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Kerygmania: Ruth, the Moabite
Deuteronomy 23 says that "no Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation ". (NIV)
Ruth was an ancestor of David, she was a Moabitess.
Can anyone explain this (seeming) anomaly?
Ruth was an ancestor of David, she was a Moabitess.
Can anyone explain this (seeming) anomaly?
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One possibility is that, like First Testament restrictions against homosexuality, the rule against Moabites in the assembly of the Lord only applied to men (and male line descendants). Anyone here have enough fluency with Hebrew gender cases to see if that translation works?
The footnote in my Oxford Annotated Bible defines it thusly: "the national governing body, or popular legislature, was charged with a broad range of judicial, political, and policy matters."
I'm certain the assembly included women, as when it was gathered for certain solemn occasions it included even nursing babies. Can't have a nursing baby without a nursing mother, most irregular that. Oh, and brides--see Joel 2:16.
Good article here; tl;dr version is what I've long said - when the "Book of the Law" was found during the Temple spring cleaning, the ink was suspiciously wet: https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-who-wrote-the-torah-1.5318582
You are confusing when the events described occurred and when the book was written. You would agree wouldn't you,that none of the Gospels was written until after Christ's death - in the case of John, much later, with the Epistles written before he put quill to papyrus.
We both know the cyclone this wind blows into.
The genealogy tells the tale for me. However, although we are not told the author of Ruth, and Rabbinic tradition suggests it may have been Samuel, what we do know is that it succeeds the Torah so Moses did not write it or it would have been partofTorah and consequently, it cannot antedate Deuteronomy ..which he did write.
It concludes, cautiously, opting for a fairly conservative dating, that (The events in Ruth could be dated to within eight conventional forty-year generations of the death of Moses.)
Even then there could be further argument about the dating of the final form of Deuteronomy. And, if it is to be identified with the book of the law rediscovered during the reign of Josiah, for how long had it been ‘lost’?
The account of the rediscovery in the days of Josiah suggests that by that time even the keeping of the Passover had been lost since some time in the days of the judges. (2 Kings 23.22)
It wouldn’t be surprising, therefore, if the commandment noted in the OP was unknown in the days of Ruth.
What might be more surprising, I suppose, is that the Lord commanded Samuel to anoint David as king. But maybe that lends weight to @Lamb Chopped’s comment above about who did or did not count as a Moabite.
There is no reasonable way Ruth precedes Deuteronomy.
Across the four gospels there are about 20 places where Jesus uses ‘Moses’ to reference the Torah, but it is not clear how far this is an actual assertion of Mosaic authorship, and how far it was simply the use of a piece of common shorthand terminology.
And your second paragraph above appears to suggest that Boaz married Ruth not because he may have been unaware of the prohibition against marrying a Moabite but because he was a backslider.
But for this thread, the question remains, why the Lord should have told Samuel to anoint as king someone whom the law prohibited from entering the assembly of the Lord.
Bathsheba took care to secure the support of a prophet and an army commander in arranging the succession of Solomon. David apparently set the precedent by gaining the backing of Samuel. So David had quite a credibility issue as a usurping general of Moabite ancestry. And you can see his chroniclers and scribes doing their best to overcome it for the sake of his legitimacy and that of his successors.
Going back to a mistake in I made in dating Deuteronomy. I do stand corrected when it comes to composition. But the legend of Ruth is much older. Deuteronomy was written in the 7th Century BCE
reformedanswers.org/answer.asp/file/43316
[Code fix. Mamacita, Host]
No, it really doesn't. It depends on who has the best evidence. Not all beliefs are equal. Those based on better evidence are better.