Boaz Reawakened:

Modeling Masculinity in the Book of Ruth

Hugh S. Pyper

Among his other signal contributions to the development of biblical stud-

ies, David Clines has been a pioneering voice in the study of masculinity
in biblical texts. It is a mark of his importance in this field that he contrib-
utes some “final reflections” to Ovidiu Creangă’s edited volume on Men
and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond, in addition to contrib-
uting a chapter himself.1 In these reflections, while acknowledging that
the volume marks a coming of age for such studies, he makes a threefold
plea for further work. First, he calls for a broadening of the theoretical
base of masculinity studies; second, he urges those who work in this field
to demonstrate a commitment to a critique of “the kinds of unthinking
masculinity that are spread all over the Hebrew Bible.”2 Finally, he calls for
Yahweh as the quintessence of masculinity to be subjected to a particular
examination.
Clines’s significance for this field is affirmed by Deryn Guest in her
consideration of the present and future state of the critical study of mascu-
linities and the Hebrew Bible. She echoes Stephen Moore’s view that Clines
has not only been one of the first but remains one of the most productive
voices in such studies.3 She offers an overview of his contribution, which
traces the sometimes troubled boundary between feminist criticism and

1. David J. A. Clines, “Dancing and Shining at Sinai: Playing the Man in Exodus
32–34”; and “Final Reflections on Biblical Masculinity,” in Men and Masculinity in the
Hebrew Bible and Beyond (ed. Ovidiu Creangă; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2010),
54–63 and 234–39.
2. Clines, “Final Reflections,” 239.
3. Deryn Guest, Beyond Feminist Biblical Studies (BMW 47; Sheffield: Sheffield
Phoenix, 2012), 121.

-445-
446 INTERESTED READERS

the study of masculinities and cites Clines as someone who, with clear
feminist sympathies, moves into masculinity studies as a way of respecting
the claim of women to their own experience. While sympathizing with
this move, Guest sees in practice that this has meant that masculinity stud-
ies has tended to become equated with the study of male characters and
characteristics in the text. This can reinforce an equation of gender and
sexuality and makes it hard to examine the question of “masculine” char-
acteristics displayed by women.
Guest argues that a wider category of “genderqueer” studies may be the
way forward as there are genuine risks that the distinctive experiences of
both women and men may be overlooked if masculinity studies are viewed
as an augmentation of feminist studies. At the same time, the importance
of allowing LGBT voices to be heard cannot be ignored. What both of
these positions may do, however, is to reinforce the idea that gender stud-
ies are not the concern of straight heterosexual men. Guest advocates a
shift to a perception that genderqueer analysis is about what one does with
texts, rather than who one is.
In this paper, I want to take up at least part of this challenge and to
argue that at least one biblical character who has at times been held up as a
model of masculinity in the biblical text is a site where the tensions of the
biblical model of masculinity can be explored and where the relationship
between studies of masculinity and other theoretical frameworks, in par-
ticular queer studies, can be examined. The character in question is Boaz
in the book of Ruth.
Boaz has often been regarded as exemplary in his masculinity. The first
mention of him, indeed, describes him in a phrase that can be translated as
“a man of power and substance,” but that is almost the Hebrew equivalent
of “a real man” (Ruth 2:1). An intriguing contemporary manifestation of
Boaz’s status as a masculine ideal is to be found in the world of Christian
online dating. As an example, the singles site www.adammeeteve.com has
a page that offers a “Women’s Christian Dating Guide to Finding a Boaz
Husband,” clearly assuming that Boaz represents an ideal in this regard.
As the site explains, a Boaz man combines loyalty and generosity. He has
good moral friends and is not afraid to pray with his wife.4 Such a use of
Boaz as a model of what a Christian woman should be looking for is wide-
spread in magazines and books offering advice to Christian teenagers.

