Who was Ruth?
When they lived Set in the period of the judges, before the monarchy
In short
Ruth is a Moabite widow who refuses to go back to her mother’s house and travels with her Israelite mother-in-law to Bethlehem. The book that carries her name tells of the harvest, the request made on the threshing floor, the redemption carried out by Boaz, and the birth of David’s grandfather.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 8 min read
The book of Ruth is four chapters long and one of the best-built narratives in the Hebrew Bible. There is no miracle, no prophet, no battle. There is a family that loses everything, a decision made on a road, and a sequence of negotiations about land and marriage that ends in a genealogy.
It is also one of very few biblical books whose protagonist is a foreign woman, and the text keeps pressing that point: she is called the Moabite five times across four chapters, including in the legal declaration of the last one. That insistence is not carelessness — it is the argument of the book.
The famine, and a journey that goes wrong
A famine in Bethlehem pushes Elimelech, his wife Naomi and their two sons into Moab, a neighbouring and historically hostile country. They stay. The sons marry Moabite women — Orpah and Ruth. And then, within three verses, all three men die.
What remains is three widows with no men to support them, in a society where that meant destitution. Naomi decides to go back, knowing there is food again in her own land, and sends her daughters-in-law home to their mothers. It is a formal release: she acknowledges she has no more sons to give them and lets them go.
The decision on the road
Orpah accepts, weeps and goes back. The text does not reproach her for it — she is doing exactly what she was asked to do. Ruth refuses, and her refusal comes in the form of an oath, with a conditional curse at the end: may God do so to her if anything but death separates her from her mother-in-law.
What she promises is not affection but belonging. Destination, dwelling, people, God and grave — all five items are about kinship, not feeling. That is why these lines are read at weddings to this day, even though they were spoken by a daughter-in-law to a mother-in-law on a dirt road.
Arriving at Bethlehem, the town recognises Naomi, and she refuses her own name: she asks to be called something else, built on the Hebrew word for bitterness. Her complaint is addressed directly to God, and the book records it without correcting her.
20But she said to them, “Do not call me Naomi (that is, beautiful), but call me Mara (that is, bitter). For the Almighty has greatly filled me with bitterness.
21I went out full and the Lord led me back empty. So then, why call me Naomi, whom the Lord has humbled and the Almighty has afflicted?”
The name Naomi asks for herself. This edition helpfully glosses both names in the verse itself, so the wordplay is visible in English. Notice the accusation folded into it: she does not say she had bad luck, she says who she holds responsible.
The harvest and the meeting with Boaz
Ruth goes out to glean — to gather what the reapers drop, a right guaranteed in Israelite law to the poor, the orphan, the widow and the foreigner. The text says she happened, by chance, onto the field of Boaz, a relative of Naomi’s husband.
Boaz notices her, asks who she is, and from then on deliberately protects her work: he tells the men to let her glean among the sheaves too, that nobody is to trouble her, that they should drop grain on purpose. When she asks why she is treated this way as a foreigner, he answers by citing what she did for her mother-in-law — that is, her reputation arrived before she did.
The night on the threshing floor
With the harvest over, Naomi sets up a move. She tells Ruth to wash, put on perfume and her best clothes, head down to the threshing floor after dark, wait for Boaz to eat and drink, and then lie down at his feet.
What happens there is the most debated passage in the book, and the debate exists because the text is deliberately sparing. It says she uncovered his feet and lay down; that he woke startled at midnight; that he asked who she was. Her reply is a legal proposal — she asks him to spread his covering over her and identifies him as a relative with the right of redemption.
Worth being honest: several of the words used here carry more than one sense in Hebrew, and Jewish and Christian commentators have differed for a very long time about what the scene describes. What the text states without ambiguity is Boaz’s answer: he commends her choice, warns her that a nearer relative has priority, and sends her off before dawn so that nobody will know a woman was there.
7And when Boaz had finished eating and drinking, and he was merry, and he had gone to sleep by the pile of sheaves, she approached secretly, and, lifting the covering near his feet, she laid herself down.
8And behold, when it was the middle of the night, the man became frightened and confused, and he saw a woman lying near his feet.
9And he said to her, “Who are you?” And she answered, “I am Ruth, your handmaid. Spread your covering over your servant, for you are a near relative.”
The whole scene in three verses, none of which says what happened between the lying down and the waking. The economy is deliberate: the narrator who described the harvest in detail chooses, here, not to describe.
The negotiation at the city gate
Chapter 4 is a courtroom scene. Boaz sits at the gate of the town, gathers ten elders as witnesses, and puts the case to the nearer relative: there is a parcel of Elimelech’s land for sale, and he has first claim.
The man accepts on the spot. Boaz then adds the second half — along with the land comes marriage to the Moabite widow, and the first son of that marriage will inherit in the dead man’s name. The relative backs out, because that would damage his own inheritance, and yields the right.
