Ruth and Naomi

Moab ( ; Greek ???? ; Arabic ????, Assyrian Muaba, Ma'ba, Ma'ab ; Egyptian Mu'ab) is the historical name for a mountainous strip of land in modern-day Jordan running along the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. In ancient times, it was home to the kingdom of the Moabites, a people often in conflict with their Israelite neighbors to the west. The Moabites were a historical people, whose existence is attested to by numerous archeological findings, most notably the Mesha Stele, which describes the Moabite victory over an unnamed son of King Omri of Israel.see'' 2 Kings 3 Their capital was Dibon, located next to the modern Jordanian town of Dhiban.

The Mesha Stele (popularized in the 19th century as the "Moabite Stone") is a black basalt stone bearing an inscription by the 9th century BC ruler Mesha of Moab.

The inscription was set up about 850 BC as a memorial of Mesha's victories over "Omri king of Israel" and his son, who had been "oppressing" Moab. It bears the earliest known reference to the sacred Hebrew name of God - YHWH - and is also notable as the most extensive inscription ever recovered that refers to ancient Israel (the "House of Omri"). French scholar André Lemaire has reconstructed a portion of line 31 of the stele as "House of David".Biblical Archaeology Review 1994, pp. 30?37

The stone is 124 cm high and 71 cm wide and deep, and rounded at the top. It was discovered at the site of ancient Dibon (now Dhiban, Jordan), in August 1868, by Rev. F. A. Klein, a German missionary. Local villagers smashed the stone during a dispute over its ownership, but a squeeze (a papier-mâché impression) had been obtained by Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, and most of the fragments were later recovered and pieced together by him.[http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/] The squeeze (which has never been published) and the reassembled stele (which has been published in many books and encyclopedias) are now in the Louvre Museum.

Basalt ()basalt definition - Dictionary - MSN Encarta. Archived 2009-10-31.http://www.yourdictionary.com/basalt is a common extrusive volcanic rock. It is usually grey to black and fine-grained due to rapid cooling of lava at the surface of a planet. It may be porphyritic containing larger crystals in a fine matrix, or vesicular, or frothy scoria. Unweathered basalt is black or grey.

On Earth, most basalt magmas have formed by decompression melting of the mantle. Basalt has also formed on Earth's Moon, Mars, Venus, and even on the asteroid Vesta. Source rocks for the partial melts probably include both peridotite and pyroxenite (e.g., Sobolev et al., 2007). The crustal portions of oceanic tectonic plates are composed predominantly of basalt, produced from upwelling mantle below ocean ridges.

The term basalt is at times applied to shallow intrusive rocks with a composition typical of basalt, but rocks of this composition with a phaneritic (coarse) groundmass are generally referred to as diabase (also called dolerite) or gabbro.

Category: Image - :Columnar basalt at Sheepeater Cliff in Yellowstone-closeup-300px.JPG|thumb|right|250px|Columnar basalt at Sheepeater Cliff in Yellowstone

Category: Image - :VessicularBasalt1.JPG|thumb|right|250px|Vesicular basalt at Sunset Crater, Arizona. US quarter for scale.

A widow is a woman whose spouse has died. A man whose spouse has died is a widower. The state of having lost one's spouse to death is termed widowhood or (occasionally) viduity. The adjective is widowed.

Gleaning is the act of collecting leftover crops from farmers' fields after they have been commercially harvested or on fields where it is not economically profitable to harvest. Some ancient cultures promoted gleaning as an early form of a welfare system. For example, ancient Jewish communities required that farmers not reap all the way to the edges of a field so as to leave some for the poor and for strangers.(, , , Peah).

In Nineteenth century England gleaning was a legal right for cottagers. In a small village the sexton would often ring a church bell at eight o'clock in the morning and again at seven in the evening to tell the gleaners when to begin and end work. L W Cowrie (1996) Dictionary of British Social History Wordsworth Reference p.130 ISBN 1-85326-378-8

In the modern world, gleaning is practiced by humanitarian groupsFood Banks Finding Aid in Bounty of Backyard NYT - Sept 9th, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/14harvest.html?ei=5070&emc=eta1 which distribute the gleaned food to the poor and hungry; in a modern context, this can include the collection of food from supermarkets at the end of the day that would otherwise be thrown away. There are a number of organizations that practice gleaning to resolve issues of societal hunger; the Society of St. Andrew, for example, is dedicated to the role.

