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An excellent and very suggestive piece, which rightly recognizes the threshing floor as a sacred precinct (temenos), and the troth plighted there as a sacred marriage rite. For Ruth, like Song of Songs, is focused on a sacred marriage rite, and it is no accident that the Counting of the Omer (Barley) between Passover and Pentecost is interrupted by L”ag ba’Omer (לַ״ג בָּעוֹמֶר), the ideal wedding day in Jewish tradition. Nor is it happenstantial that Ruth is read publicly at Pentecost (Feast of Weeks).
Washing, anointing, and clothing is in Ruth 3:3, at the center of a short chiasm, at the center of the chiastic book of Ruth, as shown by the late Yehuda Radday in J. Welch, ed., Chiasmus in Antiquity (Gerstenberg, 1981), 71-76; E. F. Campbell, Ruth, Anchor Bible 7 (Doubleday, 1975), 118-119; Clifford, CBQ, 39:574; cf. II Sam 12:20, 24:11-25, Lev 8:6-13, Ex 29:4-8.
However, p. 343 misses the point that Ruth’s conversion-declaration to her mother-in-law makes her a full Israelite, not Gentile.
Moreover, Orpah does not mean “stiff of neck, obstinate; apostate” in Classical Hebrew (which requires additional Hebrew words; p. 335, based on aggadah), but simply “neck; nape of neck,” which indicates the turning of the back at most.