It matters to see what this scene does to the story: the marriage of Ruth and Boaz is not presented as a romantic resolution but as a legal act recorded before witnesses. The affection is there in the book — it is in what the two of them say from chapter 2 onward — but the engine of the plot is inheritance law.
The last verse
A boy is born. And here the book does two unexpected things. First, it hands the child to Naomi: it is the neighbouring women who say a son has been born to Naomi, and it is she who holds the boy. Second, it gives the name — Obed — and attaches a short genealogy: Obed fathers Jesse, and Jesse fathers David.
That last line is the reason the book exists in the shape it does. It reports that the great-grandmother of the most important king in Israel was a Moabite, and it does so with no comment at all, leaving the information alone on the page.
What the text does not say
Biblical figures gather layers of tradition that Scripture does not support. Telling the two apart does not diminish the story — it gives back what is actually written.
What is commonly said
Ruth was an Israelite, or at least stopped being seen as a foreigner once she took on the God of Israel.
What Scripture says
The book calls her the Moabite from beginning to end, including in Boaz’s public declaration before the witnesses in chapter 4 — after everything she has done and said. More than that: Deuteronomy carries an explicit restriction on Moabites entering the assembly. The book of Ruth does not quote that law, does not argue with it and does not repeal it; it simply ends by placing the Moabite in David’s line. The tension is in the text, and it is what gives the book the force it has.
What is commonly said
The threshing-floor scene is a seduction, and the book is telling us so in code.
What Scripture says
The text says Ruth uncovered Boaz’s feet, lay down, and was found there at midnight. What she then says is a request for protection in legal language, and what he answers concerns a relative with prior claim and the care of her reputation. Several words in the passage carry more than one sense in Hebrew, and the disagreement among commentators is old. Honesty here means recording that the ambiguity belongs to the text, and is not something readers invented.
What is commonly said
It is a love story, and Boaz fell for Ruth out in the field.
What Scripture says
What the book narrates is a property-redemption process governed by inheritance law, with a marriage inside it. Boaz declares in public that he is marrying the widow in order to raise the dead man’s name over his inheritance, and a relative with prior claim has to decline first. None of this erases the tenderness between the two, which is real from the second chapter on — it only shows that the tenderness runs inside a mechanism rather than in place of one.
What is commonly said
Naomi is the bitter mother-in-law who provides the setting for Ruth’s story.
What Scripture says
It is Naomi who opens the book, who demands to be called by another name, who plans the trip to the threshing floor, and who ends with the child in her arms. The neighbouring women, in the last chapter, say a son has been born to Naomi — not to Ruth. The book has two protagonists, and the second one speaks more.
Where this person appears
16She answered, “Do not be against me, as if I would abandon you and go away; for wherever you will go, I will go, and where you will stay, I also will stay with you. Your people are my people, and your God is my God.
17Whichever land will receive you dying, in the same I will die, and there I will have the place of my burial. May God cause these things to happen to me, and add more also, if anything except death alone should separate you and I.”
Ruth’s answer, in the form of an oath with a conditional curse at the end. Notice that the items she lists are about belonging — where to go, where to stay, which people, which God, where to be buried — and not declarations of feeling.
11He answered her, “Everything has been reported to me, what things you have done for your mother-in-law after the death of your husband, and how you left your parents, and the land in which you were born, and came to a people you did not know before.
12May the Lord repay you for your work, and may you receive a full reward from the Lord, the God of Israel, to whom you have come, and under whose wings you have taken refuge.”
The reason Boaz gives for treating her well, and it is an interesting one: not generic charity, but a response to specific conduct he had already heard described. Her reputation reached the town before she did.
9And he said to the eldest and to all the people, “You are witnesses this day, that I have taken possession of all that belonged to Elimelech and Chilion and Mahlon, and was bequeathed to Naomi.
10And Ruth, the Moabite, the wife of Mahlon, I have taken in marriage so as to raise up the name of the deceased in his posterity, so that his name will not be cut off from among his family and his brethren and his people. You, I say, are witnesses of this thing.”
The formal declaration before the elders, where the legal nature of everything becomes explicit. Note that the stated purpose of the marriage is to preserve a dead man’s name — and that Ruth is still identified as the Moabite at that exact moment.
16And taking up the boy, Naomi placed him on her bosom, and she took on the duties of carrying him and nursing him.
17And the women of the near future were congratulating her and saying, “There was a son born to Naomi. They called his name Obed. Here is the father of Jesse, the father of David.”
The close of the book, with the child in Naomi’s arms and a genealogy of three names. The last word of the book is David’s name, and it retroactively rearranges everything read before it.
3The Ammonite and the Moabite, even after the tenth generation, shall not enter into the church of the Lord forever,
The restriction on Moabites in the assembly — this edition, following the Latin, renders the term as "church". It is not here to accuse anyone: it is here to show that the book of Ruth is written in full awareness of the problem her origin represents, and chooses to end the way it ends anyway.