Judges ends with every man doing what is right in his own eyes. No king. No covenant mediator. No stable fidelity.

Ruth opens inside that same world, in the same period, and shows what one woman’s hesed looks like when everything around her has collapsed.

She is a Moabite widow on a road in Moab, and she chooses to follow her Israelite mother-in-law back to a land and a God she was not born into.

Ruth’s story operates through both. She steps into the suzerain-vassal covenant community through hesed — the conditional treaty's social fabric, neighbor caring for neighbor. And God uses her act of loyalty to advance his unconditional covenant of grant to Abraham, the promise that all families of the earth will be blessed through his seed, now moving forward through a Moabite widow toward the Davidic line.