5 minute Bible

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 saying before condemning me to hell – so it may be worth listening to ;)

Ruth is about “redemption”, the need for husband for Ruth and so a baby to continue the “house of Elimelek” and to provide for the two widows, and so it’s about the primary virtue of the OT (and of redeemers) “hesed” faithfulness/love/kindness in covenant relationships.

So Ruth (in the Christian Bible placed between Judges and Samuel) redeems:

• it echoes and redeems the ancestral stories of failure: Judah and Tamar
• it announces and prefigures David (remember David & foreign woman, Bathsheba?) and redeems him
• it stands between the terror and chaos of Judges and presents a world where God’s virtue is revealed in his creatures lives!

An everyday tale of country folk – but crammed with theology and incidentally a crackingly well-told tale with no violence, death or hatred, but which keeps our interest all through :)

I have a few other podcasts on this lovely book.

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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 books of Samuel except by the time we reach the end of 2 Kings (even if we are slow learners) we realise that kings are not much better.

And that’s how Scripture develops in the Hebrew Bible, in the Christian Old Testament Ruth stands between a beautifully told and thoroughly nice story between two ugly collections of humans behaving badly. A reminder of God’s redemption of human wrong, and of the part we humans can play in revealing that redemption.

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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 said). This direct speech is often skillfully crafted to give a lively and rich portrayal of the person. The podcast begins with cases where a group of people speak (we already heard one of these in the post Humour in the Bible: Part 2: Still Introducing Saul). Another example of this is found in Jonah 1:8 though here different emotions are expressed. The book of Ruth uses skillfully differentiated speech to help portray the characters. In this podcast we’ll look at Boaz’ two speeches to Ruth from chapter 2 (Ruth 2:11-12; 8-9).

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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.

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