Our deeply secular era sees blessings as merely polite speech. Not so the book of Ruth. It presumes the existence of a Mind, a divine presence, ordering our lives for good, for blessing. The first and last words of the book are blessings. Ten different times different people, or groups of people, bless one another, which suggest that the author wants to tell us something about blessings.6 In the West we are more familiar with negative blessings, or curses, than we are with the idea of blessing.