Ruth, who would not go back

In the middle of the violence of Judges sits a quiet book about a famine, a widow and a field. Naomi loses her husband and both sons in a foreign country and goes home empty, telling the women of Bethlehem to call her Bitter. Her daughter-in-law Ruth — a Moabite, from a people Israel despised — refuses to leave her: where you go I will go, your people shall be my people, and your God my God. She gleans in a field at harvest to keep them both alive, and the owner, Boaz, notices, protects her, and eventually marries her under a law designed to keep widows from destitution. The book ends with a genealogy, which is the whole point: their great-grandson is David. The line of the Messiah runs straight through a foreign widow's loyalty.