Book of Ruth

Based on Wikipedia: Book of Ruth

A Foreign Woman in the Royal Bloodline

Here is a puzzle that has fascinated religious scholars for millennia: How did a Moabite woman—a foreigner from a nation explicitly condemned in Jewish scripture—become the great-grandmother of King David, Israel's greatest monarch? And if you follow the genealogies in the New Testament, she appears in the direct lineage of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Book of Ruth is only four chapters long. You could read it in fifteen minutes. Yet this tiny scroll has sparked centuries of debate about inclusion versus exclusion, the nature of loyalty, and who exactly gets to belong to a community.

The story's brevity is deceptive. Within its compact narrative lies a subversive argument about foreigners, a meditation on female solidarity, and one of the most quoted declarations of devotion in all of literature.

When the Story Was Actually Written

Let's get the scholarly consensus out of the way first, because it matters for understanding what the book is really doing.

The story is set during the time of the Judges—roughly the twelfth to eleventh centuries before the common era—but most scholars believe it was written much later, during the Persian period, somewhere between 550 and 330 BCE. The traditional attribution to the prophet Samuel, who lived in the eleventh century, is almost certainly a later addition.

Why does the dating matter? Because something significant was happening in Jewish society during that Persian period. Leaders like Ezra and Nehemiah were enforcing strict policies against intermarriage with foreigners. Jewish men who had married non-Jewish women were being pressured—sometimes forcibly—to divorce their wives and send them away.

Into this heated debate comes a story about a Moabite woman who embodies the highest Jewish virtues, marries into a prominent Jewish family, and becomes an ancestor of the royal line.

Coincidence? Most scholars think not.

The Plot in Four Acts

The narrative opens with catastrophe. An Israelite family from Bethlehem—Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two sons—flees to Moab to escape famine. Moab is not a friendly place. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the Moabites appear as enemies of Israel, associated with idolatry and sexual immorality. The book of Deuteronomy explicitly bans Moabites from joining the congregation of the Lord, "even to their tenth generation."

And yet here is a respectable Israelite family, settling among these forbidden people.

Things get worse quickly. Elimelech dies. The two sons marry Moabite women—Ruth and Orpah. Then, after about ten years, both sons die as well, leaving three widows with no male protector in a society where that meant almost certain destitution.

Naomi decides to return to Bethlehem. She urges her daughters-in-law to go back to their own mothers' homes, to remarry within their own people. Orpah, weeping, agrees to leave. Ruth refuses.

Her refusal takes the form of one of the most famous speeches in scripture:

"Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and more may the Lord do to me if anything but death parts me from you."

Notice what Ruth is doing here. She is not merely expressing affection for her mother-in-law. She is converting. Your people shall be my people. Your God my God. She is abandoning her Moabite identity entirely.

Gleaning at the Edges

The two women arrive in Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest. They have nothing. Naomi is so bitter that she tells the townspeople to call her Mara, which means "bitter," rather than Naomi, which means "pleasant."

To survive, Ruth goes to glean in the fields.

Gleaning was an ancient welfare system. Landowners were required by Jewish law to leave the edges of their fields unharvested and to leave behind any grain that fell during the harvest. The poor, the widows, and the foreigners could then come behind the harvesters and gather what remained. It was hard, humiliating work—you were essentially picking through the leavings—but it kept people from starving.

"As it happens," the text says with obvious narrative intent, Ruth ends up in a field belonging to a man named Boaz.

Boaz is wealthy, respected, and—crucially—a relative of Naomi's dead husband Elimelech. He notices Ruth working in his fields and asks about her. When he learns she is the foreign daughter-in-law who showed such loyalty to Naomi, he treats her with remarkable kindness. He tells his workers not to bother her, invites her to share their food, and quietly instructs his harvesters to leave extra grain behind for her to find.

The Night on the Threshing Floor

Now comes the most discussed—and most debated—scene in the book.

Naomi hatches a plan. Boaz, as a close relative of Elimelech, has both the right and arguably the obligation to perform what scholars call a "levirate-like" marriage. The levirate law (from the Latin word for "brother-in-law") required a man's brother to marry his widow if he died without children, ensuring the continuation of the family line and the preservation of family property.

