Just four chapters, here’s a story without violence or even conflict, a simple everyday tale of country folk, yet Ruth grips hearers is loved by everyone and carries profound theological messages, that echo into the books before and after Ruth in the Christian Bible...
Go’el is another thoroughly cultural word, that is highly theological. Again it is prominent in Ruth. This time there is one English word that is often a decent translation, redeemer, the problem is redeem carries a different weight of overtones from ga’al. There is a good short post about ga’al here with reference to Jesus [&hellip...
Here’s the first of a new series of podcasts on words that pose particular difficulty because English either lacks clearly similar concepts, or the word carries quite different connotations (emotional overtones and other baggage) from the word that denotes (points to) a similar thing. The first word is hesed a key virtue in the Bible [&hellip...
Here’s the video version of this podcast (the audio only version is here). It offers another approach to Ruth, this time borrowing from the Swiss scholar Crapon di Caprona and suggesting a reading of Ruth 2 that takes account of the cultural discrepancy implied in the text… what DO you think...
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 [&hellip...
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. ...
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 [&hellip...
Like soap-operas, and other serials, biblical narratives with several episodes often seek to bridge between two parts. These bridges are often verses that serve to link one episode to another. We’ll look at examples from Ruth, Jonah and Genesis 2-...
Ruth is a lovely story, it’s humour is (( Chapter three is a possible exception – and the humour there, if there is humour, is disguised and sexual, so very difficult to spot with confidence across cultures! )) gentle and subtle. Part of the subtlety is that most (though not all) of the signs of [&hellip...
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 [&hellip...
