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Marriage - Ruth 4

Chapter 4 ends the book of Ruth and is very technical about ancient Israel land rights. Boaz sends Ruth home in the morning and promises to get this matter squared away in the morning, so when morning comes, Boaz parks himself at the city gate and waits for the kinsman that is nearer to Naomi than Boaz so they can talk business. When the guy shows up Boaz calls him over and also asks 10 “elders of the city” to listen as witnesses so this can be a formal legal meeting. Boaz explains that Naomi is trying to sell the land that belonged to her dead husband and this other guy has the first right of refusal, and does he want to redeem it himself? The guy answers, “I will redeem it.” Boaz says, “great, not only do you get to buy the land, but you have to marry Ruth and raise up a son in the name of her dead husband.” I bet Boaz knew that the guy would be interested in the land, but once you have to start talking about raising kids that aren’t your own, then people have to stop and think for a...
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Uncovering Feet - Ruth 3

Now that Ruth and Naomi have figured out that Boaz is a kinsman and a potential marriage possibility, they get to work. There’s a lot that goes into the kinsman redeemer concept that we discussed earlier in the Torah, and I don’t really want to go through it now but it has to do with buying and selling land that belonged to God but that the people used, and when a family sold their land, a close relative was obligated to buy it back for that family. Naomi was trying to sell the land her husband’s family had and Boaz, as a kinsman redeemer, was obligated to buy it to keep it in the family. Similarly, the tradition was the same for widows who did not have living sons to take care of them, a close relative was supposed to marry them, give them sons, and keep the land and bloodline in the family. That’s basically what the premise is here, I just thought that Boaz and Ruth got married because they loved each other and it was probably that too but according to tradition, he had an obligation...
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Boaz - Ruth 2

When Naomi and Ruth come back to Bethlehem, it’s right as the barley harvest was starting and they were hungry, so Ruth offers to go to the fields and start “gleaning” in order to get some food for them. I think it’s important to mention here that Ruth could have stayed in Moab and gone back to her parent’s house and lived a life without the responsibility of caring for Naomi, who had almost certainly no way to care for herself financially. It’s a testament to her character that, for whatever reason, Ruth decided to take on Naomi’s care as her responsibility when she didn’t have to. Verse 1 notes that Naomi’s dead husband had a kinsman “a mighty man of wealth,” who’s name was Boaz. The implication of this is that maybe Naomi came back to Bethlehem with the intention of Ruth marrying Boaz and him taking care of them but later verses make me think that wasn’t the case. Verse 3 says that when Ruth went to glean grain, “her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging unto Boaz.” Th...
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The Start - Ruth 1

Around the time of Gideon, in the area that the tribe of Judah inhabited, there was a famine. The northern area of Israel was where most of the other 10 tribes lived, but in the south, where Judah lives, the IM says “the people eof Judah regularly battled another sort of enemy: the climate. Judah occupied a rugged plateau in the semiarid lands west of the Dead Sea. Normally, the land was fertile enough to sustain fields of wheat and barley, grape vineyards, and groves of olive and fig trees. But occasionally the rains failed, the crops withered and there was famine.” It was during one of those famine times that the story of Ruth starts. There’s a man who lives in Judah named Elimelech, and his wife Naomi, and his two sons Mahlon and Chilion. TB notes that the names of the sons, and probably also of Ruth and her sister-in-law Orpah were almost certainly invented by the writer of the book and points out that the names Mahlon and Chilion means “weak” and “failure” and said that no parent...
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Ruth - An Introduciton

The book of Ruth is very short, only 4 chapters and only 85 verses total. We’re going to do an introduction because honestly, I didn’t want to listen to 2 more hours of lectures about chapter 1 today, I was tired and wanted to listen to music, so this will be short. There are a couple of interesting tidbits that TB discussed about the book of Ruth that I thought were noteworthy. First, Ruth is only one of two books in the Old Testament about gentiles, the other being Job. I didn’t know that Job was a gentile so that will be interesting to discuss when we get there. Secondly, Ruth is only one of two books about women in the entire Bible, the other being Esther. TB made some interesting comparisons between the two. Ruth was a gentile who lived among the Jews, Esther was a Jew who lived among the gentiles. Ruth eventually married a Jew, whereas Esther married a gentile. This was interesting, “God’s name is mentioned a number of times in the book of the gentile Ruth, but it is not mentione...
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Destruction of Benjamin - Judges 20 & 21

The last two chapters of the book of Judges has a lot going on and are honestly just horrific. They deal with what happens after the concubine of the Levite is raped to death in Gibeah and he cuts up her body and sends it to the leadership of each tribe. After the leaders get their body piece and find out what happens, they decide that something needs to be done and calls the Levite to them and ask him what happens. He lies and says that the men of Gibeah were trying to kill him and they took his concubine and raped her to death. That’s not what happened, they wanted to rape the man so he GAVE his concubine to them to save himself. Interestingly, I think the tribal leaders would have probably been more upset if he had told the truth that they wanted to rape him because men like that get real upset over gay stuff. Anyway, the leaders all agree that this is abhorrent behavior and now something needs to be done about it. It's important to remember that Gibeah, where this evil was com...
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Gibeah - Judges 19

Chapter 19 has a story in it that has always horrified me and so I’m glad we’re getting into it because there’s been a lot of clarity for me. Again, I always thought that if it was in the scriptures then it was good and I could not for the life of me see how this was good, but now I see that it’s not good and it’s included in the scriptures to illustrate just how evil parts of Israel were at this time. It’s also important to note that this event occurred before Micah, so again, not in chronological order. There was a Levite how took a concubine. The story refers to her as the concubine and him as the husband but those words don’t make sense to me because she’s not his wife, but in that time the woman wasn’t just a mistress, she had some rights as a companion but not the full rights of a wife. He was the husband regardless, but getting those two roles straight was harder for me. This Levite and his concubine had a fight and she left the city that they lived in and went back to live wit...
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