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(Un)Covering Violence: Reading Ruth in Settler Colonial Australia

Profile image of Rebecca LindsayRebecca Lindsay

2024, Journal for the Study of Bible and Violence

Abstract

The Book of Ruth is often read as an idyllic story of romance and community. This reading fails to account for the narrative’s setting in the time of the Judges (Ruth 1: 1)—a context of extreme violence (Judg 19-21). The text’s continual characterisation of Ruth as a Moabite, with the negative connotations this brings within the Hebrew Bible, further highlights the violence underneath the narrative. These lands now called Australia (Prentis 2021) similarly offer a veneer of peaceful community. While often presented as a successful multicultural liberal democracy, the ongoing legacy of settler-colonialism shapes social spaces, including those in which the Bible is read. The biblical texts are complicit within the settler colonial project in Australia, entangled with practices of assimilation and elimination of Indigenous peoples within the so-called civilising mission. In this paper, I read the violence of the Book of Ruth in counterpoint with ongoing legacies of colonial violence in these lands now called Australia. In this contrapuntal reading, I explore how ‘Settler’ Australian Christian readers might notice and attend to the underlying violence of both biblical texts and ongoing colonial legacies in movement towards decolonial praxis.

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References (195)

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  3. On early encounters see Lake, The Bible in Australia, 42-44; Penny van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia, (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006), 93-122. For contemporary Indigenous interpretation see, for example, Denise Champion, Anaditj (Salisbury, SA: Denise Champion, 2021);
  4. Maratja Dhamarrandji and Jione Havea, "Yolngu Scriptures and Hermeneutics: Mana / Bulmanydji," in Imagination in an Age of Crisis: Soundings from the Arts and Theology, ed. Jason Goroncy and Rod Pattenden (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2022), 30-43;
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  11. Matheny argues that Ruth is written as explicit dialogue with Judges 19-21, so that Ruth becomes an intertextual voice for the women silenced in Judges. Jennifer M. Matheny, Judges 19-21 and Ruth: Canon as a Voice of Answerability (Leiden: Brill, 2022). See also Orit Avnery, "On the Threshold: Liminality in the Stories of the Concubine of Gibeah and Ruth," JSOT 46, no. 2 (2021): 230-48;
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  14. L. Juliana M. Claassens, Writing and Reading to Survive: Biblical and Contemporary Trauma Narratives in Conversation (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2020), 27; Gerda de Villiers and Jurie le Roux, "The Book of Ruth in the Time of the Judges and Ruth, the Moabitess," Verbum et Ecclesia 37, no. 1 (2016): 4; Laura E. Donaldson, "The Sign of Orpah," in Ruth and Esther: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999), 133-34; Fewell and Gunn, Compromising Redemption, 69-70. Koosed suggests a more ambiguous, ambivalent presentation of Moab in Gleaning Ruth, 29-31.
  15. Macoun, "Colonising White Innocence," 92. I note that in July 2020 a new National Agreement on Closing the Gap was entered that gives greater power and emphasis to the Coalition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peak Organisations to direct the targets and their implementation.
  16. Kunoth-Monks made this declaration on the television program Q&A on June 9, 2014. Cited in Watego, Another Day in the Colony, 9.
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  23. On the precarity of being a widow in the Hebrew Bible see, for example, Monica Jyosta Melancthon, "Widows: Tamar (Gen 38), Judith, Etcetera," Bible and Critical Theory 17, no. 1 (2021): 55-73.
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