Ruth
Edited by
Rhiannon Graybill [+–]
Rhodes College
Rhiannon Graybill is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College. She is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible whose work brings together biblical texts and contemporary critical and cultural theory. Her research interests include prophecy, gender and sexuality, horror theory, speculative fiction, and the Bible as literature. She is the author of Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford, 2016) and Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 2021). She has also co-edited three books: Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (with Cooper Minister and Beatrice Lawrence, Lexington Books, 2019), The Bible, Gender, and Sexuality: Critical Readings (with Lynn R. Huber, Bloomsbury / T. & T. Clark, 2020), and “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”: The Bible and Margaret Atwood (with Peter J. Sabo, Gorgias Press, 2020). Her current projects include the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary on Jonah(with Steven L. McKenzie and John Kaltner) and an edited volume entitled Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion (with Kent L. Brintnall and Linn Tonstad).
Philippe Guillaume [+–]
University of Berne
Philippe Guillaume is Lecturer at the University of Berne. His latest publications are A History of Biblical Israel co-authored with Ernst Axel Knauf (Equinox, 2016) and Deuteronomy in the Making, Studies in the Production of Debarim, edited with Diana Edelman, Benedetta Rossi and Kåre Berge (De Gruyter, 2021).
The Book of Ruth is an all-time Bible favorite. In four chapters, it builds a clear plot with narrative tension heightened with sexual innuendos; and it ends well. Since the 1990s at least, studies produced an array of portrayals of the heroes of the tale beyond the traditional idyllic readings. Gaps and fissures have been explored to cover its ideological premises. Feminist readings denounce the way patriarchalism used the figures of Naomi, Ruth and Boaz to bolster its social hegemony. Ruth has been presented as a coquette, Naomi as a pimp or a scold, Ruth and Naomi as lesbians, Boaz as exploiter of the proletariat, unstraight, sugar Daddy or impotent.
The growing types of LGBTQ+ orientations might offer more characterizations still; and Veganism has yet to grind Ruth’s gleanings and Boaz’s bridal gift.
Yet, time is ripe to steer a course between idyllic readings and critical ones. There is more to gender asymmetries and patriarchy than the devaluation of women. Women always have power. Neither Naomi or Ruth are powerless victims.
This volume maps an uncompromising way forward between patriarchy and advocacy.
This volume will be first published online and then as a print book.
