MegillotFestival Scrolls

Five BooksRuth

Song of SongsEcclesiastes

LamentationsEsther

Used at the Five Principle Jewish Festivals

Ruth--------------Pentecost, the harvest festival

Song of Songs-----------------Passover, commemoration of end of slavery in Egypt

Ecclesiastes-------------------Feast of the Tabernacles (or Booths), autumn feast of thanksgiving

Lamentations--------------Fast of the Ninth of Av, (July/Aug) mourning the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the

Babylonians in 587 BCE and by the Romans in 70 CE

Esther---------------Purim (Festival of Lots, Feb/Mar), celebration of the Jewish deliverance from Persian attack

Ruth• Placement in the Scriptures

o In the Christian Bible, Ruth is placed between Judges and 1 Samuel, probably because the story is set in the time of Judges

o In Jewish Scripture, the Book of Ruth is placed first of the five festival scrolls, highlighting the importance of Ruth

Who is she?• A Moabite woman• Daughter-in-law to Naomi, an Israelite widow• Ruth goes with Naomi to Bethlehem, leaving her

own Moabite family behind

Boaz• Offers help to Ruth and to Naomi, unusual

because of Deuteronomy’s directive against Ammonites and Moabites “because they did not come to meet you with bread and water when you were on your way out of Egypt . . .” Deut 23:3-6

• Baoz takes no issue with intermarriage• Fulfilled levirate• The fruit of the union of Ruth and Boaz is Obed,

the grandfather of King David

Concept of levirate, “redeemer”

• “If brothers live together and one of them dies childless, the dead man’s wife must not marry a stranger outside the family. Her husband’s brother must come to her, and exercising his levirate, make her his wife, and the first son she bears shall assume the dead brother’s name . . .”

Deut. 25:5

Intermarriage• Post-exilic writers like Ezra and Nehemiah

condemn those who take foreign wives.• They believed the women would continue to

worship their own gods, thereby insulting Yahweh

The books authors• Choose symbolic names for characters• Bethlehem means “house of bread” and the story

begins in famine and ends at harvest• Artfully rendered story

Two dates• Some scholars see this as a post-exile

composition that is in direct protest against Ezra and Nehemiah’s position on foreign wives

• Other scholars speculate that the story was an oral tradition, pre-exile, long before intermarriage was a problem.o This group compares Hannah’s conception of Samuel in 1 Samuel to

Ruth’s conception of Obed. The similarities caused the compilers of the Christian Bible to place Ruth right before 1 Samuel

Song of Songs• Song of Songs, a part of the Passover,

commemoration of end of slavery in Egypt• An allegory of Yahweh’s love for Israel• It appears a back and forth dialogue, perhaps

sung by a man and woman at weddings• At Passover, the covenant people remember how

closely the Angel of Death was, and they rejoice at the intense love shown them by Yahweh

Most sensual of all Biblical texts

• Full of emotion, the poet pours forth torrents of images that compare the human body to fruits, flowers, and animals

• Nature provides metaphors• Human love is paradoxical: desired by all, it

cannot be commanded

Lamentations• Lamentations--------------Fast of the Ninth of Av,

(July/Aug) mourning the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Babylonians in 587 BCE and by the Romans in 70 CE

• Five poems that express the people’s collective grief for the loss of Jerusalem

• These express private anguish of individuals• Unknown authorship

acrostics• A poem of 22 verses, one for each of the 22

letters in the Hebrew alphabet in which the first word of each verse begins with a different letter of the alphabet in sequential order.

• The fifth poem of the five also has 22 verses, but they are not arranged alphabetically