Rut 1:4

4. They took them wives “A kind of phrase,” says Kitto, “which usually occurs in a bad sense, as done without the concurrence of their parents, or not left so entirely to them as custom required.”

Of the women of Moab The law condemned intermarriages with the Canaanitish tribes, but, inasmuch as Israel and Moab were descended from kindred ancestors, Abraham and Lot, not with the daughters of the Moabites, (Deuteronomy 7:3;) it commanded, however, that no Moabite, even to the tenth generation, should enter the congregation of the Lord. Deuteronomy 23:3. In the days of Ezra and Nehemiah the law was so construed as to prohibit all intermarriage with foreigners. Exodus 9:0, and Nehemiah 13:0.

But it was a distinguishing feature of the age of the Judges that every man did that which was right in his own eyes, (Judges 17:6;) the law was not enforced, and men forgot the commandments of the Lord and indulged in such looseness as even to intermarry with the idolatrous Canaanites. See Judges 3:5-6.

In this marriage of Ruth, the Moabitess, and Mahlon, the Beth-lehemite, we may now see the overruling hand of Providence, by which a Gentile woman is adopted into the family from which Christ had his human lineage, thus typifying the reception of the Gentiles into the kingdom of the Messiah, and the elevation, by the Gospel, of different nations above narrow sectional prejudices and partition-walls into feelings of a common brotherhood. “The story of Ruth has shed a peaceful light over what else would be the accursed race of Moab. We strain our gaze to know something of the long line of the purple hills of Moab, which form the background at once of the history and of the geography of Palestine. It is a satisfaction to feel that there is one tender association which unites them with the familiar history and scenery of Judea that from their recesses, across the deep gulf which separates the two regions, came the Gentile ancestress of David and the Messiah.” Stanley.