The most beloved loyalty in the Bible — told by the foreign widow who lived it, and could never have earned it.
Ruth is a Moabite: a daughter of the one nation the law of Moses barred from the assembly of the LORD. She has every reason to be turned away — and instead, on a road out of grief, she says the words that have been read at weddings and gravesides for three thousand years: Whither thou goest, I will go… thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.
She follows her widowed mother-in-law into Bethlehem, a town with no reason to receive her, and goes out to glean in a field that turns out to belong to a man named Boaz — a near kinsman who notices the stranger, protects her before she asks, and prays that she will be sheltered under the wing of God. Then, at a threshing floor in the dark, he becomes the answer to his own prayer.
Whither Thou Goest is a luminous retelling of the Book of Ruth in the heroine’s own voice — an old woman in Bethlehem, looking back. It is a novel about loyalty and the reasonable choice she refused to make; about empty made full; and about a redeemer who comes near, at cost to himself, to take the foreign and the marked and the lost as his own.
Glean freely. The corners were always left for you.
A stand-alone novel in the Witnesses of Grace series, for readers of Francine Rivers, Geraldine Brooks, and Lynn Austin — and for anyone who has ever been given more than they could earn.
