A Brief History of the NIV Bible

Last week I said that I'll go over how the NIV was constructed.

So here we are.

A couple weeks ago I said that the NASB tends to render a more literal translation over the NIV, which sits at the center of the literal v. metaphorical scale of Bible translations.  That wasn't exactly accurate.

The NASB tends to translate things on a word-by-word basis, switching word order so that the phrases will make syntactic sense.  The MSG, tends to translate on a phrase-by-phrase basis, with an emphasis on readability over scholastic accuracy. Is this bad? No, I don't think so.

If you look at the history of the Bible, you'll notice that God never wanted people to be unaware of His power and grace.  Think about all the times the various patriarchs set up altars to God, and then the writer would remark "and it is still there to this day".  Now think about how many times the leaders of Israel made public announcements about God's plans and laws.  Now think about how Jesus went straight to a temple (the common meeting house of the Jews), and read from the scroll that spoke a prophecy about him, in front of the whole assembly.  Again and again you'll see how God wants his character and nature to be publically known, and even one of Jesus's last commandments was to go out to the entire world and teach people how to become disciples (Matthew 28:18-20).  Making a version of a Bible that was accesible to the common people wouldn't be unusual then.

This is why Martin Luther's Gutenburg Bible became so wildly popular: the Bible was no longer reserved for study by the clergy, but written in the language the people spoke and understood.  Shortly after, the Geneva and King James Bible followed suit, and the common people now had access to it.

It was with this mind that a few Bible scholars came together in the 1970's and decided to render a translation into modern English.  Since then, the Committe for Bible Translation has done a few updates to keep pace with the changing English language. 

Don't believe that the NIV needed to update itself into modern English?  Fifty years ago, the word "gay" used to mean "happy", but now (mostly) means "homosexual".  The first NIV came out forty years ago, so yeah, the English language changes and English Bibles need to keep pace with it.

Even in the 2011 version, the NIV changed the term "man", referring to the whole of humanity, to "humankind", because in popular language "humankind" is in far more prevelant use over "man".  These distinctions remain slight, but it is staying relevent and not stubbornly holding on to tradition.

Lastly, the NIV didn't solely rely on scholars, but retained a plethora of translators and commentators of various degrees of experience and beliefs to encompass the most complete and whole understanding of God's Word.  This was done to expand the scope of the NIV's translation, and try to render a translation that transcended factional beliefs, and it worked (for the most part).

When you get a copy of your Bible, be sure to read the section that describes the process and intent behind that particular translation.  The best way, of course, is to look stuff up in the original Greek and Hebrew, and try to fuzz all of it out, but I tend to be of the scholastic bent when it comes to studying my own Bible.

Honestly, this series took a lot out of me, and I'll be happy to start up a new series.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a lovely day!

Is your Bible missing scriptures?

As I mentioned in a previous post, some people are under the delusion that the Bible mystically appears in bookstores and aren't compiled and translated from a plethora of ancient manuscripts.  As I also mentioned at the start of this series, reading and writing in some of these dead languages was very difficult because some of them didn't have the language conventions that we are familar with, like spaces between words, punctuation marks, and upper and lower case letters.  So when we talk about the copies of copies of copies done by hand, errors happen.

If you haven't noticed already, I personally have an abiding affection when it comes to studying God's word.  I like learning the history and context of the events and symbols the Biblical authors write about.  So when I say that errors happen, I can't help but cringe just thinking about it.  But errors do happen 

The good news is that the modern Bible scholars figured this stuff out and have removed these errors. That's why modern translations of the Bible don't have verses like John 5:4, Acts 8:37, 1 John 5:7, and Mark 16:9-20; they weren't meant to be in the original text.

Before I go into why these verses are no longer in the newer translations of the Bible, can you find what these four passages of scripture have in common?  You don't have to look any of the passages up either; the clue to what they have in common is in their names.

Figured it out?  All of these deleted verses were from the NT.  Typically, the OT authors were VERY studious copying scriptures down; if it had more than a handful of errors, it would be relegated to "student study" use.  If the copies had anymore errors than that, they were burned.  The errors you'll find in the OT will be more along the lines of alternate spellings (which isn't an error really, I mean, think about the different ways to spell "Tsar", umm... "Tzar"? "Csar"?... You get the point), or numbers (like accidently adding a zero or switching the order of two numbers).  So why the deleted verses from from the NT?

