Two things come together in the Bible sketch by Chagall, ‘Ruth Gleaning’. My favourite Bible story and the economic principle of enough applied to social ethics as mercy. For a while now I’ve promised myself a good read around the literature of Ruth, and what is becoming known in biblical studies as wirkungsgeschichte. The term means the history of the influence of the text. I’m wondering where the story of Ruth, or the incidents that drive and coax the story to its ending, are expressed in art, music or in literature.
Globalisation and gleaning seem to suggest two different worldviews; perhaps gleaning, the practice of leaving the edges of the field unharvested as a giving back to God by giving to the poor and the stranger, was a good principle for ‘undeveloped’ cultures. Maybe in our more ‘developed’ society, fair trade is an equivalent today. The quotation marks in the previous two sentences are meant to help you envisage me doing that annoying thing with the finger signalled quotes, as my way of questioning any comparison between our economics and the practices of that ancient culture.
The institutionalisation of mercy in the economic practices of an ancient culture like early Israel, and these underwritten by the religious experience of those who understood the impact on a human life in being a stranger, poor and hungry, is a standing rebuke to the rapacious efficiency of globalised capitalism. The comparison does seem anachronistic given the contrast between the simplicity of life in an emerging ancient culture where gleaning wouldn’t cause global markets to tumble, and the complex inner structures of economic self interest and faceless finance that enable a French bank official to play the markets like an amusement arcade. Gleaning is a principle that sets parameters on greed.
Anyway, if you know of art pictures / sculptures, music, creative literature that borrows from or tells the story of Ruth I’d be grateful for nudges in the right direction.
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