21 Ruth and Naomi [Ruth 1–4]
The Bible passage: [Ruth 1–4]
The Story:
During the time of the judges, there was a famine in Israel. Elimelech, a man from Bethlehem, moved for a while to the land of Moab with his wife, Naomi, and their two sons.
After a time, Elimelech died and Naomi was left with her two sons.
Later, the two sons married women from Moab. After they had all lived in Moab for about 10 years, the sons died. Naomi was left without her husband and her two sons.
Naomi heard that God had ended the famine in Israel and had provided food for the people. She left the place where she had been living, accompanied by her two daughters-in-law, and started on the road back to Israel.
She told her daughters-in-law, “You should go back to your mothers’ homes. You have been faithful to my family and to me. May God be faithful to you and enable you to find new husbands.”
After arguing with Naomi for a moment, her daughter-in-law Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye and left to go back to her family home.
Ruth, however, told Naomi, “Don’t ask me to leave you or go back and not follow you. Where you go, I will go. Wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people. Your God will be my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord do bad things to me if anything but death separates you and me.”
Naomi saw that Ruth was determined to go with her and stopped trying to convince her.
The two women traveled back to Bethlehem, where the whole town was excited to see Naomi once again.
Ruth asked Naomi for permission to go into the grain fields and pick up scraps behind the workers in the field. This was commonly done by widows as a way to get food for survival.
Ruth ended up gathering grain in a field that belonged to a man named Boaz. Boaz was a man of great character and a relative of Elimelech. Later, when Boaz arrived at the field from town, he asked the servant in charge of the harvesters, “Who is this young woman?”
His servant said, “The is the young woman who came with Naomi from Moab.”
Boaz went to Ruth and told her not to go anywhere else to pick up grain, but to stay in his field. He told her that the other women would help her know where to pick up grain and where to get water when she was thirsty.
Ruth asked Boaz, “Why are you being so kind to me, a foreigner?”
Boaz answered, “I have heard all that you have done for your mother-in-law: how you left your parents, and the land of your birth, and how you came to live with people you didn’t previously know.”
At mealtime, Boaz invited Ruth over to eat with his workers. She ate and was satisfied and had some left over.
When she got up to gather more grain, Boaz told his young men to let her gather all that she needed and not to bother her. He also told them to drop a little extra on the ground for her.
At the end of the day, she went back into town and showed her mother-in-law all that she had gathered and also gave her the leftovers from her meal.
Naomi asked Ruth where she had worked and Ruth told her that she had worked in the field of Boaz.
Naomi told Ruth that Boaz was a close relative and that he was in a position to help them through any of their difficulties.
Ruth gathered grain in Boaz’s fields until the barley and wheat harvests were finished, while still living with her mother-in-law.
After getting to know each other better, Boaz and Naomi wanted to get married. Because Ruth was a widow and was entitled to property that had belonged to her husband’s family, there were customs and laws regulating who could marry Ruth and get the property. These laws were put into place to keep land from being transferred from one tribe to another. The relatives who had the rights to do this were called “family redeemers” and there was a priority structure in place for these men.
There was a family redeemer that had priority over Boaz. Boaz went to the town gate and sat down there. The town gate was where town business usually took place. Soon, the family redeemer with priority came by. Boaz called him by name and invited him to sit and talk business. The redeemer agreed and went over and sat down. Boaz also invited ten of the town’s elders to sit with them.
He said to the redeemer, “Naomi is selling a piece of land that belonged to our relative Elimelech. I thought I should inform you. You can buy it if you want to redeem it. If you do not want to redeem it, tell me, because I am next in line after you.”
“I want to redeem it,” he answered.
Then Boaz said, “On the day you buy the land from Naomi, you will also acquire Ruth, the wife of the deceased man, to perpetuate the man’s name on his property.”
The redeemer replied, “I can’t redeem it myself, or I will ruin my own inheritance. You can have my right of redemption, because I can’t redeem it.”
Boaz said to the elders that were there, “You are witnesses today that I am buying from Naomi everything that belonged to Elimelech and his sons. I will also take Ruth the widow, as my wife, to perpetuate her deceased husband’s name on his property. You are witnesses to this transaction today.”
Boaz and Ruth were married. When he was intimate with her, the Lord enabled her to conceive, and she had a son. They named their son Obed. He was the father of Jesse, and Jesse was the father of David, who became Israel’s greatest king.
The Lessons:
- God sometimes uses unlikely people to serve His purpose. If you will remember back to story 4a Abraham, his nephew Lot and his family were living in Sodom and Gomorrah when God told them to leave before He destroyed it. After they fled, Lot’s daughters both became pregnant. Their two sons were named Moab and Ben-ammi, the founding fathers of the Moabite and Ammonite nations. Ruth was a descendent of Moab. She and Boaz later became the great-grandparents of David, who we will read about soon.
- Doing the right thing often takes sacrifice. In Ruth’s case, the sacrifice was in leaving her home country and her family to go and take care of her mother-in-law.
- In Biblical terms, the idea of “redeem” is to “buy back”. God has a redeemer in place. In the Old Testament, a redeemer was one who would pay a family member’s debt or buy back land that they had sold. The idea was to keep land in the family. God had Boaz in place to redeem Naomi’s family land and keep it in their tribe. In the New Testament, Jesus came to be the redeemer for mankind. When we sin, we are in effect selling ourselves to our sin. Jesus came to be the sacrifice for our sins, redeeming us from eternal death and returning us to our position in God’s family.
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