Imagine hand-copying a novel in order to perserve it for future generations (because after twenty years, even the sturdious of books will wear out from constant use).  Now this hand-copying happens a few times until... well, how would you (a learned scholar), explain what a crinosole, or shellac, or a brazier is?  The obvious answer would be to add some explanatory notes.  Unfortunately, while we have modern means to add these notes in essays and dissertations (1), they didn't have this convention in ancient times.  A few generations later, someone comes along to make a new copy, and they add the notes to the manuscript, not realizing that they were not part of the original texts.

We get by this problem by adding this explanatory info at the botton of the page in our Bibles.  That's why in the 2011 NIV, Exodus 36:9 says "twenty-eight cubits long and four cubits wide", and marks at the bottom of the page that it was "about 42 feet long and 6 feet wide".

A second reason why extra passages entered into the textual lineage of the ancient manuscripts was because of oral tradition.  For the initial part of the early Church, people didn't think to write this stuff down, so the main way to pass the gospel around was by word of mouth.  Taking a familiar cue from how the Jews memorized long passages of scripture (like Psalm 119), the early Christians created oral traditions (like 1 Cor 15:3-8) to pass along their teaching (that's why in 1 Cor 15:5 says "to the Twelve" and not "to the apostles"; the term "apostle" hadn't been applied to "the Twelve" yet).

So if your spiritual cultivation included oral traditions, wouldn't it seem weird when while you are copying a gospel or epistle you find an instance where a teaching or event should have been, but clearly weren't added? To you, you'd think that you were "correcting" the error.

How do modern scholars tell the difference between additions and the original?  Well, we (mostly) owe that to the source documents the scholars translating the KJV used.  The original translators based their rendition from several codexes based off of the Masoretic texts (two out of the handful of texts that were available to them at the time).  Today, we have manuscripts that are much older than the Masoretic texts, and the older manuscripts simply don't have these added scriptures. 

The second reason why we know that some of the stuff was added in later is the same reason why you can read two different essays on the same topic and know that it was written by two different authors: it just sounds... different.  The way a person thinks reflects the way they express themselves, and when you read certain passages of scriptures (like Jeremiah), you can tell even through a translation that someone else picked up where the last author left off. 

Linguists and Biblical scholars have devoted their lives in the respectives fields, and have developed tools to pinpoint passages that may have been written by someone else.  Based on this information, they can make very educated guesses as to when someone added something, and when something was in the original texts.

Whew... this series is a bit dry.  I hope I'm not boring you!

Next week we'll take an in-depth look at the NIV translation, and how it was constructed.

See you there.

1: they're called footnotes :)

What evil corporations don't want you to read: the unpublished books of the Bible

Not exactly.

I think many people have a hard-wired reaction towards believing in danger and deceit over reason and trust, so that's why books labelled similarly to this blog post provoke interest (a cheap trick, I know, but I got you to read it, didn't I?)  This is a separate topic, and one that may be addressed later, but for now, let's see what these authors are touting about when they say "these are the scriptures that you are missing out on and should follow".

These "lost books of the Bible" typically fall into two categories: books that have doubtful authenticity (called apocrypha pronounced "ah-pa-creh-fah"), and the Gnostic writings (pronounced "nos-tik").  Let's start with the apocrypha.

If you start doing some research about the Bible, or come from a Catholic background, you'll eventually hear about books like 1 and 2 Maccabees, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Wisdom (Wisdom of Solomon), Baruch, Tobit, and Judith.  I'll shy away from why I think these writings were considered divinely inspired by at the Council of Trent (in year 1546), but I will say that there are several factors as to why I don't believe they are pertinent to spiritual cultivation.

The first is that none of the early Jewish scholars or historians regarded them as divinely inspired.  Josephus (37-100 CE) was a famous Jewish historian,  and he directly said that there were only 22 books of the Jewish canon.  Taking into account that Protestants divided (among other things) singular Hebrew books, like Kings, Samuel, Chronicles and the Minor Prophets, into more than one book, we come up with the same number of books that Josephus spoke about: 22.  Adding apocryphal books to the OT would... raise a few eyebrows among the Jewish community, to say the least.

