Elimelech Fled the Famine and Died in Moab

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The Prince Who Would Not Stay for the Famine

The bread ran out in Bethlehem and the whole town knew whose storehouses were still standing.

Elimelech was head of his generation, the prince of it, the man everybody looks at when the grain runs low. He looked at the harvest, counted what a long hunger would cost him, and took his wife and his two boys across the border into Moab, where the fields had not failed.

The Holy One took it badly, and said so. If My children all did what he has done, they would leave the land of Israel a wasteland.

That is the whole charge. Not that he was hungry. That he was the one man whose leaving taught everyone else where safety lives.

Heaven Reaches for the Herds First

It is a hard thing before the Holy One to put out His hand against a human being. He would rather not. So when a man sins, the first thing He reaches for is not the man. It is what the man owns.

Trouble arrives, and most people repent on the spot, and are saved, and it happens again, and they are saved again. Many times He delivered them.

Elimelech was not most people. The camels went. The cattle went. Losses a stubborn man can still file under bad weather and bad markets, and he filed them, and he stayed in Moab.

Then Scripture puts down five flat words with nothing around them. And Elimelech, Naomi's husband, died.

Ten Years and Two Graves

Mahlon and Chilion had a fresh grave in foreign ground to read, and it said go home. They did not read it that way. They married Moabite women without immersing them and without bringing them into the covenant, Orpah and Ruth, and settled in for what turned into ten years.

The Holy One spent all ten of those years warning them. When the warnings did nothing He went back to the herds, took the camels, took the cattle, and waited.

They still did not go home.

Then both sons died in the same breath of the verse, and Naomi was standing in a Moabite field with two daughters-in-law, no husband, no boys, and no property left to lose. The house that crossed the border to keep its wealth had lost the wealth and the house.

Four Miles and Four Tears

Naomi got up to go back to Bethlehem, and she did not want the young women with her.

She loved them. That is on the record. They had loved her sons well enough that neither would remarry after the burials. But she could see exactly what waits for a Moabite woman walking into Judah, the looks and the muttering and the doors, and she told them both to go back to their mothers' houses.

Orpah did not need much persuading.

She walked four miles with her mother-in-law before she stopped. Then she kissed her and turned around, and she cried four tears, and that was all of it. What she did afterward with her life was the kind of thing the tellers record without softening, and it showed the road she had chosen.

But nothing goes unpaid. Not with God, and not for her. Four miles walked beside a widow, and the wages came back as four giants out of her body, Goliath and his three brothers.

The Town Was Already in the Street

Ruth would not turn. She had decided to become a daughter of Israel, and Naomi, following the law that says you must tell a convert what she is walking into, tried to talk her out of it with the plain facts.

Sabbaths to keep. Festivals to keep. The daughters of Israel do not go to the theatres and the circuses. Every pleasure of a Moabite girlhood, listed out loud on a road at the border.

Ruth said she was ready for all of it.

"We have one Torah," Naomi said. "One law. One command. The Eternal our God is one, and there is none beside Him."

"Your people shall be my people, and your God my God."

They walked into Bethlehem on the worst possible day and the best possible day. The wife of Boaz was being buried that morning, and the entire town was already out in the street for the funeral, so there was no quiet way back in. The whole crowd turned and watched Naomi come home with nothing.

Boaz Buried Them

The kindness Boaz showed did not stop at the two living women. He took on the burial of the dead as well, and saw to it that Elimelech and both sons were laid in the ground properly, at his own expense, in a town their father had walked out on.

Later, when Naomi sent Ruth to the threshing floor washed and anointed and dressed well, Ruth carried the good clothes instead of wearing them and did not put them on until she arrived, because a woman alone on a road at night does not need to be looked at.

Elimelech never came back to see the barley. He had crossed a border to keep his household alive and lost every man in it. What came home instead was a Moabite widow with nothing, walking into a funeral crowd, carrying a line nobody had heard of yet.

He left in order to keep his family. Another man paid to bury it.