The famine, and the family that left
There was a famine in Bethlehem. A man named Elimelech took his wife Naomi and their two sons and crossed the Jordan into Moab — the country of a rival people, the descendants of Lot. They were refugees. They stayed longer than they meant to. Elimelech died there. The two sons married Moabite women — Orpah and Ruth — and lived about ten years. Then both sons died too. Three widows were left in a foreign country, with no men, no sons, no inheritance, no visible future.
Naomi heard that the famine back home was over. She decided to return. She told her two daughters-in-law to go back to their mothers' houses — “may the Lord grant that you may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband” — and she kissed them, and all three of them wept. Orpah went back. Ruth did not.
“Your God, my God”
Naomi pressed Ruth harder. “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” Ruth's answer is one of the most quoted sentences in the whole Bible. It is also the sentence that explains everything she does next:
“Do not urge me to leave you
or to return from following you.
For where you go I will go,
and where you lodge I will lodge.
Your people shall be my people,
and your God my God.
Where you die I will die,
and there will I be buried.”
She was a young widow with no children. She was leaving the country of her birth, the gods of her birth, the family she still had. She was walking into a country that would not fully claim her — the Moabites were foreigners to Israel, and some chapters of the law were not generous about Moabite women. She went anyway. The verb used in Hebrew is the verb for cleaving, the same word Genesis uses for a man cleaving to his wife. She attached herself.
Gleaning in a stranger's field
They arrived in Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest. Naomi was so changed by grief that the women of the town barely recognised her. “Do not call me Naomi,” she said; “call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me.” Ruth, meanwhile, went out to work. Gleaning — the right of the poor and the foreigner to walk behind the harvesters and pick up what fell — was the only way she could feed them. She went to a field that happened, the text says, to belong to a man named Boaz, a relative of Elimelech.
Boaz noticed her. He asked who she was. He told his young men not to touch her, told her she could drink from his water jars, told the harvesters to leave extra sheaves for her on purpose. When she asked why he had been so kind to a foreigner, he answered that he had heard what she had done for Naomi — that she had left her mother and her father and the land of her birth and come to a people she did not know. “The Lord repay you for what you have done,” he said, “and a full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.”
The redeemer at the threshing floor
Boaz was a relative, and the law of Israel allowed a kinsman to redeem the land and the family of a man who had died — including marrying the widow and continuing the dead man's line. Naomi saw her opening. She told Ruth to wash, anoint herself, put on her best, and go to the threshing floor at night where Boaz would be winnowing barley. “When he lies down,” Naomi said, “go and uncover his feet and lie down.”
Ruth did it. In the middle of the night Boaz woke up startled to find a woman at his feet. She said, “I am Ruth, your servant. Spread your wings over your servant, for you are a redeemer.” That phrase — spread your wings over me — is the same word Boaz had used the first day they met, when he said the Lord Himself had taken her under His wings. She was asking him to live out what he had already prayed over her.
There was one closer relative who had the first right. Boaz went up to the gate the next morning and settled the matter publicly. The closer relative passed; Boaz took Ruth; the elders of the city blessed the marriage.
“May the Lord make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel.”
The baby, and the line
They had a son. Naomi, who had come home empty, held him in her lap. The women of the town said: “A son has been born to Naomi.” They named him Obed. Obed had a son named Jesse. Jesse had a son named David. David's line, generations later, led to Mary of Nazareth, and to Jesus.
The Gospel of Matthew names four women in its genealogy of Christ. Three of them were either foreigners or had foreign ties: Rahab the Canaanite, Bathsheba (wife of Uriah the Hittite), and Ruth the Moabite. The outsider who chose Israel's God is in the family tree of the Saviour of the world.
What this says to us
Ruth did not plan to be anybody's great-great-great-grandmother. She was a widow making a decision about tomorrow: whether to go back to the gods and the family she had known, or walk into a country that was not hers because her heart had attached itself to a woman who worshipped the God of Israel. The decision looked small. It took one line to say and the rest of her life to live out.
God's providence runs through decisions like that. The woman who chooses the foreign land out of love for the people God put next to her becomes part of the line God is building. The field she gleans in happens to belong to a redeemer. The redeemer happens to be one of the kindest men in the Book. The baby she bears happens to become the grandfather of the greatest king Israel ever had.
Open your heart to where God is leading you — even if it is a country that is not yours, a people who do not fully claim you, a work that looks small from the outside. God is writing a line of names you cannot see from where you are standing. You might be in the chapter that the women of a city will one day name a baby after.