After Abel and Other Stories (28 page)

The night passed sleepless for those in the City of Arba. The sun rose, and still Othniel did not return. The hours passed. The sun made its passage through the sky, and fell toward the west, and still he did not return.

It was only as the last rays of the day clung to the mountains that Othniel and his men came back.

“Debir is yours,” he said to Caleb. “We have taken it from the Canaanites.”

There was jubilation in the City of Arba that night and into the next morning. Caleb led his people, singing and dancing, through valleys and over hills to see Debir's desolation firsthand. As they left, Achsah climbed to the top of the highest building, where her father had stood only days before. She watched the column of men, women, and children pass through the southern gate. When they had gone, and all she heard was the echo of their song, she looked to the east and the west, the north and the south. She knew this would never be her home again.

When Caleb returned, he fulfilled his promise. Achsah and Othniel were married that night. By noon the next day, all the Judeans who had come to behold
Caleb's great fortune left the City of Arba to return to their strongholds and homes.

Achsah and Othniel were the last to go. After the excitement and commotion of the past days, the City of Arba felt bereft of life. Caleb led his daughter as far as the city wall, and then helped her mount her donkey.

Looking down at him, she said, “I hope you know what you were doing. It's only my life that will prove you right or wrong.”

The newlyweds had not gone a mile when Achsah asked, “Debir was the bride price you paid for me, but what of my dowry? What, other than the clothes I wear and the ass on which I ride, has my father sent us away with?”

Othniel stopped his donkey. “Dowry?” he said. “I never thought to ask.”

Achsah sat stupefied, her mouth open in disbelief. This was the man who used intelligence to defeat Debir, but he did not think to negotiate with his bride's father before he took her as his wife. “Have you never been witness to a marriage before?” she said, incredulous.

“My father always handled that kind of thing,” Othniel said.

I've ended up with a dolt after all, Achsah thought. “If you weren't ready to be a man,” she said, “you shouldn't have volunteered to take down an entire town.”

Achsah pulled hard at the reins and turned her
donkey around. She set it back on the road to the City of Arba. “Come on.”

“Where are you going?” Othniel asked.

“To get what's mine,” she said.

No one was more surprised than Caleb to see the newlywed couple return so soon. “What is the matter?” he said as his daughter slipped off her donkey to confront him.

“All this is yours,” she said, lifting her arm and circling it above her head, as if to take in the entire land of Judah. “You have everything you sought, yet you could not spare a single acre for me.”

Both Caleb and Othniel stood silenced in the face of Achsah's vehemence.

“You are the clever one,” she said to her father. “You get others to do your bidding and pay nothing in exchange. Am I like a field in the desert, worth so little that you will trade me away for nothing?

“I sat by as you bartered me away for the sake of your own holdings. I paid the debt held by your promise.” She sneered. “And all I got in exchange is a hero. You have done me a great wrong. Now make it right.”

“What would you have of me?” Caleb asked, because he realized that in his happiness, he may have neglected to do his duty.

Achsah looked through the gates. The great expanse of rich land spread before her. She pointed. “Give me the
two springs that flow beneath Debir and all the land between them.”

It was a lot to ask. She was demanding the richest farmland in all of Judah, but Achsah did not care. She foresaw a lifetime guiding Othniel as he took her father's place in the nation, and for that, she deserved as much as she desired.

Caleb heard the wisdom in all she said and all she did not say. He granted her request. Then, having accomplished her mission, Achsah led her husband out of the City of Arba again, south toward their new home.

AUTHOR'S AFTERWORD

THE BOOK OF RUTH

T
his story begins in a bookstore. There, among the cramped fiction aisles of a local, independent shop where browsing is encouraged, I spied a slim volume wrapped in plastic. How unusual, I thought. Why, when we can rifle through Shakespeare, James Patterson, and everything in between, would anyone wrap a novel up so that potential buyers can't dip in and sample the wares?

I was intrigued. This book was off-limits, a mystery I felt compelled to solve. Despite the $35 price tag—who's crazy enough to pay $35 for a paperback work of fiction?—I circled back to it over and over, drawn as if against my will, and finally brought it up to the cashier.

It was the title that sold me:
Book of Ruth
. I had wanted to write about the biblical Book of Ruth for years, but something had always stopped me. I thought about an approach and rejected it, doubled back and thought some more. By then, I didn't even know where to start. Maybe, I thought, this writer had done what I had failed to do.

When I ripped off the plastic, I realized what had happened. It was not a novel, but a fine art book, slipped onto the fiction shelf because it did contain a made-up story of sorts. A now deceased artist, Robert Seydel, created the collage of words and images to pay homage to his late aunt, a woman named Ruth.

