Ruth Bible Study: Session 2 (Getting Past the Great Barrier) Sandra Richter

so welcome back to the Book of Ruth were in session 2 and we're dealing with getting past the great barrier so where do we start this study and the answer to that is exactly that we start with trying to get past the great barrier that stands between us and these fabulous characters of this wonderful little book we need to take a step out of our world and step back into their world and I've gotta warn you that this is going to be a bit of a cross-cultural experience the issue is we're gonna have to recognize that our geography is not their geography our history is not necessarily their history and our culture is definitely not their culture now reality is that the standard human condition is to assume that my culture is normative right the house that I grew up in the food that I eat the clothes that I wear the schools that I went to this is normal right and it's not until you get dropped into somebody else's culture it starts dawning on you oh my gosh not everyone eats Cheerios for breakfast there are some families out there that don't have curfews there are some families out there that are still arranging marriages for their emerging adult children for those of you who do business on foreign soil or if you've ever been a member of the Peace Corps or gone on a missions trip you've had this experience in spades and you expected to have that experience but let me warn you that you don't necessarily have to go on foreign soil to have a cross-cultural experience in fact you can have them right here on home soil one of my funnest illustrations is when my family native northeasterners you know Boston where the winters are cold and the people are colder I can say that because I come from there we decided to make the great cross-cultural journey to Madison Mississippi where the winters are warm and the people are warmer oh my gosh in the deep south people talk to strangers they do like they'll stop right there to cross the street and they'll engage you in conversation not only will they engage you in conversation which you would never do in Boston they will touch you while they talk to you and let me tell you for the first few months when we moved down to Madison Mississippi I felt just a little bit stalked actually because these people were so friendly that I was a little overwhelmed so their culture is not our culture there are issues of the rules of social engagement there's dress code there's food let's talk about dress code for just a moment do you know that every self-respecting five-year-old in Madison Mississippi has enormous hair bows in every possible color this is what you do and the the hair bows are as big as a salad plate every one of them in fact one of our favorite things to watch is my youngest's videotape there's an old word of performing in her preschool concert because at no point could we actually see Elise's face because a child in front of her had of course her enormous matching hair bow so dress codes are different food is different we were kind of a fruit and fiber you know low cholesterol kind of family fried catfish fried okra fried pickles and boiled peanuts and crawfish boils and shrimp and grits if you have never had these foods oh are you missing out because what you will find very quickly when you move into somebody else's culture is that all of these culinary secrets have been kept from you all of these years so we very quickly adapt it and thank God for our friendly neighbors who put up with us while we're in this transition but reality is that right here on American soil we were experiencing culture shock and the reason we're experiencing culture shock is because of what the anthropologists will call ethnocentrism which is this normative human posture it's everywhere it's not just white it's not just Western it's not just upper-class this normative human posture that my culture is the normal culture and everyone else's world should look just like mine well guys that business of ethnocentrism is something we're gonna have to get past as we step back into the study of Ruth and Naomi and Boaz and really we're gonna have to get past it in all of our biblical study but this is a great place to start we want to understand their world as their world yes it is beautiful that we put our faces on the biblical characters there's there's something really lovely about that but in order to hear their story the way they're telling it we're going to have to allow them to paint their own faces and we're gonna have to hear their story in their voices in other words we're gonna need to realize that studying the Old Testament is indeed a cross-cultural endeavor so for a moment put your own culture aside and for a moment let's step into their world now we're gonna do a little exercise in in pulling off our own ethnocentrism you ready take a look at this image you've seen this guy before yeah in fact almost every one of you could identify him yeah who would you say he is yes that is Jesus indeed in fact that is the image of the Sacred Heart it has been used for worship and for prayer for generations especially within the Catholic Church and everyone recognizes that as an image of the first century Galilean Jewish rabbi that we know as Jesus but take a look at this guy as you look at his image you see the color of his hair and the color of that hair yeah little bit of light brown some highlights mixed in hmm take a look at the color of that skin he is a very fair-skinned fair-skinned enough that you might want to be thinking about a little sunblock before you step outside for your day at the pool