Foremother Foremother Ruth the Moabite

Righteous Ruth the Moabite, great-grandmother of King David and an ancestress of Christ according to the flesh (Matthew 1:5), is the heroine of the biblical Book of Ruth. A Moabite by birth, she married Mahlon, son of the Israelite Elimelech, whose family had settled in Moab during a famine in Bethlehem.

After the deaths of her husband, father-in-law, and brother-in-law, Ruth refused to abandon her mother-in-law Naomi, declaring the famous words: "Your people shall be my people, and your God my God" (Ruth 1:16). Returning with Naomi to Bethlehem, Ruth gleaned grain in the field of Boaz, a wealthy kinsman of Elimelech, who, moved by her faithfulness, married her under the law of levirate kinship.

Their son Obed became the father of Jesse and grandfather of King David, making the Gentile Ruth an ancestress of the Savior, as noted by the Evangelist Matthew. She lived approximately in the 12th-11th century BC, during the era of the Judges. Ruth has no individual fixed feast; she is commemorated collectively on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers, the Sunday before the Nativity of Christ.