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Ruth is a charming tale of immigration, poverty, and marriage. In Christian Bibles, it comes right after Judges, thereby interrupting the sequence of the Deuteronomistic History. In Hebrew Bibles, it is listed among the Five Megillot, a set of short books read at special times of the year. The Jewish order here fits better: Ruth is an independent composition, not part of the Deuteronomistic History.
Some books of the Bible, like Genesis, Proverbs, or Isaiah, give every appearance of being composite works -- various materials arranged by an editor or editors and molded into their current form. Ruth, on the other hand, looks pretty much[1] like a single story by a single author. This is not an absolutely certain fact; there have arguments made that Ruth shows signs of strong editing over time.[2]
A simple read-through does not make much about the date of composition obvious, although the opening words, "Now it came to pass in the days when judges ruled," would indicate that the book is written well after the supposed period of the Judges.[3]
The great degree of uncertainty about the date of Ruth's composition can be seen in the introductory bit to the book of Ruth in the New Oxford Annotated Bible (2010 edition, page 392). On the basis of its subject matter (intermarriage between Israelites and foreign women) the NOAB places it "probably in the Second Temple period". But the Second Temple period is a huge expanse of time stretching from 539 BCE to 70 CE,[4] and the NOAB notes the "alternate view .. that the book was written during the period of the monarchy, because of its interest in the ancestry of King David." The "period of the monarchy" is likewise a very wide time period: stretching from perhaps 1000 BCE to 587. So the NOAB can't definitively narrow down the date of composition to any significant degree: every book of the Hebrew Bible must almost certainly have been composed at some point in the first millennium BCE.
That Ruth is not a part of the Deuteronomistic History can be seen in several ways. First -- the subject matter. The DH tells the political history of Israel. Ruth is a short story about a family -- it does not concern itself with the political situation outside of its primary character. The DH tells a moralistic story about national obedience and reward, and national disobedience and calamity. While Ruth does not necessarily contradict the DH on this point, and can even be read as complementary to it, it does not preach this ideology.
Campbell, Edward (1975). Ruth: A New Translation with Introduction, Notes and Commentary. Volume 7 of The Anchor Bible.
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