Graybill & Guillaume/Ruth, 10. Ruth and Moab: Abjection and Intimacy

The chapter is a dialogue between its two authors. In the first section, Sabo discusses the significance of Moab in the Hebrew Bible and its relation to the book of Ruth, in which the lines of Moab and Judah converge. In the second section, Landy analyses the first five verses of the book, in which the family of Elimelech travels to Moab, in the context of the origin story of Moab, concluding with the crucial encounter on the threshing floor. In the third section, Sabo shows how both Ruth and Boaz subvert the stereotypes associated with their ethnicities; Boaz is an anti-Judahite as much as Ruth is an anti-Moabite. In the fourth section, Landy discusses the relation of Ruth to the story of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19; its role as metahistory in foregrounding the question of whether love survives death; and its evocation of the death of Moses in the plains of Moab and Balaam’s blessing of Israel, which Ruth fulfills.