Image Details

Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY/©2001 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris

A joyful Ruth and Boaz engage in a sensual dance in a scene inspired by Ruth 3:6–8. Like the preceding illustrations, this work appears in a museum in Nice, France, dedicated to biblical scenes painted by Marc Chagall.

The widowed Ruth joins the older Boaz at a threshing floor during harvest time. She, like Lot’s daughters and Tamar, is determined to bear children and seduces a close relative to do so. Far from being castigated by the Bible, the women seem to receive tacit scriptural approval: Each case of sperm stealing produces a child who will be an ancestor of David, the Hebrew Bible’s vaunted hero-king.