[Alouette]

Ruth, the ancestor of their King David, was NOT a Jew ( she was a moabite ). Does that mean they treat this remarkable woman who believes in YHWH as less than a Jew ?

Absolutely not.

[Alouette]

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[Cicero]

Good article, and good comment in #13.

Jews are Jews because God called them, as a nation and a people. Once in, never out. A Jew can become a bad Jew, a fallen away Jew, but can never leave his Judaism.

To be a good Jew, you have to observe the terms of the Covenant, and basically do what G-d asks you to do.

Jews don't seek converts, but are willing to take people in if it seems that G-d is calling them, as with such instances as Ruth.

As a Christian, I believe that Jesus fulfills the promises of the prophets about the coming Messiah. It's also evident to me that God still favors the Jews. So, maybe the one way out of Judaism is to accept Jesus as the promised Messiah and the fulfillment of Torah. I don't see any other way.

But, as I used to tell my students, although Christians believe that the God of Israel is the true God, Jews don't believe reciprocally that Jesus is the promised Messiah. So there's an assymetrical relationship between Judaism and Christianity.

But but the relationship between Judaism and Christianity is very, very different from, for instance, the relationship between either religion and Islam, which denies and contradicts some of the basic assertions of both the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels. That makes Islam unavoidably a heresy built on Judaism and Christianity. It's all very well to speak of the three Abrahamic religions, but Islam contradicts and denies essential beliefs of both Judaism and Christianity.