Ruth

Ruth opens in the days when the judges judged, which after the last lesson is a warning label rather than a date. There is a famine in Bethlehem, which means House of Bread, so a man from the house of bread takes his family to Moab to eat. Inside five verses the man and both his sons are dead and three widows are standing in a foreign field. Two of them are Moabites and one is an Israelite with nothing left, and she tells the young women to go back to their mothers' houses because she has nothing to offer them.

Moab is not a neutral choice of nationality. Genesis 19 gives Moab an origin in incest. Numbers 25 has Israelite men drawn into the worship of Baal of Peor by Moabite women, and the plague that follows kills twenty-four thousand. Deuteronomy 23:3 says no Moabite may enter the assembly of the LORD, even to the tenth generation. Nehemiah 13:1 to 3 quotes that verse and uses it to separate foreigners out of the restored community. The book you are about to read ends by making a Moabite woman the great-grandmother of David, which is the fourth generation, not the tenth. This is not a gentle pastoral idyll that happens to feature a foreigner. It is a deliberate provocation, and it was written by someone who knew exactly which verse they were walking past.

Ruth's speech in 1:16 to 17 is the pivot, and it should be read as the legal document it is, not as a wedding text. She refuses to be sent back, binds herself to Naomi's people and Naomi's God, and closes with a self-imprecatory oath sworn in the name of the LORD. A Moabite swears by YHWH that only death will separate her from a destitute Israelite widow who has just told her there is no future in it. Compare the two great confessions of this module: Rahab's in Joshua 2 and Ruth's here. Both are made by Canaanite or Moabite women with no stake in Israel's success, and both are more theologically exact than anything the Israelites around them manage.

Then the mechanism of survival, and it is the law. Leviticus 19:9 to 10 forbids an Israelite from reaping to the edges of his field or gathering the gleanings, and from stripping his vineyard bare, and says the remainder is for the poor and the foreigner. Leviticus 23:22 repeats it inside the harvest festival calendar. Deuteronomy 24:19 to 21 extends it to the forgotten sheaf, the olive trees and the grapes, and names the beneficiaries: the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. Ruth is a foreigner and a widow at once, and in 2:11 Boaz notes that she left her father and mother behind to come. Chapter 2 is not a charming scene about a girl who catches a rich man's eye. It is what a welfare statute looks like when a real person has to live on it.

Notice what kind of law it is. There is no collection, no distribution, no administration. The landowner is required to accept a permanent reduction in yield, and the poor person is required to go into the field in the heat and work. It preserves the dignity of labour and it costs the owner real money, and it puts the two parties physically in the same field, which is why the book can happen at all. Notice also its limits. Ruth 2:9 has Boaz telling his young men not to touch her, and Naomi in 2:22 tells her to stay with Boaz's young women so that nothing will happen to her in another field, the BSB's discreet rendering of a verb that can mean to fall upon someone. Those two verses tell you what a foreign woman gleaning alone normally had to expect. The law gave her grain. It did not give her safety.

The engine of this book is a single Hebrew word, and it turns up at the three hinges of the plot. Naomi in 1:8 prays that the LORD may show chesed to her daughters-in-law as they have shown it to their dead and to her. Naomi in 2:20 blesses the one whose chesed has not been withdrawn from the living or the dead. Boaz in 3:10 tells Ruth that she has shown more chesed now than before. Beginning, middle, end. Everything that moves in this story moves because someone does chesed.

The word resists a one-word translation, which is why you will see kindness, steadfast love, loyalty, mercy and covenant faithfulness all used for it; the BSB itself uses 'loving devotion' in 1:8 and 'kindness' in 2:20 and 3:10. The most useful working definition comes from Katharine Doob Sakenfeld's work on the term: chesed is action taken for someone in desperate need, by a person who is in a position to help, who is free not to, and who acts out of loyalty rather than obligation. It is not a feeling and it is not charity. It is loyalty performed at cost, by someone who could have walked away with their reputation intact. Orpah does walk away, and the book does not criticise her. That is precisely the point. She did nothing wrong, which is what makes what Ruth does chesed rather than duty.

