Investigating the Bible: A day to honor mothers and mothers-in-law

By David Carlson Pastor

May 11 this year we honor mothers. However, mothers-in-law often get bad press. Marjorie Manson Telford wrote in the Reader’s Digest about a visit to her parents with her new husband, who was a frogman in the Navy. During their visit, her husband took her aside and said, “I don’t think your mother likes me. I explained to her that I can’t wear my wedding ring when I dive in the ocean because barracudas are attracted to shiny things and might bite off my finger. Your mother said, ‘Well, can’t you wear it on a chain around your neck?’” In the Bible, one mother-in-law was a woman of great love.

Ancient Israel suffered a famine and many Jews left their homeland for food. Elimelech, who lived in Bethlehem, traveled southeast to Moab with his wife Naomi and two sons. While there, Elimelech died. Naomi “…was left with her two sons. These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth.” (Ruth 1:3-4, English Standard Version used throughout.) Tragedy came again to the widow Naomi when her two sons died.

Naomi heard the famine had ended in Israel, so she planned her return. She told her daughters-in-law to remain in Moab to find husbands. “Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voices and wept. (Ruth 1:9). Both Orpah and Ruth insisted on returning with their mother-in-law. Naomi protested, lovingly calling these young women her own: “…Have I yet sons in my womb, that they may become your husbands. Turn back, my daughters; go your way, for I am too old to have a husband…And Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her.” (Ruth 1:11-12, 14). Ruth told Naomi, “…where you go I will go …Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried.” (Ruth 1:16-17).

In Israel, the two women had no income, so Ruth gleaned leftover barley and wheat from harvested fields. A man named Boaz noticed her and he “… said to Ruth, ‘Now, listen, my daughter, do not go to glean in another field or leave this one, but keep close to my young women … And when you are thirsty, go to the vessels and drink what the young men have drawn.’ Then she fell down on her face, bowing to the ground, and said to him, ‘Why have I found favor in your eyes, that you should take notice of me, since I am a foreigner?’ ... Boaz answered her, ‘All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told to me, and how you left your father and mother and your native land and came to a people that you did not know before.’” (Ruth 2:8-11). Boaz and Ruth later married and she gave birth to a son who became the grandfather of David, King of Israel. Ruth is one of only four women named in Jesus’ genealogy. (Matthew 1:5).

Another mother named Ruth labored in love for her son George. George’s father was a lawyer, the profession he planned for his son. However, this boy’s heroes were soldiers, like his grandfather, a general in the Civil War. His mother supported his dream; she read to him stories of Alexander the Great and others because George could not read or write until he was twelve years old. She taught him to ride a horse. He grew to be 6 feet, a muscular athlete. He received an appointment to West Point. He became a highly skilled cavalryman. He won fifth place in the pentathlon of the 1912 Summer Olympics. In World War I, he received a Purple Heart and his command of troops and tanks in World War II led to the defeat of the Nazis. Ruth Wilson Patton was the mother of General George S. Patton.

David Carlson Pastor (yes, that is his last name, not his profession) is a Polk County resident and graduate of Bethel Theological Seminary in Minnesota (M.Div., M.Th.).