Boaz is not Ruth's brother-in-law—the situation is more complex—but the same principle of family redemption applies.

Naomi tells Ruth to wash, anoint herself with perfume, dress in her best clothes, and go to the threshing floor where Boaz will be sleeping after the evening's work. She instructs Ruth to wait until Boaz has eaten and drunk and lain down, then to "uncover his feet and lie down."

The Hebrew here is almost certainly a euphemism. In biblical Hebrew, "feet" frequently serves as a polite way of referring to genitals. Scholars have debated for centuries exactly what happened on that threshing floor, but the sexual undertones are unmistakable.

Ruth follows Naomi's instructions. At midnight, Boaz wakes up startled to find a woman lying at his feet. "Who are you?" he asks.

"I am your handmaid Ruth," she replies. "Spread your robe over your handmaid, for you are a redeeming kinsman."

The phrase "spread your robe over me" is itself a marriage proposal. Boaz agrees. But there is a complication: another man, an unnamed relative, has a closer claim than Boaz. That matter will have to be settled first.

A Transaction at the City Gate

The next morning, Boaz goes to the city gate—the ancient equivalent of a courthouse, where legal matters were witnessed and settled. He assembles ten elders as witnesses and calls out to the closer kinsman, addressing him simply as "so and so" (in Hebrew, ploni almoni). The text never gives this man a name, perhaps deliberately diminishing him.

Boaz presents the situation strategically. There is a piece of land that belonged to Elimelech, Naomi's dead husband. The nearest kinsman has the first right to redeem it—to purchase it back into the family. The man agrees.

Then Boaz adds the catch: whoever acquires the land must also marry Ruth the Moabite, to raise up an heir in the dead man's name.

Suddenly the kinsman backs out. Taking on Ruth would jeopardize his own inheritance—presumably because any son she bore would legally belong to her first husband's family line, creating complications for the kinsman's existing heirs.

To formalize his withdrawal, the kinsman removes his sandal and hands it to Boaz. This strange custom—which the text itself notes requires explanation for later readers—served as the ancient equivalent of signing over property rights.

Boaz is now free to marry Ruth.

The Surprise Ending

The marriage happens quickly in the narrative. Ruth conceives and bears a son. The women of Bethlehem celebrate with Naomi, telling her this grandson will be "a restorer of life" and noting that her daughter-in-law, who loves her, is "better to you than seven sons."

That phrase—better than seven sons—is remarkable in a patriarchal culture that valued sons above almost everything. The number seven in Hebrew symbolism represents completeness or perfection. Ruth, the foreign woman, is being praised as worth more than perfect completeness.

Naomi takes the child on her lap, and the neighbor women declare, "A son has been born to Naomi!" Even though genetically the child belongs to Ruth and Boaz, in the legal and social framework of the time, this baby restores Naomi's family line.

The child is named Obed.

Then comes the kicker, tucked almost casually into the final verses: Obed became the father of Jesse, and Jesse became the father of David.

David. The shepherd boy who slew Goliath. The king who united Israel and conquered Jerusalem. The central figure of Jewish national identity, from whose line the Messiah was expected to come.

His great-grandmother was a Moabite.

The Political Argument Hidden in Plain Sight

Once you understand the likely context of the book's composition—that period in the fifth century when Jewish leaders were expelling foreign wives—the story's message becomes pointed.

The argument goes something like this: You want to exclude foreigners? You want to break up marriages between Jews and non-Jews? You want to ban Moabites from the congregation?

Your greatest king is one-eighth Moabite.

The Book of Ruth serves as a rebuttal to ethnic exclusivism. It argues that foreigners who genuinely convert—who embrace the God and people of Israel as Ruth did—can become not merely acceptable Jews but exemplary ones. Ruth displays chesed, the Hebrew term usually translated as "loving-kindness" or "loyal love," which is considered one of the highest virtues.

The later rabbis found an elegant solution to the apparent contradiction with Deuteronomy's ban on Moabites. The Mishnah—the foundational text of rabbinic Judaism—ruled that only male Moabites were excluded from the congregation. Female Moabites like Ruth could convert and marry Israelites without restriction.

