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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 256. Back to Bethlehem
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Back to Bethlehem
2. Orpah, like Ruth, is faced by all that it means to carry out that journey to its end-all that it means in the surrender of worldly prospects, in the severing of old ties, in running new and quite incalculable risks. She has to face it, for Naomi herself, in her faithful witness to truth, puts it before them both quite plainly, and each in turn must make the great decision. Orpah the elder is the first to declare her choice. What it was Naomi records in the text: “Behold, thy sister in law is gone back unto her people, and unto her gods: return thou after thy sister in law.” Ruth's life had now reached its decisive moment. It is the moment when the great choice has to be made on which everything, as regards her fulfilment of God's purpose, must depend. What a crisis it is! And how isolated, how seemingly alone, it finds her! So far she had moved step by step with Orpah. Now Orpah her sister-in-law-Orpah, side by side with whom she had accepted the hand of her Israelite husband; Orpah, who with her had bowed under the stroke of widowhood; Orpah, who with her had started to bear Naomi company on her return to Bethlehem-now Orpah has gone.
Behind her, in the sweet light of reminiscence, is Moab, the home of her childhood, of her mother and father: the scene of her friendships, the centre of her interests. Before her lies Israel with its dark, forbidding hills, its alien faces, its unknown trials. What calls her thither? To outward seeming, little. Ease, pleasure, even common prudence, as Naomi points out, bid her return to that land where love and hope are waiting for one so winning. Yes, but she “hears a voice we cannot hear.” It is the voice of duty, of compassion, of faith, of love. This calls her on, and will not let her go. That desolate widow strikes her heart with a high heroic note. And not only that. It is no mere Naomi she sees standing before her there in piteous farewell. It is her dead husband's mother. Nay, more, it is her dead husband's faith, her dead husband's Jehovah. Can she go forward to make these her own? She can, and even now she will. With a resolution conveyed in suppressed fire, Ruth refuses to quit the side of Naomi. The words in which the resolve is uttered constitute the most determined, the most decisive, the most unhesitating confession of love in all literature.
Intreat me not to leave thee,
To return from following after thee:
Whither thou goest, I will go;
Where thou lodgest, I will lodge:
Thy people shall be my people,
Thy God shall be my God:
Where thou diest, will I die,
There also will I be buried:
Jehovah do so to me, and more also,
If ought but death part thee and me.
Ruth had conquered. Great as Naomi had been in nobleness of heart, in self-sacrificing love, from this time onwards she takes only the second place in the story; it is the younger woman who becomes the heroine of the tale. The Arnon is crossed, Moab is left behind, the Jordan is passed, and at last they reach the winding way that leads them up towards Bethlehem.
The story of Ruth tells where David got his poetry and all the rhythm and melody of his life. The blood in the veins of this daughter of swarthy Moab here swells and surges in fine passion; and, in the music which she makes, her heart keeps the time which worlds of larger harmony beat. What a perfect little carol of love and duty to have been begotten without a moment's effort and flung to the mountain winds! We in the finest sense know Ruth as the “meek ancestress of him who sang the songs of sore repentance” the moment we hear her lift up that tuneful voice under the open sky between Moab and Bethlehem.1 [Note: Armstrong Black, The Book of Ruth, 48.]
3. Ruth's passionate outburst of tenderness is immortal. It has put into fitting words for all generations the deepest thoughts of loving hearts, and comes to us over all the centuries between, as warm and living as when it welled up from that gentle, heroic soul. The two strongest emotions of our nature are blended in it, and each gives a portion of its fervour-love and religion. To love is to give one's self away, therefore all lesser givings are its food and delight; and, when Ruth threw herself on Naomi's withered breast, and sobbed out her passionate resolve, she was speaking the eternal language of love, and claiming Naomi for her own, in the very act of giving herself to Naomi. We hear in Ruth's words also that forsaking of all things which is an essential of all true religion. Her declaration closes with a vow to Israel's God. It dethrones Chemosh for ever. It exalts Jehovah as her future guide and shield. As such, we need not scruple to call it her “conversion.” We have seen how, in her, human love wrought self-sacrifice. But it was not human love alone that did it. The cord that drew her was twisted of two strands, and her love to Naomi melted into her love of Naomi's God.
I believe in the holy realities of friendship,-pure, lofty, intellectual; a communion of kindred affinities, of mental similitudes; a redemption from the miserable fetters of human selfishness; a practical obedience to the beautiful injunction of our Common Friend, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” I believe, too, that the pure love which we feel for our friends is a part and portion of that love which we owe and offer to our Creator and is acceptable to Him, inasmuch as it is offered not to the decaying elements of humanity, but to those brighter and holier attributes which are of themselves the emanations of the Divinity,-to those pure emotions of the heart and those high capacities of the soul in which that Divinity is most clearly manifested; and that, in proportion as we draw near to each other in the holy communion and unforbidden love of earthly friendship, we lessen the distance between our spirits and their Original Source,-just as the radii of a circle in approaching each other approach also their common centre.1 [Note: Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, i. 113.]
4. In Ruth's entrance into the religion of Israel we see a picture of what was intended to be the effect of Israel's relation with the Gentile world. The household of Elimelech emigrated to Moab during a famine, and, whether that were right or wrong, they were there among heathens as Jehovah-worshippers. They were meant to be missionaries, and, in Ruth's case, the purpose was fulfilled. She became the “firstfruits of the Gentiles.”
When Christina Mackintosh was invited to go to Africa as the wife of Coillard, the missionary, she at first yielded to the opposition of her family and declined. Two years later François Coillard wrote once more. In this second appeal she perceived a call from God which she could not resist; but it was a terrible wrench to leave everything dear to her. She was no longer in her first girlhood, she had no illusions whatever as to the kind of life that awaited her; and it was not the kind she liked; she now preferred civilization to the wilds. Besides, going to Africa was very different then from now: it meant exile for life. Her widowed mother had become reconciled to the step she was taking, and wrote to her intended son-in-law that she “would rather see her daughter a missionary than a princess.” But opposition of another kind was not lacking; at this crisis of her life, the choice was deliberately put before her and as deliberately made. Her intended husband knew not all but something of what she was renouncing when he wrote, “I do not know that I could do what you are doing, giving up all for an unknown country and an almost unknown husband.”
At Cape Town her first words when they met were: “I have come to do the work of God with you, whatever it may be; and remember this-Wherever God may call you, you shall never find me crossing your path of duty.”1 [Note: Coillard of the Zambesi, 97.]