Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 59 · February 28
The Road Out of Moab
“And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:”
Three widows standing on a road between two countries, and the oldest has just told the other two to go home.
Turn again, my daughters, go your way; for I am too old to have an husband. Naomi works the arithmetic and finishes with her reason: for it grieveth me much for your sakes that the hand of the LORD is gone out against me. She believes God has turned on her, says it to their faces, and one of them stays anyway.
Take Ruth in as a person rather than as a reading. She is Moabite, from a nation Israel's law kept at arm's length: An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD. She married into an immigrant family who had come to Moab because Bethlehem was starving. Ten years, no child recorded. All three men of the household are dead, and the only person left with any connection to her is a bitter foreign woman with no legal duty toward her whatever.
Orpah does the sensible thing and goes home, and the book never says a word against her.
What Ruth answers is an oath, ending with a curse called down on herself if she breaks it: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me. Sitting inside it is thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God, said to a woman who has just told her that this God is against her.
They reach Bethlehem, and Naomi announces to the town: Call me not Naomi, call me Mara. I went out full, and the LORD hath brought me home again empty. Ruth is standing next to her while she says empty.
The warning, then, for anyone who has heard these lines at a wedding. They were spoken uphill, to somebody who could give nothing back and did not say thank you, by a woman binding herself to a God she had watched fail to look after the family she married into. Borrow the sentence if you like, and borrow the address it was spoken from as well.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 59 is Sweet Sleep (Proverbs 3:24).