Ruth for the Bravest!

By Jonathan Mubanga Mumbi

Ruth, a story of love and friendship from three thousand years ago that forces today's Bible reader to look harder and listen more attentively than ever. Why? Because half the world can relate to it more easily than to contemporary Christianity's values and perspectives on the meaning of love and friendship. Global South Christianity is becoming more missionary and Ruth speaks their language. Do they care about authorship arguments when they believe in a God who is in conversation with them every day? Will they care about the truthfulness of what some progressive Western Christians think are myths when they have just experienced a salvation that begs for a label points clearly to the supernatural? These are the coming faces of the Global South's brand of Christianity, of which Africa is not an insignificant part. This book intends to encourage the reader into the necessary conversations that will help the goals of the Good News to those who have lost it and to those who have never heard it. The Bible is the "good news" to some and the "good book" to others and something else to yet others choosing to engage it negatively.

The book of Ruth represents family concerns shared by the Global South and many people groups for whom the social safety nets of Europe and the Americas do not exist. Survival of the family has become an urgent Russian and Chinese concern for a different reason than for Africa and other Third World nations. The point of the levirate law, a law at the center of this book, was to provide an answer to a long standing problem that has not gone away. The Gospel preached by Evangelicalism is supposed to provide better answers than the Old Testament levirate law. If God's plan is to make the Jew jealous of the non-Jew, as the Bible claims, is the brand of values and social safety measures in Christianity the kind that will attract such followers of other religions to Christianity? This reading of Ruth is a primer towards a deeper study of the book itself. It is also a reading of Ruth with an eye towards community development and Global South concerns for the most vulnerable. Americans and Europeans are crying for fences to keep out the hordes from the South on their borders. Ruth has something to say about family survival and dislocation (may YHWH visit their countries of origin with food sufficiency and peace!). What God thought would help Israel become a leading nation includes the Levirate law.

I hope the reader will get much further than I have gone in this book because dealing with a world some consider to be a "jungle" threatening their "garden" requires compassion and wisdom in improving upon that which God gave to Israel. Love and wisdom is everywhere on the pages of Ruth and those who engage with the poor and needy of this world need to bring to their engagements more rather than less of these character strengths.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Mubanga Mumbi
• Release date: Jun 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215353684

Jonathan Mubanga Mumbi

I am Jonathan M. Mumbi an ordained Bishop of the Church of God (World Missions Zambia). This is a denomination under the World Missions Department of the Church of God, Cleveland Tennessee, USA.I have been in ministry since 1988 and mostly a volunteer in Youth With A Mission (YWAM) +30 years. My wife, Jean Mumbi, and I have served at various levels in YWAM and in the Church of God. My passion is to empower young people through nonformal Christian tertiary education. My educational journey has been mostly through YWAM's University of the Nations but I am grateful to have earned a Master of Divinity and a Master of Theological Studies through Nations University. I am a Pastoral Counselor and a lecturer. We are a family of which the youngest is going twenty-three and her siblings are adult brothers.Special personal note: None of the organizations served or mentioned will endorse every opinion I hold, neither do I want to leave anyone under the impression that I writes for, or, under any other authority other my own passion to write what I feel inspired to write.

Book preview

Ruth for the Bravest!

The Challenge of Biblical Compassion in Christian Africa.

Published by Jonathan M. Mumbi at Smashwords

Copyright notice © 2023 Jonathan M. Mumbi

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please download a legal copy from the approved distributor’s retail partners. Thank you for respecting this writer’s contribution to God’s people and caring about Global South spirituality.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

CHAPTER 1. AFRICA IN WESTERN CULTURAL TRAPS

CHAPTER 2. HOLY MOSES BEFORE THE BURNING CRITICS’ NEST

CHAPTER 3. AUTHORSHIP OF THE BOOK OF RUTH

CHAPTER 4. THE CONTEXT OF THE BOOK

CHAPTER 5: VERSE BY VERSE OBSERVATIONS

CHAPTER 6: A CURRICULUM OF COMPASSION IN RUTH

CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION

THE END

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NOTE!: The text of the Book of Ruth in use is from the Bible in Basic English copyrighted 1949 and 1964, a Public Domain Bible.

