Chapter 26

connected in some way with Moab, as the book of Ruth represents him to have been; whereas a later age would hardly have dared to invent a Moabite ancestress for him, had there been no tradition to that effect.

The object of the book has been supposed by some to be to commend the so-called levirate marriage. This is improbable: not so much because the marriage was not strictly levirate, since neither Boaz nor the kinsman was the brother-in-law of Ruth--it would be fair enough to regard this as a legitimate extension of the principle of levirate marriage, whose object was to perpetuate the dead man's name--but rather because this is a comparatively subordinate element in the story.

The true explanation is no doubt to be sought in the fact that Ruth the Moabitess is counted worthy to be an ancestress of David; and, if the book be post-exilic, its religious significance is at once apparent. It was in all probability the dignified answer of a man of prophetic instincts to the rigorous measures of Ezra, which demanded the divorce of all foreign women (Ezra ix. x, cf. Neh. xiii. 23ff.); for it can hardly be doubted that there is a delicate polemic in the repeated designation of Ruth as _the Moabitess_, i. 22, ii. 2, 6, 21, iv. 5, 10--she even calls herself the "stranger," ii. 10. It would be pleasant to think that the writer had himself married one of these foreign women. In any case, he champions their cause not only with generosity but with insight; for he knows that some of them have faith enough to adopt Israel's God as their God, i. 16, and that even a Moabitess may be an Israelite indeed. Ezra's severe legislation was inspired by the worthy desire to preserve Israel's religion from the peril of contagion: the author of Ruth gently teaches that the foreign woman is not an inevitable peril, she may be loyal to Israel and faithful to Israel's God. The writer dares to represent the Moabitess as eating with the Jews, ii. l4--winning by her ability, resource and affection, the regard of all, and counted by God worthy to be the mother of Israel's greatest king. The generous type of religion represented by the book of Ruth is a much needed and very attractive complement to the stern legalism of Ezra.

LAMENTATIONS

The book familiarly known as the Lamentations consists of four elegies[1] (i., ii., iii., iv.) and a prayer (v.). The general theme of the elegies is the sorrow and desolation created by the destruction of Jerusalem[2] in 586 B.C.: the last poem (v.) is a prayer for deliverance from the long continued distress. The elegies are all alphabetic, and like most alphabetic poems (cf. Ps. cxix.) are marked by little continuity of thought. The first poem is a lament over Jerusalem, bereft, by the siege, of her glory and her sanctuary, i. 1-11, though the bitter and comfortless doom which she bewails in i. 12-22, is regarded as the divine penalty for her sin, i. 5, 8. Similarly in ii. 1-10 her sorrow and suffering are admitted to be a divine judgment. Her shame and distress are inconsolable,