There is a genuine ambiguity in 2:20 worth giving your students, because it is where the book's theology hides. Naomi says, of someone, that his chesed has not been withdrawn from the living or the dead. Hebrew grammar allows the antecedent to be Boaz or the LORD, and commentators have divided on it for centuries. The BSB has taken a side in its typography: it prints 'May he be blessed by the LORD, who has not withdrawn His kindness from the living or the dead', and the capital H makes the LORD the one whose kindness continues. Hebrew has no capitals, so that is the translators' reading, not something the text settles. The other reading is every bit as strong: that the one who has not withdrawn his chesed is Boaz, who has just fed and protected a living widow and, by honouring Ruth, is keeping faith with her dead husband Mahlon. On that reading Naomi is blessing Boaz, and the LORD is the one asked to bless him. Neither reading can be proved from the grammar. It is probably not an accident. In a book where God does almost nothing visibly, the sentence that cannot decide whether it is praising the man or praising God is exactly the sentence you would expect.

Because look at how little God does on stage. Ruth 1:6 says the LORD had attended to his people by providing them with food. Ruth 4:13 says the LORD enabled Ruth to conceive. That is the whole inventory of direct divine action in the book: bread and a baby. No voice, no vision, no prophet, no miracle, no angel. Everything else is done by human beings choosing to be loyal, and by the narrator's quiet arrangement of coincidences, including the one in 2:3 where Ruth happens to end up in the field of a relative. The theology of Ruth is not that God is absent. It is that God's chesed reaches Naomi through Ruth's feet and Boaz's barley, and that this is the ordinary way it works.

Do not flatten Naomi on the way through. In 1:20 to 21 she tells the women of Bethlehem to stop calling her Naomi, which means pleasant, and to call her Mara, bitter, because the Almighty has dealt bitterly with her. 'I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty.' She names God as the author of her losses, to his face, in public, and the book records it without correction and without a rebuke from anyone. A student who has been taught that faith means not saying such things has been taught something Ruth 1 does not know.

The go'el, the redeemer (the BSB prints 'kinsman-redeemer'), is a family office rather than a metaphor, and the Torah gives it several jobs. Leviticus 25:25 makes the nearest relative responsible for buying back land a poor kinsman has had to sell, so that the clan does not lose its inheritance. Leviticus 25:47 to 49 extends it to buying a kinsman out of debt slavery. Numbers 35 gives the go'el haddam, the avenger of blood, the duty of pursuing a killer. Jeremiah 32 shows the land version actually performed, with Jeremiah buying his cousin's field on the eve of the exile. The point of the institution is that in Israel a family's land and a family's freedom are not left to the market; a relative is on the hook for them.

Chapter 3 is where Ruth turns Boaz's own prayer back on him. In 2:12 he had blessed her as one who has come to take refuge under the wings of the LORD, using kanaph, a word that means both a bird's wing and the corner of a garment. At the threshing floor in 3:9 she says, in the BSB's words, 'Spread the corner of your garment over me, for you are a kinsman-redeemer', and the word behind 'corner of your garment' is the same kanaph that the BSB renders 'wings' in 2:12. The BSB's own footnote at 3:9 says the word can mean either, and sends you back to 2:12, so the echo is visible to a student who reads the footnote even though the English words differ. He asked God to shelter her; she tells him he is the shelter and names the legal office that makes it his job. It is the boldest speech any woman makes in the Old Testament and she makes it at night, in a grain store, to a man who has been drinking, in a position of total vulnerability.

Be honest about the scene's ambiguity. The Hebrew uses margelot, the place of the feet, and the verb for uncovering, and 'feet' can function as a euphemism elsewhere in the Old Testament. Boaz's instruction in 3:14 that she leave before anyone can recognise her, and his remark that it must not be known that the woman came to the threshing floor, tells you that at minimum both of them understood the reputational danger. What the narrator does not say is that anything happened, and scholars divide on whether the ambiguity is prudish reticence, deliberate suspense, or a signal that nothing did. The responsible position is that the text is charged and unresolved, and that a teacher who flattens it in either direction is adding to scripture.

Chapter 4 moves to the gate, which is the courthouse, and this is where the book's real transaction happens. Boaz convenes ten elders and offers the nearer redeemer the field. The man agrees at once, because redeeming a field is a straightforward asset purchase. Then Boaz attaches the condition: acquiring the field means acquiring Ruth the Moabite, to raise up the name of the dead on his inheritance. The man withdraws immediately, and his stated reason in 4:6 is exact. 'I cannot redeem it myself, or I would jeopardize my own inheritance.' He has done the arithmetic. He would pay for the field now, and the son Ruth bore would inherit it as Mahlon's heir, so the money would leave his estate permanently and his own children would get nothing for it.

