Naomi Tried Three Times to Send Ruth Away and Failed

Most readers think Naomi was being generous on the road out of Moab. Two widowed daughters-in-law walking home with her into a country they had never seen, and she turns around on the dusty road and tells them to go back. Go back to your mother's house. Go back to the town you grew up in. I am too old to give you new husbands. I am too broken to be the matriarch you need. The scene has always been read as a wounded old woman trying to spare two younger women a wasted life.

The rabbis did not read it that way at all.

The Yalkut Shimoni, the medieval compilation of rabbinic material assembled by Rabbi Shimon HaDarshan in thirteenth-century Germany from earlier Talmudic and midrashic sources, opens its treatment of Ruth 1 with a question that bites. Why did Naomi tell them to turn back at all? The plain reading is that she was being kind. The midrash says no. She was trying not to be embarrassed by them.

Embarrassed, the Yalkut explains, because Jerusalem was not a melting pot. The midrash paints a picture of the holy city with an almost aggressive specificity. There were separate marketplaces in Jerusalem, the rabbis say. The market of the kings and the market of the prophets. The market of the priests. The market of the Levites. The market of the common Israelites. The foreigners had their own markets, and their own clothes, and their own corners of the city, and they did not mix. What one community wore, the other did not wear. What one community sold, the other did not sell. The city was a set of concentric rings of belonging, and Naomi was the widow of a prominent family from Bethlehem walking home after ten years of foreign exile, about to be stared at the moment she set foot in her old town.

And she was not going to walk in with two Moabite girls in foreign clothes at her side.

That is the Yalkut's hard claim. Naomi's first instinct was not compassion. It was shame. She could already hear the whispers in her mind. Look what she brought back from Moab. Look at the wives her sons took there. Look at what the land of idols did to a daughter of Judah. She could picture the stall keepers turning away and the women closing their shutters and the children pointing at the strange veils and the strange tongues. So on the road she turned around and told Orpah and Ruth to go home. Not to spare them. To spare herself.

This is a darker Naomi than most readers are prepared for, and the midrash does not apologize for it. What the midrash does instead is use Naomi's weakness to set up the miracle of what happens next.

Naomi tells them to leave. They weep and refuse. She tells them a second time. Orpah wavers. She tells them a third time. Turn back, my daughters. Go (Ruth 1:12). Three times, not two. The Yalkut seizes on the triple as a legal pattern. From this we learn that we do not refuse a convert after the third time. In other words, Naomi's shame has accidentally performed the exact ritual by which Jewish law receives a soul from outside the covenant. A court is supposed to discourage a would-be convert three times, to test whether the desire is real. Rabbi Shimon HaDarshan's compilation is saying that Naomi, without meaning to, ran the halakhic test on both girls on a Moabite road, and one of them walked away, and one of them did not.

Ruth stayed. After the third refusal Ruth clung to her, and the Hebrew verb in that moment is the same verb the Torah uses when Adam clings to his wife and becomes one flesh (Genesis 2:24). Ruth clung. She put her arms around her mother-in-law and held on as if the force of her grip was the only argument she had left. And then she opened her mouth and said the line every Jew knows by heart. Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people are my people, and your God is my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried (Ruth 1:16 and 1:17).

The Yalkut has one more thing to say about the road. It quotes Rabbi Chiya, a second-generation Babylonian amora from the early third century, who offered a worrying aside about converts in general. Do not trust a convert for twenty-four generations, Rabbi Chiya warned, because the old ferment can still rise in the dough. But, he added, when a convert takes on the yoke of God out of love and awe, and for the sake of heaven and nothing else, the Holy One does not turn that person away. Rabbi Chiya supports his claim from Deuteronomy 10:18, where God is described as loving the convert and giving him bread and clothing. And Rabbi Chiya notes, with the quiet precision of a rabbi who counts, that the Torah warns forty-eight times about how you must treat the convert. Forty-eight. The same number, he says, as the Torah's warnings about idolatry. As if the two commandments were weighted equally in heaven.

Naomi did not know any of this on the road. She had no commentary. She had no reassurance. She had only her shame and her grief and a Moabite girl who would not let go of her elbow. The Yalkut then names a pattern the rabbis noticed and could not stop talking about. Two foreign women, the midrash says, gave themselves up for the sake of the tribe of Judah. One was Tamar, daughter-in-law of the patriarch, who sat by the road at the crossroads and shouted in her heart, I will not leave this house empty. The other was Ruth. Two women who refused to accept that the story of a Jewish household could be allowed to end without them. One of them, in the end, would become the great-grandmother of David. The other would become the mother of Perez, the ancestor of them all.

And then, as if Rabbi Zeira, a late third-century sage who moved from Babylon to the Land of Israel, could no longer bear the beauty of the story quietly, the Yalkut gives him the last line. This scroll has no law in it. It has no purity or impurity. It has no permission and no prohibition. Why then was it written? To teach you the reward of those who do acts of lovingkindness.

Naomi had tried to send Ruth away out of shame. Ruth had refused out of love. And the later rabbinic imagination turned that refusal into the birth story of a dynasty. The widow who had walked out of Moab with nothing walked back into Bethlehem with the grandmother of a king hanging off her arm, and the stalls in all the marketplaces of Jerusalem could say whatever they wanted.