Scripture Daily

Context No. 357 of 4322 · Ruth

Context · Reflection

Ruth 4:11-17: in context

11All the people who were in the gate, and the elders, said, “We are witnesses. May the LORD make the woman who has come into your house like Rachel and like Leah, which both built the house of Israel; and treat you worthily in Ephrathah, and be famous in Bethlehem. 12Let your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, of the offspring which the LORD will give you by this young woman.” 13So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife; and he went in to her, and the LORD enabled her to conceive, and she bore a son. 14The women said to Naomi, “Blessed be the LORD, who has not left you today without a near kinsman. Let his name be famous in Israel. 15He shall be to you a restorer of life and sustain you in your old age; for your daughter-in-law, who loves you, who is better to you than seven sons, has given birth to him.” 16Naomi took the child, laid him in her bosom, and became nurse to him. 17The women, her neighbors, gave him a name, saying, “A son is born to Naomi”. They named him Obed. He is the father of Jesse, the father of David.

The book of Ruth began in grief. Naomi had left Bethlehem in a famine and lost her husband and both her sons in a foreign land, and when she came home she told the women not to call her Naomi, which means pleasant, but Mara, which means bitter, because, she said, I went out full and the LORD has brought me back empty. This passage is the last page of that story, and it is the exact reversal of where it started.

Boaz has married Ruth, Naomi's loyal foreign daughter-in-law, and Ruth bears a son. And watch how the women of Bethlehem frame it, because they do not congratulate Boaz or even Ruth first. They turn to Naomi. Blessed be the LORD, they say, who has not left you without a redeemer, one who will restore your life and sustain you in your old age. The empty woman is being filled again. And they name the source of it in a way that would have startled that culture: your daughter-in-law who loves you, they tell Naomi, who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth. In a world that measured a woman's worth in sons, a foreign widow's loyal love is declared worth more than seven of them. Then Naomi takes the baby and lays him against her chest and becomes his nurse, the empty arms now full. And the book ends with a quiet bombshell: this child is Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David. The whole intimate, domestic story of grief and loyalty turns out to be the hidden root of Israel's greatest king.

The pattern is worth holding onto. God refilled a life that had gone completely empty, and he did it through the faithful love of an unlikely person, and it mattered far beyond anything Naomi could have seen from inside her grief. Where have I dismissed the ordinary, loyal love around me, or my own, as too small to count, when it may be exactly the place God is quietly rebuilding a life, and more than a life?

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