4. See http://www.adammeeteve.com/pages/christian-women_dating.html.
 PYPER: BOAZ REAWAKENED 447

In contemporary biblical studies, by contrast, Boaz has been compara-

tively neglected. Partly as a backlash against a tradition of reading Ruth
that saw the women as at best the agents through which Boaz achieved
the patriarchal aim of ensuring his progeny, most feminist readings of
Ruth have focused, understandably, on the relationship between Ruth and
Naomi and have latched onto the book as allowing a positive role for rela-
tionships between women and nonpatriarchal relationships in a broader
sense. There is, however, one significant genealogy of literary and gender-
related readings of Boaz in his biblical context; it stems from Mieke Bal’s
study of Ruth in her Lethal Love.5
In her discussion, Bal refers to Victor Hugo’s poem celebrated poem
“Boöz endormi” from his collection La légende des siècles, published in
1859, itself probably the single most influential meditation on Boaz in
Western literature. In the poem, Hugo describes the dream of the sleeping
Boaz in which he sees a great tree sprouting from his belly with a singing
king at the foot and a crucified god at the apex. At the feet of the uncon-
scious Boaz, unknown to him, is Ruth, lying awake and gazing at the stars,
unaware of her coming part in this dream. The concentration on Boaz, the
barely concealed phallic imagery, and the allusion to the tree of Jesse with
its hope of progeny might seem to epitomize an interpretation of Boaz as
the patriarch and a reading of the book of Ruth that consigns women to
the role of mere instruments of male procreation. Naomi is absent, and
Ruth waits attendance on her sleeping lord. Yet even within Hugo’s verse,
things are not so simple. The patriarch is asleep, and dreaming. It is Ruth
who is awake.
There is much to be said about this poem; indeed, it is obliquely the
source of the title of this paper. Bal’s interest turns out to be primarily in
Jacques Lacan’s comments on it. These are characteristically casual and
oblique, but recur in various interconnected places in his work. In this par-
ticular instance, Bal is alluding to his discussion of one line of the poem in
particular in his essay “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious”: “Sa

5. Mieke Bal, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), esp. 68–88.
448 INTERESTED READERS

gerbe n’ était point avare ni haineuse.”6 Bal furnishes an English version of

this: “his sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful.”7
Lacan’s point is that “miserly” is a description that properly belongs
to Boaz, not the sheaf. He then goes on to claim that the sheaf has now
usurped the praise for generosity that belonged to Boaz and that is one
of the characteristics of the masculinity he embodies. Despite this usur-
pation, Boaz himself returns later to the poem in the form of an unex-
pected promise of fertility, which is now focused on his paternity, not on
his harvest. Lacan here echoes Hugo’s depiction of a Boaz who is elderly
and widowed and conscious of his own lost potency. Even in his sleep,
Boaz questions how he, an old man, could father children. It is Lacan’s
insistence on the centrality of impotence rather than fertility in the poem
that Bal appreciates.
Bal’s ultimate conclusion as to Boaz’s role comes out of these inver-
sions. Boaz becomes a hero because “he dares to assume the point of view
of the woman.”8 Furthermore, he “accepts being reflected, by the mise en
abyme, in a female role.”9 In chapter 4, she argues, he acts to subvert the
law in an analogy to Tamar in Gen 38. He thus represents a particular ver-
sion of the “fearful father” found throughout Genesis who overcomes his
fear by accepting a feminine role. What we have here is a feminized Boaz,
or at least one who acknowledges his feminine role. That is intriguing in
our context, and certainly complicates any simple reading of Boaz as the
patriarch or the ideal of manhood.
This, however, is not the only allusion to “Booz endormi” in Lacan’s
writings. It figures in his seminars of 1957 and particularly in the seminar
for June 19 entitled “Essai d’une logique en caoutchouc,” which forms
part of a larger interpretation of Freud’s case study on little Hans. Once
again, Lacan turns to Hugo’s poem as he seeks to understand the nature of
paternity. In this case, however, his attention is caught by the final stanza

6. Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Écrits: A

Selection (trans. Alan Sheridan; London: Routledge, 1989). The essay was originally
published in 1957 at the same time as Lacan was delivering the seminars collected in
Séminaire IV in which the poem is also quoted. Lacan also seems to be quoting from
memory as he substitutes the “point” of Hugo’s line, correctly quoted by Bal, with
“pas.”
7. Bal, Lethal Love, 69.
8. Ibid., 87.
9. Ibid.
 PYPER: BOAZ REAWAKENED 449

of the poem where Ruth is gazing at the crescent moon through her veils
and wondering,

what stray god, as he cropped

The timeless summer, had so idly dropped
That golden sickle in the starry field.10

Lacan seizes on the reference to the sickle. In a context where Boaz has
been metaphorically and metonymically linked to the sheaf and the sheaf
to the phallus, the “idly dropped sickle” invites a link to ideas of castra-
tion. In her explanation of this passage, Shuli Barzilai relates this to Lacan’s
fascination with Hesiod’s story of the revenge of the earth goddess Gaea
(Gaia) against Ouranos, the sky or heavens, who is both her son and her
husband. She creates a great sickle, which their son Cronos then uses to
castrate his father, flinging his genitals and the sickle aside.11 This imports
a rather more troubling note into the idyllic picture of the young girl lying
at the feet of the unconscious older man under the crescent moon.12 As
Lacan comments,

It is a question, in effect, of the fine and clear crescent of the moon. But
it cannot escape you that, if the thing is pertinent, if it is something other
than a very pretty painterly stroke, a touch of yellow on the blue sky, it
is insofar as the sickle in the sky is the eternal sickle of maternity, that
which has already played her small role between Cronos and Uranos,
between Zeus and Cronos.13

Lacan, then, sees a story of castration and the anxiety over paternity in
this text. Masculinity is shown here to be a very unstable and indeed
threatened condition. I have explored this dimension of Ruth elsewhere,

10. Jacques Lacan, “Essai d’une logique en caoutchouc,” in Le Séminaire de Jacques

Lacan, livre IV: La relation d’objet (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 378.
11. Shuli Barzilai, Lacan and the Matter of Origins (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 220–23. The passage in question is from Hesiod, Theogony 154–182.
Whether such an analogy was in Hugo’s mind is not clear, but one should certainly not
dismiss it as a possibility.
12. The resonances with this story continue in the depiction of the scene where
Gaea entices her husband to sleep with her: “And great Sky came, bringing night with
him; and spreading himself out around Earth in his desire for love he lay outstretched
in all directions” (ll. 176–178).
13. Lacan, Séminaire IV, 378–79; translation provided by Barzilai, Lacan, 221.
450 INTERESTED READERS

in company with Julia Kristeva, coming to the conclusion that Boaz’s

masculinity is undermined by the text’s refusal to speak of the maternal,
which means that Boaz is drawn inexorably into the vacant maternal role
and ultimately suffers in turn his own form of silencing by the text.14
Here, however, I want to adopt a rather different tack and explore a
more positive reading of Boaz as a model not just of the fragility of patriar-
chy but of a different understanding of masculinity, which has implications
for our reading of the book of Ruth. I take a cue once again from Cheryl
Exum’s sophisticated treatment of the way in which readers have under-
stood the gender relationships and roles in Ruth.15 She cites Bal’s study in
support of her contention that “all three main characters [Ruth, Naomi,
and Boaz] in the book of Ruth participate in the symbolic transgression
of secular boundaries” and invites us to approach the relationships in the
book in “a way that destabilizes our familiar gender categories.”16 Her dis-
cussion is based on questioning the need to choose, as most commenta-
tors do, between the Ruth-Naomi and Ruth-Boaz dyad. My question is
whether we can go further. I want to suggest that there is another set of
relationships that has been overlooked in discussions of Ruth: the relation-
ships between men. It is not only Ruth and Naomi who are involved in
both heterosocial and homosocial relationships; so too is Boaz.
In what follows, I am not claiming to be uncovering secrets of the
social structure of ancient Israel or a hidden agenda in the book of Ruth.
The aim is to offer a counterreading that might illuminate the assumptions
about masculinity that underlie contemporary readings of the text by both
feminist and traditional readers. Bal’s remarkable reading at least puts in
question the function of Boaz’s character in the dynamics of the book of
Ruth. I want to put this to the test by attempting a reading of the text that
substitutes the usual unspoken assumptions that the characters are driven
by heterosexual desire with an assumption that homosexual desire may be
at work in the text. As an experiment, why not read Boaz from what might
be called a homonormative rather than heteronormative perspective?

