Blessings from YHWH (Ruth 2:4)

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⁴ WE SEE BOAZ COMING FROM BETHLEHEM.

וְהִנֵּה־בֹ֗עַז בָּ֚א מִבֵּ֣ית־לֶ֔חֶם

I’ll explain the capital letters, and my translation of וְהִנֵּה v’hinneh as “WE SEE,” in a minute. First I’ll give the floor to Adele Berlin from her book Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative:

There are several other examples of ‘wehinneh’ clauses which do not indicate a character’s point of view—i.e. someone else is not seeing what is mentioned in the clauses. Rather they mark the entrance of a new figure into a scene after the scene has been set by previous narration. They are all part of the narration (not direct discourse), and all stand first in their verses and involve a verb of motion. I would translate wehinneh in all of them as ‘at that point’.

To deal with a smaller point first, בָּא ba can be either a perfect — the past tense, “he arrived” — or a participle — the progressive tense, “he was arriving.” How you translate it depends on how you “hear” the phrase. Now for v’hinneh.

As we explained long ago, הנה is often a point-of-view word, something I no doubt learned from Adele’s writing and scholarship, of which I’m a great admirer. That doesn’t mean this meaning fits in every case, and certainly not (as she says) that it is always the point of view of a character in the story. By all means have a look at Num 25:6, 1 Sam 11:5, 1 Kgs 13:1 and 25, and Jud 4:22, her other examples, for yourself. She would translate our phrase (as she says in introducing her comment) as, “At that point, Boaz arrived from Jerusalem.”

Next point: We both agree on what actually is happening in the story at this moment. Rather than focusing on the “poetics,” though, I am trying to build on my observation from last week that וַתֵּ֤לֶךְ וַתָּבוֹא֙ va-télekh va-tavo ‘she went and she came’ of v. 3 was meant cinematically, the literary equivalent of the change of scene in a movie. With the first verb, we are with Naomi, watching Ruth leave; with the second, we are in the barley field, watching her arrive.