Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ruth · About this commentary
Like Rachel and Leah
Ruth 4:11-12
11 All the people who were in the gate, and the elders, said, “We are witnesses. May Yahweh make the woman who has come into your house like Rachel and like Leah, which both built the house of Israel; and treat you worthily in Ephrathah, and be famous in Bethlehem. · WEB
The town's blessing places a Moabite widow beside the mothers of Israel — and names a scandal as the precedent.
We are witnesses. The whole assembly answers, and then adds a blessing nobody asked for.
May Yahweh make the woman who has come into your house like Rachel and like Leah, which both built the house of Israel. The comparison is the highest available: the two wives of Jacob, from whom the twelve tribes descend. The elders of Bethlehem apply it to a Moabite, in public, on the day she is married. Whatever the law's bar on Moab meant to them Deuteronomy 23:3, it did not produce silence here.
Then a second precedent, and it is a startling one. Let your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah. The story behind that name is the ugliest in Genesis — Judah's refusal of levirate duty to his widowed daughter-in-law, and her deception to obtain by force what she was owed Genesis 38:26.
The elders choose it because the parallel is exact. Perez was born of a levirate obligation finally met, in Judah's own line, and the town is blessing Boaz with the same outcome by a straighter road. And the genealogy at the end of the chapter will begin with Perez.
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