The Book of Ruth as Evidence for Israelite Legal Practice

Abstract

The short story of Ruth involves three legal processes-inheritance, redemption and the re-marriage of a childless widow 1)-upon all of which the legal sections of the Pentateuch give less information than might be desired and, consequently, considerable discussion has ensued as to the relationship between the procedures reflected in Ruth and the laws as codified in the Torah. In this essay it is proposed to summarize some of the discussions which have taken place, both in the Rabbinic scholarship of the middle ages and in the critical scholarship of the more recent past, and to express some views of the present writer on the subject. However, before proceeding to a detailed examination of these matters, a question of a more general nature must also be considered, namely the question of whether it is valid to derive any conclusions as to legal procedure from a text of the nature of Ruth, which is essentially a short story and by no means a treatise on jurisprudence. In the Rabbinic texts which will be examined below we must not, of course, expect this question to have been considered, for the question in itself would have seemed to these scholars heretical; the book of Ruth, no less than the Torah, was to them a part of the Holy Scripture and an accurate record preserved from early times. Nor do we, so far as the writer is aware, find the question acknowledged in any of the many recent writings on the subjects covered by this essay. Those scholars who have, in recent years, written on the legal problems of the book of Ruth have apparently based their work on the assumption that the answer to the question posed above is in the affirmative, for they draw legal conclusions from the book. The present writer is likewise of the opinion that a text such as Ruth may be used for the study of law and legal procedure.