Judges, Ruth: Revised Edition (The NIV Application Commentary)

by K. Lawson Younger

Furthermore, had she ended up in another field, her situation may have been much worse.29 Ruth is not just a single woman gleaning on the edges; she is a female foreign worker. Given human nature, it would be naïve to think she is not harassed and even in danger (given the last stories in the book of Judges, the period in which the book of Ruth is set).30 Shepherd has commented that like modern female foreign workers, Ruth too is invisible to the dominant culture, a point [illustrated by the fact] . . . that neither Naomi nor the Bethlehem women acknowledge Ruth’s existence in concrete terms. What we have suggested here is that while Ruth and other female foreign workers may well be invisible to other women in the dominant culture, they are often conspicuously and dangerously visible to men within the dominant culture—some of whom give them good reasons for wishing that they were not.31