Next is that the books tend to be hit-or-miss when it comes to historical accuracy. While the Bible has been noted to be so historically accurate that it outstrips the Egyptian and Mesopotamian histories, 2 Maccabees goes as far as apologizing for not getting all of its details right.  This is in sharp contrast to  the Bible's constant assertion to its accuracy, and that it is the direct word of God. Don't believe me? Read Amos and count how many times it says "This is what the LORD says".

Personally, I think the biggest proof that the apocrypha are not "lost books of the Bible" is because none of the NT writers, Jesus, or the early christians ever quoted from them.  When addressing the Pharisees, Jesus mentions the Jewish Canon of Scripture the Pharisees studied, saying “From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah" (Lk. 11:51, cf. Mt. 23:35), which conforms to the order Jewish scholars studied their scriptures, and that order didn't include the apocrypha.  So to Jesus and his early followers, none of them regarded the apocrypha as coming from God.

The second major collection of writings described as "lost books of the Bible" are the Gnostic writings.  The first thing you need to know about the Gnostic writings is that it was based on this Greek idea that anything spiritual was pure, and that anything physical was corrupted and sinful.  Add a sprinkle of Christian elements added to it, and POOF! You have Gnosticism. 

Unfortunately, Gnosticism faces a serious problem when dealing with the fact that Jesus physically existed on Earth.  If everything physical was sinful, and Jesus was physical, how could he be without sin?

The Gnostics got out of this conundrum by claiming that Jesus didn't physically appear on the Earth, but that he came "in Spirit".  In order to legitimize their claim, they wrote their own gospels and said that they were the inspired and revealed word of God.  The early Christians were quick to point out that these "Hidden-Until-Now" gospels weren't written by any early Christians, much less the apostles, and that most of the information contradicted the already established teachings.  One example is that the "Gospel of Thomas" contains passages which are meant to be kept secret, which doesn't makes sense because there are numerous passages in both the Old and New Testament encouraging people to make sure everyone knows about God.

Aside from that, the Gnostic "gospels" runs in direct contradiction to what we know about the real gospels.  At the very least, how could Thomas Didymus put his hands in Jesus's wounds unless Thomas could physically put his hands inside a physical body?  I could bring up several other instances in which denying Jesus's physical appearance on the Earth runs grossly contra to the biblical narrative, but let me just say that several early Christian writers knew that Gnosticism was a false teaching (some theories say that Jude was written in direct response to this), and universally rejected it.

In the end, modern Bibles aren't missing anything, and for your day-to-day, practical use, you aren't missing out on "hidden" or "lost" teachings by not reading the apocrypha or Gnostic writings.

Next week we'll talk about why your Bible makes a lengthy note about John 7:53-8:11, and other scriptures.

Sources used:

https://carm.org/why-apocrypha-not-in-bible

http://www.bible.ca/catholic-apocrypha.htm

http://www.gotquestions.org/apocrypha-deuterocanonical.html

http://www.gotquestions.org/gospel-of-Judas.html

Which is the most accurate translation of the Bible?

This is a bit of tricky question.  Which is the most accurate translation?

Purists scoff at The Message Bible, and (in my experience) exclusively read from the New American Standard, or some criticize the New International Version as too "politically correct", while others go around reading the New King James Version or English Standard Bible perfectly content. 

So which translation is superior?  Well, that depends on what you're looking for.

As I mentioned from an earlier post, translating (much less translating from a bunch of dead languages) is a hard thing to do.  Translators are constantly battling literal over metaphorical meanings, and what ends up happening is that some versions reflect the translators' decisions.  Generally, this scale of literal vs metaphorical goes like this:

NASB>HCSB>NIV>NLT>MSG

In order to highlight the differences between the translations, let's take a look at John 3:16 and see how the different versions render it:

New American Standard Bible
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

Holman Christian Standard Bible
For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.

New International Version
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

New Living Translation
For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

The Message Bible
This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.

Pretty much the same, right?  Now, check this passage:

New American Standard Bible
Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.

Holman Christian Standard Bible
The people here were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, since they welcomed the message with eagerness and examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.

New International Version
Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

New Living Translation
And the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they listened eagerly to Paul's message. They searched the Scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth.

