Ruth and Esther
in Belief: Theological Commentary on the Bible
Pages
158
Publisher
Westminster John Knox
Published
4/21/2025
ISBN-13
9780664232504
Ruth and Esther theologically examines Ruth and Esther as moral agents who overcome gendered violence with moral courage and imagination.
In this volume of the Belief commentary series, Marcia Y. Riggs brings a womanist, social-ethical reading of the books of Ruth and Esther to reveal the intersection of various forms of gendered violence—social, political, ethnic, economic. Riggs insightfully invites readers to examine how Ruth and Esther are social actors and moral agents responding constructively to gendered violence in their contexts, and she offers historical and contemporary examples of gendered violence to juxtapose with the experiences of Ruth and Esther. In the process, readers are inspired to ask who are the Ruths and Esthers in our society. How is the church responding to the marginalization of these women? How are people of faith doing ministry in solidarity with the struggles of these women?
In all, this resource for preaching and teaching provides insights about faithful ethical responses to violence, encouraging readers to be in dialogue with biblical texts as they ask questions about their complicity with violence in our environments today.
In this volume of the Belief commentary series, Marcia Y. Riggs brings a womanist, social-ethical reading of the books of Ruth and Esther to reveal the intersection of various forms of gendered violence—social, political, ethnic, economic. Riggs insightfully invites readers to examine how Ruth and Esther are social actors and moral agents responding constructively to gendered violence in their contexts, and she offers historical and contemporary examples of gendered violence to juxtapose with the experiences of Ruth and Esther. In the process, readers are inspired to ask who are the Ruths and Esthers in our society. How is the church responding to the marginalization of these women? How are people of faith doing ministry in solidarity with the struggles of these women?
In all, this resource for preaching and teaching provides insights about faithful ethical responses to violence, encouraging readers to be in dialogue with biblical texts as they ask questions about their complicity with violence in our environments today.
Collections
This book appears in the following featured collections.
- Commentaries by Female Scholars by Best Commentaries
- Non-Western and BIPOC Commentaries by Best Commentaries
Reviews
DavidH
June 25, 2026
June 25, 2026
Marcia Y. Riggs’s Ruth and Esther is a passionate womanist ethical reading, valuable for drawing attention to poverty, ethnic marginalisation, women’s vulnerability, imperial sexual exploitation, and the genuine moral horror of violence in Esther 8–9. Its central weakness, however, is that its “religious ethical mediation” framework too often outruns the text. Riggs frequently turns narrative possibilities into assertions: Ruth’s voluntary loyalty to Naomi and Yahweh becomes potential identity-violence or ethnic annihilation, despite the book’s continued insistence that she remains Moabite; the socially dangerous and sexually suggestive threshing-floor scene becomes evidence of seduction, trafficking, or exploitation, although the narrative deliberately leaves important details unresolved and foregrounds Ruth’s explicit appeal for redemption and Boaz’s protection, restraint, and legal responsibility. Likewise, Vashti is credited with an unrecorded history of repeated debasement and then implicitly faulted for not reforming a royal harem over which the text gives her no influence, unfairly shifting responsibility for Xerxes’ misogynistic decree from the king and his advisers to the woman who refused humiliation. Riggs rightly refuses to sanitise Esther 9, especially the counter-decree’s scope, the extra day of killing in Susa, and the treatment of Haman’s sons; yet she wrongly treats Haman’s execution as ending the threat, overlooking that his irrevocable extermination decree remained in force, and she psychologises Esther and Mordecai as pursuing a “power play” without textual evidence of such motives. Most seriously, her movement from God’s hiddenness to implied divine justification of, or complicity in, violence is theologically unwarranted. Riggs raises worthwhile contemporary questions, but her commentary is unreliable where her ethical conclusions displace the narratives’ own emphases on divine providence, covenant loyalty, human integrity, protection of the vulnerable, and Ruth’s Davidic-redemptive horizon.