Space for Moral Agency in the Book of Ruth *

1. Introduction

In her 2011 SBL Presidential Address ¹ Carol Newsom employs insights from neuroscience and ethnopsychology to explore literary representations of moral agency in Second Temple Jewish literature. She takes as her starting point the neuroscientific observation that

She then presents and applies the schema of ethnopsychologists Paul Heelas and Andrew Lock ³ who attempt to map moral agency across cultures. In their proposed grid Heelas and Lock

With this analytical framework in mind, Newsom traces how moral agency is conceptualized in various Second Temple texts, showing how moral agency is affirmed, how internal or external impairments of moral agency are conceivably overcome, and how, in certain instances, moral agency is denied.

Following Newsom's theoretically adventurous lead, I, too, will exercise a transdisciplinary reach to consider how issues of moral agency affect the construction and perception of literary characters in the book of Ruth. ⁵ Three theoretical impulses steer the following reading: postclassical literary theorist Monika Fludernik's insights on narration and identity, ⁶ social philosopher Michel de Certeau's notion of narrative's spatial syntax, ⁷ and literary theorist and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the ‘event-ness of Being’. ⁸ This theoretical constellation permits some other ways to think about ‘location’, ‘control’, and ‘conflicted consciousness’.

Fludernik observes that conversational narratives are inevitably presentations of the self and often function to protect ‘face’, to vindicate one's identity, to bolster one's image. ⁹ Since the book of Ruth employs more conversation, proportionately speaking, than any other biblical narrative, we have the opportunity to consider how character speeches present, protect, save ‘face’ as they indicate the capacity or incapacity to enact moral agency or as they elicit moral accountability from others.

Conversations, of course, always take place in a context; consequently, some attention to space is in order. According to de Certeau, ‘Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice' ¹⁰ —which functions not only to ‘link together’ different spaces or to plot movements from one place to another, but also to construct, regulate, reflect how spaces are constituted by different kinds of activities and practices. In de Certeau's schema there are ‘proper’ places that are ‘owned’ and strategically controlled by powerful, willful subjects, institutions, or social systems, and there are ‘other’ subjects who, deprived of ‘proper’ location, find ways to utilize and ‘consume’ established places in order to survive. In this discussion we will explore how geographical, social, and bodily spaces encourage and discourage certain practices and how the crossing of, and tactical behaviors within, those spatial boundaries inform our perceptions of moral agency.

Space cannot be divorced from time. We consider in the reading below how spatial practices capitalize or attempt to control time, and how human choices both shape and are shaped by the spatial and temporal matrix. Making a brief appearance is Bakhtin's concept of ‘event-ness’, which, in the context of literary theory, refers to the ability of some narratives to capture the unpredictability, and therefore the ethical accountability, of human actions. The way in which the book of Ruth plots the ‘eventness’ of human behavior invites further reflection about how the book itself exercises moral agency in its rhetorical context.

2. Answering the Glance of the Other

'[T]he self is projected in the first place’, writes Fludernik, ‘in order to answer the glance of the other’. ¹¹ The first ‘self considered here is the figure of Naomi. Naomi begins as a bit player in someone else's narrative, a story launched by a ‘proper’ place's failure to live up to its name. Famine in Bethlehem, the ‘House of Bread’, prompts Naomi's husband Elimelek to move his family to Moab. Under the control of her husband and extenuating circumstances, Naomi gradually emerges as an intelligible self in an ambivalent world where life, death, and foreignness press upon her identity. Eventually bereft of her husband and sons, and left only with her two Moabite daughters-in-law, Naomi must make a move or face absorption into foreign space. Hearing a rumor of bread now available in the ‘House of Bread’, she chooses to return home with her daughters-in-law providing initial escort.