The Message Bible
They were treated a lot better there than in Thessalonica. The Jews received Paul’s message with enthusiasm and met with him daily, examining the Scriptures to see if they supported what he said.

So, NLT and NASB say "Noble", HCSB and NLT say "open-minded", and MSG says something along the lines of "they were treated better, so they must be cool, right?"

It is in these moments that I turn to the original Greek and figure out why all of these Ph.D's disagree on the translation.  Apprently, the word used literally means "Born of high rank" (eugenes) or someone whose character is noble.  Since I'm pretty sure that Luke wasn't commenting on the socio-economic status of the Bereans, we can assume that he was describing their character.  What made their character so noble? They listened to Paul, kept an open mind, but tempered their enthusiasm with checking what he said against what the scriptures said.

So which rendering do you prefer? Noble? Open-minded?  Generous?  I'm in favor of "open-minded", because the literal meaning doesn't always convey the subtleties of the figurative meaning.

Now I have a bigger question for you: which translation is flat-out wrong? 

I don't think any of them are; some might emphasize certain elements above others, but they pretty much retain the same message: the Bereans treated Paul well, actually listened to him, and made sure that what he was saying wasn't just rabble-rousing, but true to what the Scriptures also said.

Next week we'll talk about the so-called "lost books/passages" of the Bible.  See you there.

How would you translate the Bible?

I think many people regard the Bible as something that is immutably sacrosanct, that only one version is true, always is true, and those words cannot mean anything else besides what is written on the page.

While I do admire this type of reverence some have for the Bible, I think they forget that the Bibles they buy at a bookstore had to come from somewhere. I mean, crates of Bibles don't come floating down from the sky and land on a bookstore's doorstep; they get shipped from the place they were printed, printed where the document was inserted, compiled before printed, and translated from the original languages before they were compiled.

At the source, the Bible was written in Kione Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic.  Today, modern scholars translate the Bible from these original version into everything from Afrikaans to English to Russian and even Chinese.  The problem with translating the Bible from one of its original languages into English (or whichever language is native to you) is the same problem all student of languages know: some things just get lost in translation. 

For example, if you want to express (in Spanish) your passionate, ardent desire for a certain special someone in your life, you'd say "Yo te amo", literally "I love you".  At the same time, if my friend's mom tells her son "Te quiero mucho" before he leaves the house, the literal translation would be "I want you much".  The closest English equivelent of "Te quiero mucho", however, is "I love you". 

Scholastic, diplomatic, and corporate translators battle this problem all the time: trying to convey the levels and nuances of meaning from one language to another.  For example, the word "repent" typically means  "changing one's mind after experiencing a deeply grieved conscience".  Etymology.com has the following entry regarding the origin of the word:

repent (v.)
c. 1300, "to feel such regret for sins or crimes as produces amendment of life," from Old French repentir (11c.), from re-, here probably an intensive prefix (see re-), + Vulgar Latin *penitire "to regret," from Latin poenitire "make sorry," from poena (see penal). The distinction between regret (q.v.) and repent is made in many modern languages, but the differentiation is not present in older periods.

In the original Kione, however, passages in the Bible translated as "repent" use a different word: "metanoia".  According to biblos.com, meta means "behind with", while noia means "understanding, mind". So "metanoia" = "behind with the mind", or putting away the old mind, the old thoughts, understanding and perspective of the world.  This is the same concept when Jesus teaches that new wine must be put in new wineskins (Matthew 9:27); repenting doesn't mean changes from a guilty conscience, but becoming something completely new and different. 

Like I said, some things just get lost in translation, not to mention what happens when you make a translation of a translation of a translation.  Hawaii's Pidgen Bible is actually an English translation into Hawaiin pidgen, or a translation of a translation of a translation.  Imagine playing the children's game telephone, but instead of trying to repeat exactly what was said, try to say the same thing using different words.  By the third person, you'd almost be guaranteed that what was said is not exactly what was said.

Does this mean that all translations are wrong and we need to read the scriptures only in their original languages?  Not at all, because every (English) translation I've read carry the same gist of the Bible message: God cares for and adores you, and wants a relationship with you. :)

That being said, there are some people I know who pretty much exclusively read the Bible in its original languages who deeply want to desire the greater intricacies revealed in God's word.  If you have any questions as to the wording of a scripture, I'd try to find the original Greek word used and then try to find other passages that use the same word.  Eventually you can get a sense of context about how the word is used, and the many multi-faceted meanings from a particular word or phrase.

