Episode 253: Rev. Dr. Judy Fentress-Williams – The Book of Ruth

Pete  

You’re listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas. 

Intro  

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Pete  

On today’s episode, we’re talking about the book of Ruth with Reverend Dr. Judy Fentress-Williams.

Jared  

Yep, Judy is a professor of Old Testament at Virginia Theological Seminary and also the author of “Ruth” in the Abington Old Testament commentary series.

Pete  

Yeah, so we had a great conversation, let’s get into it.

Judy  

Jared  

Welcome, Judy, to the podcast. It’s great to have you.

Judy  

It is great to be here! Thank you for the invitation.

Jared  

Absolutely. We’re excited to jump into Ruth, so could you first walk us through the plot of the book? And introduce us maybe to the main characters? Just so that we have a feel for what we’re talking about here.

Judy  

Absolutely. So this is a short book, it’s only four chapters. We like to describe it as a novella, in that it has this really lovely, complete structure, but the story begins in Bethlehem with a family. We’re first introduced to the father, Elimelech, and then his wife, Naomi, and then their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion. They’re in Bethlehem in the area of Ephratha. And that word itself means “fruitful.” And so the place names “fruitful” in Bethlehem, which is “house of bread” suggests plenty. So that’s where we begin. And then a famine comes and the family is forced to migrate to Moab. We know from the history of the Bible that Moab is not the place you want to be because they’re foreigners, and they’re foreigners that we particularly don’t like. But because of the famine, the family is forced into this space. And while they’re there, first the father Elimelech dies. And then we have the two sons Mahlon and Chilion, who marry Moabite women. Their names are Ruth and Orpah. The story says that after about 10 years, they’ve been there about 10 years, both Mahlon and Chilion die. 

So in addition to this famine, we have all this death of the men in the family. Now we have Ruth left with Orpah and Ruth. The next action that happens in the narrative is that Naomi hears that now there’s food back home in Bethlehem. And so she makes this decision to return to her homeland and she begins the journey back with her two daughters-in-law, these two Moabite women. And the story goes that somewhere on the way back, she stops and decides she’s going to send them back home to their mothers and they protest. They want to stay with this family that they’ve married into, they want to honor this commitment they have and there’s this back and forth. Naomi finally prevails with Orpah and Orpah leaves to go back to her family. 

Then we have this iconic scene where Ruth says “No, no, no, no, I’m going to stay with you. Your people, my people, your God, my God. Where you die there, I die, there I will be buried,” and she goes on and makes this huge oath. So Naomi doesn’t have anything left to fight that off. They return to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest. And then Ruth engages in a practice we would describe as gleaning. She is able to go to places where people are harvesting, and in accordance with biblical law that we have in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the harvesters are forbidden to harvest everything. They have to leave the edges and the corners for the widows and the orphans. And so Ruth goes out on behalf of her mother-in-law to harvest and she just so happens to be gleaning in the field of a man named Boaz. The name evokes this strength—we’ll talk a little bit more about these names in a moment. 

And then Boaz just happens to come to the field on the day that Ruth is out there and he notices her and asks about her, and he’s told that she is a Moabite, and that she’s been working hard all day. And he immediately speaks to her and calls her daughter, and invites her to sit down and to rest and to eat with the workers. And then he instructs the workers not to bother her, not to molest her, not to make her time there difficult, and furthermore, to pull out a little grain so that she gets some extra. Ruth goes home at the end of the day and shows her mother-in-law what she has, and her mother in law says “Where have you been?” When she mentions the name of this relative, Naomi knows that this is someone who is related to them, someone who can stand in the role of what we would call a kinsman-redeemer, so he can help their situation. 