FOREWORD

The Book of Ruth has a lot to teach us because it paints a picture for us of how other people in Bible times did their best to live lives of obedience to God and have compassion towards one another. Western Christians can relate to Ruth through layers of interpretation but not so with most citizens of the Global South for the majority of whom Ruth speaks to contemporary issues. If this book succeeds in provoking anyone to treat obedience to God as proof of one’s love for God, and compassion for others, this little effort of mine will be more than rewarded. My purpose is not to add another commentary to the long list of commentaries available to the saints.

As an African pastoral counselor, I believe that I owe it to my community to be ruthless with cultural clothing that caricatures the truth for many on this continent. I owe it to friends of my continent to create understanding especially for those whom God sends to Africa to add a dimension of God’s love. I release this work under the title, Ruth for the Bravest! because the need to be brave in the way we do compassion is calling people of faith to take a hard clear-headed look at themselves and step up as players on the global stage.

I release this book for a reader in need to fix his or her own price to make it accessible to those who cannot afford it (I have rural Sub-Saharan Africans in mind for this). It hoped that it will not be resold for a profit, locked into any other copyright (howsoever arising), or redistributed without its original cover and contents. For everyone else wishing to support my teaching ministry, or just reading my insights on this Old Testament book, your buying it at the set price is a welcomed appropriate donation. A bibliography is provided to acknowledge selected sources that speak to some of the issues treated in this writing. This inclusion is not necessarily a blanket endorsement of any individual or group of authors or their endorsement of this writer’s subject matter or reasoning. Any deficiencies in presentation, quality, and style are fully my own (so too the choice of using a personal tone where an impersonal one is deemed to be standard).

I thank you for the bold step of choosing this book! Jonathan M. Mumbi. 1st July, 2023.

CHAPTER 1. AFRICA IN WESTERN CULTURAL TRAPS

This generation of Bantu people who know their Bibles is angry. New Christians converting from polygamous societies are confused. Whose fooling who? Is the book of Ruth a joke? Is it intended to teach Global Southern Christianity anything? Is Ruth a type of the Church and Boaz a type of Jesus as Evangelicalism often teaches us? Almost a third of the Bible’s references to a Kinsman-Redeemer are in Ruth’s four chapters. YHWH, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, is called a Kinsman-Redeemer in the Old Testament. Why the audacity to supplant him and make Boaz a picture of Jesus and the Church? If the husband of the two women, Oholah and Oholibamah is YHWH representing the tribes whose capital was Jerusalem and Samaria respectively (Ezek 23:1-4), why not Boaz to represent YHWH in Ruth, if God freely uses a polygamous picture to describe his compassion and patience elsewhere? Jesus is a youth and Boaz is not, why insist that the older man is a picture of Jesus?

And the militancy around redefinitions of family, family relationships, and family size. This Western crusade that makes it impossible to define the binary sexes of the Bible in everyday language; is it a war worth globalizing (unless hegemons, intoxicated with their own power, decides to re-craft a world in their own image)? Why do people who dare depart from the Western Christian secularist mold find themselves in miry pits for offering alternative interpretations to the Hebrew-Judaic scriptures? If a book such as Ruth points to a compassionate alternative that has worked for the poorest of the poor from antiquity, shall Global Southern Christians call the preaching of the Bible Hate speech for fear of being cut off by supporters of this angry and militant progressivism?

The story of Ruth is loaded with danger and risk. According to Hebrew tradition, three thousand years ago a man with dreadlocks who never touched wine or ate grapes and grew up in the tent area of YHWH’s mobile tent of presence wrote this story. Why a man, and one who is a Nazirite from birth? The Holy Spirit moved upon him and inspired him to do so and he also stands as a reliable witness because of his personal relationships with some people mentioned in the story who were also known to him. The Prophet Samuel is that man. He knew David and his father, Jesse. He anointed both the reigning king of their days (King Saul) and the future king, David. In the case of the anointing of David for royal service, he knew it was to be a secret that the reigning king was never to know about for the life of both the prophet and the future king. This man is brave, but so too is Naomi, the widow who brought Ruth to Bethlehem.

Naomi is brave. She confronts her daughters in law with the reality of her own lack of chances of getting married, and the fact that even if she did get married, the long wait for their future husbands to grow up was sure to wear them down. She is brave enough to kiss Orpah, her daughter-in-law goodbye and weep with her. She does not blame her for her choice and she goes on to discourage Ruth giving Ruth the example of her sister-in-marriage. Naomi is brave to go home empty handed and bringing along with her, a Moabitess she cannot even afford to feed. It gets worse. Naomi prepares Ruth for a night meeting with Boaz at Boaz’s threshing floor. What does it take for a mother to hand the surviving wife of her dear son to another man? And what does it take for that woman to obey her mother-in-law? Courageous love.

