Where did Ruth come from?

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Accepted Answer

Ruth was a Moabite, from the country of Moab: the high tableland east of the Dead Sea in today's Jordan, between the gorge of the Arnon and the brook Zered, with the plain to the north, up to Heshbon, held by Moab in some periods. The map point for Moab stands at Kerak, the old Kir-hareseth, about 75 km south-east of Bethlehem in a straight line; on foot the way went round the north end of the Dead Sea, by Jericho and the fords of the Jordan, and up onto the plateau. The book never names Ruth's town, only “the country of Moab”, which the Russian Synodal translation renders as the fields of Moab. In a famine “a certain man of Beth-lehem-judah went to sojourn in the country of Moab”, with his wife Naomi and two sons, who “took them wives of the women of Moab; the name of the one was Orpah, and the name of the other Ruth”. When all three men had died, Ruth would not go home: “whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God”. She came to Bethlehem as “Ruth the Moabitess”, gleaned in the field of Boaz and married him, and her son Obed “is the father of Jesse, the father of David”. Later David, hunted by Saul, brought his father and mother to the king of Moab, perhaps trusting this kinship; Matthew names Ruth among the four women in the genealogy of Jesus. Her origin was a question in itself, for the law said: “An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD”. The rabbis answered that the ban meant Moabite men, not women, and made Ruth a descendant of Eglon, king of Moab. When the book was written is debated: many date it to the monarchy, for its interest in David's line, while others read it as a gentle answer, after the exile, to Ezra and Nehemiah's dismissal of foreign wives. The story is set “in the days when the judges ruled”, whose dates are themselves disputed; the map uses 1100 BC as a conventional point.