Ruth and Esther

Queen-Sutherland's Ruth & Esther (Smyth & Helwys, 2016) is warmly written and pastorally engaged, but readers should be aware of serious theological and exegetical problems that emerge when it is placed alongside the major scholarly commentaries it cites. Most strikingly, the commentary is repeatedly derogatory toward God. In her theatrical "cast listing" for Ruth chapter 1, Sutherland places YHWH among the "Extras" — below three men who die in the first five verses — reducing the sovereign God of Israel to a walk-on in his own story. She states plainly that "God is named in the story, but the image is not flattering," and in the book's introduction brackets God grammatically alongside the villain Haman as one of the "forces that seek to destroy life" that "must be named and challenged" — an astonishing equivalence. She describes YHWH as "a heavy-handed God of famine and death" and introduces the book by saying God "finally remembers" his people in Ruth 1:6, implying divine negligence where the Hebrew word (paqad) simply means God acts faithfully on their behalf, with no connotation of tardiness. She praises Naomi for standing before God to "shake her fist," treating Naomi's bitter accusation against God not as a cry of spiritual crisis (which is how Bush, Block, and others read it) but as the moral engine of the story — even claiming Naomi surpasses Job because "Job speaks but Naomi acts." For Esther she concludes that "God may be absent, but Esther and Mordecai would nevertheless carry on," dismissing any reading that finds hidden divine providence as "apologetic and unconvincing." This brings us to the commentary's central inconsistency: Sutherland cites Adele Berlin's Esther (JPS) more than any other work — roughly 37 times — yet directly contradicts Berlin's core argument, which is that the book of Esther quietly advocates for the conviction that God's providence protects the Jewish diaspora even when his name is unspoken. Similarly, she cites Frederic Bush's Word Biblical Commentary as a technical authority throughout, while rejecting his equally explicit conclusion that the story's resolution involves "the providence of God," and she draws on Karen Jobes's NIV Application Commentary (which devotes its longest theological section to demonstrating that divine concurrence operates in every human decision in Esther) while ignoring that argument entirely. In short, she dismisses as inadequate the very theological framework of the scholars she most relies upon, without ever directly refuting their reasoning — a logical move called a false dilemma, because she presents only two options (God is truly absent, or you are naively importing LXX-style piety into the text) while ignoring the well-established third position that providence operates through human action even when unnamed. Her treatment of Ruth chapter 3's threshing floor scene exhibits circular reasoning: she assumes a sexual outcome in order to read the deliberately ambiguous Hebrew word for "uncover" erotically, then uses that reading to confirm the sexual atmosphere — whereas Bush and Block both argue carefully that the scene's restraint is intentional and that Ruth's speech in 3:9 is primarily a legal petition for marriage and protection under Israelite custom, not an act of sexual aggression. A sidebar titled "Just Get Him Drunk" opens with a crude line equating wine with male sexual availability and then draws false moral equivalences between Ruth and Lot's daughters committing incest, Tamar deceiving her father-in-law, and Judith beheading a general — situations that differ decisively in moral, legal, and narrative terms, all flattened into a single framework of women manipulating men through sex and alcohol. Vashti is heroized as a feminist resister who refuses to enter "male space," but as Jobes explicitly warns, this forces moral judgments onto a character whose motivation the text never supplies — and Berlin, Sutherland's own primary authority, treats Vashti almost entirely as a plot device with no heroic dimension. Throughout the commentary, Boaz is read with consistent suspicion — listed mockingly as "Mr. Pillar-of-the-Community," his piety in 2:12 described as possible "subtle flirtation" — while Daniel Block's Zondervan Exegetical Commentary, the most recent major Ruth commentary, reads Boaz as the book's supreme moral exemplar, a model of Torah righteousness who foreshadows the Davidic king and ultimately the Messiah, calling his book The King Is Coming for this very reason. Finally, Ruth's declaration "Your God is my God" (1:16) — which Block identifies as the theological climax of the entire book and analyzes in detail as a radical transfer of covenant allegiance from the Moabite deity Chemosh to YHWH — receives less space in Sutherland than a sidebar on lesbian reception history, leaving a lay reader without adequate guidance on what is arguably the most theologically significant moment in Ruth. Taken together, these problems — derogatory language about God, logical fallacies that avoid rather than engage opposing arguments, internal contradictions between Sutherland's conclusions and her own authorities, crude interpretive choices in key sidebars, and a structural bias toward reading human agency as a replacement for divine action rather than an expression of it — make this a commentary that should be used, if at all, only alongside a more exegetically and theologically grounded alternative such as Block, Bush, or (for Esther) Jobes.

This commentary is beautifully written and well organized with a methodological focus on intertextuality. The introduction gives attention to Ruth and Esther in the Megillot, text-critical issues, possible genre designations, and details its canonical history. This commentary highlights connections with indigenous readings of Ruth, along with Ruth’s reception history in film, literature, and art. [Full Review]

This work has some good insights into the book of Esther, however, the author's politics creep in to the point that the book is not helpful in many section. For instance, in the exegesis on chapter 1 the focus becomes feminism and gender roles rather than the providence of God at work. In the third chapter, the author's politics come out even more when she attacks American culture's laws on birth control and abortion. Though in general SHBC is a good series, I might skip this work in favor of other authors with similar levels of insight that do not bring politics into play.