The Gleaner: Ruth of Moab

By Matthew I. Hughes

Two widows walk home along a lawless road.

In the days when the judges ruled, one of the two will not leave the other. What waits at the end of that road is a barley field and a graying kinsman with a room in his house he no longer enters. Then comes a midnight on a threshing floor that will lift a dead man's name back into the light.
A foreigner, a widow, and childless, Ruth of Moab has lost the two shelters a woman has in that world and never had the third, which is belonging. On the Moab road she binds her life to her broken mother-in-law: the purest and most reckless vow in scripture. Then, by chance, she walks into the field of the one man in Bethlehem who kept the old law of kindness in his heart.
Told as the great harvest romance it always was, this is the story behind the Book of Ruth. Naomi comes home bitter and renames herself for grief. A quiet, watchful love kindles between a foreign gleaner and the man who protects her before he dares to woo her. There is the audacious night on the threshing floor. And there is the duel at the town gate, fought by law instead of swords, won by the kinsman who loses and lost by the one who wins his point.

Book 1 of The Called and the Kept, where the king's line begins. She came up the road with nothing, and the town called her stranger. This is the story of how a foreigner's loyalty on a hard road became the ancestry of a shepherd, a king, and a covering of wings for the world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HH7G1G55
• ISBN13: 9798951321640
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: M. Hughes Books
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"