At some undisclosed geographical point between Moab and Judah, Naomi attempts to dismiss her young companions with a blessing (1.8–9):

Then she pauses, drops the pious pretense, and offers practical advice: ¹³

The syntactical shift marks a corollary shift in tone and worldview. The blessing, dictated by religious custom, imagines a world where the deity's moral behavior parallels worthy behavior in the human realm. But as we soon learn, Naomi's personal view of Yhwh hardly matches this vision. The blessing breaks off, with Naomi revealing her true understanding of how the world works for women: it will be up to the girls to find their own security; and such security comes spatially only in the ‘proper’ place of a husband's house. ¹⁴

Embracing her and weeping, the two girls protest, insisting they will return with her to her people. Naomi's rejoinder continues her pragmatism, exposing her understanding of the world's limited options, her own sense of personal hopelessness, her body's failure to inspire desire or to be fertile space, and her honest perception of Yhwh:

As Tod Linafelt has argued, the poetry in the characters’ speeches in Ruth 1 indicates heightened emotion that reveals the characters’ inner selves. ¹⁵ Stammering, too, is a sign of authenticity, of unrehearsed direct speech. Naomi's faltering poetry ‘answers the glance of the other’ with a stumbling, emotional, and seemingly sincere confession of her inability to be the kind of moral agent that she perceives the two girls need. Her bodily space is barren; her social sphere is bleak; and she is too busy dodging Yhwh's blows to address the needs of others.

Orpah departs, but Ruth remains, despite Naomi's unfiltered admonishment to return with her sister-in-law ‘to her people and her gods’. With the cultural and religious differences that separate the women now bluntly voiced, Ruth has an alibi ¹⁶ to depart. Naomi has exposed the root of what could, in cultural perception, be the cause of her own misfortune: living in a foreign space among foreign people who worship foreign gods can hardly meet with Yhwh's approval. As much as she might care for her daughter-in-law and dread being alone, continued association with this foreign woman carries theological, and thus existential, risks, and so Naomi presses for spatial separation. ¹⁷ Her attempt to send Ruth back to her native place reveals Naomi's ‘default state of consciousness’ to be ‘fragmented and conflicted’.

Ruth, however, is unwilling to adopt this alibi and erases Naomi's projected differences with her own terse, but impassioned poetry:

Affirming her willingness and ability to traverse whatever spatial, social, and existential boundaries necessary, Ruth takes her place alongside Naomi, even acknowledging Yhwh's death-dealing temperament. Ruth's resolve seems to reflect an ‘executive self’ deciding to act in a coordinated way, despite the ambiguity of her motives. What generates this powerful allegiance to Naomi is unclear. Does she feel a familial sense of duty? A generational obligation? A deeper emotional connection? All of the above? Moreover, as a Moabite bride ‘lifted’ (‭אסנ‬) by an Israelite sojourner, she carries a murky backstory. Was she ‘lifted’ from impoverished childhood circumstances? ¹⁸ Has Naomi been essentially her ‘mother’ for most of her life? Is there even a viable home in Moab that would welcome her? Despite the acknowledged risks, does she really have anything to lose in this venture to Bethlehem? Moreover, could her youth affect her capacity to make good moral decisions? ¹⁹

Upon seeing Ruth's determination, Naomi ‘ceases to speak to her’. What does this intentional silence communicate? Acquiescence? Relief? Annoyance? A mix of these emotions?

Their arrival in Bethlehem forces another self-revelation ‘to answer the glance of the other’. ‘Is this Naomi?’ ask the women of the town. Naomi counters with a new identity:

Naomi continues to see herself in Joban terms, ‘under the control’ of a deity who is presented as having his own ‘unsystematic and uncoordinated series of impulses and desires’. On the one hand, he is depicted as malicious and capricious; on the other hand, the legal language suggests just cause for accusation. Building upon her earlier claim that Yhwh has struck her, Naomi profiles the deity as both an over-zealous prosecutor and an agent of malice and violence. Naomi's self-perception reflects a quandary over her guilt or innocence, but nevertheless a belief that Yhwh's cruelty denies her a sense of moral agency. Her once ‘full’ and ‘sweet’ life, with its personal, familial, and communal resources for moral action, is now ‘empty’ and ‘bitter’. The story she once imagined herself to be living is now in ‘narrative wreckage’, ²⁰ and she foists this wreckage onto Bethlehem with no clear vision of how she might repair her damaged life or create a new living space for herself.

