Hibernate is not a good example of an ORM, frankly. (I myself have horrors of both Hibernate and TopLink, which was the top Java ORM way back when.)

Ruby's ActiveRecord is a much better choice. It has an excellent balance between SQL and OO. It doesn't pretend that SQL doesn't exist; on the contrary, it encourgaes SQL use, and merely maps tables to objects, adds a bunch of useful features (data validation, change management, automatic joins, declarative migrations) and gets out of your way most of the time.

For example:

    users = User.where("created_at > ?", Time.now - 1.year).
      order('name').limit(10)

Results are lazily loaded and composable, so you can do:

    users = User.where("created_at > ?", Time.now - 1.year)
    if (page = params[:page])
      users = users.offset((page - 1) * 10).limit(10)
    end

Joining is easy:

    users = Users.joins(:accounts).
      where(accounts: {type: 'facebook')).first

becomes something like:

    select users.*
    from users
    join accounts on accounts.id = users.account_id
    where accounts.type = 'facebook'
    limit 1

Have you used rails ORM (activerecord) or sqlalchemy ? (I haven't used the latter much but people rave about it). Hibernate is an ORM taken to the extremes