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 ḥesed, 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 ḥesed embedded in the biblical narrative.

Luigi De Angelis Soriano is a scholar with an academic and professional background in law, education, and literature. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Western University (London, Canada), where he taught language courses, conducted research, and provided writing consultation to scholars across a wide range of disciplines. His scholarship focuses on the reception of biblical texts across drama, visual arts, poetry, and film. He is the author of scholarly articles including “Women's Bonds and Chance Encounters: An Analogical Reading of the Book of Ruth and Joshua Marston's Film Maria Full of Grace” (Journal of Religion and Film, 2025) and “The Criminal, the Advocate, and the Judge in 2 Samuel 13 and Tirso's La venganza de Tamar” (Neophilologus, 2023). Dr. De Angelis Soriano currently manages the writing and tutoring division within Library and Learning Services at Huron University College, where he leads interdisciplinary initiatives in writing, communication, and subject-specific academic support.