Scenario of the musical "Ruth"

The scenario can be downloaded here.

Summary of the story

Around 3000 years ago, Naomi, her husband and their two sons leave Bethlehem, in Israel, to escape the famine. They then live many years in Moab - the present Jordan - and their sons marry wives of the land. When Naomi's husband and her two sons die, she decides to return to Bethlehem. Her daughter-in-law Orpa returns to the house of her father, but Ruth decides to follow Naomi to the land of Israel.

In those days, widows had no means of subsistance, so their situation was dramatic. Ruth therefore decides to take advantage of a law that allowed the poor to follow the harvesters in the fields during the harvest and to pick up the grains that they left. By luck, she gets to work in the field of Boaz, a man who was related to Naomi and therefore had some responsibility over her. There indeed existed at that time a tradition that the brother of a man who had died without a heir should marry the widow to give a heir to his deceased brother. Naomi therefore invites Ruth to ask Boaz to marry her, and he accepts, although Naomi's husband was not actually his brother. The story then explains how Ruth became the great-grandmother of king David.

Despite some traditions that sound bizarre to us, this story is still relevant today: It shows how the welcome and the integration of a foreign refugee can lead to a mutual enrichment and a new start. In comparison to other biblical texts, the divine presence is quite discreet in this story, apart from in some "lucky chances", in the Law given to Moses that enables the happy end, and in the faith of the main characters.