This chapter explores twelfth-century readings of the book of Ruth, seemingly a short pastoral story. The limited scale and scope of the book is particularly revealing of the careful ingenuity and engaged earnestness with which clerics and monks approached scripture, a fact that may be obvious but is often obfuscated by the apparent repetitions from exegete to exegete, the deep unfamiliarity to a modern eye of the intellectual tools and methods they used and the sheer textual mass of medieval exegesis. There is still a lot that historians can learn from reading those texts. In the book of Ruth, the fluid identities of the two female protagonists and their eventful lives, alongside the clear figure of a Boaz-Christ that elevated the theological status of the whole book, were scrutinised, assimilated and reinvented by twelfth-century clerics, monks and masters who had their own identities, life trajectories and zeitgeist to imagine and to shape through their words.

This final chapter of Part II reflects on the relationship between kinship and law, both in the Narrative of Transjordanian Tribes and in the biblical corpus more broadly.

This second chapter of Part III looks at the composition of the Rahab account. Instead of understanding Rahab as the eponymous ancestor of an ancient clan (like Caleb and the Calebites), it demonstrates that we would be better served by interpreting her as a paradigmatic Other. Just as she came to be the prototypical proselyte for the rabbis, she figures in the biblical account as an archetypal outsider who successfully achieves membership among the people of Israel. Inasmuch as she is not associated with any one clan or community, this liminal figure from Canaanite society could serve as a safe proxy for outsiders in various times and places.