14. See Hugh S. Pyper, “Other Mothers: Maternity and Masculinity in the Book
of Ruth,” in A Critical Engagement: Essays on the Hebrew Bible in Honour of J. Cheryl
Exum (ed. David J. A. Clines and Ellen van Wolde; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011),
309–32.
15. J. Cheryl Exum, “Is This Naomi?” in Plotted, Shot and Painted: Cultural Rep-
resentations of Biblical Women (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 129–74.
16. Ibid., 172.
 PYPER: BOAZ REAWAKENED 451

The point here is to show that there are assumptions at work in all
readings. What is intriguing, however, is that this alternative provides a
reading that can account for some otherwise puzzling aspects of the story.
That does not necessarily say anything about the intentions and assump-
tions of the author of the story and the social mores within which it is set,
I concede, but once again the point needs to be made that the same is also
true of a reading that assumes that heterosexuality is normative.
In the spirit of Cheryl Exum’s use (in “Is This Naomi?”) of the ambig-
uous gender roles in Philip Calderon’s painting of Ruth and Naomi to
unsettle assumptions about the reading of the relationships between Ruth,
Naomi, and Boaz, I too will turn to a painting. Now in the National Gallery
in London, it was painted by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeldt (1794–1872),
a German artist best known for his widely reproduced series of woodcuts
illustrating the Bible.17 It is entitled Ruth in Boaz’s Field.
A young woman stands to the right of the picture, her bosom full of
stalks of ripe grain; a few spare stalks drooping languidly from her right
hand. To her right, two men and a woman are hard at work reaping with
their backs to us. In the distance, four of the workers seem to be resting.
One young woman sits facing away from us and from the other three fig-
ures. These are all young men, two of whom are sitting chatting while a
third is drinking from a pitcher of some kind.
A commanding middle-aged man, in a rich cloak and a bowl-shaped
hat, stands to the left of the painting, attended by a young man who keeps
close to him. Indeed, the lad leans in toward him and eyes the strange
woman guardedly. Behind her, a female reaper looks up rather mournfully
and apprehensively from applying her sickle to the corn and gazes at the
two men.
The two male figures are clearly presented as a pair and cut off from
the other characters by the diagonal line formed by the staff of the younger
man, which contrasts in its rigidness with the soft curve of the woman’s
sheaf. The older man’s left arm, gesturing toward Ruth, protects the youth
from our gaze. It is clear, too, from their stances that the young man is
placed in solidarity with Boaz as against Ruth, whose isolation is palpable.

17. These were published in Germany in batches of thirty between 1852 and 1860
when the complete series of 240 were collected and published as Die Bibel in Bildern
(Leipzig: Georg Wigand, 1860). The picture in the National Gallery dates from 1828.
It is clearly the template for one of the two illustrations of the book of Ruth in the
later work.
452 INTERESTED READERS