In the next chapter, Naomi instructs Ruth on what she wants her to do. She has a plan that she has hatched and she wants Ruth to execute it. She instructs her to put on her good clothes, to put oil on her skin, and then to go to the threshing floor at night. This is where Boaz is stationed. This is where people would be separating the grain from the chaff. It is a place where women would not be. She’s instructed to go at night and wait until he lays down, to see where he lays down, to make sure no one sees her, and then to stealthily get there. And when she gets there, she’s instructed to uncover his feet. And Naomi then says, “And he’ll tell you what to do.” And so Ruth does as instructed. She gets out there and then she uncovers Boaz’s feet. And the story goes that Boaz is startled when this happens and asks who she is. And she names herself, or self-identifies for the first time in the story, and makes a request of him. So she doesn’t do exactly what Naomi tells her, she doesn’t wait, she says, “My name is Ruth, put your cloak over me, cover your maidservant.” 

She’s asking for protection. Boaz offers a blessing and tells her this act of faithfulness is greater than all the other things he’s observed. He will take care of her. He tells her to stay the night because he doesn’t want anyone to see her, which is a little curious, because in the next scene, in the morning he fills her cloak with grain for her to take back to her mother-in-law. And so in the end of this chapter, she goes back literally carrying Boaz’s seed in this garment she’s wearing, and Naomi knows that everything is going to work out. 

The next day, Boaz goes to the gate of the town, where people would gather, where the elders would appear, where business transactions happen, and he waits because before he can fulfill this obligation to Ruth, he has to deal with the next of kin. There is someone who has the right to redeem Naomi and Ruth and their land before he. And so he waits for this man to come. And when the man comes, he greets him and says, “I have this opportunity for you to redeem the land of our kinsman, Elimelech.” And the man says, of course I want to redeem it. And then Boaz slips in, “Oh yes, and when you do, you will also acquire this Moabite widow.” And now all of a sudden the relative doesn’t want to do it, which frees Boaz up to do it. 

Boaz marries Ruth and upon marrying her, they have a child, and this child’s name is Obed. And that child at the end of the story gets placed in Naomi’s bosom. And so the line that would have been cut off with the death of Naomi’s husband and sons is restored through Ruth and Boaz, this kinsman-redeemer. Ruth is blessed by the women and Boaz is blessed by the men. And then the very end of the story gives us this lovely little genealogy, which takes us to King David. So we have a very short, compact story that is loaded with a great narrative arc, great, great dialogue, and there is meaning in all of these names.

Pete  

Thank you for that wonderful summary of the book. A couple of things just come to mind here, and I guess we’re getting into sort of like historical-critical kinds of questions here, but maybe just a cluster of questions. Like, why was this book even written, do you think? I mean, it’s hard to tell, you know, but like, why was it written? And there’s probably more than one opinion on that. But also, do you think this is primarily historical or fictional? And who cares? Like, what’s the difference between those two? What difference would it make?

Judy  

Yeah, those are great questions. So I would start by saying; Instead of asking why was this book written? We may want to ask; Why was the story told? The Israelites were an oral culture. And so this is a story that was told. And so the origin of the story, and the actual writing of the story committed to some kind of permanent form, could have been separated by generations. And that matters, because when we think about dating in a historical critical method, and we want to figure out when it may have been written, that may have very little to do with how long the story had been in circulation. So if I think about the story of Ruth, we are hard pressed to designate this story as history. All of the names are symbolic. Elimelech means “my god is king,” Mahlon and Chilion mean sickness and destruction, which is a sign about what’s going to happen to them.

Pete  

Yeah, what mother would name their kids that right? [Chuckles]

Judy  

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Judy

And there are a number of moments in the story that seem to be more appropriate to what we would see in a comedy. For example, Ruth goes to glean and it just so happens that she ends up in the field of Boaz. And an additional coincidence is that Boaz actually happened to show up at the field on that day.

Jared  

Pete asked the question of “why do you think it was written?” and we went down the path of it being more likely that it wasn’t historical, the names and the meanings, so can you talk more about the meaning of it? And I think we may need to comment too on the placing of the book in the Christian and Jewish canon because I think that’s going to be tied to this as well.

