The Moabitess and the Kinsman-Redeemer
Post #38 in the queue

Hear the herald's claim in full. A Moabitess with no right to enter the assembly of Israel was bought at the gate of Bethlehem by a kinsman, married, and made the mother of kings, and the book that tells it ends not with her name but with David's. Ruth is not a tale about a loyal woman earning her place. It is the gospel in the shape of a purchase: a field left for the poor, a garment spread over the destitute, a sandal surrendered at the gate, and a child given by the Lord, all moving toward the Son of David who buys His bride at a price she could never pay.

Begin where the purchase is declared, for the declaration names the whole book. The anchor passage is the voice of Boaz before the elders: "You are witnesses this day, that I have bought all that was Elimelech's, and all that was Chilion's and Mahlon's, from the hand of Naomi. Moreover Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, I have purchased to be my wife, to raise up the name of the dead on his inheritance, that the name of the dead not be cut off from among his brothers, and from the gate of his place. You are witnesses this day" (Ruth 4:9-10). Mark the verbs. Bought. Purchased. Not persuaded, not pitied, not welcomed as a guest. Bought, before witnesses, at the gate where judgment sat.

Now go back to the beginning, and see what kind of woman had to be bought. The book opens in famine, in the days when the judges judged: "It happened in the days when the judges judged, that there was a famine in the land. A certain man of Bethlehem Judah went to live in the country of Moab, he, and his wife, and his two sons" (Ruth 1:1). Bethlehem means house of bread, and the house of bread had no bread. Elimelech took his house into Moab, the land of the enemy, and there he died, and there his two sons married Moabite women, and there his two sons died also (Ruth 1:3-5). What remained was a widow, Naomi, and two widows beside her, with nothing: no husband, no son, no land worked, no name to carry forward.

Then the Lord visited His people. "Then she arose with her daughters-in-law, that she might return from the country of Moab: for she had heard in the country of Moab how that Yahweh had visited his people in giving them bread" (Ruth 1:6). Mark the order. She heard, and then she arose. The bread was given before she moved toward it. She did not make bread in Moab, and she did not bargain for it. She heard that Yahweh had given, and hearing set her feet on the road back to Bethlehem. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ (Rom 10:17).

Naomi told both daughters-in-law to go back to their own people and their own gods, and Orpah went back. Ruth stayed, and her staying is the most quoted speech in the book: "Don't entreat me to leave you, and to return from following after you, for where you go, I will go; and where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God; where you die, will I die, and there will I be buried. Yahweh do so to me, and more also, if anything but death part you and me" (Ruth 1:16-17). Read it carefully, and do not turn it into a proof of human resolve. The speech is beautiful because it is a clinging, and clinging is what a destitute person does when she has been given something to cling to. Her words are the fruit of that hearing, not the root of it. No one comes unless the Father draws him (John 6:44). The text does not praise her will. It shows a woman held.

She came to Bethlehem as a gleaner, and gleaning is the next movement of the book. The law had left a margin in every field for the poor and the foreigner, and Ruth went out to gather what she had not planted (Lev 19:9-10). She happened upon the field of Boaz, a kinsman of Elimelech's house, a man of standing (Ruth 2:1-3). When Ruth fell on her face before him and asked why she, a foreigner, had found favor in his sight, he answered with the very theology the book is teaching: "May Yahweh repay your work, and a full reward be given you from Yahweh, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge" (Ruth 2:12). Under whose wings. Refuge is the word, and refuge is not earned by gleaning. Gleaning is what a person under refuge does while she waits for the harvest to feed her. She ate what she did not sow, drank water she did not draw, and carried home an ephah of barley she did not grow (Ruth 2:14-18). Grace, in this book, is a field with its edges left uncut.

But gleaning is not the end, and the book knows it. A gleaner is still a foreigner in someone else's field, still a widow without a name carried forward. So Naomi sent her to the threshing floor, to the place where the harvest is separated and judged, and Ruth went down at night and lay at the feet of Boaz, and when he woke she made the plea that is the hinge of the whole book: "I am Ruth your handmaid. Therefore spread your skirt over your handmaid; for you are a near kinsman" (Ruth 3:9). Spread your skirt over me. The skirt is the garment's corner, the wing, the covering. She is asking for what Boaz had already named: refuge under wings, now made concrete as a husband's covering. Boaz answered with blessing and with a promise, and he added the one obstacle honestly: "Now it is true that I am a near kinsman; however there is a kinsman nearer than I" (Ruth 3:12). A nearer redeemer held the first right, and the right had to be honored before the purchase could be made.

So the book moves to the gate, the place of judgment, and there the doctrine of redemption is acted out in public. Boaz sat with ten elders, called the nearer kinsman, and laid the land before him first. The nearer kinsman said he would redeem it. Then Boaz added the condition that changed everything: the day he bought the field, he must also take Ruth the Moabitess, to raise up the name of the dead on his inheritance (Ruth 4:5). And the nearer kinsman drew back: "I can't redeem it for myself, lest I mar my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption for yourself; for I can't redeem it" (Ruth 4:6). Read that sentence as the law's own confession. The nearer kinsman was willing to buy land, but he was not willing to buy the widow with it, because taking Ruth meant taking the dead man's name and the cost of a child who would not carry his own name. He could not redeem without marring his own inheritance, and so he took off his sandal and gave it to Boaz, and surrendered the right to walk that ground as its owner (Ruth 4:7-8).

Then Boaz spoke the anchor words, and the elders witnessed, and the people blessed the house to come. "So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife; and he went in to her, and Yahweh gave her conception, and she bore a son" (Ruth 4:13). Mark who gave. Yahweh gave her conception. Ruth had lived ten years in Moab without a child. The child was not the product of her planning, any more than the field was the product of her planting or the covering the product of her pleading. The women named the child Obed, and the book closes its story with a genealogy, because genealogy is the thread the promise runs on: "They named him Obed. He is the father of Jesse, the father of David" (Ruth 4:17). From Perez to Hezron to Boaz to Obed to Jesse to David (Ruth 4:18-22). The Moabitess who had no entrance becomes the great-grandmother of the king, and the king's line runs on to the Son of David, in whom every promise made to David's house is kept forever (2 Sam 7:12-13; Luke 1:32-33).

This is why the book ends with David and not with Ruth, and why David ends with Christ. The church was not gathered from the near and the worthy, but from those who were far off, brought near by blood (Eph 2:13). She was redeemed not with silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish (1 Pet 1:18-19). She was bought at a price, and she is not her own (1 Cor 6:19-20). Boaz is the shadow of that purchase; Christ is the substance: the Kinsman-Redeemer who took flesh to redeem (Heb 2:14), who loved the church and gave Himself up for her (Eph 5:25-26), who did not wait for her to make herself presentable before He bought her.

So the thread runs to its end, and the end is Christ. The Moabitess clung, because she had been drawn. The redeemer bought, because the nearer claim could not. The Lord gave a son, because the womb was His to open. And he who believes in Him has eternal life now, as present possession, not as a future bargain (John 6:47). The purchase at the gate of Bethlehem is finished, the witnesses have spoken, and God gives the increase Himself.