RUTH (Book of)<\/p>\n
1. Contents.The book is really the narrative of a family story, told in a charmingly idyllic way. The fact of most far-reaching interest which it contains is that the Moabitess Ruth, i.e. one who is non-Israelite, is represented as the ancestress of the house of David; this is very important, as testifying to a spirit which is very different from ordinary Jewish exclusiveness, and as far as the OT is concerned can be paralleled only by the Book of Jonah. A point of subsidiary but yet considerable interest in the book is its archology; the notices concerning the laws of the marriage of next-of-kin (Rth 2:20, Rth 4:1 ff.), and of the method of transferring property (Rth 4:7-8), and of the custom of the formal ratification of a compact (Rth 4:11-12), are all evidently echoes of usages which belonged to a time long anterior to the date at which the book was written, though in part still in vogue.<\/p>\n
2. Date.The language of the book has an Aramaicizing tendency; it implicitly acknowledges itself to have been written long after the time of the events it professes to describe (Rth 1:1, Rth 4:7); in the Hebrew Canon it is placed among the Hagiographa; these considerations lead to the conclusion that the book must be of late date. That it is post-exilic cannot admit of doubt; but to assign to it a date more definite than this would be precarious. This much, at least, may be said: the third portion of the Hebrew Canon was completed, at the earliest, after the close of the 3rd cent. b.c. Now it is not likely that a book which purported to contain a fuller genealogy of David than that of 1Samuel would have been long in existence without being admitted into the Canon.<\/p>\n
W. O. E. Oesterley.<\/p>\n
Ruth (Book of) RUTH (Book of) 1. Contents.The book is really the narrative of a family story, told in a charmingly idyllic way. The fact of most far-reaching interest which it contains is that the Moabitess Ruth, i.e. one who is non-Israelite, is represented as the ancestress of the house of David; this is very … Continue reading “Ruth (Book of)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-encyclopedic-dictionary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80973\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}