Judy  

Absolutely. So I like the argument or the theory that Ruth is written or comes into its final form at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, which would have been the sixth or fifth century. The reason I like that is because of all of the anti-foreign marriage material that we get in Ezra and Nehemiah, and particularly Ezra, where we have this very strange account of the people hearing the law, realizing they’re not supposed to marry foreign women, and then it simply kind of says they sent their wives and children away. How does that work? What happened to them? Did they not have any obligations to their family? It’s a strange—

Pete  

It’s not just “you can’t marry them.”

Judy  

Right.

Pete  

It’s, “you have to get rid of them.”

Judy  

Yes. And it was just a strange moment in the story where they all go away. What? How did that happen? And I wonder if we have, in that account, this desire on the part of the people, this movement towards this heightened sense of nationalism, and embracing of insiders and outsiders that goes a little too far. And in the story of Ruth, we have this counter narrative that essentially says, y’all wouldn’t even be who you were without this foreigner, and not just any foreigner, a Moabitess. And so the Moabites are people that the Israelites had a special disdain for [Chuckles]. And we have scripture references that tell us—I want to say something like Deuteronomy 23—that essentially says, “You shall not see to their well eing, so long as they live.” 

Pete  

Yeah, they didn’t like Moabites. 

Judy  

At all. And then we also have that story in Genesis 19, about the origins of the Moabites and one of the things we learn in the Bible: How do you disparage someone? How do you make someone “other?” Well, you disparage them by, you know, putting them in some kind of suspect sexual situation. So here we have Moab and Ammon, coming out of this incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughters.

Pete  

Yeah. Could you flesh out a little bit more, who the Moabites were? Like, where are they located and stuff like that?

Judy  

Pete  

Yeah, it’s interesting, Judy, that there are very oftentimes, as you know, multiple explanations for things like when something was written and why it was written just because the data aren’t there. We can’t really nail it down. But you prefer the later like post-exilic, Ezra-Nehemiah date?

Judy  

I do. 

Pete  

Okay, yeah.

Judy  

I am also happy to live with the theory that says the story originated at the time of David, and then gets reused in the time of Ezra-Nehemiah. I mean, essentially, that’s what we do with biblical stories. We’re taking stories that came from one context and applying them and using them in another one.

Pete  

Yeah, we do that with the Bible and the Bible does it within itself. 

Judy  

Exactly.

Jared  

There are a lot of these, I think we’re—hopefully, because I have a lot of questions—there’s some cultural idiosyncrasies from what’s the significance of a Moabite, to the uncovering of the feet, and—

Judy  

Jared  

—there’s a lot going on that if you don’t know the culture, you can be really confused. But before we get there, can you just comment though, on—because I do want to kind of tie a bow on the placement in the Christian and Jewish canon, because I find that really interesting as well.

Judy  

Absolutely. Well in the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Ruth belongs to a collection of writings that we call the Festival Scrolls, or Megillot. They are five books that are associated with holidays. And so in that collection we have Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Ruth, Esther, and Lamentations. So Ruth is associated with the Festival of Weeks, this harvest festival, and that makes sense. We’ve got all this harvest going on in the book. And so this book is chanted at that festival every year. So when people celebrate this holiday, they remember this story. So in the Hebrew Bible, we would see Ruth in that collection, that Megilot scroll in the third division of the Bible, which we call Ketuvim. 

