I had an experience this week that writers will recognize. I wrote a very small targeted fantasy as a way of unfolding some of the complexities of Israel’s post-Exilic history in the 6th Century BCE. It’s not as arcane as it sounds. Really. We had a really good discussion of this little fantasy in the group for whom I wrote it. One of the the members of the group expressed her appreciation for how really smart the authors were.

I agreed. Then, the rest of the day, I found myself confronted with really similar challenges which obligated me to be as smart as the authors I had invented and on several occasions, I actually did—I did the smart thing, just as my characters did.

That is the experience I am sure will be familiar to the writers among you.

The course I am working on studies the books of Jonah and Ruth and I have called them the “Yes, but…” stories. It is no secret to anyone that Ezra, the priest who played a leading part in putting Judah back together after the Exile in Babylon, ran a very tight ship. He took particular aim at the intermarriage of returning Judaeans and local Canaanites because he saw it as most likely to lead to idolatry. So Ezra, as I represent him in this story is a very narrow reformer.

The stories of Jonah and Ruth point in a different direction and were, according to quite a few scholars, composed during this very tense post-Exilic time. Because no one knows who wrote those stories and because I wanted to keep my fantasy on the light side, I named the authors Dick and Jane. It brings up a world of associations that is completely incompatible with Ezra, Jonah, and Ruth.

In this fantasy, Dick and Jane are alarmed by Ezra’s extreme social restrictions and meet with him to change his mind and moderate his behavior. (I told you at the beginning that this was a fantasy; you are going to have to give me a little room to imagine the scene I need.). They both know that telling Ezra that they think he is going too far is not going to help. So instead, they tell him a couple of stories. If there were a contemporary bumper sticker, “Tell Stories to Power,” Dick and Jane would be the reason for it. It is these stories that led one of the people in my group to celebrate how really smart Dick and Jane were. [1]

The stories present characters that cannot fit into the world Ezra is living in. They don’t appear to be making a point that matters to Ezra and in that sense they are simply a distraction. But they do make a point and the point they make cannot be made using the characters and the social dynamics that Ezra is most interested in. He will have to accept different characters, a different narrative arc, and a different outcome if he is to really tune in to the stories Dick and Jane are telling him.

Dick tells the story of Jonah. It is a story with one Israelite, unless you count the great fish and the vine-eating worm as Israelites on the ground that, unlike Jonah, they do what God tells them to do. Everyone else is pagan and all the pagans are admirable.

At the risk of asking you to remember more of Jonah than you want to, Jonah gets a call from God to go north to Nineveh and give a message to the Ninevites. This ought to be very much a Mission Possible for Jonah because the message is a message of imminent destruction and Jonah hates the Ninevites. But Jonah tries to sneak away (west) instead. God sends a violent storm to prevent that voyage and the sailors on the ship—worshippers of other gods who have no reason to care at all about the tiff Jonah is having with his God—act heroically on his behalf.

Jonah arrives in Nineveh and begins to preach imminent destruction and the people immediately take him at his word and begin to repent. The king of Nineveh follows suite and God changes his mind and forgives all the Ninevites and cancels the scheduled destruction.

What is Ezra to do with a story like that. Nothing in it says that the Israelites are not God’s special people. Nothing in it allows for the slow descent into polytheism and idolatry which is Ezra’s greatest concern. The whole point of the story so far as Nineveh is concerned is that God opposes bad behavior—the Ninevite king refers to it once as “violence”—but is quick to forgive when remorse is shown. Nothing in that story helps Ezra in his purity crusade.

Then Jane follows with the story of Ruth. I am representing these events as if they really happened and I feel obliged to say now and again that I am making up the whole Dick, Jane, and Ezra confrontation. The only piece of that for which there is biblical support is Ezra’s behavior in post-Exilic Judaea. Dick and Jane are fictions, as are Jonah and Ruth.

And Ruth turns out to be no better than Jonah; no easier for Ezra, that is. Ruth is a Moabite, a member of a truly hated neighboring nation. The whole identity and essence of Ruth is bad. It is only her behavior that is good. She marries an Israelite boy from Bethlehem. Her new husband dies, as does his brother and his father. That leaves the widow, Naomi, Ruth’s mother-in-law. The only sensible response is to do what Naomi tells her, which is to go back to her parents’ house and find a nice Moabite boy, but Ruth does not do what is sensible. She pledges her loyalty to this foreign woman in words so direct and powerful that they are still used in weddings in the U. S.

Then she accompanies Naomi on the trip back to Bethlehem, where she goes immediately to work, gleaning grains of barley in the fields so they will have something to eat. As the situation develops, she does what Naomi tells her to do. Naomi is the veteran Israelite, after all. Then, on Naomi’s advice, she does what her benefactor—and future husband—Boaz tells her to do. And after all that, she becomes the grandmother of David the King. How Jewish can you get, really?

But there is nothing in Ruth for Ezra to use any more than there is in Jonah. Ruth is the obvious target of Ezra’s ethnic concerns and everything about her is admirable. As Ezra hears the story, he is forced to hear about the ideal villain—a Moabite woman—behaving like an ideal Judaean. Ruth’s love for Naomi and her hard work on Naomi’s behalf are flawless. There is nothing there for Ezra to use and, in fact, the categories aren’t even helpful in Ezra’s crusade, which requires the holy families to stay clear of the non-Israelites. Boaz, to pick an obvious hero, does not stay clear of non-Israelites.

When he buys the property that belongs to Naomi’s family, he also buys Ruth—most versions say “acquire”—and then he marries her, knowing that if their union produces a son, the son will inherit everything that would have come to Ruth’s former husband. None of it will go to the current husband. That is not a problem for Boaz, who is as generous and openhearted as the foreign woman he is marrying.

Another great story; another completely useless tale for Ezra. It uses people from the wrong categories and those people don’t behave in ways that seem iconic to Ezra, so he has, apparently, wasted a whole afternoon listening to engrossing and useless stories.

So as I read what I had written, I felt it press on me. I have my own crusades to conduct, of course. I am entirely pleased with the good characters in Jonah (the sailors, the people and the king) and the good characters in Ruth (Ruth and Boaz). I am not so well pleased with the behavior of Dick and Jane, who, faced with a political regime that was, as I have constructed it, out of control and going too far, simply told engaging stories. What I want to do, in the face of such a political regime is to oppose it in the most forceful prose I have at my disposal. That will do no good at all, of course.

What would actually do some good is to do what Dick and Jane did, which is to conjure up really good narratives that, as Emily Dickinson famously put it, “tells the truth, but tells it slant.” It is hard to do. It is hard even to want to do. And to do it as well as Dick and Jane did it,is truly amazing.

[1]. By contrast with the Wise Men in Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus, who saw a star that represented a new king of Israel, so they rushed over to Jerusalem to share the good news with….um….the current king of Israel. Wise, but not Smart.