Justice and Hesed in the Book of Ruth and its Cultural Legacy

This book argues that the biblical story of Ruth functions as a text that spurs the reader's participation in making meaning, with justice and ?esed, understood as kindness, loyalty, and steadfast love, playing a crucial role not only in the biblical narrative but also in its cultural legacy across time and media. Barthes's notion of the writerly text and Genette's hypertextuality ground the theoretical framework for analyzing the biblical story and its afterlives through selected retellings: Tirso de Molina's Spanish drama La mejor espigadera (The Best Gleaner), Nicolas Poussin's French Baroque painting L'été (Summer), Marc Chagall's modernist illustrations for Dessins pour la Bible (Drawings for the Bible), and Gabriela Mistral's Hispanic postmodernist poem "Ruth." Within an intertextual and intermedial framework, the book examines why the story of Ruth continues to inspire retellings across time and media and how those retellings negotiate the vision of justice and ?esed embedded in the biblical narrative.