The kingship of David appears to be in direct violation of the Mosaic Law—or is it? As Ruth is traditionally studied in celebration of Shavuot/Pentecost, I want to tackle this important question.
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Shavuot, or you might call it Pentecost, is coming up and it is traditional to study the Book of Ruth. Why is that? Because Ruth takes place largely during the barley and wheat harvest that mark the time between Passover and the Feast of Weeks, aka Shavuot. And Ruth introduces a mystery into the Scriptural account of King David. Namely, how can the descendant of a Moabite be not only the King of Israel, but also God’s own choice for Israel’s King? As we will see, this is strictly forbidden in the Mosaic Law and this indeed poses a problem for legalists who see all of the laws as black and white, set in stone decrees. If we view the law is immovable, then we must reject David, but if we see the law as wisdom guidelines and even, as Yeshua/Jesus Himself said, allowances made because of hardness of heart—then the beauty of the story of Ruth opens up for us like a rose and the debate subsides as we see that Yahweh truly is the same yesterday, today and forever.
Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.
All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible which my friend Matt Nappier plugged me into and I am enjoying, but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want.
First of all, I want to talk about Moab. According to Genesis 19, the Moabites and Ammonites came about because of incestuous relations between Lot and his two daughters and if you have ever wondered how such a thing could have happened in the first place, and why those girls would have considered it their duty, I wrote about it in my curriculum book, Context for Adults: Sexuality, Social Identity and Kinship Relations in the Bible. But anyway, these are the reported origins of both Moab and Ammon, Israel’s neighbors to the east and close kin—much like the Edomites of Mt Seir. All of these descend from Terah, Abraham’s father. So, were the Moabites and Ammonites cursed because of their origins? No, of course not. In fact, God blessed them and gave them their own inheritance—a land inheritance that Israel was not permitted to encroach upon or take away. The problem with the Moabites and Ammonites came up when Israel was completing their forty years of wandering in the wilderness and were trying to access the Promised Land from the east, requiring them to travel through the nations bordering Canaan. We see this described in the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Now, Yahweh had absolutely forbidden the children of Israel to lay a finger on either the Moabites or the Ammonites, but He did give them a victory against the Amorites, and against Bashan, and against the Negev. This was because, again, of Yahweh’s covenant with Abraham, Lot’s uncle. But the Moabites were terrified of Israel—maybe they didn’t get the memo that the Israelites weren’t allowed to mess with them. And hence we get to the very famous encounter with Balaam, a pagan who for some strange reason could speak to and hear from Yahweh. I guess he had his satellite dish tuned correctly. And he was famous for this, so Balak, the king of Moab, hired Balaam to curse Israel. And the whole account is a complete disaster for Moab, and for a lot of cattle and for all those people who had to build all those altars on the spot to sacrifice them on. Yahweh, of course, uses Balaam to bless Israel instead of curse them. Multiple times even, making the entire story very comical.
However, the sequel is anything but comical. Balaam wasn’t permitted to curse Israel, however, he did figure out a way to advise Moab into creating a set of circumstances where the men of Israel would bring curses onto themselves instead. So, instead of providing hospitality to the children of Israel on their way through to the promised Land, the Moabites instead showed the men of Israel disastrous hospitality by throwing a huge cultic feast where the men ended up deciding to eat meat sacrificed to the Moabite gods, and either engaging in cultic prostitution and therefore joining themselves to the ba’alim of the Moabites or intermarrying. I have heard good arguments for both and both do count as prostitution in terms of idolatry. One bold young couple actually entered the camp of Israel, perhaps for more privacy, and Phineas speared them through when caught in the act. That day, twenty-four thousand were reported to have died of the plague that was unleashed against Israel and all of the leaders of Israel who were involved with this idolatry were killed as well.
But what would this have looked like from Moab’s point of view. In my opinion based on ancient Near Eastern culture, I don’t believe they had ill intent. Certainly, Balaam’s advice almost certainly had ill intent but then maybe not. Balaam could actually have been giving what any pagan would consider to be good advice when faced with a threat from a more numerous people and their regional deity. Namely, “If you can’t beat them, join them—and/or get them to join you.”