So remember, we have what’s called an Old Testament, which comes from the Hebrew Bible—the same books, different order, and a slightly different count. That shouldn’t be distressing to any of us, 1 and 2 Samuel counts as one, 1 and 2 Kings counts as one, the Minor Prophets count as one, but all the same material. But the Hebrew Bible is divided into three divisions: the Torah (the first five books of the Pentateuch), and then that second section is what we would call the Prophets. So think Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and then the books we would call the prophets, the three major prophets and the 12 minor. Everything else is in that third division, the Ketuvim, and that would have been the part that came together last. So from that perspective, we would think of Ruth as a “later” book. However, the first translation of the Bible was from Hebrew into Greek in what we call the Septuagint. And when that translation took place, Ruth was moved. Why? Because the book begins in the days that the judges ruled. And the book ends with a genealogy that takes us to David. So based on those two time markers, Ruth also fits nicely in between Judges and Samuel. So that at the end of Judges, we come to Ruth, and then Ruth ends with the David genealogy, and sure enough, in Samuel we’ll be introduced to David. So those are the two different places where we would encounter Ruth.

Pete  

And those places are really, I mean, they’re just different rationales for placing that book in different places in the canon. 

Judy  

That’s right. 

Pete  

And apparently ancient people didn’t get all hung up about it. 

Judy  

No. No.

Pete  

Right? I mean, that’s interesting, we might.

Judy  

Yeah [Chuckles]

Pete  

But they don’t.

Judy  

No. But that’s because once again, we have a narrower view of Scripture because we come from a writing culture. When we think about these collections, this Bible is a collection of writings of stories. And so it could have ended up in a number of different orders.

Jared  

That’s helpful to me, not that it’s conclusive or anything, but it is helpful, because again, in my tradition, it would have been super important that we thought of Ruth as a historically accurate tale because of the connection with David and because of the overall view of the Bible. And the placement in the canon would have supported that interpretation, way more than the Jewish Hebrew Bible, which, you know, the Ketuvim, the writings, you wouldn’t really think of that as being a historical section of biblical books, per se. And so-

Judy  

That’s right. But I think the Bible, when we ask the question about historical accuracy in the Bible, it’s an invitation for us to be more critical of how we understand history. I like to tell my students that in many books of the Bible, history is in service to the narrative. That what matters most is telling this story about how God did something with God’s people. That they’re not writing for us, they’re not writing a historical volume for us. And so their concerns about getting all the details right is not a concern in the way that it is for us. And the reason that it is for us is, in many ways, our sense of truth is limited to historical accuracy.

Pete  

Jared  

Pete  

Ah, to live in the modern world.

Judy  

Yeah, we can’t let go of historical accuracy and still have the Bible be meaningful. And that’s a narrow space to live in.

Pete  

It is, and it’s a problem once you start reading the Bible and realizing things don’t fit together very nicely. 

Judy  

Jared  

Right. Well, in light of that, and in that spirit, I think, let’s maybe dive into the narrative. Because I do think there are some confusing cultural pieces here. So maybe, overall, we can first talk about this role that Boaz plays and there’s also the other person in the narrative of this kinsman-redeemer, and this levirate marriage, and what’s going on there that maybe we would be missing without that cultural context?

Judy  

Okay, so much. We have to remember in the ancient Near East, that land and property belonged in the hands of men, went from father to son. And so in the vast majority of cases, a woman needed to have either a husband or a son in whose name the land would be assigned on her behalf. We have some exceptions to this. We can talk about the daughters of Zelophehad later if we have time. But what we have in this story is Naomi losing her husband and then her sons. So now what levirate marriage affords is the opportunity for close living—the closest living male relative to marry this widow and have a child with her and that child then stands in as proxy for the father, maintains the name of this deceased father, so that the wife, the widow, can inherit land and be provided for. 

We have a nice account of marriage in Genesis with Judah and Tamar. And what’s interesting in this account, is that Ruth is younger. We know that Naomi is older because she goes on and on about the fact that she’s too old to have another son. So we have now Ruth, who will be the person who will enter into this levirate marriage with Boaz. Boaz marries her and has a child with her, and now that child will stand in the family line in the place of the deceased husband of Ruth, who was Mahlon. Now, what’s interesting is that it’s not clear that if the Moabites are persona non grata, how it is that Ruth gets to be in this levirate marriage in the first place?

