The Book of Ruth: A Reflection on the Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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Post Author: Sarah Ross

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It’s midnight. At some point my sleepless child drifted off. I did for a while, but it didn’t last. I felt drawn to read the Bible. Of course, I turned to the book of Ruth. Where else, on this night, when we have lost RBG?

Ruth is an odd story in many ways. The whole plot centers around weird antiquated marriage customs. There are some scandalous sexy bits that don’t translate well into English.

It’s an odd story in the Bible, because it centers on the love and steadfast commitment that two women have for each other. There are only two books named for women. Very few Biblical narratives pass the Bechdel test.^[1]

And it opens with the phrase, “In the time of the Judges…” which may mean very little to you. Judges is not a book taught much in Sunday school or preached much from the pulpit. It’s a depressing book about a terrible time in Israel’s history. There was a void in leadership, and the people “did as they pleased.” The nation was in shambles, constantly getting invaded and ransacked. The book of Judges reflects an extremely violent, gory, and chaotic era.

And in the time of the Judges, we get Ruth. Ruth wasn’t a national leader. She wasn’t a warrior. She wasn’t even a citizen. She’s a Moabite—a person from one of Israel’s despised enemy nations. And we get Naomi, an angry, grieving, bitter woman who has given up on life. She literally tells her friends to call her a name that means “bitter,” because she’s just had it with life. Naomi’s lived through the ancient equivalent of 2020. These two women, a daughter-in-law and mother-in-law, both widowed and poor, devote themselves to each other and survive against the odds as an unexpected family.

And honestly, nothing spectacular happens in the story. The big dramatic conclusion is that the widowed immigrant woman gets remarried and has a baby. Hardly earth-shattering stuff.

And yet, this story, in all its ordinariness, gives the one glimmer of hope, the one flicker of a better possible future, amid the chaos.

In the end, what we learn from the story is that even when things seem most bleak, when there is national and international chaos and violence and starvation, when the people are following false idols and living in fear, God is not gone.

God may seem absent from the halls of power and the military battles and the things that normally make the history books. But God is not gone.

God is at work in the love between two widows whose relationship doesn’t make a lot of sense to others. God is at work in the life of a penniless immigrant woman. God is at work among the people most of us might ignore completely. And there at the margins, in the midst of grief and despair, in a place no one would expect it, hope flickers into life.

Thus endeth the lesson.

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^[1] For a brief introduction to the Bechdel Test, in which movies are rated based on three simple criteria for healthy representation of women (having 1) more than one female character who 2) talk to each other 3) about something besides a man), visit  https://bechdeltest.com/. This bar for representation, which is set surprisingly low, is cleared only by a small percentage of movies ever made. Some variations of the rule also specify that the characters should have names, which is also a low standard, and seldom met.

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Image by: Emily Peck-McClain
Used with permission