I. Name and Contents

The book takes its name from the person around whose fortunes it centers.

Ruth was a Moabitess who became the wife of Mahlon, son of Elimelech and Naomi, who were driven by a famine in Bethlehem to dwell for a season in the land of Moab. Naomi, after the death of her husband and two sons, resolves to return to her old home and kindred and Ruth accompanies her. There she goes to glean in the field of Boaz and finally marries him and becomes the ancestor of David. The genealogy of David, given in the end of the book, connects the history found in Samuel with David's ancestors in the tribe of Judah. Two points of interest thus center in it, the singularly picturesque narrative of the social life of the period and the light it throws on the ancestry of David, with its mingling of Jewish and Moabitish blood.

II. Its Position

In the Hebrew Bible it is the second of the five Megilloth and in later times was read annually at the Feast of Pentecost. In the Spanish manuscripts it is placed first among these rolls. In the Talmud it is spoken of as being the first book in the Kethubim or Hagiographa. In the Septuagint and in our English Bible it is placed between Judges and Samuel because of its historical relations and to give proper introduction to the genealogy of David. There is no good reason to think it was ever considered a part of Judges, from which it is widely separated in the Hebrew Bible.

III. Its Date

The date of the facts recorded is probably about sixty years before the birth of David.

There is nothing to fix positively the date of the composition of the book. The birth of David fixes a point back of which we need not go, but how long after David's time we must go will depend on certain internal conditions which are not very decisive.

Some would allow a long time for the mellowing tone which pervades the book. The contrast between the rough, lawless times recounted in the book of Judges and the rural security and peacefulness of this book is indeed very great, but the two might easily coexist as we can see from the history of any country. During the most harrowing times of our own Revolutionary and Civil wars there were not wanting beautiful visions of domestic and rural tranquillity.

From the fact that it traces the genealogy of David but does not mention Solomon some have inferred that it was written in the lifetime of David. The language shows no signs of decay such as we find after the exile, or even after Solomon's time. Driver says it stands on a level with the best parts of Samuel. The few words which have been called Aramaic may easily have been current in the colloquial language of the people at any period of their history. There does not seem any strong reason for assigning the composition of the book to a date much later than that of David. The hostility of the Jews to marriage with foreigners became more intense from that time, 1 Kings 11:1, 2, until it soon became a cause of reproach. The intense bitterness of this feeling in Ezra's time would seem effectually to show that it could not have originated in his day.

The passage in 47, explaining the casting off of the shoe, is the strongest argument for a late date, but this does not call for an exilic or post-exilic date, as Ewald and Wellhausen think, for in the primitive conditions then existing one or two centuries often bring about great changes of social customs.

IV. Its Purpose

Various reasons have been assigned for the existence of the book: to recommend the duty of Levirate marriage, Deut. 25:5; to reprove the intolerance of the Jews toward foreign marriages; to soften the dark outlines of the book of Judges; and to record the genealogy of David. The latter seems the stronger reason. Goethe speaks of it as "The loveliest little epic and idyllic whole which has come down to us."

LITERATURE

Commentaries: Keil and Delitzsch and Lange. Ryle, Canon of the Old Testament, pp. 115 and 132; Stanley, Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church, I. 336. Introductions of Bleek, Driver, Keil. Article "Ruth," in Bible Dictionaries of Smith and Hastings and in Encyclopedia Britannica.