Pete  

Yeah, I mean, especially since she’s not—yeah, she’s not related. 

Judy  

That’s right. 

Pete  

There’s no kinsmanship going on here.

Judy  

That is right. 

Jared  

Wait, so go back? What’s the complication with that? Say more about why.

Judy  

She’s a Moabite.

Jared  

Right. But is that on the fact that she’s a Moabite? Or just the fact that she’s not kin?

Judy  

That she’s not—

Pete  

Related to Boaz.

Judy  

Well, she’s related, the only way she’s related to Boaz is through Naomi. 

Jared  

Through marriage to Naomi’s son.

Pete  

Right.

Judy  

Correct. That’s right.

Pete  

So, Naomi is being helped by Boaz’s union with Ruth? 

Judy  

Absolutely. 

Pete  

So she’s doing a solid for her mother-in-law.

Judy  

She’s doing something that Naomi could not do. She’s the one who goes gleaning. She’s the one that goes out to the threshing floor. She’s the one that has this child with Boaz. And then the child gets placed in Naomi’s bosom and all of the folks in the town say, a child has been born to Naomi.

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

So then this really is an act of—in a lot of ways, I mean, I think it is for Ruth’s sake, as well. But in a lot of ways, it is an act of service to Naomi to provide a means of care for Naomi and legacy there.

Judy  

Yeah. So think again now about all the places in the story where Ruth is described as being faithful, this faithfulness that she has given or demonstrated to her mother-in-law. First by coming back with her in the first place, gleaning for her, doing all of these things for her mother-in-law.

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Pete  

Another aspect here of cultural issues—and if I don’t ask this, my students are going to kill me.

Jared  

Exactly, has to be.

Pete  

They’re going to kill me if I don’t ask this.

Judy  

Let me guess, what happens on the threshing floor?

Pete  

Yeah. What’s the uncovering of the feet?

Judy  

Pete  

I mean, we read all the notes in the study Bibles and say, yeah… It depends on how conservative the study Bible is, how far they want to go with this. 

Judy  

That’s exactly right.

Pete  

So explain what you—she uncovers his feet?

Judy  

Yes, so feet is a euphemism for men’s genitals. So think about Isaiah 6, you know, “In the year King Uzziah died I saw the Lord high and lifted up” and you have these seraphim flying around with six wings. “With two they covered their face, with two they covered their feet,” they’re probably covering their middle section, their loins.

Jared  

Right, okay. 

Pete

As is appropriate, I think.

Judy  

Yeah. [Laughs]

Jared  

Yeah, that’d be weird if it’s like, let’s cover up our feet, but not our genitals. Let’s leave that just hanging out.

Judy  

Pete  

Judy  

And so here in this story, she says, “uncover his feet, and then he will tell you what to do.” Now, what happens in this story is that he’s startled in the middle of the night. But before we get there, I can’t skip the best part. So in the original languages, the pronouns get messy. Naomi actually is saying to Ruth at one point in this narrative, “then I will go down.” So it’s like, who’s going down to the threshing floor, Ruth or Naomi? 

And so you have all of these notes that say, well, this is a very, very ancient polynomial suffix and it looks like it says “I” but it actually means “you.” And that is a legitimate explanation. But it is also possible that when we look at the overall structure of this story that something else is going on. Let’s go back to the origin of the Moabites, where you have Lot’s two daughters who say, “Look, we’ve got to do something so that our line is preserved, so that we don’t just die out.” And so they sit there and they say, we’re going to wait until our father gets drunk, and you will go in tonight, and then I will go in tomorrow night. So here you have in Genesis 19, the origin of the Moabites happens when these two women conspire to continue the line by doing what needs to be done with the man who’s a little drunk.

Pete  

In other words, you have the “You/I” interplay.

