Although the Book of Ruth is in many respects a classic example of biblical Hebrew narrative, with its stripped-down style and the opaqueness of its character's inner lives and motivations, there are two examples of formal poetry in the book (1:16–17 and 1:20–21). Biblical poetry works with a very different set of literary conventions than narrative, and by taking note of those conventions, we can see the distinctive contributions made by these poems to the book as a whole.

Love, according to the poets, is something like a math problem. Whether it is two striving to become one or the triangulating effect of three, we find a venerable history of number-crunching in the literature of love, not least in ancient Israel's great poetic presentation of desire, the Song of Songs.