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Does God help those who help themselves? That may seem to be the message of the books of Esther and Ruth. Some think that Ruth’s attractiveness won over Naomi and Boaz, or that Esther’s bold faithfulness saved her people. But a closer reading shows an embittered Naomi to have abandoned the Promised Land and God’s people, and Esther to have become thoroughly assimilated to the culture and values...

now remembers Orpah? She rejected the road to emptiness, but at the same time unknowingly turned aside from the one road that could have led her to a life of lasting significance and meaning. The world’s wise choice to avoid emptiness leads in the end to a different kind of oblivion. Then there was Ruth. Ruth was a nobody, an outsider, a Moabite of all things.1 There was nothing kosher about Ruth. She knew she would be about as welcome in Bethlehem as a ham sandwich at a bar mitzvah. Conventional
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