HEBREW WORD STUDY – WHERE YOU GO KI EL AHSHER אל אשׁר תל כי
Ruth 1:16: “And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave you, or to return from following after you: for where you go, I will go; and where you lodge, I will lodge: your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”
Ruth declares: “Where you go.” In Hebrew this is “Ki el asher talaki.” However, Ruth may have been speaking a variant of her own Moabite language. The Moabite language is an extinct Canaanite language which is Semitic in its roots, uses a variant of the Phoenician Alphabet and is the language that Aramaic and Arabic finds its roots. Hence there is a very subtle and interesting play on the word asher which means where but also means happiness or blessing in the Moabite language. So what Naomi might have heard was: “Where you go to be blessed, I will go.” More specifically to the context, “Where you go to be blessed by God I will go.” Translators will not go this far as clearly Naomi had nothing to offer Ruth, only poverty, hardship and no hope of marriage – some blessing huh?
But this play on the Canaanite and Hebrew words go further as she says: “Where you lodge I will lodge.” The word “lodge” in Hebrew is “alin” which could come from the root word “lin” which means to lodge, or spend the night somewhere. But that would mean the third letter had to be a Vav and not a Yod. I believe there is a Canaanite origin in this word for lodge. The Hebrew text uses a Yod, as the third letter. This makes it the Aramaic “‘alayan.” The closest we have to the Hebrew would be “’alavan” which means lodge and translators just assumed we had an anomaly here. I think not, I believe the writer deliberately used a Yod rather than a Vav for the third letter to show Ruth was speaking her native language and hence this would be rendered as: “Where you will draw closer to God, I will draw closer to God.”
Sure Ruth was loyal to Noami, but she was more loyal to the God her husband and Naomi introduced her to.
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