Orpah's Four Tears and the Four Giants of Gath

Orpah had walked forty paces with Naomi before she stopped on the road out of Moab. Behind her lay her dead husband's house, the empty loom, the table set for no one. Ahead lay Bethlehem and a foreign God. She had already said she would go. She had taken her mother-in-law's hand on the road and meant to keep walking.

Then she stopped.

Ruth stood a little apart, watching the two of them, the old woman and the younger one, hands still joined in the dust. Naomi did not pull away. She only waited, the way the bereaved wait, expecting nothing, ready to be left.

The Four Tears on the Road Out of Moab

Orpah wept. Not the long wail of a widow at the grave, but four slow tears, one after another, and they fell on Naomi's neck where their faces met. She pressed her mouth to the old woman's cheek. "Go back to your people," she did not quite say it, but her feet had already said it. The kiss was a goodbye and both of them knew it.

Ruth did not move. "Where you go, I will go," she told Naomi, "and your God will be my God." She clung. Orpah loosed her grip and turned, and the forty paces she had come she walked back the other way, alone, toward the gods of her childhood and the men of her own country.

Heaven counted the paces. Heaven counted the tears. Nothing on that road was lost, not the loyalty that stayed and not the loyalty that turned. Both were written down, and both would be paid back in full, in flesh, on a field far to the south, in a country called Gath.

What Grew from a Kiss

That same night, the road behind her, Orpah did not go home to mourn. A hundred men of the Philistines came to her, and a hundred more, and she lay with the camp until the camp had no count of her. From that night four sons would rise in Gath, and the sages who read her story said it plainly: as the reward for four tears shed on a widow's neck, four mighty men came out of her.

Their names were Saph and Madon, Ishbi, and one more, the largest, whose shadow would fall across a whole valley. These were the four the scroll of Samuel would gather into a single verse at the end of David's wars, four born to one giant in Gath, four cut down by David and the men who loved him. The kiss on Naomi's neck had a price, and the price was four bodies in the field.

The Champion Who Came Forward Forty Days

Years turned. Israel and Philistia faced each other across the valley of Elah, two ridges of armed men and a dry riverbed between. Out of the Philistine ranks walked the largest of Orpah's sons, helmet and greaves and a spear like a weaver's beam.

"Am I a dog," Goliath roared at the boy who finally came down to meet him, "that you come at me with sticks?" There was a dog in that taunt, and the sages caught it. On the night Orpah turned back, they said, even a dog had mingled with her, so that the giant carried the insult he flung in his own blood.

Morning and evening he came forward and shouted across the valley. He did this for forty days, presenting himself, daring any man in Israel to fight. Forty days he stood there untouched, and the sages counted those days too. As the reward for the forty paces his mother had walked beside Naomi, her son was granted forty days to stand and rage before he fell. The loyalty that turned back bought him exactly that much time and not an hour more.

The Stone and the Sword

On the fortieth day the boy came down. He carried a shepherd's sling and five smooth stones out of the brook, and he did not wear armor. The giant laughed at the size of him. The sling sang once. The stone went where the helmet did not cover, and the largest of Orpah's sons fell forward into the dust of the valley he had ruled for forty days.

The boy was David. He would be king. And the three brothers of the fallen giant would not forget the valley of Elah.

The Last of the Brothers

Long after, when David was old and his strength had thinned, Ishbi of Gath caught him on a battlefield and bent him down beneath a spear, the last brother come to collect the last debt. David's men closed around their king and killed the giant before the spear could fall. So the count was finished. Four tears, four giants, four bodies in the field, and the line of Ruth standing over the line of Orpah at the end of every fight.

David did more than survive them. He went against the Philistine foe and shattered their horn, broke the strength of Gath so that to that day it never rose again. The great-grandson of the woman who stayed had cut down, one by one, the sons of the woman who turned back. Two kisses on a road in Moab, two bloodlines, and the whole long war between them was already decided the night Orpah counted out her four small tears and walked her forty paces home.