The Literary Effect of Gender Discord in the Book of Ruth

In the book of Ruth there are numerous instances of disagreement in gender between a pronoun and its antecedent. Without discounting the various philo logical explanations that have been given for this disagreement, this article argues that the gender discord is also a literary device that makes an important contribution to the book's narrative design and its development of characters. The laconic style of Hebrew narrative usually offers no glimpse of characters' inner lives, but by recognizing the concentration of discordant forms in Naomi's speech, we can appreciate how they characterize her grief and her ambivalence toward Ruth. The discord also highlights the theme of gender reversal in the book of Ruth. However the examples of gender discord might be explained grammatically, they also play an integral role in the characterization of Naomi and her relationship with Ruth. Disagreement in gender between a pronoun and its antecedent is common enough in Biblical Hebrew that it has been treated in the fields major reference grammars. Most often, the gender discord consists of a masculine pronoun stand ing for a feminine noun, and the grammars agree that this replacement is related to "a weakening in the distinction of gender" by which the feminine plural suffix was subsumed under its masculine counterpart.1 Furthermore, such disagreement has been regarded as a late phenomenon that is especially prevalent in the later books of the Hebrew Bible and also in the Dead Sea Scrolls.2