ContradictionsReading order 201Bible context 4 min read
Is it OK to marry a Moabite?
Ruth's marriage receives divine blessing and produces David's ancestry, while Ezra and Nehemiah condemn marriages that include Moabite women. Ruth's nationality is assumed by the comparison but not stated in the supplied Ruth excerpt.
- Textual conflict
- Interpretive tension
- The passages pull in different directions, but the conflict depends on how their wording, scope, or narrative context is read.
- Importance
- Major
- A major event or claim with wider implications.
Ruth's celebrated marriage conflicts with condemnation of Moabite marriages, though her nationality and identical governing conditions are not supplied in that excerpt.
An editorial assessment of the quoted passages. Importance describes the stakes; it does not increase certainty. Reading order weighs both.
God grants a child to Boaz and Ruth's celebrated marriage
So Boaz took Ruth, and she was his wife: and when he went in unto her, the Lord gave her conception, and she bare a son. And the women said unto Naomi, Blessed be the Lord, which hath not left thee this day without a kinsman, that his name may be famous in Israel. And he shall be unto thee a restorer of thy life, and a nourisher of thine old age: for thy daughter in law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons, hath born him. And Naomi took the child, and laid it in her bosom, and became nurse unto it. And the women her neighbours gave it a name, saying, There is a son born to Naomi; and they called his name Obed: he is the father of Jesse, the father of David.
Ruth 4:13-17
Translation / edition: King James Version (KJV)
Read the full chapter:Ruth 4
Marriages to Moabite and other foreign women are condemned
Now when these things were done, the princes came to me, saying, The people of Israel, and the priests, and the Levites, have not separated themselves from the people of the lands, doing according to their abominations, even of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites,