As they imagine that Naomi is selling a field that once belonged to Elimelech, contemporary readers of Ruth miss the economic implications of the deal Boaz wins at the expense of the other next-of-kin. Arguing in favor of the priority of the ketiv at 4:5, this chapter shows that the matter of land shares clarifies the gate scene and reveals why Naomi and Boaz deserve the title of tricksters.

This chapter challenges the common references to the Pentateuch, in particular the so-called “laws” on gleanings (Leviticus 19; 23; Deuteronomy 24), land redemption (Lev 25), Zelophehad’s daughters (Numbers 27; 36), the levirate (Deut 25), and the exclusion of the Moabites (Num 25; Deut 23). On the basis of the priority of the ketiv in Ruth 4:5, the Ruth story made sense in light of marriage customs before, keen as they were to present Jews as Torah-abiding, the Alexandrian translators introduced a qere in Ruth 4:5.

The Book of Ruth has its place in very different canonical positions in the Christian Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible. Following the Septuagint, Ruth is located between Judges and 1 Samuel in the Christian canon. In the Hebrew canon, Ruth can be found among the Ketuvim (Writings) either between Proverbs and Song of Songs or between Song of Songs and Lamentations, depending on the rabbinical tradition this is followed. This chapter argues that there are a sufficient number of structural, semantic and literary connections between Ruth and the concluding chapters of Judges and the opening chapters of Samuel to indicate that Ruth may have been written as a response to those texts, thereby forming the central panel of a literary triptych. This literary evidence increases the likelihood that the Greek canon reflects an earlier version of the Hebrew canon. Early Christian and Jewish sources, especially Jerome and the Bava Batra tractate of the Babylonian Talmud, support the proposition that Ruth originally had its place between Judges and Samuel and was moved to the Ketuvim (Writings) sometime after the third century CE.

The book of Ruth is often considered to be a happy story. It is also celebrated as a happy text for feminist and queer biblical interpretation. However, Ruth is also frequently disappointing, as the book complicates or fails to meet our expectations of a positive female relationship of friendship, solidarity, or love. This chapter argues for the importance of disappointment in reading Ruth. Drawing on work on queer feeling and affect, it charts four forms of disappointment: unhappy objects, cruel optimism, queer failure, and “no fun.” Each of these modalities of disappointment is associated with the work of a specific queer theorist: unhappy objects hail from Sara Ahmed’s queer and feminist critique of happiness; cruel optimism originates with Lauren Berlant; queer failure is most closely associated with Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, and no fun is a framework borrowed from Bo Ruberg’s work on queerness and video games. Separately and together, they offer new ways of understanding disappointment in Ruth, suggesting that unhappy, uncomfortable, and unpleasant feeling can be useful, liberating, or even worldmaking.

Many interpretations of the book of Ruth turn on questions of the ethnicity of Ruth. Implicit is the idea that the book of Ruth needs to be read through the lens of Deut 7:1–6 and 23:4–7, laws that regulate intermarriage and membership of the “assembly of Israel.” However, after these laws from Deuteronomy are rid of the intellectual baggage of the intermarriage crisis in Ezra and Nehemiah and the story of Solomon’s wives in 1 Kings 11, they do not apply to the situation described by the book of Ruth. The book of Ruth is read more clearly without imposing the framework of these laws. Rather, identification of Obed as an Israelite is entirely what should be expected, despite Ruth’s Moabite ethnicity, according to the primordialist assumptions of the book of Ruth (in line with many other texts from the Hebrew Bible).

It is always tempting to imagine that a single author sat down one day with quill, ink, and scroll in hand to compose the wonderful story that has been transmitted to posterity in the form of the Book of Ruth. However, it is far more likely that Ruth began like other biblical narratives as a very short text, possibly based on an oral tradition, that was then expanded and developed and reworked by later generations of scribes. This chapter will examine the textual and contextual traces that point to the existence of a sexier and less pious original version of the story in which Naomi goes down with Ruth to the threshing floor to surprise Boaz after he has fallen into a drunken sleep. Naomi tricks Boaz into sleeping with both women and then marrying them and fathering their sons. This older version of the narrative was significantly rewritten and overwritten by redactors to erase all references to Boaz’s relationship with Naomi and to transform the story into a bucolic idyll about the pious, generous, and monogamous Boaz, the contented widow Naomi happy to live out her days as a surrogate grandmother, and the proverbial woman of excellence and ancestress of David, Ruth.

The book of Ruth is often read as a story that celebrates family, acceptance, and loyal lovingkindness. However, recent interpretations problematize the characterization of this narrative as idyllic, pointing to its troubling themes and the potentially exploitative dynamics between its characters. I argue that interpretations which highlight the charming and positive aspects of this narrative by turning away from its ambiguity and mess work to domesticate the story. Such interpretations train readers of Ruth, and other biblical stories, to frame out uncomfortable tensions of power and difference in the story world. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s observation that learning to notice what we are taught not to notice is “a form of political labor,” I argue that learning to recognize these interpretive tensions can uncover similar tensions at work within diverse contemporary interpretive contexts. Through the uncomfortable work of turning towards what has previously been framed out of interpretations of Ruth, I explore how the narrative might become a conversation partner in noticing and naming entanglements of the idyllic and the exploitative.

The genre of the book of Ruth has been much debated. Variously described as a novel, novella, folktale, or short story, the book is often connected to the Israelite “wisdom” tradition as an example of “narrative wisdom.” Typically, scholars who make this connection suggest that the book was written to affirm and demonstrate some of the ideals of the book of Proverbs. Recently, I turned this idea on its head by arguing that far from affirming these ideals, the book of Ruth can instead be understood as an extended problematization of the limits of “wisdom” as espoused in books such as Proverbs (Quick 2020). Rather than Proverbs, therefore, the book of Ruth might in fact be closer to two of the other so-called canonical texts of the biblical wisdom genre: Qoheleth and Job, which also reflect on and complicate conventional wisdom. In this chapter, I reflect upon these suggestions by further developing the connections between Ruth and the wisdom tradition. By focusing on the thematic and formal characteristics of wisdom literature, I argue that Ruth can be understood as a wisdom text – but one which destabilizes traditional wisdom tenets. And this is inherent to the adoption of prose discourse in the book of Ruth, as a discursive and aesthetic strategy for complicating wisdom conventions.