and the eyes a beautiful kind of aquamarine blue yeah and the Palmolive soft hands okay take a look at this guy who would you identify him as same answer same recognition and it doesn't even matter what part of the planet you come from you would look at that image and you would say well that's Jesus but Jesus in this image has red hair hmm we have an Irish Jesus here okay his skin again very fair complected so fair that this guy better not even collect his mail without SPF 15 okay he's got eyes that are a bright blue and those hands I don't think they have ever touched a sponge let alone a hammer okay as you look at those images you see images of a character you recognize as Jesus but you also recognize that this character is a pale skinny white guy and you know enough about the story of the Bible and you know enough about the story of Jesus to know that he was not a pale skinny white guy right what was his ethnicity the man's Jewish he's Semitic that means the color of his skin should be olive the color of his hair should be dark perhaps even black his eyes they should be brown and after three years of itinerant preaching in the Galilean Sun that man should be brown and after being trained as the apprentice of a manual laborer a contractor he should be buff we should not be having Palmolive soft hands we should not be having piano player fingers we should be having calluses and scars and perhaps even a finger missing so what is it that has made the Jesus of these images the pale skinny white guy and the answer is ethnocentrism he is being painted according to the image of the painter as opposed to the original image now do I think it's a crime for us to put our faces on the biblical characters no not at all I actually think there's something beautiful about it but if you're truly going to understand the story of Ruth you're gonna need to do just a little better than that and I'm gonna help you with it let me show you some other images that I would call ethnocentric I love this one um this one is coming from the Middle Ages it is a picture of the disciples at the wedding at Cana of Galilee and johannes de berry is responsible for this one guys that dress code would have gotten the disciples laughed out of their hometown not only are they seated on Thrones with crowns look at the clothing this is so not Nazareth or take a look at this one this one comes from Bright Hope Baptist Church in Philadelphia Pennsylvania and this image is actually an image of an african-american Jesus and Bright Hope Church in Philadelphia Pennsylvania is a thriving Church that is putting the face of their congregation on the face of Jesus how about this one this comes from st. John's Episcopal which is a church that I have ministered in several times I love these people in downtown Memphis and back in the 1950s an artist named John Henry DeRozan actually visited their sanctuary and painted these beautiful murals of the biblical characters in Nordic fashion so now we have a Viking Jesus notice that all of those characters are exceptionally tall blond and absolutely completely buff so Jesus winds up blond at his baptism up close and personal again fair and this is clearly not the Jewish Jesus but it's a nope centric presentation of Jesus here's one of my newer favorites this one comes from the cathedral of Cusco in Lima Peru and you look at that image and you recognize the characters okay this is the Last Supper that all makes sense to me you see the disciples but if you get up close and personal with this image you're seeing some of the ethnocentrism built in because you're seeing that what they're feeding Jesus on the night of the Last Supper their luxury item that needs to be offered to this hero of all heroes is not the standard lamb of the Passover meal because of course this is a Passover meal and their rules about what you eat at Passover and liam is part of the rules but these guys wanted to offer Jesus something that in their culture was extraordinary was special and that extraordinary little critter critter critter if you look close at the plate that's no lamp in fact what you're looking at are these little guys you're looking at guinea pigs okay now in Lima Peru that's a delicacy in my household that's a pet and in Jesus household that's verboden rabbis don't eat rodents and they especially don't eat rodents for the Last Supper these are fun presentations of how we tend in our ethnocentrism sometimes to lose the culture that we're trying to step into so our job over the course of this study is to step over the line into Ruth's culture and to realize that in stepping over the line what we're looking for is real people real people who lived in real places they had their own culture they had their own traditions they had their own rules of social engagement that look a lot different from ours and as we interact with this book they're going to be incidents in this book are gonna kind of stun you because they're not part of your culture but they are part of theirs and one of the reasons when I teach my students I emphasize this real people in real places is because that demonstrates the fact that these real people are engaging real faith you see as long as your biblical characters stay in their ivory tower then there's no aspect of their exercise of their own faith that challenges you or me because their ivory tower people they're you know they're Superman they're Captain America they're perfect well no they're not Ruth Boaz Naomi real people real places and these are real crises that we're dealing with okay so let's take our first step back into ruse culture and one of the most important things you need to know about Ruth and Boaz's culture is that they actually come from a tribal society and for most of us these days a tribal society is something we hardly remember or perhaps of only encountered in movies for Americans if you were to think back to the Cherokee and the Sioux and the indigenous Americans that lived in tribal groups okay you're getting close if you're from the middle east and you're still dealing with the various constellations in the Muslim world and you're watching it on the news perhaps one tribe throwing rocks at another tribe okay maybe you're getting close or if you're from certain parts of Africa you're still dealing with the ethnic divisions of tribalism but for most Westerners this is pretty far away well guys tribal society is indeed what Ruth and Boaz's culture was and what that means is that the family is the core of everything society is structured around the family in every expression that means that economic opportunity and all vocational goals are actually structured by and happen through the family that is not true for the standard Westerner in fact your vocation in the culture of Israel would be dictated by your father's vocation you would have little choice in the matter and moreover your engagement of that vocation would be completely based on your birth order and your gender this would be dictated from the moment you were born if you're the firstborn you were gonna be your father's apprentice you will always pull the densest workload you will always be watched like a hawk your father will be all over you like white on rice from the day you utter your first word until the day you replace him as the patriarch of the clan if your second born the load is lighter third born fourth board and fifth born just keep moving down the line until you're David an eighth born well first of all by the time your eighth born your inheritance fit in a backpack and on top of that the expectations that are placed on you will be equally light your gender if you are male your world goes this way if you are female your world goes this way and that is the reality of society what your father does is what you do unless he in his ultimate authority in the family decides that he needs to apprentice you off to someone else in other words basically sell you into another service or perhaps enlist you in the army um that's economic opportunity what about law it's also enforced by the family there are no police forces in the Land of Israel you get in trouble it is your dad who pulls you literally on the carpet spare the child spare the rod spoil the child this is not a metaphor in the world of Israel if your father can't control you then your uncle's will and if your uncle's can't control you they won't call the elders of the tribe and the elders of the tribe will call you on the carpet and if they can't control you according to the book of Deuteronomy the young incorrigible young adult male who will not work and consumes the resources of the family without giving back the community is called to stone him hmm law happens within the family this is why nothing in Israel society isn't personal and so to the safety nets of the society are not impersonal either for the unemployed for the accused for the widow for the orphan the aid that is out there all comes to the family system that's a tribal society what about a bureaucratic society well that's you that's me society structured around the state economic opportunities they come through the state vocationally supposedly you can be whatever you want to be as long as you get enough training to get there law that's gonna be enforced by the state as well so if you wind up getting pulled over by one of Kentucky's finest cuz you're going 75 miles an hour down Harrodsburg Road you can be sure that he's going to ask for your documentation that demonstrates that you're an upstanding citizen of the state isn't he and then if you can't produce that documentation he's gonna pull out his handcuffs and he's gonna throw you in the car and he's going to take you down to the police station and make you appear before a judge and let me tell you none of those people are gonna be related to you and that's as it should be in a bureaucratic system law is enforced by the state and what about safety nets well in our bureaucratic society there are a lot of safety nets yeah there's unemployment there's disability there's Medicaid Medicare there's food stamps there's foster homes there's orphanages these aren't all high functioning safety nuts but they're all safety nuts that come to the state whereas in Ruth and Boaz's world the only safety net was the safety net of the family so let's take a look at how that society is actually structured what you're looking at right now is a chart of Israelite Society and how it starts with a segment that's called the bait of and really that's their word for family bait of is a Hebrew phrase and it means the household of the father now society is not only tribal Israel's society is actually patriarchal so it's a male oriented tribal society now we're not going to emulate their culture but we need to understand their culture so in this society the core unit of the society was this extended family called the father's house now for you and I typically the core unit of the family is a husband a wife and 2.5 kids living in the burbs right that's the core unit of our society not in Israel society it was a husband his wife his adult sons their wives and their children all living on the family farm all working is a unit to support the extended family Hebrew doesn't even have a word for a family that is smaller than three generations anywhere up to 20 members think about early farming families in the United States at the turn of the century and how you would have the the core farming couple in the main house with any underage children the oldest would be married and have built his own house you know perhaps on the back 10 acres and he'd have his wife and a couple of toddlers the second oldest maybe he would still be in a trailer and and just be married and no kids yet and the youngest brother would still be living in the main house that would be a picture of the bait of in Israel's history that's their core piece now after that core piece when the beta got too big to handle itself it would split off and the eldest sons of each family unit would take over their own bait of father's household that's where the word clan comes from and typically a village in Israel's world would be about 200 people that's all 200 250 people and it would be made up of a sequence of clans after the clan comes the tribe itself you've heard about Israel having 12 tribes well it's not a metaphor they had 12 tribes yeah they did and each tribe had its own senior patriarch and he was a very authoritative person and then the 12 tribes when they were all together that's the nation so this is Israel's world and when we pick up the story of Ruth and Boaz we're actually picking up this society before monarchy comes on the scene so Israel is just the 12 tribes and they're all living in their own territories under their own tribal authorities they're all living in their little extended families their their little villages made up of clans and they're all barely making it which is going to become more and more important as we move through this story so how are we going to describe Ruth and Boaz and Naomi's culture we're gonna learn two words and you're gonna work on this in your study guides so that this material is available to you one of the words is patriarchal one of them is patrilineal and the other is patrilocal and you can hear the word Patra in all of those because father the oldest living male is critical to Israel's society now again we are not going to recreate this culture because if we did we're gonna have to pick even even if we were we're gonna have to pick a phase of its development but this is their world we're stepping across the boundary and in this world the word patriarchal has to do with authority and it's the idea that that oldest living male is not sent off to a nursing home right rather that oldest living male is actually running the household and that patriarch is the center of the household and all authority and all responsibility for the household actually rests on his shoulder and if he's a good patriarch he does not lay his head on the pillow at night until he knows that every member of his family is safe and fed and moving forward into their future the second word we need to learn is the word patrilineal and that word has to do with descent ancestral descent or inheritance and because this is a tribal culture all of the resources of a family moved to the next generation through the family system you can't just sell stuff or give stuff away we have been treasuring and saving this material for generations we are going to pass it on to the next generation and we're gonna do it through the male line again we're not emulating we're just understanding so the primary resource these people have in this particular phase of human history is land and children I don't know about you but in my world my children are not exactly an economic asset are you with me yeah when I'm done getting these two through school through club soccer through orthodontic Spain for college tuition maybe a little bit of graduate school American Eagle jeans of boots and all the other stuff that goes into raising these children I'm gonna be in the poorhouse they are not an asset no but in a farming community they are labour and so they are an asset and land of course and this land cannot be sold in israelites culture it has to be inherited so these are the things that they are passing on and we are gonna bump into all of this in the story of Ruth we're gonna bump into something called the inalienable land law that law cannot be sold and rather if a family member is forced to the margins economically where they actually have to sell their land it's a kinsman's responsibility to actually step in and buy their land back for them this is going to become very important when we start talking about Elimelech and how he had to leave the family patrimony to go to Moab another law that protected these resources is something called the levirate law and this is the idea that if a woman is widowed before she has the chance to bear a son in this patriarchal culture it is her brother-in-law's responsibility this one's a little scary to step in and actually get her pregnant in her deceased husband's name so that there's an heir to inherit the deceased husband's goods this is going to become very important when Naomi Ruth it I'll loose their husbands what is Israelite law now you actually have already bumped into patrilineal ISM you just probably didn't know it and you bumped into it when you read your Bibles and couldn't find a woman's name in a genealogy hmm have you ever wondered why everyone listed in the genealogies of the Bible or male is it because God is a misogynist he hates women he doesn't think they're important to the story heck no it's because this is a patrilineal culture and they're busy recording who's related to who so they know where the inheritance goes and they're tracking it through the male line we'll come back to that all right what about women in the society very important question for our larger story because our heroes in the story are women in fact unbeknownst to you at this point the true lead character of this story is Naomi and according to the biblical narrator she is both our hero and our victim and it is her story that we are following as we see Ruth and Boaz playing as her counter characters well a woman in this culture would be understood to be first her father's daughter and she would be protected under the legal and economic protection of her patriarchy her father so she would belong to a paid off then she would be married off and she would leave the bait off and she would join her husband's bata and she would become her husband's wife and through her husband she would have links to the economy and the legal system then if all things went well she would bear a son who would survive which the morality right mortality rate was quite high and he would grow up to be a strapping young man who would protect her in her old age this is how women move through this society this was normative this is why your old testament says over and over and over again protect and defend the widow in the orphan because the widow and the orphan are the ones that fall outside the betaf what happens when a woman loses her father before she has a husband what happens when a woman who's already left her bed ah've loses her husband when she does not yet have a son and the answer is she's destitute and so the widow in all of the Old Testament and all the way into the New Testament if you've read James lately is the one who needs the protection of the people of God the most and of course the story we're heading into is about two ultimate widows who have lost every connection to their bed off and every means of protection within their society so the last business has to do with patrilocal and that's the idea that the family unit and the living space is actually built around the oldest living male so the bait of is not simply a family unit it's actually a family compound and in that family compound we have a sequence of relatives adults middle emerging adults adolescents and small children who are all working their tails off simply to survive this is a subsistence culture it will stay a subsistence culture for eons which means everybody is barely making it and so they will collectively farm the land they jointly own share the produce and move on to the next generation what did their living condition look like well you're looking at an image on the screen of the typical family compound well you've got two or three of these for room pillared houses the women are upfront and personal you can see them taking care of domestic chores they're grinding grain into flour which could take hours and hours every day they're weaving textiles into clothes they're cooking the food they've got the small children clothes the men are out in the fields they're keeping the Sheep they're farming the land this is the bait of of Israel's culture this is a world in which life was hard survival was uncertain and family was everything let me introduce one more term before we close down this and that is the term redemption or the term to redeem as you enter into the study you're going to keep bumping into this word now throughout your experience with your Bible your church if you have any background whatsoever you have heard the word redeemed before and to you it's probably become something I call biblic a word that's been used so often by the church in English that has become gibberish well guys this word isn't gibberish and this word wasn't born in the Bible this word actually comes out of tribal law it pre-existed your Old Testament and the word has to do with the responsibility of a kinsman in this particular type of society to step up to the plate and be the safety net for his family member a good patriarch of real patriarch stepped up to the plate and if his family member had been shoved to the margins because of life circumstances in poverty he put his checkbook on the counter and he said how much that one belongs to me or if that patriarch was in a situation where a family member had been captured by an enemy and was a powa their life was at risk a good patriarch actually stepped up to the plate and said my life for his life my weapon for your weapon that one's mine and I'll go down for him that's what patriarchs do that's what patriarchs are supposed to do and what we're going to see in the story that's about to unfold it's two of the most voiceless to the most marginalized of Israel society an old widow who cannot have another child and a young widow who is a foreigner who has no child and a man a man who is not the closest relative but he's a relative all the same who is willing in the midst of their crisis to step up to the plate and to say I'm a kinsman and I will redeem my resources my home my life for the this is a story in the book of Booth Ruth about Redemption Redemption that is going to become a core phrase throughout everything we know about our Bibles and the story the great story of Jesus the Christ launched question for this session turn to the person next to you and report to them one thing you learned about Israelite culture that rocked your world you

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Keywords: Seedbed, Christianity, Asbury Theological Seminary, Sandra Richter, Epic of Eden, Sandy Richter, Ruth, Book of Ruth, Bible Study, Bible, Sunday School, Small Groups, Scripture

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Length: 34min 1sec (2041 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 18 2018