Ruth was a Moabite woman whose life is recounted in the Old Testament book that bears her name. Having married into an Israelite family that had settled in Moab during a famine, she was widowed, and afterward chose to leave her own people and accompany her mother-in-law Naomi back to Bethlehem, adopting the God and people of Israel as her own. The Orthodox Church numbers her among the righteous foremothers of Christ, since through her son she stands in the ancestral line of King David and, ultimately, of the Saviour.
According to the Book of Ruth, she had married Mahlon, a son of Elimelech and Naomi of Bethlehem, who had come to Moab to escape a famine in the land of Judah. After the deaths of her husband and her father-in-law, and when Naomi resolved to return home, Ruth refused to part from her, declaring that Naomi's people would be her people and Naomi's God her God. Arriving in Bethlehem at the time of the barley harvest, she supported herself and Naomi by gleaning in the fields, coming by providence to the land of Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi's late husband.
Boaz, fulfilling the duty of a near kinsman, took Ruth as his wife and so continued the family line of Elimelech. Their son was Obed, who became the father of Jesse and the grandfather of King David, making Ruth the great-grandmother of David. In Christian tradition she is one of the women named in the genealogy of Jesus Christ recorded in the Gospel of Matthew.
