Ruth 1 Footnotes

1:1-2 Moses decreed that Moabites were not permitted for a period of ten generations even to enter the Lord’s assembly (Dt 23:3-6), yet Mahlon and Chilion married Moabite women. Naomi’s comment (Ru 1:15) suggests that Ruth and Orpah had been participants in the idol worship of their people. The author merely recorded the fact of the marriages, without indicating that Mahlon and Chilion had acted wisely. Two factors, however, mitigate what appears to be their disregard for Moses’s ordinance. First, a “generation” need not be one hundred years (Gn 15:13,16), requiring a one thousand year period before the expiration of Moses’s prohibition, which had been uttered only some three hundred years previously. A generation could refer simply to the time between a person’s birth and the birth of that person’s child. Second, Moses’s prohibition applies to Moabites’ entering the Lord’s assembly (the worship gathering); it did not specifically prohibit marriage with a Moabite woman, since the assembly was predominantly made up of men (see Dt 16:16). Moses provided for the possibility that an Israelite might take a woman from another ethnic group as a wife (Dt 21:10-13).

1:20-21 Naomi correctly recognized that God did not necessarily bring only good situations into one’s life but that he at times brought difficulties (see Jb 1:21; 2:10). Elsewhere in Scripture such difficulties are understood to be for the purpose of testing or discipline (e.g., Pr 3:11-12; Heb 12:7-11), but Naomi has not attained that insight at this stage.