Ruth Walked Through the Gate Closed to Moab

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The Road Where Orpah Turned Back

Three widows stood in the wind on the road out of Moab. Naomi had buried a husband and two sons in ten years of foreign soil, and now she turned on her daughters-in-law like a woman shaking off a debt. "Go back," she said. "Each of you to your mother's house. May the Lord deal kindly with you."

They wept. Orpah kissed her and went.

Ruth would not let go of her.

"Where you go I will go," Ruth said. "Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried."

Naomi stopped arguing. They walked the rest of it in silence, down out of the Moabite highlands, over the Jordan, up into barley country. When they came into Bethlehem the whole town stirred. Women crowded to the street and said, "Is this Naomi?"

"Do not call me Naomi," she told them. "Call me Mara. I went out full and the Lord has brought me back empty." She had not said one word about the young Moabite standing behind her with the bundles.

Barley at the Edge of a Rich Man's Field

The harvest had just started. Ruth asked to go out and glean behind whoever would let her, and Naomi let her go, because there was nothing in the house.

She landed on a field belonging to Boaz, a wealthy man of Elimelech's clan. He came out from Bethlehem in the middle of the morning, greeted his reapers, and stopped. "Whose girl is that?"

"The Moabite girl who came back with Naomi," the overseer said. "She asked to glean among the sheaves. She has been on her feet since morning and has hardly sat down."

Boaz walked over to her. "Do not go glean in another field. Stay here with my young women. Keep your eyes on the plot they are cutting and follow behind them. I have told the young men not to touch you. When you are thirsty, go drink from the jars the young men have filled."

Ruth put her face to the ground. "Why have I found favor in your eyes, that you should notice me, when I am a foreigner?"

He had heard what she did for her mother-in-law. He said so, and at mealtime he handed her roasted grain until she ate her fill and had some left to carry home. When she got up, he told the young men quietly to pull stalks out of the bundles and drop them for her, and not to shame her.

She beat out what she had gathered. It came to most of a sack of barley. Naomi looked at it and asked where she had worked.

Night on the Threshing Floor

At the end of the harvest Naomi gave her instructions like a woman laying out a bet. "Wash. Put on oil. Put on your cloak and go down to the threshing floor. Do not let him know you are there until he has finished eating and drinking. Watch where he lies down. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down."

Boaz ate, drank, and lay down at the end of the grain pile in good spirits. Ruth came softly, lifted the cloak off his feet, and lay there in the dark.

At midnight the man jerked awake and twisted around. A woman was lying at his feet.

"Who are you?"

"I am Ruth your servant. Spread your cloak over your servant, for you are a redeemer."

He blessed her for coming to an older man instead of chasing the young ones. Then he told her the hard part. There was a kinsman closer than he was, and the closer man had the first claim. "Stay tonight. In the morning, if he will redeem you, good. If he will not, I will."

She lay there until it was almost light. He poured six measures of barley into her cloak before anyone could recognize a face on the threshing floor, and sent her back up to town.

The Sandal at the Gate

Boaz went up to the gate and sat down where the elders sat. The nearer kinsman came by and Boaz called him over. Ten elders of the town took their places.

"Naomi is selling the piece of land that belonged to our brother Elimelech," Boaz said. "If you will redeem it, redeem it. If not, tell me, because I come after you."

"I will redeem it," the man said.

"On the day you buy the field from Naomi," Boaz said, "you also acquire Ruth the Moabitess, the widow of the dead man, to raise up the name of the dead on his inheritance."

The man pulled back from it. "Then I cannot redeem it. I would ruin my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption yourself." He did not say the word Moab out loud. He did not have to. He drew off his sandal and handed it over, which was how a bargain was closed in Israel in those days, and the elders watched a whole line change hands over a strap of leather.

"You are witnesses," Boaz said.

"We are witnesses," the elders answered. "May the Lord make the woman coming into your house like Rachel and Leah, who between them built the house of Israel."

The Child Laid in Naomi's Lap

Boaz took Ruth, and she bore a son.

The women who had stood in the street asking whether that grey woman could really be Naomi came crowding back in. "Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you without a redeemer. Your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is worth more to you than seven sons, has borne him."

Naomi took the baby, laid him against her chest, and became his nurse. The neighbor women named him Obed. He fathered Jesse, and Jesse fathered David.

Nobody at that naming said the word Moab either.