Jon Levenson on the Moral Force of the Book of Ruth
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah
4.8 • 658 Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2022
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Beginning Saturday night, the Jewish people will celebrate the holiday of Shavuot. During the festival, Jews traditionally study the book of Ruth, the biblical text that tells the story of a non-Jewish widow who becomes the great-grandmother of King David.
To help uncover why the book of Ruth is so beloved, and to make sense of the intertextual references and literary allusions at work in it, the Harvard professor Jon Levenson joins this week's podcast. In conversation with Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver, he explains how the narrative drive of Ruth moves from death to life, and reveals how its principal figures manifest the virtue of ḥesed, traditionally translated as loving-kindness, and meaning loyal devotion.
Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In just a few days, the Jewish people will celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, during which we study the book of Ruth, a much-loved biblical text that explains how a non-Jewish widow becomes the ancestor of King David. |
| 0:21.6 | Many of our listeners will know the basic outlines of the story, |
| 0:24.6 | that Naomi and her husband Elimelech and their two sons travel from Judah to the land of Moab, |
| 0:30.6 | where the sons marry, famine arrives, and Elimelech and both of his sons die. |
| 0:36.6 | One of Naomi's daughters-in-law returns to her people, |
| 0:39.6 | but the other, Ruth, decides to return to Bethlehem with Naomi, manifesting a virtue known in Hebrew |
| 0:45.8 | as Chesed, a quality that is traditionally translated as loving kindness and means something |
| 0:52.2 | like loyal devotion. Having returned to Bethlehem, Ruth meets the |
| 0:56.7 | landowner Boaz, who, manifesting his own qualities of Hecad, comes to provide for Naomi and Ruth, |
| 1:04.9 | and eventually, upon discovering that he is a family relation to Naomi, marries Ruth. The great grandson of Ruth and Boaz will |
| 1:13.0 | one day rule Israel and become one of the most significant religious figures in the history of |
| 1:18.7 | Judaism, Christianity, and the civilization of the West. Welcome to the Tikfoot podcast. I'm your host, |
| 1:24.9 | Jonathan Silver. My guest this week helps us make sense of the illusions, |
| 1:31.0 | intertextual references, and literary devices that are at work in the book of Ruth. And he does much more |
| 1:37.1 | than that, too. John Levinson is the Albert A. List professor of Jewish studies in the Divinity School |
| 1:43.3 | at Harvard University. He reads Ruth as a |
| 1:45.8 | story that moves from death, widows barely surviving famine, to life, the unlikely birth of the |
| 1:52.6 | ancestors of David. And so that's the spirit in which we'll discuss this week, the book of Ruth. |
| 1:58.2 | If you enjoy this conversation, you can subscribe to the Tikva podcast on |
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| 2:07.6 | grow this community of ideas. I welcome your feedback on this or any of our other podcast episodes |
| 2:12.6 | at podcast at tikfafund.org. And of course, if you want to learn more about our work at Tikva, |
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