You see, the Moabites would not have been able to even remotely imagine a god who was jealous and exclusive. That sort of thing just didn’t happen in the ancient world. All of the gods needed to be served and worshiped or the cosmic functions that hey took care of would fall into ruin. The sun wouldn’t come up, the rain wouldn’t fall, the crops wouldn’t grow, etc. They didn’t live in the sort of world where their sun god was demanding exclusive worship. Even the sun god needed the grain god served or else he wouldn’t get fed from the grain god’s bounty. This was a completely interrelated system, even parasitic and symbiotic in some ways. The humans needed the gods but the gods needed the humans even more—as we see in the Atrahasis epic where Enlil decides to destroy all humanity with a flood and if it wasn’t for one human being hidden away and saved, the gods would have all starved for lack of sacrifices. Oops!
And so, I suspect that when the Moabites found themselves unable to destroy their enemies, that Balaam suggested an alliance instead—one brought about through alliances by marriage. And this was not unheard of in the ancient world. Marital alliances have been the way of peace between tribes and kingdoms, I imagine, since just about the beginning. As soon as two groups worship the same gods and are bound together in community by marriage and kinship, fighting tends to end. This is why ancient kings generally took so many wives—they were largely political alliances. So, looking at this from Balak’s point of view, they cannot hope to do anything to harm Israel, but they might just be able to become one with Israel. What Moab wouldn’t have known is that Yahweh doesn’t operate like they believe their gods do. He is the only God and there can be no others. So, when the Moabites held a cultic feast and undoubtedly had their young virgin daughters dancing—some of the men of Israel ended up attending. Marriages were seemingly arranged and consummated, and that required the approval of the patriarchs—hence we see that there were elders and leaders involved and they were actually the first to be punished. Young men didn’t just marry without their fathers’ approval. And what Moab would have seen as two countries uniting by marriage, Yahweh saw as treachery and rebellion, idolatry and sexual immorality. It really is important to see these things from Moab’s point of view. What they were doing was entirely logical and I doubt if their intentions were nefarious because they just wouldn’t have understood Yahweh’s scruples about His people not worshiping anyone else. It was so contrary to everything they believed and understood about the way the world of the gods worked that it might as well have been written in modern English and presented to them on a floppy disk. I hope you guys all know what a floppy disk is.
So, I believe that Balaam’s advice went like this: “if you can’t curse them, then join them. Throw a big party, invite them over and allow them to meet your daughters. Give your daughters to their sons and they will give their daughters to marry your sons. They are blessed, after all. Your gods will be their gods and their God will be yours.” But, regardless of how the Moabites saw their own actions, or how Balaam saw them, Yahweh saw the effects and affected a covenant lawsuit against the children of Israel—legally taking action for their covenant violation by way of a plague. In order to keep this from happening again, Moses enacted this added legislation against the Moabites and Ammonites in Deuteronomy:
3 No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the Lord’s assembly; none of their descendants, even to the tenth generation, may ever enter the Lord’s assembly. 4 This is because they did not meet you with food and water on the journey after you came out of Egypt, and because Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram-naharaim was hired to curse you. 5 Yet the Lord your God would not listen to Balaam, but he turned the curse into a blessing for you because the Lord your God loves you. 6 Never pursue their welfare or prosperity as long as you live. (Deut 23:3-6)
The specific charges lodged against Moab and Ammon are severe in the ancient world. The implication is that either Israel asked for hospitality and did not receive it, or that it simply was never offered at all even though the people groups shared close kinship ties. And yet, if that was their only crime, it would be a different story as we see in Moses’s follow-up regulations:
7 Do not despise an Edomite, because he is your brother. Do not despise an Egyptian, because you were a resident alien in his land. 8 The children born to them in the third generation may enter the Lord’s assembly. (Deut 23:7-8)
Edom flat out refused them passage and even refused them food and water in exchange for money. But when Moab decided to curse what Yahweh has blessed, that was a direct act against Yahweh Himself and so Moab was forever barred from being a part of the assembly of Israel, the ekklesia, aka the qahal. It was an act of rebellion and a personal affront. Therefore, Moses barred them from joining the assembly. And yes, I said Moses. The reason I said Moses is because of something Yeshua says about a regulation in the next chapter—namely, in Moses’s statements about divorce. In Mark 10, Yeshua calls Moses’s statements about allowing divorce to be an “allowance because of the hardness of your hearts” and then calls his audience back to Genesis 2 and what God actually wanted. Men were dealing unfaithfully and treacherously with their wives because they took an allowance and were exploiting it for all they could get and that is the problem with allowances. Allowances set our minds in the direction of “what can I justify or get away with based upon what is written down?” And that’s just what we do. We would rather read the Bible to see what we can get away with than to look into God’s creational purposes for our lives. You see it a lot with polygyny proponents, “Well, it isn’t outlawed anywhere in the Torah…” and that is true but every time it is mentioned in the Scripture there are negative connotations and/or consequences.
Moses allows slavery as well and yet our creational purposes in Genesis 1 give us a mandate to rule over Creation wisely, not over one another. But pro-slavery people, again, take an allowance and mistake it for permission and even approval. Yeshua, on the other hand, in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere—He destroys the allowances. He calls us back to that sin-free creational intent. He never makes any sort of allowances. That’s why people detest the Sermon on the Mount, it’s a painful reminder to those of us who like to live our lives on the edge–pushing that envelope based on what some part of Scripture allow–that we are headed in the wrong direction. But that’s the consequence of the Sinai covenant not being written on our hearts and why Jeremiah promised a vast improvement. According to Jeremiah 31, not only would we have commandments in writing, but we would have them in and on our hearts, and as our hearts are changed, our stomach for allowances disappears.
So, when reading Moses, we cannot forget that he made allowances and Yeshua was clear in stating that Moses made those allowances, not Yahweh. Yahweh didn’t institute human kingship, or slavery, or divorce or any other kind of oppression—because in the beginning they didn’t exist. In the beginning, no one was abusing anyone else and so no allowances were necessary. It all comes from a wrong way of looking at the Torah, one which Yeshua tried to correct. Just because Moses made an allowance doesn’t mean that it is God’s intention for our lives. If we view allowances in this light then they will lead us in the wrong direction. Moses had to deal with reality and place limits on human depravity, but he never eradicated it—in a way, he just funneled it and controlled the spread. Even today, most debates about the commandments don’t seem to relate to creational intent but instead to conversations about what we can and cannot get away with according to the written rules and very little is said about, “What would the love, mercy and patience of God that we see from the beginning to the end of Scriptures do?”
And so, back to Ruth, we have Moses placing an all-time prohibition on Moabites ever entering the assembly of Israel. Does this really represent the heart of God, that an entire people group be beyond salvation and redemption? To answer that, we must read the book of Ruth, which, as I mentioned before, is traditionally read by Jewish families for the Festival of Shavuot. That it also happens to be the day that the Holy Spirit fell upon the followers of Yeshua gathered at the Temple (aka the House) in full view of Jews and Gentile proselytes from “every nation under heaven”, the story is particularly important to understand. Is anyone truly barred, by nationality, from inclusion in the Kingdom of Heaven? The Jews of the first century certainly thought so, and in Luke 4, Yeshua was in danger of being tossed off of a cliff for even suggesting that Yahweh was intervening in history on behalf of the Gentiles. And it was probably a full ten years before Peter was ready to receive that vision about Gentiles being made clean in Acts 10.
Yahweh is all about forgiveness and redemption, even to the point where we have to admit that He looks like an enabler from a human point of reference. And so, when we look at the “Sinai and beyond” portion of the Torah as often dealing with allowances and not original creation intent, it makes what happened with Ruth, and David’s kingship, make a whole lot more sense. The prohibition on Moabites becomes more of a guideline for a certain kind of inclusion rather than an eternal truth, just as no one would countenance soldiers forcibly taking POW women as brides or POWs as slaves in modern Christian society—despite Moses allowing it. Again, as Yeshua said, Moses’s allowances vs God’s creational intent—it makes all the difference in the world when studying how Yeshua is the embodiment of Yahweh’s character and love in the flesh.
