In a way perhaps unique in the Hebrew Bible, the novella of Ruth, especially for such a short work of literature, demonstrates a wide-ranging knowledge of other ancient Hebrew texts. Not limited to learned allusion, this knowledge is in fact constitutive of the work---its working---as a whole. Focusing on two of the most prominent relationships with other texts (the Pentateuch and Judges), I will consider in this paper how the kind of textual knowledge and know-how Ruth presumes as a work of literature reflects a practice of philology (of making, understanding, and interpreting texts) that has crossed over into the realm of leisure. This will be shown by explicating through close readings the ways in which Ruth is interpretive or hermeneutic without being prescriptive, as well as literary and learned without becoming, as prose fiction, a serious or "epic" work. Demonstrating (on the part of its creators) and presuming (on the part of its audience) a creative and multi-faceted engagement with other texts that may best be characterized as play, and thus as a practice of leisure, Ruth reveals to us a discrete Judean literary episteme in the late Persian period with its own "law of what can be said" (as Foucault says of archives). For this reason, Ruth is important evidence for reconstructing the expressive potentials of a literature (and the supporting conditions) that allows a philologically-oriented literary play, one which, in late Persian Yehud, is quite different from the socio-cultural contexts most often associated with literatures of leisure (such as, for example, in elite, urban circles in the high Roman Empire).