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On the surface, the book of Ruth tells the tale of an unlikely marriage between a destitute Moabite widow and an upstanding citizen of a Judean village. The deeper import of the story, however, has to do with the internal boundaries that define the people of God. Is Israel a closed community, held together exclusively by bonds of kinship, or a nation that welcomes faithful outsiders into its...

A complex of relationships, memories of conflict and ethnic stereotypes thus infuses the story of Ruth, suggesting that Moabites functioned as near others in Israel’s world and thus as a perceived threat to national identity. Deuteronomy codifies these sentiments by singling out Moabites and Ammonites as peoples who are never to be admitted into the Israelite assembly (Deut. 23:3–6[4–7]). The reasons given for this radical exclusion are, first, that they did not greet Israel with food and water when
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