Judy  

Yes. And so—

Pete  

In Genesis 19, where the Moabites originated, and now you’re seeing like, I guess you’re seeing an intentional allusion—

Judy  

An allusion to that story.

Pete  

Oh, I—That’s a much better explanation for me.

Judy  

I like that. Yes. So then my question is, how do the Moabites get reincorporated into the story of Israel? You could argue in the same way they came out. You have this origin story which is the explanation for how the Moabites are excluded or why they are “other.” And in the story of Ruth, you’ve got a kind of acknowledgment of that origin tale in the story of how Ruth will become Boaz’s wife. And let me just pause here because I think one of the things we need to acknowledge in biblical stories of Moab and Ammon and Edom and all of these places that become these other nations and their enemies, that these people are all related. Right? Edom is Jacob’s brother, Esau. Ammon and Moab are Lot’s sons/grandsons. So one of the things I love about the Bible is, you know, the people who are your enemies are actually your cousins. 

And how does that help us think about our enemies today? Or who is “other”? These are constructs that we carefully form that we have stories about, to justify why we don’t like these people. And we have a great story. Well, now we have a story that asks the question, or perhaps this, and this is why maybe we should start embracing these people. In the story of Ruth, Ruth is the person who brings life to Naomi’s situation. Okay. Anyway, back to the feet. 

Pete  

Judy  

Pete  

Yeah. And? 

Judy  

I don’t know. 

Pete  

Oh!

Judy  

I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there, but here’s what we do know! I mean, this story is filled, it is rife with sexual innuendo. The threshing floor is the place where the grain gets sifted, and the whole agricultural world, this whole system, is one that’s built on fertility, and what you have to do in order to create, to produce fruit. And so written into this whole concept of planting seed, you know, you’ve got seed, which is—we think of as the seed that goes into the ground. It’s also the word for semen. So you’ve got all of this kind of sexual innuendo throughout the story, right? He literally puts seed in her apron and sends her back. 

Pete  

Mhmm.

Judy  

Right? So there’s all of this imagery that’s just kind of abundant. So the text doesn’t tell us but the text definitely teases us. There are people who will draw a line in the sand and say nothing happened. And I would say—How can you say that? A…

Pete  

Judy  

And B., what’s at stake in that statement? Why is it important that nothing happened?

Jared  

Right. That was the emphasis in the telling of the story in my tradition growing up.

Judy  

Jared  

We have to—

Pete  

No good girl would ever do this.

Jared  

We have to preserve Ruth as the faithful Proverbs 31, which happens to fit within our current sexual ethic and purity culture. And so that’s why. 

Judy  

And that’s so none of you young people get any ideas.

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

Right. Don’t go uncovering people’s feet, now! 

Jared

You can’t be a good person and uncover feet!

Pete

Right!

Judy  

Yeah. None of that. None of that!

Jared  

Well, that does tie in. And we want to turn here in the last bit of our time—it resonates in terms of your work on postcolonial biblical studies and the reception of the book of Ruth. And how that filter and how that way of thinking has shaped some of how you look at this book. And it seems to be tied some to this idea of enemies and cousins and outsiders and forced migration. And there’s just a lot here. So what has that impact been for you?

Judy  

Yeah, I like to think of Ruth as a survival manual and I like to think of it as a book about identity politics. I think that Israel is constantly struggling with her identity. This is a small nation that’s surrounded by big nations. So she’s constantly in a position of constructing and defending who she is over and against all of these other folks. That’s why you have such strong narratives against the enemy, “I may not be able to fight you, but I’m going to tell a really bad story about you.” And you see this in the way that the “other” is constructed. 

What’s interesting about Ruth is that if you read it through the lens of postcolonial approach, one of the things you would say is that Israel definitely sees the Moabite as other. But in this story, it is also saying there’s a moment in our history where we would not have made it without the stranger, the other, the foreigner. And when we look at the genealogy, it’s also saying the foreigner isn’t so foreign. The foreigner is our distant cousin. And so how do we reconcile the reality of our connection in humanity with our inclination to separate and divide? 

