The Book Of Ruth Is A Romance — And So Much More
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(OPINION) I’m afraid there’s no way to write this column without sounding like a nerd of the first order.
But let’s face it. I am, alas, a nerd of the first order.
Specifically, I’m a Bible nerd. If possible, that’s even less sexy than Trekkies or people who dress up like manga characters.
I find the Bible endlessly fascinating. The longer I’ve read it, the more profound it’s become. My favorite part of being a pastor isn’t preaching, or even going to potluck dinners (which I definitely love). It’s leading Bible studies.
Here’s why the Bible brings me such joy.
Right now, I’ve got a Sunday morning Bible class going. We’re slowly making our way through the Old Testament, Genesis to Malachi. By “slowly” I mean we’ve been engaged in this study for a year and just made it to Ruth, which is only the eighth of the Old Testament’s 39 books.
If you haven’t read Ruth recently, or ever, you should. It’s a classic romance.
I should say, it’s a romance among other things.
That’s what intrigues me about the Bible, Old Testament and New. Nothing is ever just one thing. It works on a straightforward level, but it’s also full of allusions to other biblical passages and buried meanings and, well, there’s no end to it. Or if there is an end, I haven’t found it yet. The past, present and future intertwine one another. Layers upon layers. Wheels within wheels.
The book of Ruth seems a simple tale. During a famine in Israel, a husband, a wife and their two sons flee to neighboring Moab. The sons marry Moabite women.
Tragedy strikes. The father dies. Then both sons die. That leaves the three women as widows with no means of support.
Because her daughters-in-law are young, Naomi, the mother, urges them to go back to their own families and to find new husbands. Naomi says she’ll return to Israel.
The women weep together. One daughter-in-law finally agrees to go back to her family.
But the second daughter-in-law, Ruth, refuses. She vows to stick with Naomi. Thus two widows, one old and one young, one an Israelite and one a Moabite, set off for Israel to see what will befall them.
When they eventually arrive in Bethlehem, where Naomi is from, the famine is over, and farmers are harvesting crops. Ruth goes to the fields to see if she can find leftover grain for them to eat.
She comes to a field owned by a wealthy man named Boaz.
Boaz sees Ruth searching and is moved with compassion. He warns his field hands not to mistreat her. He gives Ruth water and food. He orders the gleaners to discard sheaves of grain on purpose so she’ll have plenty.
You can easily predict what happens next. Boaz is older than Ruth, but they fall in love. They marry. Boaz provides for not only Ruth but also Naomi. Ruth and Boaz have a son, Obed.
As I said, a romance.
Yet there’s so much more to it. Way more than I can include here.
Several books earlier, in Deuteronomy, God has laid down a defining law the nation of Israel must obey if its people want to be blessed: they’re to always provide for aliens, widows and orphans:
“When you reap your harvest in your field and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow, in order that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.”
But by the time we get to the book of Judges — the book that precedes Ruth — Israel has fallen into all manner of disobedience and disarray. The suggestion is that it’s not particularly compassionate anymore.
Except maybe for a few tenderhearted holdouts such as the old farmer Boaz.
Upon seeing Ruth — an alien and a widow — Boaz does exactly what God commanded. He shows mercy.
The result is a profound love between Boaz and Ruth. And the birth of their son, Obed.
But that’s not the end. Because Obed later has a son. His name is Jesse. And Jesse eventually has a son named David.
Yeah, that David, the greatest king in Israel’s history.
For Christians, the story doesn’t even end there, with Ruth and Boaz’s great-grandson. It gets better still.
Some 28 generations after King David, according to Matthew’s New Testament genealogy, Jesus is born — in Bethlehem — of this direct ancestral line from Ruth and Boaz.
When you put together biblical pieces such as these, you see a way bigger picture emerge. As an outcome of Ruth and Boaz’s comparatively modest acts of goodness — showing loyalty to an elderly mother-in-law, providing for a foreign widow — not only do the Israelites receive a transformative king, but from the Christian perspective, the world receives its Messiah.
Ruth and Boaz don’t know it, but they’ve saved the Earth. Without Ruth and Boaz, there’s no Obed. Without Obed, no David. Without David, no Jesus. Through the righteousness and romance of Ruth and Boaz, God manifests his own undying love for all humanity.
And like them, when we show some small act of love, mercy or generosity, we also may initiate a cycle of deliverance that ripples for generations.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.