Who are these men and what is their relationship? I contend that, in the
absence of any textual clue, our first assumption would be that the pair are
father and son.
Once the picture is identified as marking the encounter with Ruth in
Boaz’s field, however, we have to revise that assumption. No son of Boaz
is mentioned at this point in the text. The only candidate for the role of
the younger man is “the young man who was in charge of the reapers.”
Paradoxically, this painting emphasizes Boaz’s lack of offspring in the
text. Within the Hebrew Bible, he is an anomalous character; apparently
wealthy and mature, he appears to be without a wife and children. Boaz’s
unmarried status was something that the Talmud (b. B. Bat. 91a) felt the
need to explain by asserting that his wife died on the day that Ruth and
Naomi arrived in Bethlehem. There is no biblical support for this, but that
such an explanation was offered shows that the absence of a wife had to
be accounted for. Even the rabbis, however, do not attempt to gainsay the
fact of his childlessness at this point in the text. Boaz already occupies a
somewhat queer role in relation to the social norms of the text.
This picture might further lead us to reexamine the passages where
Boaz and this young man have dealings with each other. What happens
to these if we consciously decline to adopt heteronormative assumptions
and instead attempt what we might call a homonormative reading? Boaz
interrogates the young man about Ruth in Ruth 2:5–7. In a homonorma-
tive context, does his question about “who the woman belongs to” and the
young man’s lengthy explanation of how she came to be in the field simply
reflect Boaz’s interest in Ruth, or is his question prompted by his concern
that the young man himself is taking an interest in her that the young man
at some length tries to explain away? Is the young man’s explanation of
Ruth’s conduct and his emphasis that she has been working without ceas-
ing simply a generous defense of the young woman, or are there other pos-
sible readings? The biblical tradition is clear that Moabite women above
all are a source of temptation to Israelite men. Why would such a woman
appear in a field with the young reapers? What else might she have been
doing with her time rather than gleaning after them?
The meaning of 2:7 is somewhat obscure, perhaps reflecting that the
young man is rather flustered as he provides his explanation. His remarks
about Ruth “resting” are unclear. Could it be that Ruth is resting at the
moment when Boaz comes into the field, and is this something that the
young man feels under pressure to excuse and indeed to play down? Why
would a young woman come into the field simply to lounge around? If we
 PYPER: BOAZ REAWAKENED 453

follow the implications here, does Boaz’s question, “Whose is this young
woman?” raise the possibility that Ruth could be in some sense the pos-
session of one of the young men in the field? Might money have changed
hands? Is this a possibility that Boaz is aware of and is his reaction fueled
by a perceived threat to the relationships between the men in the story?
The relative prolixity of the young man’s answer might suggest that he is
aware of possible readings of the situation that he is anxious to disavow.
Is he, in short, denying to Boaz that Ruth is any threat to the relationship
between them?
In the light of all this, is Boaz’s assurance to Ruth in 2:11 that he has
warned the young men not to “trouble” her a reflection of his concern
over her welfare as the potential object of their youthful lust, or is he more
worried by his own potential loss of their affections? Even more radi-
cally, rather than seeking to forestall their erotic interest in Ruth, does his
instruction seek to forestall the possibility that the young men’s jealousy
might be directed at this potential interloper into his affection for them? Is
the point to avoid the possibility that Ruth’s presence might further disrupt
the homosocial relations between Boaz and his reapers? It may be that
Boaz acts generously as her protector by instructing the young men not to
touch her and by telling her to stay with the young women, but the effect
is to remove her from the company of the young men. Is his concern her
safety or the maintenance of the all-male community he shares with the
young men?
Now, these suggestions could add up to a reading that sits uneasily
with the cultural and other presumptions that are quite justifiably applied
to the text of Ruth. But there are, I submit, other lines of evidence that
Boaz queers the jealously guarded boundaries of the patriarchal role in
the book.
Chief among these is the incident on the threshing floor in 3:6–12.
As it progresses, it definitely casts Boaz in a rather queer light. As I have
discussed elsewhere, it plays with a number of conventions in biblical
scenes of courting.18 Typically, it is the man, or his proxy, who seeks out
the woman. In the classic type-scene of “the woman at the well,” not only
does the man wait for the woman at a meeting place where he is sure that
women will gather, but the woman offers to draw water for him. Here there