Thanks for reading!  Next week we'll continue talking about the Bible and its different translations.

Why Should I read the King James Version?

Many people regard the King James translation as the most superior English translation of the Bible.  And they would be right-- 400 hundreds ago.

There are many people who say that reading any other version of the Bible (besides the KJV) is a sin.  Most of their claims are based on the fact that it is the original English translation, which is wrong (that credit goes to the Wycliffite translation in 1384), or that one must read the Bible in its original language, which is also wrong (it was originally written in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic), or that it has remained unchanged since its first publication, which is also wrong (it was first published in 1611, but underwent many revisions until 1769).  Modern English translations are far superior, and here's why:

First, the KJV was based on a handful of sources: the Aleppo and Leningrad Codex for the OT, and then the Textus Receptus, Theodore Beza's revised Textus Receptus, Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum omne, and (arguably) the Latin Vulgate for the NT.  

While the KJV was based on (about) six sources, modern translations use about 5,000 sources for just the NT alone. 

Not only that, but the Greek manuscripts that the KJV translators used were dated around the 11th century; today, we use manuscripts from the 1st and 2nd century.  That's not including the manuscripts we use for the OT (like the Dead Sea Scrolls), which are half a millenium older than our Greek sources.

Second, our understanding of Kione Greek is much better.  For several hundred years, scholars literally thought that the version of Greek the NT was written in was some sort of a celestial language.  It wasn't until relatively recently that scholars figured out that the Greek used to write the NT was a commoner's dialect.  Non-Biblical manuscripts were uncovered that were written in the same language as the Bible, but they weren't from the New Testament.  Comparing the non-Biblical and Biblical sources, modern scholars have a greater understanding of Kione Greek. 

Picture trying to learn English just reading Michael Crichton novels, and then discovering Stephen King, George RR Martin, Rowling, Steinbeck, Chaucer, and Shakespeare.  Your understanding of the language would expand in scope, much like modern scholarship in understanding Kione Greek.

Lastly, the English language has evolved, while the language used in the KJV hasn't.  Don't believe that languages evolve? Let's look at the word "soft".  Today, it's an adjective that describes something smooth, plushy, or gentle.  Back in Shakespeare's time (the time when the KJV was published), "soft" meant "hold on a moment".  That's why in Romeo and Juliet, Romeo says "Soft! What light from yonder window breaks?" 

In 1 Corinthians 13 of the KJV Bible, the word agape is rendered as "charity", while modern translators use "love".  The difference in this is huge, because agape describes a love without boundaries, while today we understand "charity" as being giving, yet this "giving-ness" doesn't require emotional investment.  If you can think of an English word that means the same thing, then perhaps modern translators should use it, but for now we are stuck with "love".

Despite this, are there any good reasons to read the KJV?  Several, but perhaps not for serious scholastic or spiritual guidance.  The first one would be because someone wants to learn more about the Bible, and they are stubbornly sticking to the version they are familiar with (myself at one time), so you have to accomodate them. Another is because there are few translations which are as dramatic and evocative as the KJV (which is why Hollywood almost exclusively quotes from it).  The last one would be to compare and contrast the modern translations, the KJV, and the original Greek, to convince the person stuck on reading the KJV that they are being stubborn and hard-headed.

We'll continue talking about the various translations, starting with a brief overview of the most popular English translations of the day.

Thanks for reading, and see you there!

How We Got the Bible: How the Ancients Read it

After you've studied philosophy for a while, you begin to ask some pretty weird questions; some of which we take for granted.

No, I'm not talking about "Why is the sky blue?" (That's a question for science), I'm talking about "What proof do I have for my own existence?  How do I know that I'm not a brain in a jar given the illusion that I'm experiencing life? What proof do I have that good and evil exists, outside of relying on the opinions of others (argumentum ad populum), or myself (when I know I've been wrong from time to time?"

These are very good questions, which we'll look at later (I keep saying that, don't I?), but for right now I want to ask a question that (I think) most people wouldn't normally ask about the Bible: why does it have chapters and verses?

