Ruth is a lovely story, it’s humour is1 gentle and subtle. Part of the subtlety is that most (though not all) of the signs of humour are missing. However, I think we are intended to smile in at least two ways in the portrayal of the characters. For this entry in the humour series I [...]
Browsing Posts in Ruth
Well, Judges was thoroughly censored for E100, as it is for most church use, the bits we got were the rare good bits, cf. my Twisted tales: or should the book of Judges be censored? (which got me into trouble with a fundamentalist who could not be bothered to actually listen to what I was [...]
The book of Judges starts badly and gets worse. The end gets completely censored, never read in church, even the Sunday School stories get their naughty bits covered up! The book ends with a slogan in 21:25 “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.” Which neatly prepares for the [...]
After looking at Direct speech in biblical narratives and especially how the manner of speaking characterises Boaz and Naomi in the book of Ruth and a side glance at the question of whether Ruth’s very arrival at Boaz’ field was chance or not (in Chance or Providence?) I’d like now to suggestthat thinking more deeply [...]
There are many ways in which the story-tellers of the Bible ensure that their tellings are lively and engaging. One is through the way they report speech. There is usually more “direct speech” (where the words of a character are “quoted”) then “indirect speech” (where the teller tells us the gist of what the character [...]
Often in biblical narrative things “just seem to happen”, rather like they do in our lives But are such “happenings” chance or divine providence at work? We’ll try to decide, using Gen 37:12ff. (read with Gen 39) and Ruth 2 as examples. Right-click here to save the podcast for this audio
Typescene sounds like a typical technical term scholars use make Bible stories dull In this podcast I hope to show you it’s exactly the opposite and that by spending 5 minutes learning about typescenes you can discover a livelyness you may have missed, even in a well-loved story like Ruth. (Other passage you should have [...]
In this post I’ll start looking at how we respond to the Bible’s silences, often there are questions we want to ask the Bible, which the Bible does not answer. What do we do then? Some of these questions, like the one I start with produce classic biblical puzzlers… By the way, if the sound [...]
