The book is of the utmost value as showing us the state of morals and manners in that far-off time, and letting us see with what crude material the great ideas committed to Israel--the unity and spirituality and righteousness of God--were compelled to work themselves out. The Book of Ruth, which was formerly, in the Jewish collections, regarded as a part of the Book of Judges, is a beautiful pastoral idyl of the same period. Its scene is laid in Judea, and it serves to show us that in the midst of all those turbulent ages there were quiet homes and gentle lives. No sweeter story can be found in any literature; maternal tenderness, filial affection, genuine chivalry, find in the book their typical representatives. The first sentence of the book gives us the approximate date of the incidents recorded: it was "in the days when the judges judged." The concluding verses give us the genealogy of King David, showing that Ruth was his great-grandmother; it must, therefore, have been written as late as the reign of David,--probably much later; for it describes, as if they belonged to a remote antiquity, certain usages of the Jews which must needs have shaped themselves after the occupation of Canaan. Yet it could scarcely have been written so late as the Captivity, for the marriage of Ruth, who is a Moabitess, to Boaz, is mentioned as if it were a matter of course, with no hint of censure. In the latter days of Israel such an alliance of a Jew with a foreigner would have been regarded as highly reprehensible. Indeed the Deuteronomic law most stringently forbids all social relations with that particular tribe to which Ruth belonged. "An Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter into the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generation shall none belonging to them enter into the assembly of the Lord for ever.... Thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy days for ever." (Deut. xxiii. 3, 6.) But Ruth, the Moabitess, becomes the wife of one of the chief men of Bethlehem, with the applause of all the Bethlehemites, and the highest approval of the author of this narrative; nay, she becomes, in the fourth generation, the ancestress of the greatest of all the kings of Israel. This certainly shows that the people of Bethlehem did not know of the Deuteronomic law, for they were a God-fearing and a law-abiding people; and it also makes it probable that the incident occurred, and that the book which describes the incident was written, before this part of the Deuteronomic code was in existence. It is therefore valuable, not only as throwing light on the life of the people at that early period, but also as illustrating the growth of the pentateuchal literature.