I think most people take for granted that the Bible has chapters and verses, like how we often take for granted the existence of good and evil.  The problem is that the ancient Israelites didn't (and some still don't) read the Torah (first five books of the OT) or Nevi'im (pretty much everything else from the OT) with chapters and verses; they read it from a VERY LARGE scroll.  That's the reason why in Luke 4:16-21 Jesus unrolled a scroll and had to find the place where the prophecy about him was written.  Let me illustrate how hard that would've been:

Have you ever gone to a webpage that was exceedingly long?  Like you just kept scrolling down and down and down, and it just kept going?  Imagine doing that sideways, and the length of the webpage is a little less than the size of the Old Testament.  Now imagine that this HUGE scroll had no chapters and verses as reference points. Yeah, it was hard, and at least Hebrew had spaces between words.  Ancient Greek was much harder to read.

This may seem strange, but have you ever wondered why we have punctuation marks, capital letters, or spaces between our words? If you're reading this, then you're most likely familiar with reading things based on the Latin alphabet, and haven't been exposed to writting systems that don't have capital letters or punctuation marks.  Chinese, Korean, and Japanese don't have capital letters, but they have adopted punctuation marks into their modern writing.  Ancient Greek didn't have spaces, punctuation marks, or lowercase letters.  Try reading this:

IDONOTUNDERSTANDWHATIDOFORWHATIWANTTODOIDONOTDOBUT
WHATIHATEIDOANDIFIDOWHATIDONOTWANTTODOIAGREETHATTHEL
AWISGOODASITISITISNOLONGERIMYSELFWHODOITBUTITISSINLIVING
INMEFORIKNOWTHATGOODITSELFDOESNOTDWELLINMETHATISINMY
SINFULNATUREFORIHAVETHEDESIRETODOWHATISGOODBUTICANNO
TCARRYITOUTFORIDONOTDOTHEGOODIWANTTODOBUTTHEEVILIDON
OTWANTTODOTHISIKEEPONDOINGNOWIFIDOWHATIDONOTWANTTOD
OITISNOLONGERIWHODOITBUTITISSINLIVINGINMETHATDOESIT

That was Romans 7:15-20, and the entire New Testament was written like that. 

Spaces, punctuation marks, and lowercase letters helps differentiate when there are pauses and breaks in thoughts, and help establish when new thoughts begin or end. Remember that illustration I made earlier about a really long webpage read sidways?  Now imagine doing that while reading the above text.  Kinda hard to find a passage of scripture right?

Well, the good news is that there were a couple people who knew this, and a little while after the Bible was translated into Latin (which added spaces between words), a French dude named Stephen Langton divided the Bible into chapters in 1227, and another dude named Robert Stephens went a step further and separated the Bible into verses in 1551. The modern Bible still reflects that reference system.

That's why in 1 Corinthians 6:16, Paul quotes only portion of Genesis 2:24 andleaves out the rest of verse 24. To Paul, he was quoting a portion of a book, much like how we would quote a portion from a modern novel.

A dude named Don Steward does a good job explaining the pitfalls and advantages of having this reference system, but for now, I think we've wrapped up this topic for this week.

Next Tuesday, I'll be talking about the origin of the King James Bible.  See you there. :)

Image source: http://www.torahscribe.com

Ruth Chapter 3 (for real this time)

Last week I flubbed and said I was going to examine Ruth chapter three.  It was really chapter two.

Let’s try this dance again.

To recap: Naomi’s husband and sons have died, leaving her and her daughter-in-law, Ruth, widows.  Ruth sticks by her, and they move close to a relative who takes up responsibility of them.  Ruth works hard under the care of Boaz (the aforementioned relative).  This attracts the attention of Boaz.

The narrative: Naomi tells Ruth that she needs to step-up Ruth and Boaz’s relationship.  She tells her to get all nice and pretty and sleep at Boaz’s feet when he goes to sleep that night (this was understood to be a marriage proposal in those times).  Boaz stumbles into the barn, knocks out, and Ruth lies down at his feet.  When big brother Boaz wakes up, he sees a woman sleeping at his feet, and is a little confused (understandably). He is a bit peeved that he might be associated with drunk-sleeping around (understandly), and demands to know who it is.  Ruth identifies herself, pleads with Boaz to be more involved with her care, and Boaz agrees— but first he’s got to convince someone who is more closely related to them to marry her.  Boaz then sends her away with a large gift of grain, to help seal his promise, and the chapter ends.

