One of Our Kinsman-Redeemers

Ruth comes home at the end of the day with a load of barley and food left over from a meal somebody gave her. Naomi does the arithmetic before she hears a name. Nobody gleans that much on their own, so somebody out in that field decided to be good to her, and Naomi is already blessing the man for it while she is still asking which field it was.

Ruth gives her the name. Boaz. And Naomi answers with a sentence she has not been able to say since she walked back into Bethlehem.

May he be blessed by the LORD, who has not withdrawn His kindness from the living or the dead.

Earlier she had told the whole town that the LORD brought her back empty and had testified against her. Nobody has argued her out of it since, and nothing has been explained to her. She has a sack of grain and the name of a relative, and those turned out to be enough to get her speaking well of God again.

She also takes the kindness wider than herself. The living and the dead, she says, which folds her husband and her sons into the same sentence.

Then she puts the book's main word on the table. Boaz is a close relative, she tells Ruth, one of their kinsman-redeemers. A kinsman-redeemer was a family member holding the standing to step in: to buy back land the family had lost, and in some cases to stand in for a man who had died. The office comes out of Israel's law. So Naomi is not saying that Boaz is a nice man. She is saying he has the standing to do something about the state the two of them are in.

Ruth adds a detail Naomi has not heard yet. Boaz told her to stay with his workers until they had finished gathering all his harvest, which is a place through to the end of the season, not one good afternoon.

Naomi's reply is about safety. It is good for Ruth to keep working alongside the young women, she says, so that nothing will happen to her in another field. She has thought about what another field could mean, and she says it out loud instead of worrying quietly.

Then the chapter stops.

So Ruth stayed close to the servant girls of Boaz to glean grain until the barley and wheat harvests were finished. And she lived with her mother-in-law.

No proposal, no rescue, nothing settled. Two women in one house through the barley harvest and then the wheat, with food coming in and the days going by. Whatever is going to happen to them has not started happening yet.