3. Proper Places and Tactical Maneuvers

Once in Bethlehem, Naomi recedes into an unidentifiable space while Ruth and Boaz take center stage. Focalizing identity markers abound for these two characters, beginning with the narrator's summation at the end of ch. 1. The accrual of labels—'Naomi's daughter-in-law’, ‘the one returning from the fields of Moab’, and the oft-repeated ‘Ruth the Moabite'—shows Ruth to be a body out of place, in need of explanation, definition, qualification. ²¹ Moreover, the specific allusion to Moab makes her morally suspect. ²² However, Boaz, too, begs for social definition, and the narrator obliges with a corresponding pile of descriptors: Naomi's ‘kinsman, on her husband's side’, ‘a man of substance [an ‭ליח‬ ‭רובג‬ ‭שיא]’, ‘from the family of Elimelek’. When ‘Ruth the Moabite’ ventures out to glean, she just so happens onto the field of Boaz who, we are reminded, is ‘a member of Elimelek's extended family’ (2.3). This information, as well as Ruth's Moabite label, is repeated yet again at the end of the ch. 2. If the Moabite label marks Ruth as a body out of place, as a stranger in need of aid, as a foreigner of dubious morals, Boaz's various designations ground him firmly in society as ensconced, entitled, financially endowed, and morally responsible.

In de Certeau's terms, Boaz occupies a ‘proper’ place, a place that is owned, strategically set apart from all that is ‘other’, a place that can be mastered through sight, where the owner's ‘eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and “include” them within its scope of vision’. ²³ He strides onto his own field, ‘answering the glance of the other’ with pious greeting: ‘Yhwh be with you!’ (2.4). But as Fludernik quips, ‘Identities cannot be upheld without the co-operations of others’. ²⁴ Accordingly, his workers, no doubt eager to keep their employment, respond, ‘And Yhwh bless you!’ Indeed, ‘blessing’ favors Boaz, equipping him to bring others into his space, to position them in ways that serve his economic and social ends, and to favor them with his own frequent words of blessing. Not surprisingly, his theological and moral subjectivity conforms, as does Naomi's, to personal experience and emplacement. But while Naomi, three times bereft and stumbling back from foreign soil, feels the back of Yhwh's hand, Boaz understands Yhwh to be, like himself, a fair employer and protector who pays a decent wage and who shades all laborers seeking shelter. With sandals planted firmly on his own soil in his own hometown, standing tall as a ‘pillar of the community’, ²⁵ Boaz has no reason to view Yhwh as anything but gracious, and this, in turn, informs his own magnanimity.

Ruth as foreign immigrant, on the other hand, does not fit neatly into the social system. She has no ‘proper’ place and instead occupies an ‘in-between’ space. While Boaz strategically structures his space to meet his ends and to shore up his identity, Ruth must rely on what de Certeau calls ‘tactics’, ‘calculated action[s] determined by the absence of a proper locus’. ²⁶ The difference in social location is particularly striking in how the two characters are subject to time. De Certeau asserts that an owned, ‘proper’ place represents ‘a triumph of place over time’, in that ‘it allows one to capitalize acquired advantages, to prepare future expansions, and thus to give oneself a certain independence with respect to the variability of circumstances’. ²⁷ In contrast, one who operates tactically in the terrain of others depends heavily on time, waiting upon possibilities, seizing chance and opportunity from moment to moment. Boaz's agricultural success points to his social and economic ability to control his future. Ruth has no such control. She insinuates herself into the proper spaces of others, seizing opportunities to ‘make do’ in ways that stretch, manipulate, and transgress the social boundaries. ²⁸ Unlike the inactive Naomi, she ventures into public space with a plan to use that space to her advantage, namely to glean in the field of one who might show her favor (2.2). As chance would have it, she lands in Boaz's field, quickly gets the measure of this socially structured space, and waits for opportunity.

Boaz, naturally defaulting to the ‘panoptic practice' ²⁹ of an owner of proper space, immediately spies a foreign element in his domain and seeks to position her socially. ‘Whose girl is this?’ he asks (2.3). His overseer stammers, ‘She is the Moabite girl, the one returning with Naomi from the fields of Moab…’ (2.6–7). The overseer depicts her as an immigrant, someone out of place, a Moabite who should be in Moab's fields, and yet here she is, uninvited and unexpected, both in Boaz's field and in his field of vision. For Ruth's part, this is not coincidental, since she sets out intentionally to find someone ‘in whose eyes I might find favor’.

