In the biblical story of Ruth, a woman's husband and sons die while she is living in a foreign land. Left with her two daughters-in-law, she decides to return home to the land of Israel. When her daughters-in-law offer to accompany her, she tells them to go back to their birth families because she has nothing to offer. One of them, Ruth, refuses to leave her mother-in-law alone.

The rest of the story focuses on Ruth as she works to support the two of them, eventually marries, and becomes the great-grandmother of King David. The story appears to have been recorded after the exile in Babylon, a time when the new administration in Jerusalem ordered the people to remove any foreign women and children from their families. By claiming a foreign woman among the great David's ancestors, the story challenged this cleansing.

But reading the story with a Japanese Canadian woman, I learned that the second daughter-in-law, Orpah, the one who disappears after the first few verses, is a model of liberation for Korean women among others. Orpah did not have to stick with her mother-in-law. She is set free to make her own way. This reading came as a surprise for me, who had been taught to read the story from Ruth's perspective where absolute dedication is the virtue. But as I thought back to the funeral of a young Korean man and the way his mother arrived and took over, as I remembered his wife, I understood something different. I now see the value of Orpah in the story.

As a well-off White woman, I need help seeing the stories I know by heart from the perspective of the dispossessed, people on the margins, Indigenous, racialized, and Black peoples. When I came across a notice for the book Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization I immediately ordered it. The book introduced me to a few stories I had completely forgotten and provides different perspectives on some I know well.

Recently, my daughter passed on a warning from a prominent BIPOC woman about using "decolonize" as a metaphor. The woman's concern is that if we focus on metaphoric decolonizing, we forget the real work of taking apart the structures of racism. I take her point. I do think, however, that we need to undo the thought structures that support the colonial structures, that we need to open up the ideologies that underpin structural racism in order to do the work in society. I hope we remember, however, that we are not finished when we begin to understand the way our thinking is complicit.

The forward of the book acknowledges that biblical stories have been used to justify colonial actions, taking land from indigenous peoples, but also askes the question: is it possible for the exploited and their allies to reclaim the Bible from the dominant powers?

Let me give another example of what this might look like, and this reading I learned through the work of Ched Myers. There is a story of Jesus sitting in the courtyard of the Jerusalem temple with his disciples watching people put money into the treasury. A widow, comes and drops in two copper coins. Jesus summons his disciples and says: "Look. Most of these people put in large sums, but this woman has put in more than all the rest because she gave everything all she had to live on." (paraphrased, Mark 12:43)

Usually, this story is quoted with praise for the woman's sacrifice. However, the clues that Jesus is angry are right there. Just before this, he is criticizing the wealthy who claim to be religious for devouring the homes of widows. Pointing to this woman giving up all she had to feed herself is a parallel critique of the way these particular structures hurt the poor.

The next clue: Jesus immediately begins a diatribe against the religious elite and the structures that oppress, declaring that the temple and the oppressive society that runs it is coming down. Jesus' comment about the widow condemns the religious elite for building their power and prestige on the backs of the poor.

There are things we think we know, things we assume to be right. But when we stop and examine our assumptions, we begin to see the ways in which we are short-sighted, myopic, wrong. And acknowledging we are wrong is one step in the work of finding a better path.

Cathy Hird lives on the traditional territory of the Saugeen Ojibway