Anonymous · 600 BCE · road

The Book of Ruth, four chapters. A family leaves Bethlehem for Moab because of famine, and ten years later the widow comes back with nothing except a foreign daughter-in-law who refuses to be sent home. It is thirty miles each way, and it is one of the few books in the Bible in which nobody is killed.

1. 1
   Moab

   Elimelech takes his wife and two sons east across the Dead Sea to find food, and dies there - and the sons marry Moabite women and then die too, leaving three widows in a country not their own.

2. 2
   The road to Bethlehem

   Naomi hears the famine has broken and starts back, telling both daughters-in-law to return to their mothers - and Ruth will not, in the speech that has been read at weddings ever since: where you go I will go.

3. 3
   Bethlehem

   They arrive at the barley harvest with nothing, and Ruth goes gleaning in a field that turns out to belong to a relative - and the book ends with a genealogy, because her great-grandson is David.