Ruth

Ruth is four chapters long and it is the only book in the Bible named after a foreign woman. It opens in the period of the judges, which the book of Judges describes as a time when everyone did what was right in their own eyes. Against that background, Ruth is a story about ordinary people behaving well when nobody is making them.

A famine drives an Israelite family into Moab. The father dies there. The two sons marry Moabite women and then they die too, and three widows are left with nothing. Naomi decides to go home to Bethlehem and tells her daughters-in-law to stay with their own people. One of them does. The other, Ruth, refuses, and says the sentence the book is remembered for: where you go I will go, and your people will be my people.

What follows is quieter than most Bible stories. There is no battle and no miracle. There is a field, a harvest, a landowner named Boaz who notices, and a series of small decisions that add up to a rescue. Two ancient laws sit underneath the whole thing. Israelite farmers were told to leave the edges of a field unharvested so the poor could gather food there, and a relative was expected to step in when a family was about to lose its land and its name. Ruth and Boaz are both doing more than the law required of them, and the book is quietly keeping score.

The book does not name its author. It ends with a short family tree, and the last name on it is David, which is the point the writer has been walking toward the whole time. A Moabite widow who gleaned in somebody else's field turns out to be the king's great-grandmother, and in Matthew's gospel she is named again in the family line of Jesus.

It is a good book to read with children. The chapters are short, the story is easy to follow, and the kindness in it is the kind children can actually copy.