Whether this interpretation was original or retrofitted to accommodate Ruth's problematic ancestry, we cannot know. But it allowed the tradition to preserve both the exclusionary law and the inclusive story.

The Names Tell a Story

Hebrew names in the Bible often carry meaning, and some scholars believe the names in Ruth are almost too perfect to be historical.

Elimelech means "My God is King."

Naomi means "Pleasant" or "Lovely."

Mahlon, her son who dies, means "Sickness."

Chilion, the other dead son, means "Wasting" or "Destruction."

Orpah, who turns back to Moab, has a name related to the Hebrew word for "back of the neck"—the body part you show when you turn away.

Ruth's name is less certain. It may be related to a word meaning "friend" or "companion," which would fit her role perfectly.

Do these meaningful names prove the story is fiction? Not necessarily. But they do suggest that whether or not there was a historical Ruth, the story as we have it has been artfully crafted.

Female Solidarity in a Man's World

Modern readers, particularly feminist scholars, have found rich material in the relationship between Naomi and Ruth.

Here are two women, both widowed, both economically vulnerable, navigating a patriarchal society that offers them almost no independent agency. Their survival depends on men—on Boaz's kindness, on his willingness to marry Ruth, on the legal apparatus of kinsman-redeemers and city-gate transactions.

And yet.

Look at who drives the action. Naomi plans the threshing-floor encounter. Ruth executes it with courage. Together, they secure their future through intelligence and initiative, using the system's rules to their advantage.

The deep bond between the two women—Ruth's famous declaration of loyalty is addressed to Naomi, not to any man—has led some scholars to read the book as a celebration of female friendship and resourcefulness in the face of structural disadvantage.

Others have gone further, seeing in Ruth and Naomi's relationship a model for intimate bonds between women that transcends categories familiar to modern readers. Whether or not one accepts these readings, the centrality of the female relationship is undeniable. The men in the story, even Boaz, are somewhat peripheral. The emotional core is two women choosing each other.

The Manuscripts That Survived

The Hebrew text of Ruth comes to us through manuscripts copied and recopied over centuries. The oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts are the Aleppo Codex from the tenth century and Codex Leningradensis from 1008 CE—more than fifteen hundred years after the book was likely composed.

However, fragments of Ruth were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, those famous documents discovered in caves near the Dead Sea beginning in 1947. These fragments date from around 50 BCE to 68 CE, giving us a witness to the text more than a thousand years older than the complete medieval manuscripts.

The remarkable finding: the Dead Sea Scroll fragments show only minor variations from the text that has been transmitted through the centuries. The scribes who copied Ruth were extraordinarily careful.

There is also an ancient Greek translation called the Septuagint, made in the last few centuries before the common era. This translation, used by Greek-speaking Jews and later by Christians, survives in codices from the fourth and fifth centuries.

Why This Story Endures

The Book of Ruth has been read liturgically by Jews on the holiday of Shavuot—the Feast of Weeks, which commemorates both the spring harvest and the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. The connection makes sense: Ruth's story takes place during the harvest, and her acceptance of Naomi's God parallels the acceptance of Torah.

Jewish converts have long held Ruth in particular esteem. Here is scriptural precedent for the convert who chooses Judaism out of love and loyalty rather than birth. The rabbis elaborated Ruth's character extensively, portraying her as a model of righteousness.

For Christians, Ruth's place in the genealogy of Jesus adds theological significance. Matthew's Gospel, unusually, names four women in Jesus's ancestry: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Three of them are explicitly foreigners. The inclusion seems deliberate—a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the message that the Gospel would go out to all nations.

But beyond these religious significances, the story endures because it touches something universal. The decision of Ruth to stay with Naomi—to choose loyalty over self-interest, belonging over biological ties—speaks to anyone who has ever chosen their family rather than merely inheriting it.

"Wherever you go, I will go."

It is a vow that has been quoted at weddings, funerals, and moments of decision for three thousand years. Not because it appears in scripture, but because it captures something true about the kind of love that creates bonds stronger than blood.

The woman who spoke those words was a foreigner, an outsider, a member of a despised nation. She became an ancestor of kings.

That reversal—the outsider brought inside, the despised becoming honored, the widow becoming the mother of a dynasty—may be the most enduring message of this small and perfect book.