18. See Pyper, “Other Mothers,” 326–28.

454 INTERESTED READERS

is a reversal: it is Ruth who travels alone at night to await Boaz, and Boaz
who offers her food.
Other aspects of this scene are also clear reversals of gender roles as
outlined in other biblical texts. When Ruth “uncovers” Boaz’s feet, she is
the only woman in the Hebrew Bible to be the subject of this verb. In Lev
18 and 20, the many repetitions of the forbidden act of “uncovering the
nakedness” of another are always undertaken by a man. Boaz is, therefore,
the only man in the Hebrew Bible who is the object of a woman’s “uncover-
ing.” Once more, conventional gender roles are reversed.19
But perhaps we can go even further with queering this incident. Was
Boaz simply looking forward to a lonely night sleeping on the thresh-
ing floor, or was he planning to meet someone there? It does seem a bit
odd that he, who has all the servants we have met in chapter 2, would
undertake the threshing on his own.20 Does the narrator’s account of
Boaz’s surprise when he wakes to find a woman at his feet—“behold; a
woman!”—simply reflect that Boaz does not expect that anyone will be
there, or is the shock that it is—a woman? The wording of the verse brings
to mind the famous and unintentionally funny moment in Wagner’s Sieg-
fried when Siegfried stumbles upon the unconscious Brunnhilde and
exclaims, “Das ist kein Mann!” Who else might Boaz have been expect-
ing? What about the person who had the most likely excuse to be on
the threshing floor: the young man in charge of the reapers?That Boaz is
aware of the potential attractiveness of young men is revealed in his sub-
sequent conversation with Ruth, where he praises Ruth for her loyalty in
not going after “young men, whether poor or rich” (3:10). It is intriguing
how Boaz here articulates the potential temptation she has resisted. Ruth,
after all, might be forgiven for going after a rich man in her distressed
circumstances, but that is not Boaz’s presumption. The temptation he can
empathize with is the temptation to go after a man because of his youth,
whether he is rich or not. We should note too that Boaz does not explic-
itly make the connection to himself that is often read into this verse. It

19. Other women do undress men, but in situations where the man is either
unconscious or actively resisting any sexual advance. Lot’s daughters are the seducers
of their father, and Potiphar’s wife removes Joseph’s cloak.
20. Boaz is the only person mentioned as being at the threshing floor. It is possible
to speculate that there are other people sleeping there that evening, but they are never
mentioned. The possibility that he has gone alone in expectation of an assignation is
open within the text.
 PYPER: BOAZ REAWAKENED 455

is a heteronormative assumption that supplies the thought that Boaz is

contrasting himself with the young men as the object of Ruth’s attentions.
He praises her for her loyalty, without specifying the object of that loyalty.
The reference could easily be to Naomi, especially in the light of Boaz’s
praise of Ruth’s behavior toward her mother-in-law in 2:11.
It is possible to read his subsequent treatment of her on the threshing
floor in a way consonant with such a homonormative reading. Although
Boaz promises to perform the duty of the next of kin, he could quite simply
be referring to the transaction over the land, which ensues in chapter 4.
Boaz seems to be in full possession of the legal facts of the case in chapter
4 without any intervening explanation being necessary. We may assume
that he was equally aware of this in chapter 3 and that his concerns are
with Ruth and Naomi’s economic welfare.
The point is that readings that proceed on the basis that he is sexually
attracted to Ruth at this point are themselves based on an assumption.
If we decline to follow this assumption, his subsequent permission for
her to lie down at his feet could be interpreted as his indication that their
relationship is companionable, not sexual. After all, he has just made the
rather tactless statement that there is another with the rights of next of kin
and that if this other person chooses to exercise those rights that would
be “good” (2:13). That is hard to square with a reading of this episode that
sees it as a paradigm of romantic attachment. Boaz seems to be entirely
pragmatic in his handling of this encounter with Ruth.
The upshot of all this is that Boaz does gain Ruth as his wife. The
people at the gate congratulate him and evoke two previous stories from
Boaz’s ancestry: the story of Rachel and Leah, and that of Tamar. The queer
thing is that these are stories of women who had to get around the prob-
lem of what we might term “the reluctant patriarch.” As I have outlined
elsewhere, Leah and her father overcome the obstacle of Jacob’s preference
for her younger sister by the trick of substituting Leah for Rachel in the
dark so that he sleeps with her and thereby is obliged to accept her for his
wife.21 Rachel in her turn has to resort to the use of substitute mothers and
mandrakes before she finally gives birth to Joseph. Leah’s deception is ulti-
mately responsible for the birth of Judah, who, in his turn, has to be tricked
by Tamar into fathering Perez, the son who will be Boaz’s ancestor. Boaz’s
very existence depends on the determined intervention of women in order

