Ruth

Ruth (Hebrew Rut, often understood as "friend" or "companion") was a Moabite woman who, by faith and covenant loyalty, became the great-grandmother of King David and an ancestress of the Messiah. Her story, set "in the days when the judges ruled" (Ruth 1:1), shines as a quiet jewel of hesed — steadfast, self-giving kindness — against the dark and chaotic backdrop of that era. That she was a Moabitess, from a people normally excluded from the assembly of the LORD, makes her welcome into Israel all the more a wonder of grace.

When famine drove Elimelech and Naomi of Bethlehem to sojourn in Moab, their two sons married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth; but in time all three men died, leaving the women widowed and destitute. As Naomi resolved to return home, Orpah turned back, but Ruth clung to her with one of Scripture's most celebrated confessions of devotion: "Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God" (Ruth 1:16–17). So the two widows came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest (Ruth 1:22).

To provide for Naomi, Ruth went to glean in the fields and "happened" upon the land of Boaz, a kinsman of Elimelech and a man of standing. Boaz showed her favour, and blessed her as one who had come to take refuge "under the wings" of the LORD, the God of Israel (Ruth 2:12). At Naomi's counsel Ruth came by night to the threshing floor and asked Boaz to spread his garment over her and act as kinsman-redeemer (Ruth 3:9). When a nearer kinsman declined the duty, Boaz redeemed the family's land and took Ruth as his wife at the city gate (Ruth 4:9–10). Their son Obed became "a restorer of life" to the once-bitter Naomi (Ruth 4:14–17).

Ruth's significance reaches far beyond her own day. Obed was the father of Jesse, the father of David, so that this faithful foreigner stands in the royal line of Israel (Ruth 4:17) — and Matthew names her among the women of Jesus' genealogy, a Moabite grafted by grace into the ancestry of the Christ (Matthew 1:5). In Boaz the willing kinsman-redeemer (goel), who pays the price to redeem an impoverished outsider and make her his own, the book foreshadows Christ, the great Redeemer who buys back his bride at cost. And in Ruth herself — the Gentile who forsook her gods to shelter under the wings of the LORD — Scripture offers a luminous picture of saving faith and of God's mercy reaching out to the nations.