So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife; and he went in to her, and Yahweh enabled her to conceive, and she bore a son.
World English Bible
This verse is examined in more than one Scripture Analysis section. Each lens is shown on its own terms, in the section's own words; GEBible reaches no verdict of its own.
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So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife; and he went in to her, and Yahweh enabled her to conceive, and she bore a son.
World English Bible
Questions where the Bible appears to say two different things, with the passages on each side set together.
Deuteronomy 23:3 and Nehemiah 13:1 explicitly forbid Moabites from ever entering the assembly of YHWH, but the book of Ruth makes a Moabite woman the great-grandmother of King David — placing her, and her descendants, squarely inside the congregation.
Critical scholarship: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction.
Historical detail
The proposed answers and sources for each reading are on the question page.
Deuteronomy 23:3 bars Moabites from the assembly of Yahweh to the tenth generation, and Ezra 9-10 commands the forced divorce of foreign wives including Moabites. The book of Ruth celebrates the marriage of Boaz to the Moabite Ruth as the source of the Davidic line.
Critical scholarship: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction.
Law & ethics
The proposed answers and sources for each reading are on the question page.
Each section sets the viewpoints side by side; you weigh the evidence. Here, "critical scholarship" means academic study, not a value judgment. How this is built →
Within each section, grouped by shared field or question type — not a cross-section comparison.
This citation refers to this GEBible page — the verse and the analysis gathered here. To cite the underlying scholarship, cite those sources directly.
"Ruth 4:13 — Scripture Analysis" GEBible, https://gebible.app/analysis/verse/ruth/4/13?version=WEB (retrieved 27 August 2026).