21. See Pyper, “Other Mothers,” 327–28.

456 INTERESTED READERS

to overcome a patriarchal reluctance to procreate. Jacob was seemingly

prepared to wait fourteen years for Rachel, revealing little sense of urgency
over fathering a son by her, and Judah was more concerned to save the life
of his son Shelah than to ensure the continuity of his own family line. In
their blessing, the people of Bethlehem seem to enroll Boaz in turn in the
line of reluctant patriarchs who have to be cajoled into fulfilling what in
other terms is his “natural” destiny of fatherhood.
Might the implication be that the people of Bethlehem are aware that
Boaz would rather spend his time with the young man in charge of the
reapers and that Ruth will have her work cut out in fulfilling her role as
mother? Is it indeed only a Moabite woman, with her sinister allure, who
could extract a baby from Boaz, who is otherwise content to live a life sur-
rounded by the men of his household? Without her, would Boaz’s wealth
and possessions have passed in course of time to the chief of his reapers?
The experiment of a homonormative reading may leave more ques-
tions than answers, but it does suggest some new answers to old questions.
As James Harding has argued in his comprehensive study of the recep-
tion of the story of David and Jonathan, the point is not to propose an
anachronistic rereading of the gender roles prevalent in Israel at a par-
ticular period in ancient history.22 Rather, what such a reading points to
is the way in which the text is open to different readings. As Harding says,
“the reception history of the David and Jonathan narrative is an illustra-
tion not of the lengths to which wilful readers will go to pervert the plain
meaning of a text, but of the way the potential openness of a given work
may be unfolded and reactivated by later generations of readers.”23 Yet
he also points out that asking the question of whether the relationship
between David and Jonathan is “homosexual” is “to mistake the effect for
the cause.”24 The story itself is inseparable from the history of discourse on
same-sex relationships.
My point here is a similar one, if with slightly different nuances. The
story of Ruth and Naomi has had a comparable role to that of David and
Jonathan in the history of the discussion of the validity of same-sex rela-
tionships, particularly but not solely between women. Harding’s caveats
apply in this case also, as they do to any attempt to apply contemporary

22. James E. Harding, The Love of David and Jonathan: Ideology, Text, Reception
(Sheffield: Equinox, 2013).
23. Ibid., 365.
24. Ibid.
 PYPER: BOAZ REAWAKENED 457

categories of gender and relationship to the ancient world and to literary

characters. However, the concentration on one set of relationships in Ruth
because of their value in opposing the use of the Bible as an authoritative
bulwark for heteronormativity has oddly had the effect of deflecting atten-
tion from a particularly “queer” character who can be read in a way that
unsettles heteronormativity less obviously but perhaps more subversively
from the point of view of studies of masculinity.
Boaz, the model husband for the young Christian woman addressed
by adammeetseve.com and the archetypal patriarch in many other read-
ings, can be read as the model of a very different sort of masculinity that
is constituted by a different set of relationships and could be character-
ized as a benign homosociality. Read in this way, Boaz can become one of
the resources that the biblical scholar can turn to in forwarding Clines’s
project of undermining the “unthinking masculinity” of the Hebrew Bible.
The models of masculinity in the Bible are more diverse and queerer than
might at first appear.