The overseer stumbles on, relaying her request to glean ‘among the sheaves after the reapers’. An appeal for favor well beyond typical gleaning practices, Ruth's request represents, to use de Certeau's language, a certain ‘poaching’ on the space of others. ³⁰ Rather than requesting to join his labor force as any able-bodied young woman might do at harvest time, she asks, though unentitled, to glean immediately behind the reapers where the sheaves are being bound. ³¹

Recognizing the social and geographical boundaries Ruth has already crossed, Boaz (summoning his ‘executive self and adjusting the structure of his domain) immediately attempts to restrict her movements, insisting that she stay in his field close to his young women, and that she keep her eyes on her work. His word choices here (2.9) and elsewhere (2.15, 16) indicate that, without his protection, her safety is not assured. ³² She responds with exaggerated gratitude, simultaneously probing his motives: ‘Why have I found favor in your eyes—that you should notice me—when I am a foreigner?’ (2.10)

Boaz's answer reveals that he knows more than he lets on. ‘It has indeed been told to me’, he says to her, ‘of all that you have done for your mother-in-law after the death of your husband. You left behind your father, mother, and birthplace to come to a people you did not know before’ (2.11). In true command of his ‘proper’ place, he not only sees all, he knows all. He deems Ruth's traversing of space and identity a remarkable narrative, reminiscent of Abraham's legendary migration and deserving of accommodation. In de Certeau's terms, the surprising ‘tactics’ of the stranger call for a reconfiguring of ‘proper’ space. Ruth's travel narrative inspires divine hospitality and protection in an otherwise menacing situation, and changes the rules of engagement with newcomers in Boaz's own fields.

Throughout her exchange with the pious landowner, Ruth tests, if not transgresses, social boundaries. Not only does she question the reasons for his favor, she seeks yet more favor (2.13): ‘May I [continue to] find favor in your eyes, my lord, for you have comforted me. You have spoken to the heart of your maidservant.’ Then, with a quick recovery of propriety, she adds, ‘even though (of course) I am not one of your maidservants’, implying perhaps a willingness to be something more. By noon the self-avowed ‘foreigner’ who is ‘not even one of the maidservants’ is dining with the reapers, and eating from Boaz's plate (2.14). Her occupation of the reapers’ domain pays off abundantly, with more grain than any ordinary gleaner could possibly hope for, and substantially more food than a day's wage could purchase (2.17). While Boaz may attribute this success to Yhwh's ‘paying a good wage’ and cast her migratory initiative as ‘seeking refuge under Yhwh's wings’ (2.12), Ruth keeps the reason for her relocation to herself. What she makes abundantly clear, however, is that it is Boaz's favor, and later in ch. 3, that it is Boaz's wing that can create the space in which she can live. For Ruth, theology is no substitute for ethics.

At day's end Naomi stirs at the sight of Ruth's hard-earned food, and manages a generic blessing on ‘the one who noticed you’ followed by a more enthusiastic blessing upon hearing the name Boaz, describing either him or Yhwh—the syntax is not clear—as one not ‘forsaking hesed to the living or the dead’. The blurring of Boaz and Yhwh continues as she further explains to Ruth that the man ‘is close to us, one of our redeemers’ (2.19–21). ³³ Naomi's words offer a first sign of hope that her story might have a bearable ending after all.

Naomi, like Boaz, also expresses concerns about Ruth's movements. When Ruth teases her saying, ‘Yes, and he told me to stick close to his young men until the end of the harvest’, Naomi quickly counters with instructions to ‘go out with his young women’ instead (2.21–22). Her expressed concern for Ruth's welfare, notably absent from their morning exchange, represents the gradual emergence of Naomi's moral sensitivities.

The chapter thus ends with the introduction of food into Ruth and Naomi's ambiguous space, bringing with it tangible connections to Bethlehem's soil ³⁴ and the hesed of both deity and kin. This expands and reconfigures their plight both socially and temporally. Modest plans for the short term are discussed (2.21–22), and the language of proximity (‘close to us’, ‘going out’ with Boaz's female workers, staying in Boaz's field) accentuates how spatial dynamics affect the potential for moral agency on the parts of all the major characters.

