The beginning in the end
Orpah remembers
Ruth 1.
I remember the first time I saw their family. I was just a girl, and I’d tagged along with my mother when she went to the market. I heard a woman with a funny-sounding accent trying to barter with a few coins for some food to feed her family. I looked over and saw a boy clinging to her skirts. He wasn’t much older than me but I noticed that his clothing looked…weird. And when he spoke, he echoed his mother’s funny-sounding accent. When my mother caught me staring, she grabbed my hand and whisked me away from that foreign boy and his mother.
Photo by Graphic Node on Unsplash
I was young, secure with my home and family – what did I know of the strength it took for that mother to uproot her family, to risk the perilous journey to another country? I didn’t know of the determination required to go to the market and subject yourself and your children to the rude stares and rolling eyes of those around you. I didn’t understand the guts it took to willingly move to a place where parents might tug on the arms of their curious children to keep them away from you. Or the force of will it took to endure the whispers of people who complained about “outsiders” coming to take up precious resources, stealing jobs, occupying limited housing.
And on that day, I had no idea that the strange boy I’d stared at in the market would one day become my husband, or the woman with the funny accent would become my cherished mother-in-law.
Everything I know about strength, I learned from Naomi.
She didn’t talk about it often, but sometimes, when we’d finished our chores for the evening and had a few moments before turning to bed, she might tell Ruth (my sister-in-law) and I about her life “before.” Before the famine. Before she moved to Moab. Before she lost nearly everything. Then she had what most people would consider “the good life.” She was married, and she and her husband had two sons. It was the kind of life that I dreamed of when I was a girl. The way she described Bethlehem in Judah sounded idyllic.
Her life was no idyl, however.
Instead, a famine chased her from her home and into Moab. There is no love lost between Moab and Judah… And she buried her husband in the soil of Moab. Still, she carried on as best as she could. She managed, against all odds, to build a life, though she was now a widow in a land that she never called home. Once upon a time, my mother whisked me away when she saw Naomi, newly arrived from Judah in the market. However, my family had an abundance of daughters and not much capital. So, when Naomi, by then a familiar face (even if she never lost her accent), came to my father and asked if they might consider giving me as a wife to her son, he agreed. Naomi found another woman – Ruth – to marry her other son. Though I was afraid in the way of a bride the day we said our vows and I went to live in Naomi’s house with my new husband, it didn’t take long for me to realize that this was a good family. I was treated kindly. I grew to love my husband. Naomi was generous and gentle with us. Ruth and I became fast friends. And things were pretty good for a few years.
Those years were not without their struggles, of course. Now that she’d managed the Herculean task of finding wives for her sons, the one thing Naomi wanted more than anything was to be a grandmother. She waited so eagerly for babies that would grow our family. With two sons and two new daughters-in-law at the prime of their lives, it should have happened easily and quickly. But month by month, and then year after year, neither Ruth nor I had any announcement to light up her eyes. No matter how often we wished, lit candles, prayed to her God (and ours), and hoped; no matter how many of Naomi’s home remedies we tried or how much advice we put into action, our wombs remained stubbornly empty. This went on for ten long years, and after a time, we’d mostly given up the hard work of hoping.
And then, without warning, death struck. Again, for Naomi. It took Mahlon and Killion – my husband and then Ruth’s (and both of Naomi’s precious sons) one right after the other. Now it was just Naomi, Ruth, and I… three unattached widows in a world where belonging to a man was everything. One of these widows was long past child-bearing years, and the other two had not been able to conceive a child despite a decade of trying. What could become of a household like ours?
Naomi was usually strong and tended to take things in stride. But something shifted in her after the death of Mahlon and Killion. On her worst days, Naomi (whose name means “pleasant” or “sweet”) would say she didn’t think she wanted to carry on, now that her life had become one bitter pill after another. Naomi would still pray to the God that she worshipped and walked with for years, but her prayers sounded jaded and cynical. She never said she doubted that her God existed; she simply stopped believing her God was good. She believed God’s hand had turned against her. With this kind of testimony, I admit I hedged my bet. I would bend my knee to worship her God when she did so in her house; but sometimes I would whisper prayers to the deities that I had grown up worshipping in my own home. …Not that they had helped much either when everything was taken away from us...
