In his book Reviving the Golden Rule: How the Ancient Ethic of Neighbor Love Can Heal the World, Andrew DeCort offers a fresh guide into the history of “love your neighbor” and how this movement can overcome othering today.
Where did “love your neighbor as yourself” come from? How has it changed our world, and why does it matter now? In this expansive book, Andrew DeCort unpacks the unfolding of what he calls “the neighbor love movement” across thousands of years. With powerful personal stories and inspiring examples drawn from history, DeCort invites us to advance this ancient movement today in the face of othering, dehumanization, and violence.
Taken from Reviving the Golden Rule by Andrew DeCort. Copyright (c) 2025 by Andrew David DeCort. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com
Ruth: The Divine Love That Overcomes Othering
The book of Ruth is one of the smallest in the Bible. But it narrates one of the Bible’s most powerful stories of overcoming othering and loving the enemy. It’s the story of Ruth and Boaz and their countercultural relationship.
Earlier in the Bible, we learn that the Moabites were othered as Israel’s hated enemies. Moses commanded Israel never to allow Moabites to enter the community or even to show them kindness (Deut 23:3-6). Moabites were seen as descending from a dirty, incestuous ancestry. They were also resented for betraying Israel when it was journeying through the desert after escaping slavery in Egypt (Gen 19:36-38; Num 24).
This othering became so severe that King David brutally massacred and enslaved the Moabites (2 Sam 8:2). After the exile, the reformers Ezra and Nehemiah then reinforced Moses’ law against the Moabites: they had all of them rounded up, separated from their Jewish families, and systematically excluded them (Ezra 10; Neh 13). Twenty passages in the Hebrew Bible have nasty, othering things to say about Moabites.
This is the crucial background for understanding the radical ethics of the book of Ruth, because Ruth herself was a hated other: a Moabite.
In this seemingly innocent story, an Israelite woman named Naomi and her husband migrate to neighboring Moab in search of food during a famine in Israel. Soon enough, Naomi’s husband dies. While still in Moab, her two sons marry Moabite wives, but the sons also die. It is likely that Israelite observers would have seen Naomi as cursed by God. After all, she voluntarily defied Moses’ command and mixed with the despised Moabites. Her family is dead, and her life is falling apart.
After the famine ends, the bereaved Naomi decides to move back to Israel, and her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth insists on coming with her. Strikingly, Ruth is called a “Moabite” seven times in this story (Ruth 1:4, 22; 2:2, 6, 21; 4:5, 10). In the Bible, seven is the number of fullness, like the seven days of creation in Genesis 1. The author wants us to see Ruth as the total Moabite—as Moabite as it gets. Nevertheless, Naomi daringly welcomes Ruth to come home with her.
This is where the story becomes truly scandalous and subversive. Back in Israel, Naomi sends Ruth to work as a daily laborer in the field of a respected Israelite named Boaz. He is presented as a person of covenant love or hesed (Ruth 2:13, 20; 3:10; 4:13; see Ruth 4:15). This is extremely important because God names Godself as “abounding in hesed” when God reveals God’s core character to Moses in perhaps the most significant divine revelation recorded in the Hebrew Bible (Ex 34:6). In fact, almost fifty verses in Hebrew Scripture name hesed as God’s essential attribute, which is alluded to in the first chapter of Ruth (Ruth 1:8).
So Boaz is a man of God, a human who embodies God’s own loving character. How, then, will he respond to Ruth, the sevenfold Moabite? Will he exclude her as Moses commanded in the law and Ezra demanded in his “purified” community? Or will he do something different?
Against all expectations, Boaz proactively welcomes Ruth the Moabite to work in his field. In fact, he shows her special kindness. As if that weren’t already too much, Boaz ends up fully embracing Ruth the Moabite and marries her. For Boaz, Ruth is “a woman of noble character” (Ruth 3:11), and her character matters to him far more than her othered identity.
Provocatively, then, Boaz is presented as the embodiment of God’s covenant love precisely in his decision to break the Mosaic law and love an othered enemy as his own wife. In this story, love transcends law. Or, better said, Boaz’s love for the other restretches the law back to its universal scope at the heart of creation and Abraham’s calling to bless all people. Thus, the lawbreaker who should seemingly be condemned by God and expelled from the community becomes the archetype of God’s own essential character and a crucial link in the community’s ancient story. At the end of the book, we learn that Boaz and Ruth become the great-grandparents of King David (Ruth 4:22).
Even more shockingly, Ruth, the sevenfold Moabite, is listed as one of the great-grandmothers of Jesus in the first chapter of the New Testament (Mt 1:5). Boaz’s practice of transcending biblical law with love for the enemy gives birth to the Messiah and participates in the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. The author thereby gives us an important clue into how we should set our expectations for who Jesus will become and how he will see others. The heteronautic, other-embracing Messiah will follow his great-greatgrandparents’ path and take it further than many imagined possible. Unsurprisingly, then, Christian interpreters have seen Boaz as a prototype of Jesus.
The book of Ruth is small but radical. It serves as a profound precedent for human character and divine love overcoming human othering and entrenched exclusion. In fact, Ruth gives an example of love abolishing othering even when that othering was justified by Scripture itself. Boaz’s love for Ruth breaks out of the hardened pattern of othering neighbors into enemies and instead embraces them as family.
Together, Ruth and Boaz mark a crucial moment in the neighbor-love movement and offer an enduring, inspiring model of how to love still today.
Andrew DeCort (PhD, University of Chicago) is the author of Reviving the Golden Rule: How the Ancient Ethic of Neighbor Love Can Heal the World (IVP Academic, 2025) and Blessed Are the Others: Jesus’ Way in a Violent World (BitterSweet Collective, 2024). He co-founded the Neighbor-Love Movement in Ethiopia, co-leads Prophetic: The Public Theology Fellowship, and writes the newsletter Stop & Think.