That arithmetic tells you precisely what Boaz risks, and it is worth being concrete because Boaz is usually preached as generous in a vague way. He pays market price for land that will pass out of his line into the name of a dead man. He takes into his household a Moabite widow whose nationality carries Deuteronomy 23 and Numbers 25 with it. He does this publicly, before ten witnesses, in a small town, having already let it be known that he lets a foreign woman glean among the sheaves and takes grain out of the bundles for her. He is the well-off man in the story and the only person who stands to lose anything by it. Note also, for exactness, that Ruth 4 is not simply the levirate law of Deuteronomy 25 being applied. Boaz is not Mahlon's brother, and the narrator has to explain the sandal ceremony in 4:7 as a custom of former times, which suggests distance from the practice. Scholars including Edward Campbell, Jack Sasson and Frederic Bush have noted that the combination of land redemption with marriage in Ruth 4 matches no surviving statute exactly. The legal background is real and the precise procedure is not fully recoverable. Say so rather than inventing a law. One more wrinkle: the BSB's 'you must also acquire the widow' in 4:5 follows the spoken reading of the Hebrew; the written consonants read 'I acquire', and some scholars take Boaz to be announcing his own marriage, which would change the nearer redeemer's arithmetic. The BSB footnotes do not mention it, and the quiz below rests on the BSB's reading.

Ruth stands in two different places in two different Bibles, and this is not a trivial matter of binding. In the Hebrew Bible it belongs to the Ketuvim, the Writings, and in the standard printed Masoretic order it comes among the five Megillot, immediately after Proverbs. Jewish orders have varied: the list in the Talmud at Bava Batra 14b puts Ruth first among the Writings, before Psalms. In the Septuagint, and from there in the Christian Old Testament, Ruth stands where the story's own date sentence puts it, between Judges and 1 Samuel.

Take the Christian placement first, because it is the one your students have. After Judges, Ruth is an answer to the last verse of Judges. There was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in his own eyes; then four quiet chapters, and a genealogy that ends with David. Notice what that placement redeems. Judges 17 and 19 both use a man from Bethlehem as the hinge of a horror, and Judges 19 sends a woman out of a house to be destroyed. Ruth has a Bethlehem where a foreign widow is fed and protected, and where a man risks his own inheritance rather than take advantage of a woman who is entirely in his power. The line of the coming king arrives through loyalty, not through force, and it arrives through a woman from the nation the law excluded. Read here, Ruth argues that the cure for Judges was already growing in a barley field while the tribes were tearing each other apart.

Now the Hebrew placement. Among the Writings, following Proverbs, Ruth is wisdom literature. Proverbs closes with the poem about the eshet chayil, the woman of valour, and the next book opens on a woman whom Boaz calls, in 3:11, an eshet chayil, the same phrase (the BSB renders it 'a wife of noble character' in Proverbs 31:10 and 'a woman of noble character' in Ruth 3:11). So the abstraction is followed immediately by a case study, and the case study is a destitute Moabite. It is also the scroll read at Shavuot, the feast of the grain harvest and, in Jewish tradition, of the giving of Torah at Sinai. Read there, the book is about what Torah looks like when it is actually kept: the gleaning laws working, the redeemer's office honoured, chesed done at cost, and a Gentile freely choosing the God of Israel at the festival of the covenant. Neither placement is a distortion. Each one asks a different question of the same four chapters, and a student who has read it both ways has read it twice.

The date of composition is disputed and you should not pretend otherwise. The narrator's aside that the sandal custom belonged to former times, and some features of the language, have led many to place the book in the post-exilic period, where it reads naturally as a counterweight to the policy on foreign wives in Ezra 9 to 10 and Nehemiah 13. Frederic Bush belongs on that side: he reads Ruth's Hebrew as transitional toward Late Biblical Hebrew and concludes that its author cannot have written early. Others, including Campbell and Hubbard, have argued that the Hebrew is largely classical and that the linguistic evidence does not carry a late date, placing the book earlier, while Sasson holds that the language cannot date the book at all. There is no consensus. Note that the book's force survives either way: if it is late, it is a protest; if it is early, it is a memory that made the later protest possible.

End with the genealogy, because it is the book's punchline and it is usually skipped. Ruth 4:18 to 22 runs from Perez to David, and Perez is the son of Tamar, who is the other woman the elders name in their blessing at the gate in 4:12, and whose story in Genesis 38 involves a disguised widow and a father-in-law. Matthew 1 will pick up the same line and name four women in it: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and the wife of Uriah. Matthew is reading Ruth 4 and he has noticed what it is doing. The genealogy of Israel's king, and of Israel's Messiah, is not a clean line of insiders. It runs through a Canaanite in Jericho and a Moabite in Bethlehem, and it gets there because ordinary people kept a law about the edges of a field.