🏳️‍🌈🏺🛐 Ruth/Naomi: Bible 5

🏳️‍🌈🏺 2-GAY IN HISTORY 🏺🏳️‍🌈

Ruth and Naomi

It’s not just David and Jonathan who are treated as ‘special’ friends in the Hebrew Bible, but two women as well.

Many now consider it the Bible’s best love story.

In the Book of Ruth, famine has struck the land, and two women are now widowed. Naomi tells her daughter-in-law to go home.

Ruth refuses.

And what she says is immortalized in Christian marriage ceremonies every day:

“Where you go, I will go.

Where you lodge, I will lodge.

Your people shall be my people,

and your God my God.

Where you die, I will die—

there will I be buried.”

(Ruth 1:16 8:1:16)

Spoken at heterosexual weddings as vows of lifelong union. The Bible places them in the mouth of one woman to another.

The Hebrew verb used is dāvaq — “to cling” — the same verb used in Genesis for a man “cleaving” to his wife or a soul clinging to a beloved 34:3

It’s an obvious, intentional parallel.

The narrative then centers their bond. Ruth lives with Naomi, providing for her financially. They struggle and strive together in a patriarchal world. When Ruth finally has a child, the townswomen proclaim:

“A son has been born to Naomi.”

(4:17)

The emotional arc belongs to the women. Boaz is a biological necessity; Naomi is narratively central.

Scholars see the queer reading. Ken Stone, Deryn Guest, and J. Cheryl Exum all argue that the text presents a covenantal same-sex bond using language otherwise reserved for marriage. It is affectively intense, economically intertwined, socially visible, and theologically sanctioned.

Nothing in the story rebukes it. Nothing distances the reader from it. Instead, Israel’s royal line is built on it. From Ruth and Naomi to David, the lineage in the Gospels is built on these queer foundations.

You could read it as just a platonic commitment between a younger woman and an older one. But the text treats it as exceptionally devotional and covenantal—as holy. So much so that countless couples have chosen to hear those words as the truest form of love: the very definition of what marriage means, gay or otherwise.