The Widow Who Came Home With Nothing

It happened in the days when the judges ruled, a time the last verse of Judges describes as everyone doing what was right in their own eyes. There was a famine in the land, and a man from Bethlehem named Elimelek took his wife Naomi and their two sons to live in Moab. Bethlehem means house of bread, and there was no bread there. Moab was the land of an old enemy. It was not a place a faithful Israelite went by choice.

Elimelek died in Moab. The sons married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. Ten years passed and then the sons died as well. Naomi was left with two daughters-in-law and no men, which in that world meant no land, no income and no future. When she heard that the Lord had given his people food again, she set out for home.

On the road she tried to send the young women back. She had no more sons to give them. Orpah wept and went home. Ruth would not go. Where you go I will go, she said. Your people will be my people, your God my God. So the two women came into Bethlehem together, and the town stirred, and Naomi told them not to call her pleasant any more but bitter, because the Almighty had emptied her out. It was the beginning of the barley harvest.

Ruth went out to glean, the practice by which the poor were allowed to gather what the reapers dropped. As it turned out, she found herself in the field of Boaz, a wealthy relative of Elimelek. Boaz noticed her, asked about her, and having heard what she had done for Naomi, treated her with extraordinary kindness. He blessed her in the name of the God under whose wings she had come to take refuge. She went home that evening with more grain than one woman should have been able to gather.

Naomi saw the hand of God in it and made a plan. At the end of the harvest, Ruth went by night to the threshing floor where Boaz was sleeping, uncovered his feet and lay down. When he woke, she asked him to spread his garment over her, because he was a kinsman-redeemer, a relative with the right and duty to buy back the family's land and give the dead man an heir. Boaz was willing, but there was a nearer relative. He would settle it in the morning.

At the town gate, before ten elders, Boaz put the matter to the nearer kinsman. The man was willing to buy the land until he learned that it came with Ruth and the obligation to raise an heir for the dead. Then he declined, and took off his sandal to seal it, as the custom was. Boaz redeemed the land and took Ruth as his wife. The elders prayed she would be like Rachel and Leah, who built the house of Israel.

The Lord gave Ruth a son. The women of Bethlehem brought the child to Naomi and said that the Lord had not left her without a redeemer, and that her daughter-in-law who loved her was better to her than seven sons. Naomi, who had come home empty, held the baby in her lap. His name was Obed. Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse was the father of David.

That last line is why the story was kept. A famine, a migration, three funerals, a foreign widow's stubborn loyalty and a landowner's generosity turn out to be the road to Israel's greatest king, and beyond him, as Matthew 1:5 records, to Jesus Christ. None of the people in the story could see it. They simply did the faithful thing in front of them. The God who works through ordinary kindness and quiet loyalty was writing something far larger than any of them knew, and he still is.