Ruth: A New Translation With a Philological Commentary And a Formalist-folklorist Interpretation

by Jack M. Sasson

Well-known for his work in ancient Near Eastern languages and literature, Sasson emphasizes in this revised edition of his commentary on Ruth various philological problems of translation, idiom and grammar, all with strong linguistic insights. The author also treats literary features, and provides admirably compact and accurate synopses of scholarly debates, while often charting his own course. For folkloristic interpretation, Sasson concentrates on formal aspects of the text to identify the genre of Ruth, and then systematically surveys narrative feature, provenance, date, and purpose of writing. There is a large bibliography, and indexes of biblical citations, authors and subjects are provided. For this second, corrected, edition, the author has written a new preface outlining developments in Ruth studies since 1979.

292 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1979

About the author

Jack M. Sasson currently serves as Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt Divinity School and as a Professor of Classics at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses primarily on Assyriology and Hebrew Scriptures, writing on the archives from eighteenth century BCE found at Mari, Syria, by the Euphrates, near the modern-day Syria-Iraq border as well as on biblical studies.

Reviews

[Fred Kohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was referenced in most of the previous commentaries I had read on Ruth, so I decided to give it a go. As the subtitle suggests, the book is divided into two main sections: a commentary and a literary analysis. The commentary is a traditional phrase-by-phrase analysis of the Hebrew text. My lack of knowledge of Hebrew made this rough going for me. Sasson spends better than 16 pages of the 176 pages of commentary just analyzing just Ruth 4.5, much of it a discussion of the word pair qnyty/qānîtî. (It is, as he says, a pivotal verse!). I wasn’t able to follow much of it.

Nonetheless I found the philological commentary more incisive than the literary commentary. Sasson is obsessed with Ruth as folklore. Not that I disagree with him here, but he spent several pages analyzing Ruth in light of the theories of Vladimir Propp concerning Russian folk tales. I thought Sasson worked too hard to fit Ruth into Propp's scheme. Sasson's obsession with Ruth as folklore even caused him to cite the strange theory of Astour, without any disapproval, that Ruth was the Hebrew version of the Eleusis myth, in which Demeter (Naomi) rescues Persephone (Ruth) from the underworld (Moab)!

I would not recommend that you read this commentary without a strong background in Hebrew. I’m not sure what a Hebrew scholar would think of the fact that all the Hebrew has been transliterated into Latin characters. I personally find transliterated Hebrew with its esoteric (to me, anyway) diacritical marks hard to handle. But, I suppose, these marks are a drop in the bucket compared to the diacritical marks in Hebrew script.