Ruth 3:1-6 – “Knowing What We Don’t Know”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹And Naomi her mother-in-law said to her, “My daughter, should I not seek for you a place of rest which will be good to you? ²And now, is not Boaz from our kindred [the one of whom] you have been with his servant girls? Notice, he [is] winnowing [at the] threshing floor barley tonight. ³Wash and anoint and put on your garments upon you and go down [to] the grain pile. Do not let yourself be known to the man until he [is] finished eating and drinking. ⁴And he will be lying down and you must note the place where he lies down and go and uncover his feet and lie down and he will tell you what you are to do.” ⁵And she said to her, “All which you say I will do.” ⁶And she went [to] the threshing floor and she did according to all which her mother-in-law commanded her.

This passage of course always raises eyebrows. I looked forward to the opportunity to actually study the Hebrew in the hopes it would make more sense. As I read many commentaries, there were a very wide variety of responses and interpretations. All center around the question of whether there is something immoral going on here. Some suggest Naomi is being downright reckless with Ruth’s purity while others suggest it was morally dangerous but that Naomi was trusting in the integrity of Boaz and/or Ruth to protect them in an otherwise volatile situation.

What I would like to point out is that we are reading about a culture of people halfway around the world and 3000 years ago. The plain simple fact is that we know almost nothing about their culture and certainly less about the activities surrounding issues of courtship and marriage. Even today it can be almost humorous to hear how people in other countries approach the business of courting and marriage.

If we were honest, even the whole concept of levirate marriage and kinsman-redeemers, which both play significantly into this account, are completely foreign to us. I can’t even imagine the cultural gymnastics we would go through to deal with a brother-in-law taking his deceased brother’s wife – just to think about it, you realize how messy that would be. Reading ahead, the “other” kinsman-redeemer refuses to take Ruth saying, “I might endanger my own estate.” How it would have endangered his own estate we don’t know, but obviously there was something too “messy” for him in it all. For sure all sorts of customs and rules would have to quickly arise to deal with something as precarious as levirate marriage. Just in the last 10 years, as use of the internet has gone pervasive, we’ve had to develop a whole new set of “cyber-ethics” to regulate how we communicate on-line. That is complex enough, but, I would suggest, it would be trifling compared to issues of courtship, marriage, sex, family procreation, etc.

As I said above, I had hoped the Hebrew would help me but, instead, what I find is the exact opposite. What we have in these six verses is almost all dialogue, almost all a record of what Naomi and Ruth said to each other in a language and culture from 3000 years ago. In fact, what I find is that even the way they talk almost defies understanding. I have suggested above a translation of these verses but I have to confess, it is very difficult to translate. The way they talk bears little resemblance to our modern sentence structures. They use participles and infinitives in crazy places, leave out words (I indicate in the brackets […] where I have had to add words which simply are not there in Hebrew), and just generally obviously they don’t even think like us.

I say all of that to make my point -- I think we should admit we don’t have the slightest clue and lay off maligning these three very godly people. I personally think that to imply anything even suggestively immoral is to have missed the integrity of who these three people are. Looking ahead, notice when Boaz discovers Ruth at his feet, his very first words are “the Lord bless you,” and then he tells her, “All my fellow townsmen know that you are a woman of noble character.” That doesn’t exactly sound like “pillow talk,” does it?

I would suggest what is going on here is simply one of the customs that developed around the practice of levirate marriage, that there is no impropriety of any kind, and we should be reminded how important it is to “know what we don’t know,” to openly admit it, and especially to refrain from accusing people in places where we lack the facts to make any evaluation at all. I would suggest it makes a lot more sense that Naomi (an Israelite) is instructing Ruth (a Moabite) what, in this Israelite culture (from 3000 years ago!), are the accepted customs to be followed in pursuing levirate marriage. I don’t know if other ancient cultures practiced levirate marriage too, but even if they did, you can bet they all came up with a whole set of do’s and don’ts unique to their own countries. Ruth would need instruction from Naomi how to “fit in” with this Israelite culture. My contention, I suggest, would be supported by how quickly Boaz understood exactly what Ruth was asking for. He obviously didn’t think she wanted “to crawl in bed with him.” He immediately understood she was appealing to the practice of levirate marriage and his position as kinsman-redeemer. He immediately understood that.

I would suggest it is true all through life we need to learn to “know what we don’t know” and then have the humility to admit it. In my field of engineering, everywhere we go people expect us to be “experts.” Too many of my colleagues respond to that by never admitting when they frankly don’t know. They plunge ahead and even design processes when the truth is they don’t know what they’re doing. They think they have to pretend expertise they don’t have or people will “take their business elsewhere.” As a result I have spent a considerable portion of my career cleaning up the messes these guys leave behind. I have found, instead, that no one seems to mind if I admit, “I don’t know much about that,” and then say, “But if you’d like me to work on it, I’ll learn as fast as I can.”

I suspect that same problem surfaces here. Pastors and theologians are “supposed” to be experts in the Bible. When it comes to the Bible, people expect them to “know.” It seems at first glance inappropriate for them to walk away from a Bible passage saying, “Beats me.” But, just as with engineers, theologians need to learn to “know what they don’t know” and have the humility to admit it. And the same principle extends to every walk of life. It is in the end a pride issue to go around acting like we’re omniscient, forming opinions and making statements based on knowledge we ought to admit we simply do not have. Then when we start accusing other people of improprieties based on facts we don’t have, we have really crossed the line.

Based on the “facts” we do have – the information we are clearly given in the book of Ruth, it is my conclusion that these are three very godly people and I intend to consider their dialogue and actions on that basis until the Lord shows me something different.

I would suggest that this passage reminds us we all need to learn to “know what we don’t know” then have the humility to admit it and act accordingly. God help me to be aware of what I don’t know and help me especially not to be maligning good people when I ought to be admiring them.

What if everybody did?