Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Ruth - A Further Thought

One final thing about the Old Testament Book of Ruth which we discussed at Bible Book Club last week.

Fairly late into the conversation I introduced the contextual material from Genesis 19:30-38. The myth told there about the origins of the Moabites was that the daughters of Lot got their father drunk and had sex with him in order to continue the family line. The answer to the child's question 'Daddy where do Moabites come from?' is that Moabites are what you get if you have sex with your father. It's not pretty and it's not complementary. The Bible is terribly xenophobic in places.

It means that the Book of Ruth is, to some extent, the parable of the Good Moabite and anticipates Jesus' Parable of the Good Samaritan.

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