How Naomi's Life Falls Apart

How Naomi’s Life Falls Apart
RUTH 1:1-9

One Sunday in the church to which we belonged in England that story was the set Old Testament passage on a day when I was due to preach. My default instinct is to look to the Old Testament passage as the one on which to preach (someone has to), but on that occasion when I read this story, my immediate reaction was to think there was no way in which this tale about women from the countryside could speak to our inner-city congregation. Then I realized that the difference was superficial. The life issues the story deals with were the pressing life issues in our urban setting. Both contexts involve people handling similar experiences, such as having to move because they have no work, migrating to a foreign country in that connection, losing husbands and coping with widowhood, undertaking cross-cultural and interreligious marriages, and wondering which community they belong to...

Ruth starts where Judges leaves off; we are still in the time of the leaders. It starts with things going wrong, but whereas Judges talks about things going wrong because God makes them go wrong when Israel itself goes wrong, there is no suggestion here that the famine is an act of judgment. It’s just one of those things, like the famines in Genesis that affected the families of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and his wives. In a good year there can be a good harvest in Israel, but in a bad year there can be insufficient rain at the right time, or a locust epidemic. The country is always only one step from famine. What is Elimelek to do? His own farm cannot feed his family, and presumably the famine affects everyone else in the area so they cannot simply bail him out (the Ephrathites would be one of the kin groups within the clan of Judah, the group living in the Bethlehem area). Somehow he has to provide for his family. Apparently other farmers in Bethlehem are just hoping to get by somehow. Perhaps they have been able to store up some grain from the good years and can now use it to get through the lean years, but evidently Elimelek has not been able to do that. He hears that things are better in Moab. From Bethlehem he can look east across the deep Jordan Valley, with the Dead Sea at the bottom, and see the mountains of Moab rising on the other side. The story of Ehud and Eglon in Judges 3 shows that there is no love lost between Moab and Israel. It would be humiliating and dangerous to move there, but he has to feed his family. He will not just sit there hoping against hope, like some other Ephrathites he could name. So they make the move.

Does Elimelek die of a broken heart, of a sense of failure as the breadwinner, of a sense of shame at having to abandon his farm in the promised land? The story doesn’t tell us, partly because this is a woman’s story. Elimelek is in it only because he is Naomi’s husband. Naomi in turn watches her sons get Moabite wives. Did that threaten to break her heart and impose on her a sense of failure and shame as a mother? What are nice Israelite boys doing marrying Moabite women? We all know about Moabite women. Think about where they came from (see Genesis 19:30–38). Think about the way Israelite men got attracted to them before and ended up serving their gods (see Numbers 25). And what about when the two young men then die? (The story doesn’t give us a time frame, but evidently Ruth is still childless, young, and eligible when she and Naomi get back to Bethlehem. So I imagine Naomi being forty or so and her sons being twenty or so and the marriages being quite short.) Isn’t that God’s judgment? That is what one can imagine some people hearing this story would be thinking.

Naomi’s story parallels Job’s. Blow after blow has devastated her life. She had married with such high hopes of her and Elimelek’s making the farm work and raising a family, and she has lost her farm, her extended family, her homeland, her husband, and her sons, and she is left alone in this foreign country with two foreign daughters-in-law.

Then she hears that the famine is over. For the first time, the story mentions God. Throughout, it will be reticent about doing so. It parallels the way we experience our lives, recognizing the importance of coincidences and of human initiatives that you can see, and believing that God is involved behind the scenes, but it does not usually pontificate on the precise way that is so. The storyteller doesn’t know how or whether God was involved in the catalog of negative events with which the story begins— the famine, the leaving, the marriages, the deaths. The storyteller does know how the famine came to an end. God had “paid attention to his people.” The King James Bible talks about God’s “visiting” his people. It’s actually a worrying word, because often God’s “visits” are like a visit from the Mafia. They mean judgment. It’s safer when God doesn’t visit you or pay attention to you, but this visit is different. God has become involved with Israel by giving them bread. The rains have come. The grain has grown and been harvested. The famine is over. Bethlehem is living up to its name again (it means “house of bread”; the area around Bethlehem is good farming country).

So Naomi can go home, and she really has little alternative; otherwise, what are a woman and her daughters-in-law to do? All she can do is go back to Bethlehem where the abandoned family farm still is, with her tail between her legs, as humiliated and saddened when she returns as she was when she left, ready for the women to be whispering, “You see; they thought they were being so clever going to Moab to escape the famine, and see where it got them.”

The two young women set off with Naomi to go back to Bethlehem—“back” for her, but they have never been to the land where their husbands came from. The three of them do after all comprise one family, even though an odd one now that the men are gone. Paradoxically, the two daughters-in-law, who might seem to be the symbol of everything that has gone wrong, are actually the two people who might be able to help Naomi find healing. Yet sometimes when trouble hits you, you may be afraid to rely on anything positive that is left in your life. If you have lost your farm, your country, your extended family, your husband, and your sons, it may seem there is a curse on you. If you stay attached to these two girls, will you not lose them, too? Better to anticipate the curse. They have alternatives not open to her. They have Moabite families they can go back to. Naomi refers to them as “your mother’s household.” It is one of many ways in which the story encourages readers to resist the patriarchal stereotypes that often prevail in cultures. It is not just the men who are in charge of the family’s destiny. Naomi was “Elimelek’s wife,” but he was also “Naomi’s husband”; if he “owned” her, she also “owned” him.

What is the tone of her voice and what is going on in her heart as she expresses the hope that God may look after them and that they may find other husbands? It’s often hard to “read” Naomi. She will sound deeply depressed and disillusioned with God when she is trying to persuade the two women to stay in Moab and when she herself gets back to Bethlehem. At one level she no doubt means what she says, but does she have much hope that her hopes will be fulfilled? One could hardly blame her if the answer is no.


Taken from Joshua, Judges and Ruth for Everyone – by John Goldingay