4. Poaching Private Space

With the end of the harvest season, tactical opportunities diminish. Naomi, continuing to rally her ‘executive self’, makes additional plans for Ruth's movements. Seeking for Ruth, and indirectly for herself, ‘security’ (‭חונמ‬), and knowing her own body no longer to be fertile ground, she uses Ruth's body as a down payment for economic and social stability. ³⁵ The plan, substantially more dangerous than Ruth's venturing solo into the harvest fields, involves a further poaching of space. Ruth's prospective destination telescopes from public to private to bodily space: from the threshing floor, to ‘the place where [the man] lies down’, to ‘the place of [Boaz's] feet’ (‭ויתלגרמ‬) (3.4). As it turns out, Boaz retires some distance from his workers, showing the threshing floor, like his grain fields, to be a socially structured space; the foreign interloper, however, noting the social map, makes do with what she finds, transforming a hierarchical situation into one of horizontal(!) intimacy.

She risks numerous accusations—prostitution, promiscuity, entrapment—any of which can be easily tied, through allusion and stereotype, to her foreign identity. The extent of potential scandal can be seen in the secrecy of her arrival, her stealthy departure, and Boaz's concern that no one know of her nocturnal visit. But as the risk is high, so is the possible rate of return: ‭חונמ‬, home, rest from back-breaking labor, and a secure place in the House of Bread—in other words, a ‘proper’ place.

As with all tactical maneuvers, timing is everything. A man satisfied, tipsy, and tired (3.7) is less likely to guard his personal space. As Ruth infiltrates that space, the question of identity surfaces again: ‘Who are you?’ the man asks, startled (3.9). ‘I am Ruth your handmaid. Spread your skirt/wing over your handmaid’, she continues, ‘for you are a redeemer’. As interpreters, we are literally and figuratively ‘in the dark’, unable to see what is taking place or to parse the enigmatic exchange. Nevertheless, the invitation to share the same space is clear. Bodies touch. Boundaries are crossed. Identities are redefined. And moral agency is on the line.

Both Ruth's behavior and word choices playfully, urgently challenge Boaz's earlier speech lauding the protective nature of Yhwh's wings, and she identifies Boaz as a ‘redeemer’. As a loaded signifier, ‘redeemer’ raises numerous questions regarding her motivation and meaning: Does she use the term in its technical, familial sense, signaling her destitution and impending servitude? Is she asking him to make her his ‘handmaid’ lest she become another's on account of debt? Is she calling upon redemption as a theological metaphor? Is she confusing redemption with levirate marriage? Is she hinting that he, as a redeemer, is obligated to ensure that the dead are not forgotten? Boaz's response hardly clarifies. His stilted stuttering (again, a sign of authenticity) speaks evasively of this act of hesed being greater than any prior; he commends her for not turning to ‘choice’ young men; he promises to do what she has asked of him; he declares, curiously, that the ‘whole gate of [his] people’ knows that she is an ‭ליח‬ ‭תשא‬ (a woman of ‘substance’ or ‘worth’ or ‘strength’ or ‘virtue’ or ‘character’ or…?); ³⁶ he talks enigmatically about a closer redeemer; and he insists, twice, that she stay the night with him.

As these indeterminate labels, redeemer and ‭ליח‬ ‭תשא‬, flutter elusively in the night air, the climactic scene concludes with the foreign woman having inserted herself into the most private of communal spaces—the bed of a prominent landowner. What anyone else might view as scandalous, Boaz labels hesed, thus turning moral convention on its head. Ruth emerges in the early light with both a promise of redemption and a load of highly symbolic seed, representing both food and future progeny, not simply for herself, but to fill the emptiness of Naomi.

Upon her return Naomi asks, ‘Who are you, my daughter?’ Although a puzzling question, it encapsulates well our inquiry here. Who, indeed, is Ruth after this cloaked (and uncloaking) venture under the skirt of darkness? How is she to be identified? How would we describe her as a ‘moral agent'? Bakhtin would say, the ‘answerability of the actually performed act is the taking-into-account in it of all the factors—a taking-into-account of its sense-validity as well as of its factual performance in all its concrete historicity and individuality’. ³⁷ Or in short, the answer depends upon how we understand the rest of the story.

