Ruth

Ruth is a Moabite — a foreigner from a people Israel regarded with suspicion — who becomes one of the most beloved figures in the Hebrew Scriptures and one of only four women named in Matthew's genealogy of Jesus. Widowed young and childless in Moab, she refuses to leave her widowed Israelite mother-in-law Naomi, binding herself to Naomi's people and Naomi's God in words the tradition has never forgotten: 'Whither thou goest, I will go… thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God' (Ruth 1:16).

Her loyalty leads her to Bethlehem, to the fields of Boaz, and at last to marriage and to motherhood. The book that bears her name is, on its surface, a quiet domestic story of two widows and a harvest; beneath it runs a theology of how the God of Israel gathers in the outsider and weaves the stranger into the messianic line. Ruth's son Obed is the grandfather of David. That a Moabite stands among the named ancestors of the Christ is, for the New Testament, no embarrassment but a sign: the gospel that will go to all nations is foreshadowed in the genealogy of the one who brings it.