For more on Ruth 1:1-17, listen to this episode of the NL;DR Podcast or read the chapter on Ruth in my book The Forgotten Books of the Bible.

 If you’re familiar with only one passage from the book of Ruth, it’s most likely Ruth’s passionate statement of commitment to her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi in Ruth 1:16-17,

Where you go I will go;
where you lodge I will lodge;
your people will be my people,
and your God my God.
Where you die I will die—
there will I be buried.

Ruth’s statement so beautifully models the commitment of one person to another that it has come to be used in Christian wedding ceremonies as an expression of the depth of love entailed in marriage. So deeply does Ruth love Naomi that she is willing to leave behind her whole life to devote herself to Naomi’s care.

An Immigrant’s Tale

Yet of course, in the biblical story Ruth’s vow isn’t part of a marriage ceremony. Rather, it occurs in the context of Ruth’s immigration to the land of Israel, as she prepares to cross the river from her Moabite homeland to make a new life for herself in Bethlehem. Before she can go, she must convince her mother-in-law Naomi to take her along for the journey. So Ruth makes a vow not only to devote herself to Naomi but also to Naomi’s people, immersing herself in the Israelite way of life.

Probably the story is meant to surprise its early Israelite readers, who likely would have thought of Moabites as suspicious foreigners who could never integrate properly into Israelite society. Indeed, it is often suggested that the book of Ruth was written in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, when foreign women were being forcibly expelled from Judah in order to purify the land of foreign influence (see Ezra 9-10).

Indeed, in the traditions of ancient Israel preserved in the Bible, Moabites are notoriously suspect. The biblical story of the origin of the Moabites, told in Genesis 19:30-38, traces their lineage to a drunken, incestuous encounter between Lot and one of his daughters following the destruction of Sodom. Likewise, Deuteronomy 23:3-4 declares that “No Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.”

Making Ancient Israel Great Again

The story of a Moabite woman dedicating herself to the well-being of her Israelite mother-in-law challenges the anti-Moabite biases of ancient Israel and undermines Ezra’s policy initiative to return the Moabites (and all immigrants) to their country of origin. This text not only insists that Moabite women are capable of devoting themselves to the Israelites and their way of life, but also reminds its reader that Israel’s greatness depended from the very beginning on the contributions of faithful foreigners such as Ruth.

When, in its final verses, the book reveals that Ruth is the great-grandmother of the great King David, its pro-immigrant message is complete. Not only can immigrants help make the nation great again–but in fact the nation never would have been great in the first place were it not for the Moabite Ruth and others like her.

Living as we do in a time in which our own government’s policies are being weaponized against immigrants and refugees, the resonance of the book of Ruth could not be more clear. To those voices clamoring to close the borders and send immigrants and refugees packing, the book of Ruth presents a biblical counterpoint. It insists that immigrants can contributive positively to our society as they did to ancient Israel. Indeed, it recalls that immigrants have always made America great, just as they had done in ancient Israel.

Assimilationist is Just Another Word for Racist

Yet there is a dangerous side to appropriating for ourselves this reading of Ruth that celebrates the integration of a Moabite woman into Israelite culture. African American biblical scholar Yolanda Norton, in her essay “Silenced Struggles for Survival,” describes Ruth’s vow to Naomi as an “assimilationist articulation” in which she “disavows herself from any Moab allegiance and claims unwavering allegiance to everything Israel.” That is, the text does violence to Ruth the Moabite by forcing her to disavow all things Moabite in order to be accepted into the Israelite story. To be acceptable for this text, she must turn her back on her land, on her people, and on her gods—on her entire culture. To be accepted in this text, she must cease to be a Moabite.

As Ibram Kendi powerfully reminds in his book How to be an Antiracist, assimilationist rhetoric is not antiracist. Rather, it is simply another form of racist bias. Where the segregationist believes that the ethnic minority (here, the Moabite) can never be integrated into the dominant culture (here, Israelite), the assimilationist thinks they can be integrated into the dominant culture–but only if they give up their own cultural heritage. The assimilationist believes that Moabites can become worthy of respect only by becoming Israelite. That the Latinx immigrant can be regarded as fully human only if they become culturally white.

The irony, as biblical scholar Gale Yee points out, is that Ruth can never be fully accepted as an Israelite, and so remains perpetually a foreigner. The book itself demonstrates this by referring to Ruth insistently as “Ruth the Moabite,” reminding the reader at every turn that Ruth isn’t really an Israelite even though she has given up her Moabite heritage in an effort to dedicate herself to her new Israelite community. Yee, herself a fourth-generation Chinese-American, recognizes in Ruth’s story her own experience of being a “perpetual foreigner” in the United States, never fully accepted by the white mainstream as being fully American despite generations in this country. Norton describes the experience of African Americans in the U.S. in similar terms.

An Antiracist Response to Ruth

Norton and Yee raise important questions for white progressives, not just in the way we read the Bible but in the way we relate to the ethnic minorities around us, both those who come as immigrants and refugees and those who have been here for many generations.

On the one hand, the book of Ruth invites us to celebrate and lift up ethnic minorities in a time when the mainstream discourse in America is anti-immigrant and anti-minority. Just as the book of Ruth celebrates an ethnic minority woman as foundational to the people of Israel—a Moabite woman without whom Israel could never have been great—so, too, the book calls upon us to celebrate the foundational importance of ethnic minorities to the establishment and thriving of the United States.

Yet, at the same time, the book warns us against our own assimilationist impulses, in which we lift up ethnic minorities only so long as they conform to the cultural expectations of the white majority. The book does violence to Ruth by forcing her to abandon her Moabite heritage in order to be acceptable in Israel. So, too, we run the risk of doing violence to ethnic minorities among us when we expect them to abandon their culture heritage to conform to the standards of our dominant white culture.

Let this text challenge us to move beyond our assimilationist racism to a truly antiracist embrace of cultural diversity that does not demand an oath of assimilationist allegiance but recognizes the inherent worth of all people, seeking together to build a better world.