Hookay, let’s break apart some of the more important parts:

First, Naomi tells Ruth to clean herself up, put on some perfume and nice clothes.  Now let’s be honest here, a guy will have a harder time saying “no” to a well-dressed, well-groomed, pretty lady.  We could say that Naomi was appealing to Boaz’s carnal nature, but people washed, perfumed, and put on their “Sunday best” when they visited God’s temple as well.  Looking and smelling nice isn’t just to engender physical appeal, but a symbolic gesture of respect— like going to a job interview (and in effect, this was what Ruth was going to do).

Second, when Boaz wakes up he’s kinda freaked out that there is some random lady sleeping at his feet.  His reaction of surprise and indignation is pretty indicative of his character: he doesn’t go around taking random women (including his servants) to bed with him, even while drunk.  Waking up with a woman at his feet could spawn a lot of bad rumors about his character, something that he’d want to avoid, and you could guess at his anger and confusion at the event.

Third, Ruth and Naomi trust that Boaz won’t take sexual advantage of Ruth while she sleeps at his feet.  He’s got the power to make her stay with him and coerce sexual favors from her if he so chooses, but he doesn’t.  They know Boaz wouldn’t do it, and I suspect that even if he did, Naomi and Ruth had no choice in the matter.

Fourth, Boaz agrees to the proposal.  Ruth puts her reputation and her body (read: physical safety), on the line when she sleeps at his feet.  Boaz knows they are in a desperate situation, and is probably deeply moved by the trust these two women have placed on him.  He has mercy on them, and probably remembers that the Israelites were foreigners long ago, and they needed help in a foreign land. He decides he should help them too.

Fifth, Naomi had a closer relative who could’ve taken care of them (as Boaz notes), but for some reason they didn’t go to that other relative.  This could be for several reasons: they knew Boaz was more righteous than the other relative, Boaz was in a better financial position to take care of them, or the other relative didn’t have that much incentive to take care of them.  Whether this was from clever planning of Naomi (which I suspect), or from God’s providence, I’m not too sure, but I’m going to trust God that he had a reason for the events to unfold the way they did.

Not much moving stuff this week (that I noticed), but good stuff nonetheless.  Next week we’ll be closing up the study of Ruth with chapter four.

See you there.

The Loyalty of Ruth

In last week’s post I described how Ruth trumped Esther in pretty much every category that mattered when it came to who was a better role model.  This week I want to explain why I admire her so much.

To set the scene:

Naomi was married to a dude named Elimelek.  They had two sons (Mahlon and Kilion), who married the Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah.  Through circumstances that aren’t described in the book, all the husbands die, and Ruth and Orpah (not Oprah, though that would’ve been awesome) accompany Naomi to the border of the Moabite lands.

Ruth and Orpah are Naomi’s daughters-in-law, but not even that because they aren’t married to anyone who is related to Naomi.  Despite this, when Naomi encourages her ex-daughters-in-law to leave her, everyone bursts into tears (Ruth 1:9-10, 14).  We don’t know how much time they spent together before their respective husbands died, but we do know that they had a deep relationship and were deeply grieved to be separated.

Orpah leaves Naomi, and returns to her people and gods.  Ruth wants to stay.  Naomi pleads with Ruth, “your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods.  Go back with her.”  Then we hear Ruth’s response, and one of the most beautiful declarations of loyalty in the scriptures:

“Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you.  Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.  Your people will be my people and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.  May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”

Wow.  Just, wow.

Ruth is willing to leave behind everything she knows, either because she is convinced that Naomi’s god is the true God, or that by Naomi’s example she’s become convinced that she must help this wonderful woman.  Both Ruth and Naomi are widows now, and they both know that their lives will be very hard from here on out, yet Ruth’s response isn’t a “let’s pool our resources”, it’s a “I’m sticking with you, whatever the cost, life or death, I’m with you.” 

I think that having someone to constantly back you up isn’t a necessity of life, but it sure helps to know you’ve got someone in your corner, not because they need to be there, but because they want to be.  That’s awesome.

Do you have someone in your life like that?  Someone who says “life or death, I’m with you”?

Are you that type of person to someone else?

We’ll continue talking about Ruth next week.  See you there.