Ruth begins during the time of the Judges. And the interesting thing about Ruth is that the book appears in different locations in the Christian and Hebrew Bibles—coming up either between Judges and I Samuel or right after Proverbs. Both of these placements tell an important story. In between Judges and I Samuel, we have the chronological history of Israel and specifically the line of David. When included after Proverbs, you have Ruth beginning right on the heels of Proverbs 31, detailing the excellent woman whom we would all have to agree describes Ruth to a “t”. She is the woman of valor, the woman of virtue. She is kind and self-sacrificing, humble and industrious, loyal and generous. There is hardly a positive adjective we could come up with that she would fail to measure up to. And she was born a Moabite, which is where we find her (in Moab) at the beginning of this book. Famine has hit Israel and notably in the area of Bethlehem, and so the family of Elimelech emigrates from Israel to Moab, on the other side of the Dead Sea. Interestingly, they are welcomed. They were allowed to enter the “fields of Moab and settle there” and the boys married two of the daughters of Moab: Orpah and Ruth. Tragically, all three of the men of the house die, leaving Ruth, Orpah, and their mother-in-law Naomi widowed and vulnerable. Ruth and Orpah, however, have options. They are still young and can marry again so Naomi desires to send them back home to their families so they can get on with their lives, while she returns to Israel, where the famine is now over. But the girls love their mother-in-law and refuse to leave—and this is not a normal state of affairs. After all, both marriages proved to be unfruitful as far as offspring and, in general, women were not treated remarkably well in their husbands’ homes and especially not when there were no heirs produced. Naomi must have been a remarkably kind woman, and the rest of the story backs this up. Finally, Naomi convinces Orpah to go back home but Ruth covenants herself to Naomi by famously saying, and I will include the oath form by translating Lord back to Yahweh,
“Don’t plead with me to abandon you or to return and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May Yahweh punish me, and do so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.” (Ruth 1:16-17)
Ruth has invoked the name of Yahweh in an oath to do the following things: (1) to go with Naomi, (2) to live with Naomi, (3) to become adopted by Naomi, (4) to devote herself to Yahweh alone, (5) until her death. This is no small oath in a culture where family is everything—as all ancient cultures were. Likely, Ruth could have easily snagged another husband among her own people. At the very least, she was certainly better off in Moab among her kin than as a stranger in a strange land with no prospects whatsoever and presumably no way to feed herself, much less her mother-in-law.
Really quick here, I want to talk about widows. Two kinds of widows—provisional widows and true widows. A true widow is a woman who has no husband and no sons and has no prospects for that to ever change. This is Naomi. She is the absolute epitome of everything that Yahweh is talking about when He refers to vulnerable widows. She has no prospects and she cannot have more children and even if she could, they could not care for her. Orpah and Ruth, on the other hand, are also bereft of both husband and sons but they are young and have immediate prospects for remarriage in a time when many women died young and men needed new wives to parent their existing children. If Ruth had stayed behind, she would have been remarried likely very quickly. It was mercy and love that compelled Naomi to send the girls home to their families. However, as a foreigner coming into a strange land, and a widow, with no father to protect her—Ruth in some ways becomes the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. She becomes the poor, widow, orphan and foreigner all wrapped up into one and yet she takes it upon herself to become the provider for her mother-in-law. This is beyond exceptional in the pre-Cross world.
Of course, as we see in chapter 2, Ruth worked extremely hard over the course of the almost two months between Passover and Shavuot gleaning not only barley but also wheat from the fields of Boaz, a man who was close kin to Naomi’s deceased husband. She finds favor in his eyes and he makes sure that she receives enough for both of them to eat, and that she goes unmolested by the harvesters. Boaz places Ruth under his protection and later marries her. She becomes the mother of Obed, whose son, Jesse, becomes the father of King David. And so, David is only the third generation removed from being pure Moabite. If we look at Moses’s words as being set in stone, then we have a terrible problem. However, if we see them as a guideline that was put into place in order to forbid and discourage marriage to foreigners by assuring that their offspring would never be accepted into the congregation (presumably under the assumption that they would be raised by a mother who was still a heathen), then we don’t really have a problem at all. And within a community-focused culture, a dyadic social entity, the idea of your child not being accepted into the congregation was something rather akin to the practice of shunning. Family honor would be adversely affected the child would be unmarriageable, etc. That’s what we get by going the route of this being more of an “allowance” sort of ruling. But what if we don’t go that route? What if we set the words of Moses in stone? How can we justify this? How, in fact, could God justify His choice of David as King (I know, He doesn’t have to but let’s talk about this anyway)?
Moab was being punished for two crimes. The first was a lack of hospitality—they refused to feed their brothers and sisters when they were entering into their inheritance. The second was leading the men of Israel (and no small number of leaders and elders) into idolatry and sexual sin with foreign women. I call this teaching, “Ruth and the Reverse of the Curse” and with good reason because that is exactly what all of her actions amounted to. Ruth, in her treatment of Naomi the Israelite widow, went above and beyond to provide food when her ancestors failed to do so, and far from being a heathen woman “leading Israelite men astray” she dedicated herself wholly to Yahweh and became the matriarch of a faithful line of Israelites. For a while, anyway, but the failings of the Davidic line are never blamed on Ruth—quite the opposite.