When people glean and distribute food, they may be bringing themselves legal risk; in the Soviet Union, the Law of Spikelets (sometimes translated "law on gleaning") criminalised gleaning, under penalty of death, or 20 years of forced labour in exceptional circumstancesRepression Cycles in the USSR legal burden; American Food Salvage programs work within the legal http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/colloquia/papers/gardner_paper2.pdf. In the USA, The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, a law enacted in 1996, limited the liability of donors to instances of gross negligence or intentional misconduct, alleviating gleaning from much of its definitions of the Good Samaritan Act, to consistently deliver surplus food from restaurants and dining facilities to emergency food centers.

Gleaning has been studied artistically as well as legally. Gleaning in rural France has been represented in the paintings Des Glaneuses (1857) by Jean-François Millet and Le rappel des glaneuses (1859) by Jules Breton (Category: :fr:Image - :Jules Breton - Le rappel des glaneuses.jpg|image), and explored in a 2000 documentary/experimental film, The Gleaners and I, by Agnes Varda.

Vincent van Gogh's sketch of a Peasant Woman Gleaning in Nuenen, Netherlands (1885) is in the Charles Clore collection.

Peasant Woman Gleaning

: This article is about the ancient Hebrew religious text. For the 20th-century English-language novel, see The Book of Ruth (novel)

The Book of Ruth (; Sephardic, Israeli Hebrew: [m?gi'lat rut]; Ashkenazi Hebrew: [m?'g?l?s rus]; "the Scroll of Ruth") is one of the books of the Ketuvim ("Writings") of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) and of the Historical Books of the Old Testament. It is a rather short book, in both Jewish and Christian scripture, consisting of only four chapters.

Barley is a cereal grain derived from the annual grass Hordeum vulgare.

Barley serves as a major animal feed crop, with smaller amounts used for malting (mostly for beer and certain distilled beverages) and in health food. It is used in soups, stews and barley bread in various countries, such as Scotland and in Africa.

In 2007 ranking of cereal crops in the world, barley was fourth both in terms of quantity produced (136 million tons) and in area of cultivation (566,000 km²).

Wheat (Triticum spp.)Belderok, Bob & Hans Mesdag & Dingena A. Donner. (2000) Bread-Making Quality of Wheat. Springer. p.3. ISBN 0-7923-6383-3. is a worldwide cultivated grass from the Fertile Crescent region of the Near East. In 2007 world production of wheat was 607 million tons, making it the third most-produced cereal after maize (784 million tons) and rice (651 million tons).

Wheat grain is a staple food used to make flour for leavened, flat and steamed breads, biscuits, cookies, cakes, breakfast cereal, pasta, noodles, couscous Cauvain, Stanley P. & Cauvain P. Cauvain. (2003) Bread Making. CRC Press. p. 540. ISBN 1-85573-553-9. and for fermentation to make beer,Palmer, John J. (2001) How to Brew. Defenestrative Pub Co. p. 233. ISBN 0-9710579-0-7. alcohol, vodka,Neill, Richard. (2002) Booze: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century. Octopus Publishing Group - Cassell Illustrated. p. 112. ISBN 1-84188-196-1. or biofuel.Department of Agriculture Appropriations for 1957: Hearings ... 84th Congress. 2d Session. United States. Congress. House. Appropriations. 1956. p. 242. Wheat is planted to a limited extent as a forage crop for livestock, and the straw can be used as fodder for livestock or as a construction material for roofing thatch.Smith, Albert E. (1995) Handbook of Weed Management Systems. Marcel Dekker. p. 411. ISBN 0-8247-9547-4.Bridgwater, W. & Beatrice Aldrich. (1966) The Columbia-Viking Desk Encyclopedia. Columbia University. p. 1959.

Although wheat supplies much of...