Photo by Marcus Ganahl on Unsplash
I still remember the day that Ruth and I come home from selling our produce in the market, carrying our meager earnings to Naomi, and I saw the first glimmer of hope in the eyes of my poor, worn-out mother-in-law. She hugged Ruth and I tight and told us that she’d heard a rumour that there was bread again in her home of Bethlehem in Judah. She clung to this piece of news like someone drowning holds onto a rope. That very evening she began sorting and packing what little we had. She urged us to join her – and Ruth and I, almost giddy with her sudden rush of energy – did as she asked. I realized with some surprise how close the three of us had become as we’d struggled together all these childless, sad, tiresome years. And the very next day we set out on the road with Naomi – who by now was like a mother to Ruth and I. I couldn’t remember the last time Naomi, whose joints were growing stiff with age, moved so quickly as she did as we started out on the road to Bethlehem. She was, after all these years of loss and disappointment in the land of Moab, going home.
After a day or so of travel, however, I noticed Naomi’s steps began to slow, and then she stopped. Concerned, Ruth and I turned to attend her, but she waved off our efforts. Instead, she told us that she’d come to a decision. While Bethlehem in Judah was home for her, it wasn’t home for Ruth, and it wasn’t home for me. And if she dragged us there, we would then become what she had been for all the time I knew her – a stranger, a foreigner, living among people who didn’t trust you; forced to behave, speak, and even worship in unfamiliar and hostile ways. She’d lived this herself, and she didn’t want this kind of life for Ruth and me. She assured us that we had become more than daughters-in-law to her – we had become her friends. And she knew that her own prospects in Bethlehem were not good. She was going home, she said, because she wanted to die among familiar faces, and she refused to give the soil of Moab the satisfaction of taking her too. Her prospects were dismal; ours were impossible. She could not give us new husbands in the way that her people had provided for widows for so many years – by bearing new sons for us to marry. And she knew that she had nothing with which to help us negotiate for husbands in Bethlehem. I knew Naomi never grew to love Moab; but it was home for me and for Ruth. And so she urged us to return to our mother’s houses, the houses we grew up in, for the sake of our own futures.
There were so many tears! Ruth and I pleaded with her, held on to her, and cried forever at the thought of watching Naomi – the centre of our home for so many years – walking away, never to see her again. Naomi cried too, telling us repeatedly that she was only doing this because she cared for us. We must turn back and save ourselves. “Go home!” she told us over and over.
And so, after more tears and about a million good-byes, I turned to do just that. And I expected my close friend Ruth to do the same.
I couldn’t believe it when she did not. Dear Ruth. Stubborn Ruth. How silly do you have to be? No one in their right mind would throw their fortune in with Naomi. Just ask her! She was used up, worn out, perhaps even cursed by her God.
Apparently, Ruth wasn’t in her right mind. She refused to turn her back on Naomi. She hitched her wagon to the star of an old, broken-down, hopeless widow. And she bound herself to Naomi with a beautiful oath. In time, people would even come to use these words in their wedding vows, though I wonder if people who speak these words while wearing a white dress, or standing amongst flowers and anticipating pictures and cake and a party, know that these words were first uttered in the “for poorer” part of life. Ruth said to Naomi:
“Don’t force me to leave you; don’t make me go home. Where you go, I go; and where you live, I’ll live. Your people are my people, your God is my God; where you die, I’ll die, and that’s where I’ll be buried, so help me God – not even death itself is going to come between us!” (Ruth 1:16-17).
And so, it was I who returned to Moab by myself, while Naomi carried on her way, with Ruth trailing behind her. When Ruth wrote to me and told me of their journey toward Bethlehem, she told me how quiet it was. Naomi was so shocked and undone (to be honest, I shared this sentiment), that she had nothing left to say. Naomi had simply picked up the little bag she had with her, and pressed on toward Bethlehem, leaving Ruth to hurry and catch up with her. When they arrived in Bethlehem, Ruth wrote, they were the talk of the town. They barely recognized Naomi who had gone out with a family of four, but who had returned to them after so many years, empty, hopeless, and bitter.
But the one thing she wasn’t was alone.
Because Ruth, despite the colour of her skin and the household she’d been born into, had never left Naomi’s side during that long, silent journey. In fact, Ruth made good on the oath she uttered at the roadside. She never abandoned Naomi.
Everything I know about strength I learned from Naomi.
Everything I know about loyalty and love I learned from Ruth.
