1. Megillot
Festival Scrolls

2. Five Books
Ruth
Song of Songs
Ecclesiastes
Lamentations
Esther

3. Used at the Five Principle Jewish Festivals
Ruth Pentecost, the harvest festival
Song of Songs Passover, commemoration of end of slavery in Egypt
Ecclesiastes Feast of the Tabernacles (or Booths), autumn feast of thanksgiving
Lamentations Fast of the Ninth of Av, (July/Aug) mourning the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Babylonians in 587 BCE and by the Romans in 70 CE
Esther Purim (Festival of Lots, Feb/Mar), celebration of the Jewish deliverance from Persian attack

4. Ruth Placement in the Scriptures
In the Christian Bible, Ruth is placed between Judges and 1 Samuel, probably because the story is set in the time of Judges
In Jewish Scripture, the Book of Ruth is placed first of the five festival scrolls, highlighting the importance of Ruth

5. Who is she? A Moabite woman
Daughter-in-law to Naomi, an Israelite widow
Ruth goes with Naomi to Bethlehem, leaving her own Moabite family behind

6. Boaz
Offers help to Ruth and to Naomi, unusual because of Deuteronomy’s directive against Ammonites and Moabites “because they did not come to meet you with bread and water when you were on your way out of Egypt ” Deut 23:3-6
Baoz takes no issue with intermarriage
Fulfilled levirate
The fruit of the union of Ruth and Boaz is Obed, the grandfather of King David

7. Concept of levirate, “redeemer”
“If brothers live together and one of them dies childless, the dead man’s wife must not marry a stranger outside the family. Her husband’s brother must come to her, and exercising his levirate, make her his wife, and the first son she bears shall assume the dead brother’s name ”
Deut. 25:5

8. Intermarriage
Post-exilic writers like Ezra and Nehemiah condemn those who take foreign wives.
They believed the women would continue to worship their own gods, thereby insulting Yahweh

9. The books authors Choose symbolic names for characters
Bethlehem means “house of bread” and the story begins in famine and ends at harvest
Artfully rendered story

10. Two dates
Some scholars see this as a post-exile composition that is in direct protest against Ezra and Nehemiah’s position on foreign wives
Other scholars speculate that the story was an oral tradition, pre-exile, long before intermarriage was a problem.
This group compares Hannah’s conception of Samuel in 1 Samuel to Ruth’s conception of Obed. The similarities caused the compilers of the Christian Bible to place Ruth right before 1 Samuel

11. Song of Songs
Song of Songs, a part of the Passover, commemoration of end of slavery in Egypt
An allegory of Yahweh’s love for Israel
It appears a back and forth dialogue, perhaps sung by a man and woman at weddings
At Passover, the covenant people remember how closely the Angel of Death was, and they rejoice at the intense love shown them by Yahweh

12. Most sensual of all Biblical texts
Full of emotion, the poet pours forth torrents of images that compare the human body to fruits, flowers, and animals
Nature provides metaphors
Human love is paradoxical: desired by all, it cannot be commanded

13. Lamentations
Lamentations Fast of the Ninth of Av, (July/Aug) mourning the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Babylonians in 587 BCE and by the Romans in 70 CE

14. Five poems that express the people’s collective grief for the loss of Jerusalem
These express private anguish of individuals
Unknown authorship

15. acrostics
A poem of 22 verses, one for each of the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet in which the first word of each verse begins with a different letter of the alphabet in sequential order.
The fifth poem of the five also has 22 verses, but they are not arranged alphabetically