Rape and Ruth: the woman and the text
The verb in Ruth 1:4, vayis'u, from ns', "to lift" or "pick up," may be taken to indicate that Ruth and Orpah, both Moabite women, were abducted into marriage. I translate the first three works of Ruth 1:4, "They-abducted for-themselves Moabite-women. . . . " The verb ns' occurs 661 times in the MT. The primary meaning of ns', according to The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), is "to carry" or "to lift." In virtually every translation of ns' in which the object is not a person, the verb is rendered with some form of "lift," "carry," "take," or something similar. Any thing or person may be the object of ns': the hand (Deut. 32:20), prayer (Jer. 7:13), or sin may be lifted off of a person or community (Isa. 53:11), and so forth. In Ruth ns' is also used to indicate lifting grain in 2:18. Women are the object of ns' five times: Judges 21:23; Ruth 1:4; Ezra 10:44; 2 Chr. 13:21 and 24:3. Note that in Judges, the context is the abduction of sexually naive girls from Shiloh into forced or rape-marriages for the purpose of progeny. The verb chtph in Judges 21:21, "to catch" (women), functions as a synonym. In Ezra, the women in question are specified as foreign. In 2 Chr. 13:21, Abijah's collection of women and the resulting offspring is cited as evidence of his strength in the previous verse, suggesting that these were abduction-marriages....
The normative verb indicating marriage in the Hebrew scriptures, lach, "to take," with a woman as the object, indicates in every case in the Hebrew scriptures socially sanctioned union (Gen 4:19; Exod. 6:20; Jer. 16:2, and so on).... Rape-marriage as a normative practice is introduced in Numbers 31, where sexually naïve girls are abducted as "booty," shalal. It is codified subsequently in Deuteronomy 20,21, and 24. Among the modifications introduced are the shift of focus from any outsider girl whose people are designated as "enemies" (as in Num. 31:19) to "beautiful" women and girls among the enemy (Deut. 20:11). Deuteronomy20:12-13 also calls for the abducted women and girls to be stripped, their heads shaved, and their nails cut....
.... The very name, "Moab," literally "from [my] father," evokes the alleged incestuous and therefore despicable nature of all Moabites according to the Israelite account of their origins in the Genesis 19 account of Lot and his daughters. As a result, Moabites, particularly Moabite women, are highly sexualized in the scriptures of Israel, as are many contemporary Africana women readers of those same scriptures.