Ruth the Moabite

Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. A foreign widow's covenant vow to her mother-in-law is memorized as wedding liturgy three thousand years later.

The Book of Ruth is one of only two books in the Hebrew Bible named for a woman. Ruth is a widowed Moabite — a foreigner whose people are generally treated with hostility elsewhere in scripture. She binds herself to Naomi, gleans in Boaz's fields, and by the end of the book has been named in Matthew 1 as an ancestor of King David and of Jesus. The first-person oath in Ruth 1:16–17 is the only line of scripture that later became standard wedding vocabulary across Jewish and Christian liturgy. The book's heroism is fully her own — Boaz acts only after she corners him at the threshing floor.