stuff indeed, to be called the Word of God! It is, however, one of the best books of the Bible, for it is free from murder and rapine” (I take this quotation from a modern publication of this 1794 work. See Thomas Paine, Age of Reason [Secaucus, N.J.: 1991], 121). The “murder and rapine,” so rampant throughout Judges, is, as Paine notes, absent in Ruth. It is, of course, only in the Septuagint and Christian canon that Ruth comes between Judges and Samuel. In contrast, the Jewish canon places Ruth