Ruth, in her love for her mother-in-law, is compliant. She follows her mother-in-law’s instructions and lets Boaz know that he owes Naomi’s family a duty of love and care. It is not without danger to her reputation that she does what she is told to do. Doing what looks like stalking a man in a society that stones women caught in adultery needs bravery and Semitic male-female conversation taboos do not make it easier to propose marriage to a man who does not see himself as the ideal candidate. Ruth did it.

Boaz is presumed to be married and childless due to the reference to two women who were going to build his house. Bringing in Ruth was going to hurt the wife of his youth and make her insecure with him. Boaz is brave to affirm Ruth’s bravery giving the indication that he would rather defer to the nearer of kin than himself. Most adult men would jump at an opportunity to legally take in a woman to be a levirate wife. Boaz is not like that. When the nearest of kin refused to take Ruth for fear of jeopardizing his own family life, Boaz is equal to this and other the tests. He becomes Ruth’s Redeemer and life companion. Obedience to the Levirate law is put above their emotional preferences. In a culture where people do not fall in love but see love as a divine commandment, culture, or style, there is nothing to suggest that Ruth and Boaz married and stayed married because they grew into love in its modern sense. Theirs was a love that required brave strides in doing the right things.

Coming from being a slave nation living in exile (in Egypt), their four hundred year sojourn left them with a Hebrew culture that was cross-pollinated with Egyptian culture. Moses, at the burning bush, did not even know the best way to approach the elders of Israel because their ideas of God were constantly being challenged by Egyptian ideas. The story of Ruth comes after YHWH had spoken to Israel in the hearing of all and made a covenant with them stipulating that He will be their God and they will be his people. As for their means of becoming a powerful nation, he assured them that the laws he gave them would make them look wise as a nation because they were good laws. How a slave nation become a master nation was, according to YHWH, by obeying his good laws.

The story of Ruth surrounds the application of one of YHWH’s wise and good laws. This writer is persuaded that YHWH, through Ruth and Boaz, has something to teach both Western affluent societies and Third World societies about compassion. Being schooled into a Biblical Worldview defined by the global hegemons puts a frame of interpretation on the African’s mind that ensures conformity to a predefined psycho-spiritual space. On a national scale, this conformity hinders the much-needed transformations into all that God has put in place to make nations possessors of their own glory and equal to each other as citizens of the City of God. Individuals clothed in borrowed glory live in terror of the day of shame, that is, when the glory is taken away. Trapped in layers of cultural donated glory, the Global Southern Christian learns to be a good player within the prevailing narrative or be a rebel confined to the wilderness. Thanks be to God a generation eager to deconstruct their ancestors’ constructs has risen up in the Global North. These truth-seekers are eager to listen and judge for themselves.

In 2003 I took friends from California to visit Chief Mukuni’s village, about 20 kilometers away from the Youth With A Mission base (YWAM), where we live in Livingstone, Zambia. As we walked through the village with our tour guide from the village, we were reminded twice that African chiefs cannot resign or be voted out. The guide pointed out three huts in the palace grounds; the first is where visitors are received; the second is where the Royal Highness meets his visitors and the last one is where he is allegedly poisoned if he turns out to be a bad king.

Mukuni village is very close to Livingstone, Zambia’s tourist capital and for that reason, it has been appended to tourism packages as one place where Zambian village life can be observed even if it is not in its most pristine form. The fate of Mukuni is a shared fate of many African villages. The fate of African chiefs in the current political ecology is the fate of Leopold Senghor’s negritude—if that term is understood as the unique contribution of Black Africa to humanity (English & Kalumba 1996). In the context of rapid globalization and the need for Africa to catch up with the world, the least favorable alternative is conservatism. No matter where the African lives, information will get there and when it does get there, it will offer options to God’s people that will reflect the cultural values of those with the power to shape cultures and meta-narratives (hegemons).

Put differently, today’s African village is a dynamic conserver of indigenous values, arts, ways of life, traditional services, products, and practices. Mukuni, like many other villages dotting the continent, is not static and frozen into the past. The forward-looking Tswana villager sleeping in the city during the workdays of the week and resting in his village over the weekend does not live double lives. She is not a villager who works in the city or a city-dweller who retires to the village every weekend. She is part of that intersection set where the African village dialogues with African cities through people who are both villagers and city-dwellers at the same time. Very often