willing to follow through with the marriage proposed by Ruth.36 The reason? “All of my fellow townsmen know that you are a woman of noble character.” Two points must be offered here. First, those who are in-the-know are literally, those in “the gate-house of all my people.” This is an awkward and rare syntactical arrangement37 that may refer generally to all who pass through the gate (i.e., everyone in town), or it may more specifically refer to those who meet in the gate-house (i.e., the town council).