Ruth רוּת

Rut — the Book of Ruth — is the Bible's book of lovingkindness. A famine, three funerals, and a Moabite widow who refuses to turn back: from this smallest of beginnings, in four short chapters, the line of King David is born. The book opens in the lawless days when the judges judged and closes in a genealogy that ends with David himself — as if to say that the answer to the age of every man doing what is right in his own eyes was not a battle but a kindness. Chesed is the book's quiet engine: Ruth's devotion to Naomi ('Where you go, I will go; your people shall be my people, and your God my God'), Boaz's protection of the foreign gleaner in his field, and the redemption at the gate by which a stranger from Moab is gathered under the wings of Hashem. The sages taught that this scroll was written to teach 'how great is the reward of those who do deeds of kindness.' Set at the barley and wheat harvests, Ruth is read in the synagogue on Shavuot, the festival of the giving of the Torah — the day, tradition holds, on which David was born and on which he died; Ruth's 'your God my God' is the Torah's own portrait of accepting the covenant.

This edition presents each verse word by word: the Hebrew, its transliteration, its root, its gematria, and a form-true English gloss, beneath a complete modern English translation adapted from the public-domain Jewish Publication Society version of 1917, with the Divine Name rendered "Hashem." Five classical commentators accompany the text — Rashi, Ibn Ezra, the Alshich (Einei Moshe), the Malbim, and Ralbag — so that the plain sense, the grammar, and the kindness at the heart of the story can be studied on a single page. May the Redeemer of Israel, who did not leave Naomi without a redeemer, renew our days as in the harvests of Beth-lehem.