On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:05:59 am Joe Zeff wrote:
> Please note that the Israelites had no problem with the people of
> Edom, Amor or Moab worshiping other gods, because they were
> righteous. The Amalikites, OTOH, who were in effect amoral, were an
> entirely different matter. (They had, apparently, no concept of
> Divine Retribution, either now or in an afterlife.)
And because they had "no problem" with them, they waged war on them,
slaughtered them, made them a vassal state, prohibited Israelites from
marrying Moabites ("unto the tenth generation"), and King Solomon
described them as an "abomination".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moab#Moabite_and_Israelite_Relations
The great unnamed protest writer who wrote the book of Ruth even went so
far as to claim that the greatest Israelite king, David, was part Moab,
as a protest at the racial policies of Nehemias and Ezra, particularly
their efforts to re-introduce the old prohibition on intermarriage with
Moabites and the laws forcing Israelite men to divorce their Moab wives
and send away their "half-breed" children.
I realise that there are other interpretations of the book of Ruth, but
it seems to me that the others aren't plausible.
--
Steven D'Aprano
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