Loyalty and Love in the Time of Judges(USE AS GUIDE ONLY)

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Loyalty and Love in the Time of Judges

Some people may have been taught in church that the women in The Holy Bible
were insignificant, unnamed, or even responsible for all of humanity’s suffering and
pain. But, this negative viewpoint is not the only way that biblical women should be
seen as many of them, when really examined, are often very important and complicated
people. One such woman is the young, Moabite widow, Ruth. Even though some rabbis
may see Ruth as little more than a good person and her ‘book’ as nothing more than a
curious, although beautiful , story that seems to be “out of place in the biblical corpus,”
others have seen her as much more (Moore 212). To those who believe that Ruth’s
story is an important inclusion to the Bible, it is a story about how a foreigner is not only
blessed by “God’s chosen people,” but who also blesses them in a “profoundly
important way” (Moore 206). It can even be assumed that in order to have been given her own book in the
Bible, Ruth must have done something so exceptional that it needed to be documented
and passed down to future generations. The fact that she is recorded as being the
ancestor of two such notable men as David and Jesus is not enough to warrant such
importance in this patriarchal (Moore 204), male-dominated society, otherwise, Boaz’s
story could have been written instead of Ruth’s. In fact, by telling Ruth’s side of the tale,
the Bible goes completely against the “ancient

Loyalty and Love in the Time of Judges
A. Harris