Naomi tells Ruth to go home.

She says it twice, with genuine force and the theological argument that Jehovah’s hand has gone out against her, that she has nothing left to offer, that Ruth’s best future lies back in Moab with her own people. Naomi is being accurate. She is a widow without sons, without land, without protection, returning to a town that will struggle to absorb even one destitute woman, let alone two.

And Ruth will not go.

“Where you go I will go, where you lodge I will lodge, your people shall be my people and your God my God.”

That speech appears at weddings and in devotional literature across three thousand years. What it almost never appears in is its actual context: a Moabite widow choosing covenant loyalty to a destitute mother-in-law through the institution of levirate marriage, in which Ruth’s future will be negotiated at a city gate as part of a property transaction in which she has no legal voice. The speech is extraordinary. The institution surrounding it troubles modern readers deeply.