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• W2000515255 abstract "Ruth:Playing with Redemption Alon C. Ferency (bio) The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King —William Shakespeare1 If Ruth is the biblical book with the “highest ratio of dialogue to narrative” and, in fact, “the plot is advanced mostly through dialogue, which accounts for 55 of its 85 verses,”2 then with a bit of indulgence, one may re-read Ruth not only as a scroll, but also as a script. Re-viewing Ruth through this lens, the reader or viewer may understand the text afresh as a play, and perceive its deliberate dramatic design. In so doing, the listener can humbly subject the book of Ruth to dramatic analysis, applying Aristotelian and later poetics to the study of sacred Scripture. Like a work by Shakespeare or Aristophanes, the book of Ruth unsettles as well as confirms expectations, pushing beyond a mere didactic fable to expose challenges of knowledge and identity. Largely, this is achieved through the use, or deliberate misuse, of a dramatic device called “recognition.” Recognition scenes involve, according to Aristotle, “a change from ignorance to knowledge, disclosing either a close relationship or enmity, on the part of people marked out for good or bad fortune.”3 In the book of Ruth, the recognition [End Page 3] scenes induce revelations that are both logical and implausible, bringing to the foreground salient features of the protagonists, chorus, community, nation, viewer, and even the unseen director: God. Over ten times, the book of Ruth uses the Hebrew verbal root shuv, frequently translated as “returning” or “responding”; moreover, this verb conveys a desire for knowledge, redemption, and recognition. All these words—to return, to redeem, to be recognized—imply a going back. The text tells us: “She [Naomi] and her daughters-in-law got up and returned from the Moab Highland, as she heard in the Moab Highland that Adonai had taken note of Adonai’s people, and gave them food” (1:6).4 Naomi gets up—presumably “up” from the period of mourning her sons. She wishes to live and not to die, as the men in her family had, and so she must strike out for a fresh start, and the possibility of food. She intends to “return,” but not to a place, not yet; merely to return from a place. Indeed, the absence of a named destination underscores this point. As with most grief, there is a time for weeping; and then new vigor arrives, and one can rise again—and such arising is spurred by a new awareness, a new recognition. What is this new consciousness, which brings Naomi away from the necrotizing aspects of grief, toward the more life-sustaining drives within her? What does Naomi know—or precisely, what does she recognize—that leads to this returning? I imagine that it is the recognition of the futility of her current way. In the Moab Highland, there is little to sustain life. In order to cleave to life, and the life-sustaining potential of family, one must get up and return from a barren place. In a departure from the rule set out by Aristotle, the book of Ruth thus unfolds with a recognition scene set in prose rather than dramaturgy. Interestingly, it is at this moment that God, too, experiences a recognition. Far from a deity with perfect knowledge, God as represented in this book—just as in Genesis and Exodus—must become aware, and does so through recognition of humanity and the earth. Like God’s recognition of Sarah in Genesis, and God’s recognition of the people Israel in Exodus, God’s act of recognition in the book of Ruth precipitates momentous changes in history. Whether it be a fertility crisis of decades, a servitude of centuries, or a [End Page 4] multi-year famine, God eventually takes note, and moves to intervene. (Of course, this begs the interesting theological conundrum of why the Bible sanctions a God who delays action.) Something effects a change in God’s perspective, and God’s passivity is thus interrupted. What causes God’s newfound recognition is not revealed to the reader; in fact, Naomi herself merely hears tell..." @default.
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• W2000515255 date "2014-01-01" @default.
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• W2000515255 title "Ruth: Playing with Redemption" @default.
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• W2000515255 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/coj.2014.0014" @default.
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