The two deaths of Megillat Rut

They say you die twice: once when you stop breathing, and again when your name is spoken for the last time.

Megillat Rut doesn’t open this way, but it could. The line, often attributed to Hemingway or Banksy, captures a deep human anxiety: being forgotten — for many, a fate worse than death. So universal is this fear that it has its own discipline called existential psychotherapy. Irvin Yalom, drawing on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, wrote: “Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory… Whose death will make me truly dead?”

The megillah begins in chaos. It was a time when the judges judged, a time without central authority, without stability, and without a king. Famine spread across the land. To escape the chaos, Elimelech and his family fled to Moav.

We meet Elimelech’s family: his wife Naomi, sons Machlon and Chilyon, and daughters-in-law, Rut and Orpah. The characters’ names foreshadow their fates. Naomi means sweet, pleasant, but after the great tragedy of losing her family, she changes her name. Machlon means affliction; Chilyon, destruction. Orpah’s name comes from oref, the nape of the neck, visible when she turns her back on her mother-in-law. Even Elimelech’s name captures an irony; it means “God is my King,” and in an age with no king, he moved his family out of Israel. Finally, Rut may come from reut, or friendship. 

The story unfolded tragically. First Naomi lost her husband. Then she lost her sons. Both times the text notes that “she remained.” She remained like the remains of meal offerings, expresses the Midrash (Ruth Rabbah 2:5). Naomi is what was left afterward.

Naomi rejected any comfort her daughters-in-law tried to offer. Leave, she told them. I don’t have any more sons for you. Go back to your families. My lot is much more bitter than yours. Her daughters-in-law cried. Orpah listened and returned to the home of her parents. But Rut refused and made one of the most impassioned speeches in the entire TaNaCh: Where you go, I’ll go; where you lodge, I’ll lodge; your nation is my nation, your God is my God. Where you die, I’ll die, and there I will be buried. 

In answer to this, Naomi was silent.

The pair walked to Beit Lechem, the city Naomi left years earlier. There, the women of the town gathered around her asking one question: Is this Naomi?

Did they really not recognize her? Was she truly so changed? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was an expression of disbelief that this woman brought so low could in fact be the Naomi they remembered. A Midrash imagines more subtext: “The women said: Is that Naomi – is that she whose actions are fine and pleasant [ne’imim]? In the past, she would go about in her litters, and now she is walking barefoot, and so you say: Is that Naomi? In the past she was clothed in silken garments, and now she is clothed in rags, and so you say: Is that Naomi? In the past, her face was red from food and drink, and now her face is pale from hunger, and so you say: Is that Naomi?” (Ruth Rabbah 3:7)

Naomi rejected even her own name. Don’t call me that, Naomi said. Call me Mara, because God has made me bitter. I went full, and God brought me back empty. 

They settled into their new life. Naomi — Mara — told Rut to harvest wheat so they would have food to eat. There Rut was noticed by Boaz, a wealthy landowner who happened to be a relative of Elimelech’s. Rut followed the guidance of her mother-in-law and informed Boaz who she was; ultimately, she was redeemed through the process of yibum. The text narrates this at length, but what would seem to be the actual point of the story is tersely stated: Boaz married Rut; she became his wife, and he cohabited with her. God let her conceive and she bore a son.

And then Boaz and Rut are never brought up again. The final scene of the megillah is of Naomi, not Rut, once more with a crowd of women, who praised God for the baby’s birth: May his name be proclaimed in Israel! Naomi took the child (the text does not specify from whom) and became his foster mother or perhaps his nurse, and her neighbors — women who had become friends — announced that a baby had been born to Naomi. No longer Mara, she was sweet, pleasant, once more. The name they gave the baby was Oved. 

At this point in the story names are once again relevant. Oved comes from the same root as the word “servant.” This child served his family, his nation. Perhaps that was why the women were the ones to name him, rather than his parents or Naomi. As Yael Ziegler writes, “he does not belong to his family, his tribe, or even his parents. His name, essence, and purpose are the property of the nation he serves.”

Megillat Rut begins in pain. It begins with the fear of a future without succession, the despair of a nation without leadership. It begins with powerlessness, with bitterness, with anger — with a bereaved mother who accused God of oppressing her.

But Megillat Rut ends in joy. It concludes with the naming of a child and the continuity of an ancestral line that leads to King David. It concludes with women, with friendship, with celebration.

Rut is not the main character of this story; she is its bridge. She enters at a moment of chaos and upheaval and disappears once continuity is restored. But we remember her despite that. We speak her name again and again because the Jewish people continued through her.

In this way, Rut lives. Her first death was never recorded, and her second death will never be recorded.