5. Tricks and Trade-Offs

In ch. 4 the issues of property and redemption move to the gate, the spatial and symbolic portal to the community. Contemporary readers might, at this point, feel ambushed by the narrative, having been encouraged to commiserate with these seemingly destitute widows, only to discover that they have had undisclosed economic resources all along. The ancient audience would have been, no doubt, less naïve about either the likelihood of the landholding or the asset it represents. Since land has little value unless there are laborers to work it and resources for payroll, land ownership does not guarantee self-sustainability. In other words, legally owning a plot of ground does not ensure a ‘proper’ place.

As Boaz's interchange at the gate makes clear, Naomi, as Elimelek's childless widow, holds the rights to her husband's inheritance. There are no immediate blood brothers, as the haggling over redemption shows. Should the land not be sold, it would, upon Naomi's death, seemingly go to Ruth as the childless widow of Mahlon, Elimelek's firstborn son. ³⁸ This would explain in part the initial textual problem in 4.5, where the first kethib reads, ‘On the day you acquire the field from the hand of Naomi and from Ruth the Moabite…’ Ruth, then, emerges as an ‭ליח‬ ‭תשא‬ (a ‘woman of substance’) in the same register that Boaz is an ‭ליח‬ ‭רובג‬ ‭שיא‬ (a ‘prominent man of substance’). Both are people of ‘property’ even if it is a matter of degree. This would explain how the ‘whole gate of the people’ can identify her as an ‭ליח‬ ‭תשא‬ (3.11), despite her Moabite origins. This is social description, not moral evaluation.

Ruth's prospective landownership sheds a different light both on her nocturnal overtures on the threshing floor and Boaz's subsequent public performance at the gate. Naomi and Ruth have a claim on a ‘proper place’, but no power to control what happens there. If they give up their land claim through a sale, they resign themselves to a life in ‘in-between’ space. The proceeds of the sale might support them temporarily, but would eventually be depleted. But in order for the land to be of any benefit, to truly ‘own’ it in de Certeau's sense, they need resources to cultivate it. An alliance with Boaz secures the land, the resources, and future financial stability. But Boaz has his reputation to consider, and social pressure can be a powerful constraint on moral agency. Were Boaz simply to marry Ruth without involving the custom of redemption, he could be perceived as a land-grabber who exploits and exacerbates economic inequality. And he might appear particularly avaricious if willing to marry a Moabite in order to expand his real estate holdings. For a man eager to protect his community standing, this would be unacceptable. On the other hand, he seems to be quite open to Ruth's advances, promising to fulfill her request and pressing her to stay the night with him. He is clearly willing to have Ruth remain a fixture in his ‘proper’ domain. How does he balance desire, ethical obligation, and concern for his reputation? Ruth gives him the solution.

As Jennifer Koosed observes, Ruth, throughout the story, plays the role of a classic trickster. ³⁹ On the threshing floor, in true trickster fashion, Ruth offers at outrageous risk the key to cultural change, the gift of creative compromise—a gift that she and Naomi desperately need implemented. As de Certeau points out, trickery is a tactic of the weak, often the only option. By contrast, the powerful are too often ‘bound’ by their ‘very visibility’ and can ill afford to ‘take chances with feints’. ⁴⁰ To the socially prominent Boaz Ruth also offers the gift of trickery itself, the tactic that ensures that compromise gets a hearing. This is a gift that he both accepts and employs with aplomb at the city gate to effect a solution to everyone's advantage—except, of course, the nearer kinsman's.

The trickery involves navigating and manipulating officially structured space—intercepting the ‘closer’ redeemer, staging a hearing at the gate, mustering the necessary elders, summoning witnesses—in short, constructing a ‘proper’, formal occasion to handle what appears to be a perfunctory sale of land. But taking his cue from Ruth, Boaz seizes this opportunity to make a questionable social maneuver look like a virtuous one. By creating a public spectacle over which honor and shame hang like Damoclesian swords, the nearer redeemer is first pressured to say yes to the land redemption—since it is clearly the responsible thing to do and besides, if he refuses, Boaz will undertake the responsibility, showing himself to be the better man (4.4). But no sooner than the kinsman says yes, he is pressured to say no. Why? The answer turns on how one untangles the textual problems in 4.5. If we read both kethivs in 4.5, and alter the punctuation only slightly, Boaz says to the kinsman: ‘In the day that you acquire the field from the hand of Naomi and from Ruth the Moabite, the wife of the dead I acquire to raise up the name of the dead to his inheritance’. In other words, Boaz voluntarily takes on the responsibility of levirate marriage even though neither he nor the nearer kinsman is under any obligation to do so. The prospect of a child coming along later to claim the very property upon which the kinsman is about to expend good capital forces him, as Boaz knows it will, to renege. The kinsman suffers public embarrassment while Boaz comes off looking the hero. By rewriting the appropriate ‘practices’ of ‘proper’ space, Boaz gets the farm; he gets the girl; he gets public acclaim; he is a redeemer writ large, both providing security to the needy women and ensuring the dead are not forgotten.

Publically validated, Ruth marries Boaz, expanding and formally occupying Boaz's ‘proper’ domain. The land she is destined to inherit is ‘properly’ absorbed into the estate of a Bethlehemite citizen, and she and Naomi acquire economic stability. Ruth's divinely granted offspring, like that of Rachel, Leah, and Tamar (three other notorious tricksters), ‘builds up the house of Israel’ (4.11–12). The townswomen declare the baby to be Naomi's son, redeemer, and sustainer (4.15). Moreover, the women's reminder to Naomi that her daughter-in-law who loves her is better to her than seven sons is, perhaps, not hyperbole. Ruth has tied land, family, and economic capital together in ways that a son could never do. Fulfilling her vow to Naomi, through means that neither of them likely imagined, the enterprising Moabite has shown how the tactical navigations of geographical, social, and ethically ambiguous places can create new spaces where the dead can be remembered, survivors can find new life, and at least certain strangers can belong.

6. Postscript: The Story's Moral Agency

Moral agency in the book of Ruth is not confined, however, to the internal workings of the story world. The narrative discourse as a whole also operates as moral agent in its creation of communal space for moral reflection. While I analyze this in more detail elsewhere, ⁴¹ here I simply call attention to how the intersection of character and plot supports moral reflection by capitalizing on what Bakhtin identifies as the ‘event-ness of Being’, in which each ‘step taken’ (postupok) is an indeterminate, unpredictable, but ‘answerable deed’ set against a range of alternative behaviors. There are, in other words, more possible outcomes than actual outcomes, and the story's power lies in how it frames its characters’ behaviors with alternative unrealized but conceivable futures. At every critical juncture, alternate plots ‘sideshadow' ⁴² the narrative action, indicating how things might have happened differently: Elimelek could have waited out the famine in Bethlehem as did Boaz. Naomi could have remained a widow in Moab. Ruth could have, like Orpah, gone back home. She could have chanced upon someone else's field—someone who might not have offered her protection. She could have, as Boaz observes, gone after a younger man. She could have been discovered and publically humiliated at the threshing floor. Boaz could have responded differently to her overtures. He could have continued to use Yhwh as his alibi for not acting. The nearer kinsman could have purchased the land in spite of the financial risk. Even Yhwh could have allowed Ruth to remain childless. By hinting at these options, the story leaves time and plot open, stressing at every turn that life is unpredictable, that one's actions often exceed one's circumstances, that ‘choice is momentous’. ⁴³ This is why the Davidic genealogy must conclude the story, and not serve as a preface as genealogies normally do. Nothing is predetermined, but time is left open to events of moral agency. Rather than being the teleological goal, David is a surprising outcome of specific choices made by a diverse cast of characters who occupy different kinds of social spaces. This is also why attempts to imbue the book with divine providence are lamentably wrong-headed. ⁴⁴ Yhwh holds no strings but assumes his place alongside the other characters as a performer of ‘answerable deeds’ grounded in unprecedented moments of choice and accountability. By dramatizing momentous choices, and showing where these choices lead, the book of Ruth lays the groundwork for continuing ethical reflection on what is good and what is possible.