Beyond Sighing and Swooning: Love in the Hebrew Bible

Where in the Hebrew Bible can you find expressions of human love and the part it plays in life? There’s Jacob and Rachel’s enchanting kiss at the well in Genesis; there’s the Song of Songs, that fantastic and mysterious poem of sexual and romantic longing. And then of course there’s the book of Ruth, the most complete example of a biblical love story: a tale of two highly sympathetic characters, Boaz and Ruth, one an older bachelor and the other a young widow, who navigate a series of obstacles that seem to prevent their union from ever taking place until, in the end, it does—and, in a final scene, bears fruit in the birth of a child.

In short, the quintessential love story. Or is it? According to the Israeli scholar Yael Ziegler, the book of Ruth is not a love story at all and should not be read as one. Is Ziegler right? Borrowing heavily from her excellent recent study, From Alienation to Monarchy, I’ll present her case and then argue against it.

Exhibit A in the anti-love-story case is the character whose plight is front and center in the book: neither the Moabite Ruth nor the Judean Boaz but Ruth’s mother-in-law Naomi. Naomi’s husband Elimelekh and both of her sons have died in Moab; her daughter-in-law Orpah has heeded her urgings to seek another husband in Moab; and Naomi is now returning to Bethlehem penniless and bereft of all but Ruth, who in contrast to Orpah has rejected her mother-in-law’s instructions and instead “clung” to her. The Hebrew word is davak, which implies more than a physical holding-on, being used most often to describe the ideal relationship between Israel and God: