The Return of Ruth

Can you return to a place you’ve never been? In the seventh verse of the Book of Ruth’s opening chapter, the possibility seems to be raised.

Following the deaths of their husbands, Ruth and Orpah leave the fields of Moab with their mother-in-law Naomi to search for a better life: “Accompanied by her two daughters-in-law, she left the place where she had been living; and they set out on the road to return [la-shuv] back to the land of Judah.”

Naomi quickly dissuades Orpah from continuing the journey, but Ruth clings to her mother-in-law. A few verses later, we are informed: “Naomi returned, she and Ruth the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, who returned from Moab; and they arrived in Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.” But how could Ruth return from Moab? Naomi is the only one who can actually be said to be coming back to Bethlehem, so why the odd syntax?

The Jerusalem Talmud, in Tractate Yevamot, understood Ruth’s return as spiritual rather than geographical. The word shuv is interpreted here in its common rabbinic sense as an act of repentance (teshuvah): Ruth had “returned” from Moabite paganism to belief in the God of Israel.

The Iggeret Shmuel, a sixteenth-century commentary on Ruth composed in Constantinople by Samuel de Uçeda, takes a different tack. Ruth’s “return” expressed such a strong affinity for the Land of Israel that Scripture considers her to have been born there.

For the late nineteenth century mystic Rabbi Zadok ha-Kohen Rabinowitz of Lublin, Ruth was returning not by means of conversion nor through proto-Zionism, but by reconnecting with her inherently Jewish soul. A believer in reincarnation, Rabbi Zadok suggested that somewhere along the transmigration line, an earlier bearer of Ruth’s soul had sinned, causing her to be born a Moabite. Now, through her fealty to Naomi, she was returning to her essential faith. This radical suggestion builds on a midrashic tradition that Ruth’s soul was among those brought close to God by Abraham and Sarah.

The nineteenth-century scholar Chanokh Zundel ben Yosef agreed that Ruth was possessed by another spirit. But it was that of her deceased husband, Mahlon, who was, of course, from the land of Judah. By heading there with Naomi, Ruth was returning the essence of her husband to his hometown.

The contemporary Israeli scholar Yael Ziegler sees in the word shuv not reincarnation but an intertextual reference. In Genesis, Ruth’s ancestor Lot removed himself from his uncle Abraham and his family when he left for Sodom. When Ruth arrived in Judah with Naomi it was “indeed a ‘return’” that represented “the closing of the circle begun with Lot’s abandonment of Abraham in Genesis 13.”

Modern close readers have noted ways in which boundaries are blurred between Naomi and Ruth. In the third chapter, there are several occurrences of the kri and ketiv distinction, in which a word is spelled one way in the canonical text but pronounced and understood differently according to tradition. In our case, when Ruth is instructed to head to the threshing floor at night and meet Boaz, Naomi seems to perceive Ruth as a stand-in for her own self. The written text reads “and I [Naomi] will go down to the threshing floor,” However, per tradition, we read it aloud as “and you [Ruth] will go down.” Naomi goes on to say “and I will lie down next to him” which is read as if it were “and you will lie down.”

Later, in the fourth and final chapter of the book, after the union of Boaz and Ruth produces a son, Naomi embraces the child, becomes its caretaker, and the women of Judah call out “a son has been born to Naomi,” despite Ruth being the biological mother. It is as if Ruth, once she pledged her loyalty to Naomi and her God, acted as a younger stand-in, acting solely with the goal of reviving Naomi’s own spirit.


Of course, there are simpler solutions to the puzzle of Ruth’s return. The twelfth-century commentator Abraham ibn Ezra understood the verb shuv to apply to Naomi alone and not to her daughter-in-law. Recently, the biblical scholar David A. Lambert has argued that, in the bible, shuv does not actually mean to come back at all. Rather, it means to physically turn in a different direction. If so, no one, not even Naomi, “returned.” She and Ruth simply turned away from Moab and headed to Judah.

Whether Ruth’s heading towards the land of Judah was a metaphysical return to her original soul, a reflection of her friendship with her mother-in-law, or simply a turning toward a location in which she would start life afresh, an observation recently made by the writer Tara Isabella Burton seems apt. A religious pilgrimage when properly performed, Burton writes, is “a journey that results in the transformation, and ideally purification, of the searching self . . . we find out who we really are only by untethering ourselves from those elements of our identities too closely linked to habit and home.”