what they could see. They might be people of faith; we’d like to think they are, anyway. But again—as I seem to keep saying—we don’t know. Hope so. But don’t know.
What I take away from this, of course, is Ruth’s good example of loyalty. If you’re going to pledge loyalty to someone—a friend, a spouse, your kids or parents, and of course to Jesus—you have this to live up to. Ruth demonstrates hardcore devotion. Good for her.
Ru 1.14: וַתִּשֶּׂנָה קוֹלָן וַתִּבְכֶּינָה עוֹד & they’d lifted voice of them & they’d wept again, וַתִּשַּׁק עָרְפָּה לַחֲמוֹתָהּ & she’d kissed, Orpá, to husband’s-mother of her, וְרוּת דָּבְקָה בָּהּ׃ & Ruth had clung to her, 1.15: וַתֹּאמֶר הִנֵּה שָׁבָה יְבִמְתֵּךְ אֶל־עַמָּהּ & she said: look, she’d returned, brother’s-wife of you, to people of her, וְאֶל־אֱלֹהֶיהָ שׁוּבִי אַחֲרֵי יְבִמְתֵּךְ׃ & to god[s] of her; you return! after brother’s-wife of you; 1.16: וַתֹּאמֶר רוּת אַל־תִּפְגְּעִי־בִי לְעָזְבֵךְ & she’d said, Ruth: not! you are begging to me to leave from you, לָשׁוּב מֵאַחֲרָיִךְ כִּי אֶל־אֲשֶׁר תֵּלְכִי אֵלֵךְ to return from after you, that to where you are walking, I am walking, וּבַאֲשֶׁר תָּלִינִי אָלִין and in what you are staying in, I am staying in; עַמֵּךְ עַמִּי וֵאלֹהַיִךְ אֱלֹהָי׃ people of you [are] people of me, & god[s] of you [are] god[s] of me; 1.17: בַּאֲשֶׁר תָּמוּתִי אָמוּת וְשָׁם אֶקָּבֵר in what you are dying, I am dying, & there I am being buried; כֹּה יַעֲשֶׂה יְהוָה לִי וְכֹה יֹסִיף thus he is doing, Yahweh, to me, and thus do again, כִּי הַמָּוֶת יַפְרִיד בֵּינִי וּבֵינֵךְ׃ that the death is separating between me and between you; 1.18: וַתֵּרֶא כִּי־מִתְאַמֶּצֶת הִיא לָלֶכֶת אִתָּה & she having seen that being strong, she [was] to walk with her, וַתֶּחְדַּל לְדַבֵּר אֵלֶיהָ׃ & she’d stopped from speaking to her.
