In the Library
The Book of Ruth
Anonymous, 450 BCE
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by King James Version (1611)
- Original
- Original he
- Chapters
- Chapters 4
- Length
- Length 3k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Book of Job
Anonymous
The Book of Job does the same thing, but trades Ruth's quiet loyalty for open protest, testing faith through suffering rather than steadfast love.
£1.99
My Ántonia
Willa Cather
Cather's Ántonia is a foreigner on the Nebraska plains who works the fields and stays, making a home in a land that was never hers by birth, as Ruth does in Bethlehem.
£1.99
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy
Far from the Madding Crowd does the same thing, but widens Ruth's harvest field into a full pastoral romance, where a woman's survival still hinges on a good man's steadiness.
£1.99
About the book
On the road out of Moab, Naomi tells her two widowed daughters-in-law to turn back, go home to their mothers' houses, and marry again. Orpah kisses her and goes. Ruth holds on, and gives the answer that has outlasted every empire since: whither thou goest, I will go, and thy people shall be my people. She is a Moabite, from a people Israel was taught to shun, and the whole book is built to make you love her. The book is made of hunger and barley: the small mercy in the law that let the poor gather what the reapers dropped, and a night on the threshing floor when a woman with nothing asks a man to be kind. Four short chapters, no miracles and no armies, only the daily work of the harvest and a loyalty nobody owed anybody, and then the last verses open outward and show that the line of David runs back through this foreign woman who would not let go.