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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...

the conviction that faithful foreigners can become valued members of the covenant community. The central section of the book’s last act endorses marriage to outsiders (exogamy) as an even better scenario (4:7–17). Here too the message is conveyed by direct speech, this time through Boaz and the people of Bethlehem. Boaz presents marriage to a Moabite as a means of restoring a broken patriarchal line (v. 10), the village elders equate the outsider with Israel’s ancestral mothers (vv. 11–12) and the
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