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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Ruth 1:15 - 1:15
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To the repeated entreaty of Naomi that she would follow her sister-in-law and return to her people and her God, Ruth replied: “Entreat me not to leave thee, and to return away behind thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou stayest, I will stay; thy people is my people, and thy God my God! where thou diest, I will die, and there will I be buried. Jehovah do so to me, and more also (lit. and so may He add to do)! Death alone shall divide between me and thee.†The words יֹסִיף ... יַעֲשֶׂה ×™ ×›Ö¹Ö¼×” are a frequently recurring formula in connection with an oath (cf. 1Sa 3:17; 1Sa 14:44; 1Sa 20:13, etc.), by which the person searing called down upon himself a severe punishment in case he should not keep his word or carry out his resolution. The following ×›Ö´Ö¼×™ is not a particle used in swearing instead of ×Ö´× in the sense of “if,†equivalent to “surely not,†as in 1Sa 20:12, in the oath which precedes the formula, but answer to ὁÌτι in the sense of quod introducing the declaration, as in Gen 22:16; 1Sa 20:13; 1Ki 2:23; 2Ki 3:14, etc., signifying, I swear that death, and nothing else than death, shall separate us. Naomi was certainly serious in her intentions, and sincere in the advice which she gave to Ruth, and did not speak in this way merely to try her and put the state of her heart to the proof, “that it might be made manifest whether she would adhere stedfastly to the God of Israel and to herself, despising temporal things and the hope of temporal possessions' (Seb. Schmidt). She had simply the earthly prosperity of her daughter-in-law in her mind, as she herself had been shaken in her faith in the wonderful ways and gracious guidance of the faithful covenant God by the bitter experience of her own life.
(Note: “She thought of earthly things alone; and as at that time the Jews almost universally were growing lax in the worship of God, so she, having spent ten years among the Moabites, though it of little consequence whether they adhered to the religion of their fathers, to which they had been accustomed from their infancy or went over to the Jewish religion.†- Carpzov.)
With Ruth, however, it was evidently not merely strong affection and attachment by which she felt herself so drawn to her mother-in-law that she wished to live and die with her, but a leaning of her heart towards the God of Israel and His laws, of which she herself was probably not yet fully conscious, but which she had acquired so strongly in her conjugal relation and her intercourse with her Israelitish connections, that it was her earnest wish never to be separated from this people and its God (cf. Rth 2:11).