If you would like a review copy of the print version of my new book:

Tim Bulkeley, Not Only a Father: Talk of God as Mother in the Bible & Christian Tradition (Signs) Auckland: Archer Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-1468091373

Please contact me, please say both where you expect to publish the review (blogs are quite acceptable though a full review rather than a short note would be good) and when you are expect to write it. There are no conditions and you should be as critical as you normally would.

Open Bible has a fascinating on post Applying Sentiment Analysis to the Bible.

Sentiment analysis involves algorithmically determining if a piece of text is positive (“I like cheese”) or negative (“I hate cheese”). Think of it as Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes backed by quantitative data.

The post started with a plot of the data for the whole Bible, which for anyone interested in the “big picture” of the Bible’s story is fascinating. But the data, calculated using available software on an English translation based on the calculated probability of a verse being positive or negative in sentiment, allows a closer look, and running a five verse running average gives really striking and thought provoking “pictures” of each Bible book.

While Jonah goes from bad to worse ;)

Ruth moves from negative to positive

Which both seem intuitively “right”. However, Esther needs some thought:

Esther: is the beginning really the happiest part?

I’m currently teaching the Song of Songs, and last week was Ecclesiastes, so these are interesting:

They both fit common preconceptions pretty well...

…but is it as simple as that? ;)

копия гравюры В. Фаворского. Фронтиспис 3-й главы Книги Руфь. Ксилография. 1924 WikiMedia

This post is stimulated by two things:

• last night I was interviewed before I preached on the Song of Songs, and was asked the interesting question of how experience crossing cultures (which has been a feature of my life into Congo, then New Zealand and more recently the Karen people in the refugee camp in Thailand) influences how I read the Song
• Claude’s post on a neat little textual issue in Ruth 3:15 Who Went Back to the City?

It’s not Claude’s text criticism I want to discuss, but things he says, or that I assume he implies, or fear his readers will infer, earlier in introducing the question:

It is phrases like: “The love affair between Ruth and Boaz began…” that I want to investigate. Now, before I start I’d better say I do think Ruth (the book) tells of love between Ruth and Boaz, and Boaz and Ruth. I see signs of it in chapter 2 and stronger signs in ch.3. But read in my cultural context, phrases like the one I have quoted suggest that Ruth (the book) is at least in part (and possibly among other things) a “love story”. We Westerners have been, throughout our history suckers for a good love story.

[Yes, I know, "real men" only watch "chick flicks" because their wives, sisters, girlfriends... give them an excuse to, but facts are facts, and men - at least in our Western culture - are actually more "romantic" than women. So I'll stick with tarring both genders of Westerner with the same brush.]

However, I do not think the book of Ruth is about love. It’s about חֶסֶד hesed (an amalgam of faithfulness to family or covenant relationships and great kindness). This virtue was a primary family and social value in Ancient Israel. Love was a luxury, but חֶסֶד hesed was what made the world go round.

So, did Boaz “fancy” Ruth? Probably – notice how he assumes that any of the young (and he is not young, so appreciates the value of youth) men of the village would have wanted to marry her (Rt 3:10). Why? She was a foreign (strike one) widow (strike two) who was childless after ten years of marriage (strike three). Boaz has to be imputing his own motives to them ;) Did Ruth “fancy” Boaz? Perhaps – notice how she teases him in the field (Rt 2:10,13)! But that’s not what the story is about, it is about the much more significant issues of חֶסֶד hesed.

There is a love story in the Bible (at least in the Song), but Rutrh is not it, even though it may allow its heroes to experience love as well.

Edited repost from Sept 2004

Naomi entreating Ruth and Orpah to return to the land of Moab. By William Blake, 1795

The world has changed… My parents’ generation made legal divorce a less painful process. My generation has ran behind, and overtook them – the statistics are terrible. Marriages don’t last (at least not in the affluent egotistical West). Among our kids’ friends from school there were always more “broken” or “blended” homes, than those with parents still till-death-do-us-parting. Churches too, seldom slow to learn bad ways from the world around, are full of separated and divorced halves of what once were couples. And one has to admit, people concerned are often the better for it.

Daya Willis had an op ed piece in the Herald back in 2004, which summed the social context up nicely:

Clearly, the baby boomers cocked up the whole marriage thing. They got hitched too young, felt unfulfilled en masse, split up and occasionally repeated the process.

Later she continued:

My beloved and I will get married when we’re good and ready – and only because we can see the value in celebrating our commitment to each other with all the people who matter to us.
What’s more we’ve already taken the ultimate leap of faith – we had a baby together. Having both emerged (slightly dented) from broken homes, it’s our sworn mission to maintain a happy whole family for the sake of our son.

From other things she wrote it’s clear she saw this as totally different from the dreams and ideals of the generation before. Perhaps it is. Though, it shares with the boomers’ the belief that a couple “should stick together for the sake of the kids”. And like theirs it is also, in its own way, totally different from the Christian view of marriage.

When a couple promise each other (however they word it) to love, and cherish, and share their lives, till death alone parts them – it’s not “for the children”, it’s for each other. It’s all about the big C, the word neither the boomers nor their successors can say: commitment.

Oddly (in a time of “Civil Unions”) it is the story of two women that best illustrates what it means. Ruth and Naomi:

Don’t force me to leave you; don’t make me go home.
Where you go, I go;
and where you live, I’ll live.
Your people are my people,
your God is my god;
where you die, I’ll die, and that’s where I’ll be buried,
so help me GOD–not even death itself is going to come between us! (Ruth 1:16-17)

Isn’t that what Gen 1 and 2 tell us the Creator planned for marriage – partnership with no holds barred. I hope and pray, that when Thomas and Melissa watch Barbara and me locked in fiery argument, they see the for-richer-for-poorer-in-sickness-and-in-health commitment that undergirds our lives and even feeds the flames!

Marriage isn’t about “a perfect match”, it’s about commitment – promises that you’ll keep, and those that you can rely on.