Ruth 4:13: The Ancestry of King David

//Shortly after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon, they began an effort at ethnic cleansing. You may recall that Ezra demanded all foreign citizens be kicked out of the city, even if they be “wives and children.”

It was during this time that the book of Ruth was written, and it purports to tell a story about the ancestry of David—a rather beautiful story about a young woman named Ruth, from the land of Moab. In this story, Naomi, a Jew, had relocated to Moab because of famine in Judah. There, her son married Ruth, a Moabite. Then he died, as did Naomi’s husband and other son. When the famine ended and Naomi returned to Judah, Ruth accompanied her. 

Back in Judah, the Moabite Ruth won the admiration of a Jewish man named Boaz, and they eventually married. Of this union came a son named Obed, who had a son named Jesse, who had a son named David.

The moral of the story? The book of Ruth turns out to be a bit of protest literature. It identifies the Jews’ great King David as a half-breed, precisely the sort of man that, hundreds of years later, the Jews were purging from Jerusalem.