Written by the Prophet Samuel (Traditionally)
Introduction
Ruth is one of the quietest books in the Bible and one of the most consequential. Four chapters. Eighty-five verses. No miracles in the supernatural sense — no parting seas, no fire from heaven, no angels with drawn swords. Just a famine, a funeral, a harvest, a kinsman, and a baby. And yet by the time the book ends, the reader has been shown the precise genealogical line that will run forward through King David to Jesus of Nazareth. The God who speaks worlds into being in Genesis is the same God who moves a young widow from Moab into a field in Bethlehem at exactly the right hour of the day to meet exactly the right man. The scale has changed. The hand has not.
The story opens in the days of the Judges, and the first verse carries its own quiet indictment of that era: there was a famine in the land. A man from Bethlehem — which means house of bread — leaves Bethlehem because there is no bread. He takes his wife Naomi and his two sons into Moab, the land of Israel’s old enemy. The sons marry Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. Then the man dies. Then both sons die. Naomi is left with two foreign daughters-in-law and no future, and she decides to go home empty-handed. She releases them to return to their mothers’ houses. Orpah kisses her and goes. Ruth clings to her and will not go, and in one of the most beautiful covenantal statements in all of scripture she says: where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. A Moabite woman binds herself to the God of Israel by choice, without ceremony, without advantage, with her mother-in-law weeping beside her on an empty road.
“May the Lord repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.” — Ruth 2:12
The rest of the book is Boaz. A kinsman-redeemer — a relative with the legal right and the personal willingness to restore what death has taken from the family — notices Ruth gleaning in his field, recognizes her for what she is, and acts. He feeds her. He protects her. He pays the redemption price at the city gate in front of the elders, marries her, and the Lord gives her a son. The women of Bethlehem gather around Naomi, who had come home empty, and place the child in her lap, and the book closes with a genealogy. Boaz fathered Obed. Obed fathered Jesse. Jesse fathered David. The Moabite widow who bound herself to Naomi’s God on an empty road is the great-grandmother of the king after God’s own heart, and through him she stands in the line that will produce, a thousand years later, the greater Son of David who redeems a bride not from Moab but from every nation under heaven. Matthew will name her in the opening chapter of his gospel, and the book that looks so small in the canon turns out to be a hinge on which the entire redemptive story turns.
Chapters in Ruth
- Ruth 1 – Where You Will Go I Will Go
- Ruth 2 – The Field She Happened to Find
- Ruth 3 – The Threshing Floor
- Ruth 4 – The Sandal and the Line of David