For people who are pressed to uphold the historical accuracy of every phrase and every word in the Bible, the Bible tells us that we all came from one person, from two people—shouldn’t say one, he didn’t do it by himself. But from two people, which means technically we all share the same blood. How then do we construct all of these theories around superiority and inferiority, and how this group has more rights, or this person gets more privilege, when in fact, we all share the same blood?! The only way to justify the oppression of other people is to make them something other and less-than. What the story of Ruth does is take a most hated other and put her in a role of exhibiting hesed, the faithfulness—the word that we use to describe God’s faithfulness—and as someone who has chayil. You mentioned the virtuous woman in Proverbs 31, the sense of the strength that she has. So in those ways, Ruth sets herself out as this wonderful example of a foreigner. The downside of this, of course, is that Ruth is so good that it also introduces this sense of exceptionalism, this idea that well, we can bring in a few others, but they have to be really, really good. 

That’s some of the tension in the story. I’m hoping that we read it to say this is an introduction, or an invitation for us to see the way that God works through the person that we deem “other.” And two, that our survival depends on us seeing God working through that “other.”

Pete  

Yeah. We need to bring this to a close, unfortunately, but just one side comment that you mentioned the chayil, which is the Proverbs 31 woman. I seem to recall that Ruth appears right after Proverbs.

Judy  

That’s correct, that’s correct. 

Pete  

Right, and that’s the connection they’re making—

Jared  

Right.

Judy  

Yes. 

Pete  

—in the Hebrew canon, rather than the other, like the say, the historical narrative kind of connection.

Judy  

That’s right. The Megillot can be ordered in one of two ways. In one ordering, it is in the first spot, which means it comes right after Proverbs, which would be lovely.

Jared  

Yeah. And I think that’s, whenever we sometimes think that there is “it’s always been a certain way-” 

Judy  

Jared  

I think allowing for this diversity and seeing—and sometimes even the older traditions make connections outside of the things that we’ve privileged, say, over the last three or four hundred years.

Judy  

That’s right, it really matters where you start telling the story.

Jared  

Absolutely. 

Pete  

It sure does.

Jared  

Well, thank you so much, Judy, for jumping on. And I really—

Pete  

This was just plain fun. 

Jared  

It was!

Pete  

This is fun talking about Ruth with you.

Judy  

Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

Outro  

Jared  

Well thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give.  

Pete  

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Jared  

And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@TheBibleForNormalPeople.com.

Outro  

You’ve just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People! Don’t forget, you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, Faith for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Natalie Weyand, Stephen Henning, Tessa Stultz, and Jessica Shao.

Judy  

And if you really are interested in uncovering the feet, you know, there’s this whole thing about a night demon or a river demon. 

Pete  

Oh, yeah.

Judy  

Yeah, so you can look into that.

Pete  

Why not?

Jared  

Oh. [Confused] What—What is it? Where do we find this? 

Judy  

Well, the question is why, what is it—why does Boaz say…I’ll try to find the reference for you. “Who are you?” What is he—what does he think?!

Pete  

Ohhhh.

Judy  

And there’s this idea that, you know, men can never lose semen without blaming someone. And so—

Pete  

Judy  

And it kind of—well this goes to your question of what actually happened, is if you have some kind of nocturnal emission, then it’s a night demon. 

Jared  

Right. 

Judy  

So is that what he thinks is going on with Ruth? And if so, then there was more going on!

Pete  

Jared  

Right, right, right.

Pete  

Right. 

Judy  

Yeah. 

Pete  

Gosh.

Jared  

That makes sense. Well, that’s fascinating, I know.

Pete  

That’s a whole episode right there. Night demons and nocturnal emissions. [Laughing]

Jared  

Pete  

Ah, the Bible!

Judy  

Yes. I love it, I love it, I love it.