Ruth
Author: Unknown
Ruth is set in the days of the judges and follows a Moabite widow into the family line of David.
Outline
Famine and loss (1)
Elimelech’s family leaves Bethlehem, the men die in Moab, and Ruth returns with Naomi.
The field of Boaz (2)
Ruth gleans, and Boaz protects her because she has stayed with Naomi.
The threshing floor and the gate (3–4)
Ruth asks Boaz to act as redeemer, and he settles the right before the elders.
Key verses
Ruth 1:16
Ruth binds herself to Naomi’s people and to Naomi’s God.
Ruth 2:12
Boaz asks the Lord to repay Ruth for coming under his wings.
Ruth 4:17
The child born to Ruth and Boaz is the grandfather of David.
Ruth is a short book set in the days when the judges ruled, and it reads differently from the violence around it. A famine sends Elimelech, Naomi, and their two sons from Bethlehem to Moab. Elimelech dies. The sons marry Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah, and then the sons die too. Naomi hears that the Lord has visited his people with bread and decides to go home. She tells the younger women to return to their mothers’ houses. Orpah goes back. Ruth refuses. Her speech is the book’s best-known line: where you go I will go, your people will be my people, and your God my God. A foreign widow attaches herself to an Israelite widow and to the God of Israel.
They arrive in Bethlehem at the beginning of barley harvest. Naomi tells the women not to call her Naomi, pleasant, but Mara, bitter, because the Lord has dealt bitterly with her. The book does not correct her at once. It lets the harvest answer over the next chapters. Ruth goes to glean, which the law allowed the poor and the stranger to do. She happens to come to the field of Boaz, a kinsman of Elimelech. Boaz has already heard what she did for Naomi. He tells her to stay in his field, to drink from the vessels the young men have drawn, and not to fear being harmed. He speaks of the Lord, under whose wings she has come to trust.
Naomi sees the kindness and names the family duty Boaz may perform. A redeemer in this setting can buy back family land and raise up a name for the dead. Naomi tells Ruth to wash, anoint herself, and go down to the threshing floor after Boaz has eaten. Ruth uncovers his feet and lies down. When he wakes, she asks him to spread his skirt over her, because he is a near kinsman. The request is for marriage and redemption, not a secret liaison. Boaz blesses her, says he will do it, and also says there is a nearer kinsman who must be asked first. He sends her home with grain before daylight, careful of her name.
At the gate Boaz sits with the nearer kinsman and ten elders. He offers the parcel of land that belonged to Elimelech. The man is willing until he hears that taking the land means taking Ruth, to raise up the name of the dead on his inheritance. He refuses, and gives Boaz his sandal, the sign of the transferred right. Boaz buys the land and takes Ruth as his wife. The women of Bethlehem, who heard Naomi call herself bitter, now tell her that the child is a restorer of life. They name him Obed. The book ends with a genealogy of ten names, from Perez to David.
That ending is why the story is in the Bible and not only in a family memory. In the days when everyone did what was right in his own eyes, a Moabite woman shows covenant loyalty, an Israelite landowner keeps the law about the stranger and the redeemer, and the line of David begins in Bethlehem. The judges cycle is not the only thing happening in Israel.