The last five chapters of the Book of Judges end with a phrase that tolls like a bell: “In those days there was no king in Israel; each man did what was right in his eyes.”
The society described there is not merely leaderless. It is Sodom. A concubine from Bethlehem is gang-raped in Gibeah and dismembered by her husband to send a message. A civil war nearly extinguishes the tribe of Benjamin. Unnamed characters crowd every scene, a mirroring, author Yael Ziegler notes, of a society that has stopped seeing one another as people.
Then the Book of Ruth opens. Same period. Same land. Entirely different world.
From Judges’ chaos to Ruth’s repair
Ziegler’s Ruth: From Alienation to Monarchy is a 534-page book on a four-chapter megillah. The disproportion is the point. Ziegler, a faculty member at Herzog College and teacher at Matan and Midreshet Moriah, spent more than two decades teaching Megillat Ruth in batei midrash before committing these shiurim to print. What she has produced is not a work of academic biblical criticism.
It is a work of Torah, one that happens to deploy literary tools in service of the sacred text’s deeper meaning. The methodology she calls “literary-theological,” a term she credits to Rabbi Shalom Carmy, fulfills something Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein called for in a 1962 lecture at Stern College: the application of close reading and literary analysis to Tanach, not to evaluate the text but to hear it more clearly. “I have eschewed a pretense of academic detachment,” she writes, “preferring to approach Ruth as a sacred book that contains profound insights into the religious experience.” This is a book written from within the mesorah (tradition), not alongside it.
When Ziegler examines the first words Boaz speaks in the entire megillah, “God be with you,” addressed not to his overseer but to his common field workers, she reads it as character revelation, not incidental dialogue. “The first word that issues out of Boaz’s mouth in this story is the name of God,” she writes.
“Boaz strides onto the scene as a man of piety, a man driven by the name of God that is constantly on his mind and lips.”
That observation opens into Ziegler’s larger claim: Boaz is the tikkun for the leadership vacuum of Judges. Where the men of Gibeah demanded violence, Boaz extends dignity. Where Judges ends in anonymity, every man interchangeable with his neighbor, Boaz restores names and identity to everyone he encounters.
“Without a Ruth at its helm,” Ziegler writes, “without someone with the ability to give unselfishly and totally to the other, monarchy is not a promise or a vision of bounty, but a dangerous threat, a recipe for depravity and despotism.”
Ruth’s defining quality is the systematic nullification of self in favor of the other. When Naomi tells her to leave, she stays. When she could seek a more dignified path, she gleans in the fields. At the narrative’s end, she relinquishes her child so completely that the neighbor women announce, “A son has been born to Naomi.” Ruth has exited her own story so that Naomi can have one. That capacity, to serve others without remainder, is what the Davidic monarchy will require of its founder.
Naomi, characteristically, is more complicated. The midrashim are divided on whether she bears moral responsibility for her family’s flight from Bethlehem during the famine, and Ziegler holds that tension without resolving it. The townspeople’s greeting upon her return, just two words, “Is this Naomi?” reads in Ziegler’s telling as something close to schadenfreude. She is not the saintly mother-in-law of popular retelling but a woman returning broken, whose recovery is entirely dependent on a Moabite daughter-in-law she repeatedly tried to send away. That complexity is what makes Ruth’s hessed so arresting. It is not returned.
This reconciles the two midrashim Ziegler opens with. Rabbi Zeira in Ruth Rabba says the megillah was written to teach the reward of lovingkindness. The Zohar Chadash (manuscripts relating to the Zohar but not included in printed editions) says it was written to trace the lineage of David. Ziegler’s answer is that these are the same statement: The kindness of Ruth is the specific moral architecture that makes legitimate kingship possible.
The book’s most illuminating stretch is its intertextual work.
Ziegler’s comparison of the Barak episode in Judges with Ruth’s declaration to Naomi is worth the price of the book on its own. The doubling of the verb lech, “Wherever you go I will go,” appears only twice in all of Scripture: When Barak tells Deborah he won’t fight unless she comes with him, and when Ruth tells Naomi she won’t leave. Barak’s conditional loyalty against Ruth’s unconditional one is not just a character study; it is Ziegler’s key to understanding why these two books exist in tandem.
Every year, Megillat Ruth is read on the morning after the Shavuot night of learning. Most explanations for the pairing point to hessed as preparation for Torah, the harvest setting, Ruth as the paradigmatic giyoret (convert). But Ziegler points somewhere deeper. “The Book of Ruth aspires toward kingship,” she writes in her closing summation, “which is its ultimate goal. It aims at a peaceable community that anticipates and paves the way for the new, harmonious era of monarchy.”
Shavuot is the moment the nation accepted a covenant that would eventually require a king. Megillat Ruth is the document that explains where he had to come from. Read it as such.■
RUTH
FROM ALIENATION
TO MONARCHY
By Yael Ziegler
Maggid Books
534 pages; $30