Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book
After the long descent of Judges, with its cycle of sin and its closing horrors, the book of Ruth arrives like a lamp lit in a dark room. Its very first words place it “in the days when the judges ruled,” in that same broken age we have just walked through, and yet what it shows us could not be more different. Here there are no armies, no idols, no atrocities. Here, instead, are three widows on a road, a field of barley, an honorable man at a city gate, and a baby laid in an old woman’s arms. It is a small and quiet story, and it is one of the most beautiful in all of Scripture. For while the whole nation was doing what was right in its own eyes, the book of Ruth shows us a handful of people quietly doing what was right in the LORD’s eyes, loving faithfully and living decently, and it shows us the God who was at work through them the entire time, unseen behind a famine and a harvest and a marriage, redeeming an emptied family and, through them, preparing the line of the King the age was aching for.
As you read, hold this: In the dark days of the judges, God quietly works through the loyal love of ordinary people to redeem an empty widow and a foreign woman, and to weave, unseen, the line of the coming King.
The book is named for רוּת (Ruth, ROOT), a young widow of Moab, a foreigner and an outsider by birth, who binds herself to the God and the people of Israel with a devotion that has echoed down every century since: “your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.” She is one of only two women to have a book of the Bible named for her, and it is fitting, for she becomes a picture of what it means to leave everything and take refuge under the wings of the LORD, and to be welcomed there.
The name and what it means
Ruth is a short book, only four chapters, and it reads almost like a single held breath. It sits right after Judges because it belongs to the same period, but it functions as its answer and its relief. Where Judges asks, again and again, what becomes of a people with no king, Ruth ends by quietly naming the king who is coming. Its last word, in the Hebrew, is the name David.
The book is often remembered for the loyalty of Ruth, and rightly so. But its deepest theme is a single Hebrew word that runs underneath the whole story: חֶסֶד (chesed, KHEH-sed), the loyal, covenant love that keeps faith when it has every excuse not to. It is the love Ruth shows to Naomi, and the love Boaz shows to Ruth, and above and beneath them both it is the love the LORD shows to a family He never abandons. Ruth is a book about chesed, human and divine, and about how the quiet faithfulness of ordinary people becomes the very thread God uses to work His redemption.
The world of the book
The story opens in famine and in flight. A family leaves Bethlehem, whose name means “house of bread,” precisely because there is no bread, and settles in Moab, a neighboring land long at odds with Israel. There death finds them, and a woman named Naomi is left with nothing but two foreign daughters-in-law and a long road home.
It is a world of harvest fields and gleaning laws, where the Law of God made room for the poor and the foreigner to gather what the reapers left behind. It is a world of the kinsman-redeemer, the near relative who could step in to rescue a family fallen on ruin, buying back its land and raising up its name. And it is a world of the city gate, where elders sat and matters were settled and covenants were sealed with the passing of a sandal. Into these ordinary customs of ordinary life, God pours an extraordinary grace.
The shape of the book
Ruth unfolds in four short movements, one per chapter, and the whole story turns on a single arc from emptiness to fullness.
- Ruth 1. Emptied. Famine, exile, and death leave Naomi bereft. She urges her daughters-in-law to turn back; Orpah does, but Ruth clings to her with a vow of loyal love, and the two widows come home to Bethlehem, where Naomi asks to be called Mara, “bitter.”
- Ruth 2. Sheltered. Ruth goes out to glean and “happens” upon the field of Boaz, a worthy kinsman, whose kindness covers her, and who blesses her as one who has come to take refuge under the wings of the LORD.
- Ruth 3. Covered. At Naomi’s counsel, Ruth goes to Boaz at the threshing floor and asks him, honorably, to be her kinsman-redeemer, to spread the corner of his garment over her. Boaz, a man of integrity, pledges to redeem her if a nearer kinsman will not.
- Ruth 4. Redeemed. At the gate, Boaz secures the right to redeem, takes Ruth as his wife, and the LORD gives them a son. The empty arms of Naomi are filled with a grandchild, Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David.
Our walk begins at the beginning, on the road out of Moab, and moves through all four chapters in order. This is a book to read slowly and to let warm you, especially after the long cold of Judges. But do not mistake its gentleness for smallness. Underneath the quiet is the mightiest theme of all.
The one thread to carry
If you take one thing from this book, take the word that names its heart, the word for a rescuer near enough and willing enough to buy back what was lost. It is the word גֹּאֵל (goel, go-ALE), the kinsman-redeemer, and it points far beyond Boaz.
Ruth 4:14 (BSB) — “Then the women said to Naomi, “Blessed be the LORD, who has not left you this day without a kinsman-redeemer. May his name become famous in Israel.”
Boaz redeems Ruth and Naomi because he is near of kin, able, and willing, and in doing so he becomes a bright signpost to the greater Redeemer who would one day be born in this very town, of this very line, near of kin to us in our flesh, able to pay what we could never pay, and willing to spread His covering over the outsider and the empty-handed. The book ends by tracing the family forward, and the New Testament picks up the thread and carries it home.
Matthew 1:5 (BSB) — “Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse,”
A Moabite widow, gathered in from outside, is written into the family tree of Jesus Christ Himself. That is the wonder Ruth is quietly building toward: that the God who cares about one grieving woman and one faithful foreigner is the same God who was, through them, redeeming the world. In the dark days of the judges, He worked through the loyal love of ordinary people to redeem an empty widow and a foreign woman, and to weave, unseen, the line of the coming King.