The book of Ruth, traditionally read on the upcoming holiday of Shavuot, contains no reference to sin, divine retribution, repentance, or other typical biblical themes. It is, Sarah Rindner writes, “unusually sweet,” its narrative built on acts of human kindness: the title character’s devotion to her former mother-in-law Naomi, Naomi’s devotion to her, and Boaz’s kindness to the two of them. Examining the numerous implicit references to other biblical books in Ruth, Rindner elucidates the message:

Goodness prevails in [Ruth], but not at the cost of totally effacing the tragic qualities that are present in both life and the Bible. . . .

[A]t the start of the book we learn that it takes place “in the days when the judges judged,” a direct allusion to the book of Judges. Judges depicts one offensive or ugly event after another, with increasing intensity, until the book concludes with [a] statement [that has appeared thrice in the preceding chapters] linking this state of affairs to a lack of central political leadership: “in those days there was no king in Israel, every man did what was right in his own eyes.” Although the book of Ruth is set in this historical moment, the lack of centralized political authority does not prevent its characters from displaying responsibility toward one another and fulfilling lofty ethical imperatives.

In the end, the book also invokes [the imminent arrival of biblical] kingship—due to Ruth and Boaz’s virtue they merit to be the progenitors of the Davidic dynasty. It thus represents a counter-narrative to the book of Judges—it presents kingship as a consequence of a chain of goodness, not as a Hobbesian solution to the people’s moral depravity.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].