Still Broken: Ruth's Choice

Before we start

Here is the conclusion, which is not an answer. I have decided to read this as a promise rather than a command, for the plain reason that I can live inside the first reading and not the second. Whether that is a legitimate reason I genuinely do not know.（テモテへの第二の手紙 4:1）

How you render this one word determines the meaning of the whole paragraph. A translator has to decide, and the decision is already an interpretation. Readers deserve to know that a decision was made.（エレミヤの手紙 1:18）

• One verse, read slowly, with one word held up to the light.
• How I finally made peace with a passage I avoided for years.
• I stopped here in the middle of a read-through, and wrote from the stopping.

A note

Here is the conclusion, which is not an answer. I have decided to read this as a promise rather than a command, for the plain reason that I can live inside the first reading and not the second. Whether that is a legitimate reason I genuinely do not know.

• Notes from reading a canonical and a non-canonical text next to each other.
• No conclusions. The aim was only to get the shape of the question right.
• Written out of a failed attempt to explain this passage to a child.
• I stopped here in the middle of a read-through, and wrote from the stopping.

Here is the conclusion, which is not an answer. I have decided to read this as a promise rather than a command, for the plain reason that I can live inside the first reading and not the second. Whether that is a legitimate reason I genuinely do not know.（申命記 33:9）

4Jesus [told them] in reply, "Now [you] stand accused because [you don't believe those who've been approved] by him; because if [you believed Moses,] you'd believe [me, for] he [wrote] about me to your ancestors [...]"

知られざる福音書（エゲルトン・パピルス2） 1:4（Mattison 訳（英語））

Reading the non-canonical material alongside this shows how wide the shared vocabulary of the period really was. Looking only at what was eventually collected hides that width entirely.

Now set it back into its own century. What was the community that first heard this actually worried about? Simply imagining that changes the temperature of every line.

There are obvious objections, and I don't hold this reading with much confidence. What I would defend is narrower: that the text leaves room for it.

22The king's wrath was converted into compassion; and he wept at his own machinations.

23For when he heard the cry, and saw them all on the verge of destruction, with tears he angrily threatened his friends, saying,

24Ye have governed badly; and have exceeded tyrants in cruelty; and me your benefactor ye have laboured to deprive at once of my dominion and my life, by secretly devising measures injurious to the kingdom.

マカバイ記三 6:22-24（Brenton 訳・七十人訳から（英語））

Closing

Now set it back into its own century. What was the community that first heard this actually worried about? Simply imagining that changes the temperature of every line.（ヤコブの秘密の書 11:16）