This idea that anyone is beyond redemption simply because of bloodline (or guaranteed redemption because of bloodline) certainly finds its death in the ministry of both John the Baptist and Yeshua. But really, we can really find the roots for the overturning of Moses’s banning of Moabites and their descendants from the Assembly in the account of Yahweh’s own words and decisions right after the flood.
“When the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, he said to himself, “I will never again curse the ground because of human beings, even though the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth onward. And I will never again strike down every living thing as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night will not cease.” (Gen 8:21-22)
Yahweh looked at humanity after the flood—what is left of it—and he saw a man who, although righteous as compared to his generation, never bothered to plead with Yahweh for mercy as did Abraham, who had issues with alcohol and anger, despite being obedient enough to save his own life. He saw Noah’s offspring, also, as incredibly flawed. In short, Yahweh saw us for what we are—filled with evil inclinations from the youngest age and He made a commitment to stick with us, endure us, and to save us despite ourselves. This is utterly remarkable. Noah found grace; he didn’t earn it. Same with us. And so, as long as we have God’s revealed character throughout Scripture to trust in, there is no person, no genealogical line, beyond salvation. Not Moab, not anyone. As John said, “for God so loved the world…” and not just some bloodlines. People have always found grace with God because that’s just what He is about. Yahweh isn’t a legalist which is why the Scriptures are full of seeming contradictions. We want to hedge Him in but He refuses to allow us to do it. People are wicked, but…God is good.
Ruth shows us that laws were not put in place to bar the gates to salvation, but instead for greater purposes than we sometimes want to imagine. We love to look at the Bible and see black and white but the only black and white is the black ink on white paper. We want black and white because with black and white there is no need to trust God or to know His character particularly well. We can say, “He approves of this and doesn’t approve of this, no exceptions, He doesn’t care about extenuating circumstances or about what we do and do not know. He is more interested in legalistic obedience than about our thinking about what love requires.” But in reality, and Yeshua showed us this, truly walking with God oftentimes involves choosing between commandments, as Yeshua pointed out on a number of occasions. Am I going to refrain from working on the Sabbath or am I going to save this animal from the ditch, or this other man from drowning? Which of these honors God, which shows that we trust Him to be the embodiment of love and wisdom, and which one portrays Him more as a lifeless computer only able to accept and reject input based on programming? Trust is really hard, we would rather think of Him just giving us rules that we have to follow. That’s easy. That’s why so many people just love religion, so that they can follow the black and white rules and consequences to themselves and others be damned.
Reminds me of a documentary I was watching with my mom on Tuesday called Heavens Gate: Cult of Cults. And, of course, I had heard of this cult and I think we all have but I had no idea that these people lived this way for 22 years before killing themselves. And the rules, oh my great googly moogly. They were trying to earn elevation into a new sort of manifestation of reality. But the rules denied reality and without the New Creation renewal that we have in Christ, there was just no way that it was going to work. It was incredibly tragic. But, believers can do this too—just in different ways but it amounts to the same thing. The entire concept of earning favor is so intoxicating and puts us into the driver’s seat. But it leads to attitudes like allowing such and such person to drown and an animal to needlessly suffer and to an entire people group being barred from joining the people of God if taken too far. We have to allow for mercy and sanity or we will create conditions under which we ourselves are only saved in our imaginations. It’s like when people pretend to have it all together but are falling apart in private—that’s us trying to earn God’s favor. It’s an illusion.
You know, in the end, Ruth is a person who exemplifies the Biblical truth that no one is saved or damned based on their country or culture of origin. Rahab is another. Yahweh neither owes damnation or salvation to anyone based upon the circumstances of their birth because that would be unjust. Is Yahweh loyal to Abraham? Yes, absolutely. Does that create hard and fast rules for what Yahweh can and cannot do with individuals? Absolutely not! He is God and so He does what is right—and what is right often looks counterintuitive to us because, as He pointed out after the flood, our hearts are inclined toward evil from our youth. We have our prejudices for and against others based on all sorts of things. In short, we are not suitable advisors for what is right and wrong, just and unjust when it really comes down to it.