Here was a
Book of Ruth
, but it wasn't my Book of Ruth, the one tucked between the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible. Seydel hadn't cracked the code of writing about the story of the Israelite Naomi and her loyal daughter-in-law Ruth.

That was all it took. No one was going to write the book I was looking for. I would have to do it myself.

Of all the texts in the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Ruth is my favorite. Other tales are better known—the Garden of Eden, Moses splitting the Sea of Reeds (or the “Red Sea,” as it is often translated), Samson and Delilah, but
the story of Naomi and Ruth, who cling to one another in the face of loss and displacement, is one of the fullest pictures of human life in the entirety of the Hebrew Bible. It's also one of the only books in which women and women's concerns take center stage.

In traditional teachings of this book, the highlight of the story, and the reason it is read in synagogues on Shavuot (Feast of Weeks, or Pentacost, in English), is Ruth's declaration of faith:

            
Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and more may the LORD do to me if anything but death parts me from you. (Ruth 1:16-17)

There is something poignant about Ruth's declaration. It has been pointed to over the centuries as an affirmation of the strength and beauty of Jewish beliefs. There's so much more to Ruth's words, though, and to the story in which they are set.

For one thing, this is the only place in the Hebrew Bible in which a woman declares her devotion to another woman. Ruth doesn't accept Judaism (really its precursor, since the story is set in the pre-Davidic, pre-national
period) because she has been on a spiritual quest and found that the tenets of the Israelite faith speak most deeply to her. She speaks these words out of a sense of loyalty to her mother-in-law, and despite the fact that she isn't obligated to say them.

The story is fairly straightforward, at least at the beginning: a couple, Elimelech and Naomi, moves to Moab in the face of a famine in their native Judah. They live there long enough for both their sons to marry local women. Soon all three men die. In the wake of these tragedies, Naomi and her daughters-in-law, now all widowed, decide to head back to Naomi's hometown of Bethlehem. Along the way, Naomi, broken by sorrow, implores her daughters-in-law to leave her. “Turn back, each of you to her mother's house” (Ruth 1:8). It takes some convincing, but one of them, Orpah, agrees to go and turns back.

Here is the first remarkable thing about the Book of Ruth. Despite how she's been portrayed in the Talmud and many commentaries, Orpah is no villain. She stays with her mother-in-law, even after the deaths of her husband and father-in-law release her from any duty to the family she has married into. At first, she also refuses to abandon Naomi. Even returning to her family of origin is an act of devotion: Orpah doesn't want to go, but she obeys her mother-in-law's injunction.

The point is not that Orpah is a bad daughter. In
fact, there are no villains in the Book of Ruth. Rather, she is a character whose actions are determined by her situation and a reasonable sense of human psychology, a tendency that extends to all the major players in the Book of Ruth.

So we're not meant to castigate Orpah—although over the years, plenty of people have. The Babylonian Talmud, for example, records a debate in which two sages try to one-up each other in imaging just how sexually deviant Orpah was, which leaves little doubt about how negatively they viewed her. But Orpah, as depicted in the Bible, is not bad. She is a foil for Ruth. Her actions illustrate for us just how exceptional Ruth is when she chooses Naomi over her own parents.

In turning back for home, Orpah is given the chance at a comfortable life, a new marriage, the embrace of family and clan, all of which is encapsulated in Naomi's surprising choice of words when she exhorts her daughter-in-law to return not to her father, but to her “mother's house.” Ruth, however, chooses to stay with Naomi. In doing so, she signs up for a life of destitution, living at the margins of an alien society, in a city and culture she does not know. What she signs up for is an existence completely interwoven with Naomi's fate.

To really understand the Book of Ruth, a reader has to be conversant with both social and legal precepts of pre-modern Israel. Most important is the fact that the
story shows us an environment that leaves a widow (elderly or not) with no resources, and no ability to claim any.

When Naomi and Ruth return to Bethlehem, they are the poorest and most outcast in the city. Without husbands, they can make no claim to land, and without land, they cannot engage in commerce, or even grow food to eat.

This is the reality that Ruth accepts when she makes her famous declaration of faith, and it is even more noteworthy than the commentators and teachers who have put the focus squarely on Ruth's piety, would have it. Her pledge of allegiance to God is not a sign of religious awaking. It is proof of her dedication to Naomi. What matters in Ruth's speech is how bound up she is with her mother-in-law, and her intention to remain that way. Ruth's dedication isn't ultimately to God. That is part and parcel of her loyalty to another woman, come what may.