Prompt: My Favourite Book by Another Author

My Favourite for me means a book I come back to again and again, with anticipation, knowing that I love it, and will feel at home there, and knowing too that I will always find more and understand more than I did before. So I have chosen the tale from the Bible of the Book of Ruth.

It is a roller-coaster of a story, with love, death, famine, abandonment, hope, friendship and a witty combination of innocence and arch manipulation. Women had so few choices back then. They were nothing. They had no power, no status. All depended on finding a male relative to speak for them, and in their dire distress, by honest and intricate means, that is what Ruth and Naomi did.  

Ruth leaves home  to marry, and settles down until suddenly the brothers die, and the mother-in-law must flee. Naomi gives Ruth the chance to go home, safely back to her own people to start a new life.  

We hear so many tales of the cruelty of mothers-in-law, and half the world's comedy mocks them. What I find so special here is the absolute bond between them. Naomi must have been a true second mother to Ruth, she must have been wonderful, for Ruth to reply as she did:

"Your people will be my people, your God will be my God."

I often think about what Ruth saw when she looked at Naomi. Did she see her husband in his mother's eyes, or had he had Naomi's wit and sparkle? Did Ruth recognise in Naomi the architect of her married happiness, the woman who taught her sons to be good. And what was so good about them? Were they fun, helpful, easy-going? And at the same time strong, determined, courageous, and clever?

Well Naomi was all of these things. When I first read the book, I totally missed the highly refined astuteness of this elderly and abandoned woman, revealed when they got to a place of relative safety, with her plan for survival. I thought it must be some kind of misprint, or mistranslation. I  should have mentioned, this was written in Aramaic. It's the only book left in the Bible that is in this language, which was the first language Jesus spoke. It appears in the Hebrew Bible and then in the First Testament of the Christian Bible. Jesus would have known it very well. Naomi's family lived in exile from Bethlehem, which must have struck a chord with him.That makes me love it more.

So we find Ruth as refugee, amid the alien corn, standing lonely and forlorn, espied by a wealthy man as she in hunger and desolation picked unwanted grains up from the floor.

John Keats, the English Romantic poet, imagined her there, crying for all that was lost, her heart unlocked by the song of a Nightingale:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 

          John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, stanza 6 

 It was at this turning point, from the depths of her despair, through mightily surprising ways,  that Ruth garnered in addition to the dusty grains, the man who would be her next husband. Keats' symbolic nightingale unlocked her emotions, and opened the casement on her future both because of Ruth herself, and by the vigorous legal mind of her mother-in-law.

It is a tale of devotion, and daring. It seems essential to me that both of these go together. These are inspirational women who have as much courage as love, and as much wit and wisdom as action. Together they are magnificent.

But they don't shy away from is what is and what must be. I still can't believe that the story actually says what it does.

I shall not say it. I shall leave it to you to find out :))

https://youtu.be/RBg-QRx61w0

(https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ruth+1 is in the external link - click on the chain icon to access it)