Nice Enough (Ruth 2:2)
The Book of Ruth
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We resume our reading with Ruth’s proposal to go somewhere to glean.
2 behind whoever is nice enough to let me.
אַחַ֕ר אֲשֶׁ֥ר אֶמְצָא־חֵ֖ן בְּעֵינָ֑יו
The phrase אַחַ֕ר אֲשֶׁ֥ר, with asher turning an entire verbal phrase into something that can be the object of a preposition, occurs nowhere else but in Ezek 40:1, “after [אַחַ֕ר אֲשֶׁ֥ר] the city had fallen,” that is, in 572 BCE. Perhaps this is another indication of Ruth’s lateness. Other than these few words, I’m not going down that rabbit hole at the moment.
Gleaners must walk “after,” that is, follow, the reapers, because it is the reapers who neglect a stalk here or drop one accidentally there — at which point the poor people have dibs. You grab what you can get! A Canaanite king defeated by the Israelites at the beginning of the book of Judges looks back on his own glory days and describes what that means:
Jud 1:7 And Adoni-bezek said, “Seventy kings, with thumbs and big toes cut off, used to pick up scraps [מְלַקְּטִים֙] under my table; as I have done, so God has requited me.”
This, of course, is just what Ruth has proposed (earlier in the verse) to do: pick up scraps. The root לקט l‑q‑t ‘gather’ appears 39 times in the Bible, and a dozen of them are in Ruth, all here in ch. 2. I guess we have found our new theme word, replacing שׁוב of ch. 1. Though people do gather things elsewhere in the Bible, there is nowhere else where we actually see the instructions of Lev 19:9–10 and 23:22 carried out but here.
As Ruth’s comment implies, it is not as if you can get ticketed for refusing to let poor people pick up the ears of grain that you have dropped, especially not if the poor people who invade your field are Moabites. The poor person has to make herself likeable.
What Ruth literally says is “after who[ever] I will find favor in his eyes.” Somewhere — I can no longer find it — Amos Oz wrote something about this unusual phrase, a Hebrew idiom that’s quite distinct from its English counterpart. In English we say “I like you”; in Hebrew they say, “You find favor in my eyes.” That is, if you want to be liked, you must make the effort to find the favor in my eyes.
It may or may not be correct to put so much weight on an idiom of this kind. Nonetheless, it most certainly does apply in our case. Ruth (she understands) cannot just waltz into someone else’s field and start picking up the stalks that the reapers drop. She must make herself agreeable enough that they will let her do so. Spoiler: She will!
And she will say this phrase twice more in our chapter, both times to the man in whose eyes she does indeed find favor, the man introduced to us at the end of v. 1: Boaz. Ruth’s behavior is quite self-assured throughout the book, but what she says is not assertive. As a poor woman, and a foreigner to boot, she lets her words smooth the path for her behavior.
André Lacocque comments: