Ruth or Routh? Introduction to the Textual Analysis of the Book of Ruth
Ruth - Rhiannon Graybill
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).
Rhiannon Graybill [+ ]
University of Richmond
Rhiannon Graybill is Marcus M. and Carole M. Weinstein and Gilbert M. and Fannie S. Rosenthal Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond. 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).
William Krisel [+ ]
Institut Catholique de Paris
William Krisel is a lecturer at Institut Catholique de Paris (Catholic University of Paris). His recent publications include Judges 19–21 and the “Othering” of Benjamin: A Golah Polemic against the Autochthonous In- habitants of the Land? Leiden: Brill, 2022; "Methodological Problems in Intertextual Analyses of Old Testament Texts: Genesis 19 and Judges 19 as a Case Study,” SJOT 36:2 (2022); “Was the Levite’s Concubine Unfaithful or Angry? A Proposed Solution to the Text Critical Problem in Judges 19:2,” OTE 33, 2 (2020).
Description
This chapter discusses the numerous textual variants in Ruth attested by four Dead Sea scrolls, the Septuagint and the ketiv-qere notes in the Masoretic Hebrew text edited in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartiensis and now in the Biblia Hebraica Quinta . The aim is to warn that decisions regarding which reading is preferable reflect a venerable reading tradition that often stands at loggerheads with actual textual witnesses. The variants confirm the existence of alternative plots and author characterizations that modern translations of Ruth tend to erase.