So Boaz took Ruth, and she was his wife: and when he went in unto her, the LORD gave her conception, and she bare a son.
//Shortly after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon, they began
an effort at ethnic cleansing. You may recall that Ezra demanded all
foreign citizens be kicked out of the city, even if they be "wives and
children."
It was
during this time that the book of Ruth was written, and it purports to
tell a story about the ancestry of David—a rather beautiful story about a
young woman named Ruth, from the land of Moab. In this story, Naomi, a
Jew, had relocated to Moab because of famine in Judah. There, her son
married Ruth, a Moabite. Then he died, as did Naomi's husband and other
son. When the famine ended and Naomi returned to Judah, Ruth accompanied
her.
Back
in Judah, the Moabite Ruth won the admiration of a Jewish man named
Boaz, and they eventually married. Of this union came a son named Obed,
who had a son named Jesse, who had a son named David.
The
moral of the story? The book of Ruth turns out to be a bit of protest
literature. It identifies the Jews' great King David as a half-breed,
precisely the sort of man that, hundreds of years later, the Jews were
purging from Jerusalem.
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