Excerpt from The Expositor, Vol. 2 But why should he stay to explain the custom if it had not fallen into disuse, - if it had not been so long disused that his readers had clean forgotten it Yet old legal customs are very tenacious. They do not soon, or suddenly, become obsolete even with us, and, much less, in the unchanging East. And, there fore, we may infer that the story of Ruth was written, not only after her death, but long after it. Verses 17, 21, and 22 of the same Chapter point to the same conclusion. For here we are told that Ruth had a son named Obed, Obed a son named Jesse, and Jesse a son named David. But how should David's name have been written before he was born? The Story - unless at least we have recourse to the clumsy expedient of supposing additions made to the original Scripture by a later hand - must have been composed, at the very earliest, after that great Prince was born: z'. E., it must have been written at least four generations say, from a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty years - after the events it records. To this extent, then, the Book dates itself. That it could not have been written before the time of David may be inferred from the fact that David's name is twice mentioned in it. That it was written in his time will become evident, I think, when we have caught the tone and purport of the Story. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.