You Are Witnesses Today

Boaz turns to the elders and to everybody else standing about and puts it on the record. He is buying from Naomi everything that belonged to Elimelech, Chilion and Mahlon. He says all three names out loud in the middle of Bethlehem, which means three men who died in Moab have their names spoken in the town they came from. Then he keeps going.

Moreover, I have acquired Ruth the Moabitess, Mahlon's widow, as my wife, to raise up the name of the deceased through his inheritance, so that his name will not disappear from among his brothers or from the gate of his home.

Ruth the Moabitess, in the sentence where he takes her as his wife. He could have left it off there and he does not.

The reason he gives for the marriage is somebody else's name rather than his own. He is committing himself in front of the town to raise a son who will legally count as another man's, and to hand that son the field he has just bought. He gets a wife out of the arrangement, and the son will carry another man's name, and he says so where everyone can hear.

You are witnesses today. He says it at the start of the speech and again at the end of it, and the town answers him: we are witnesses. Then the elders bless him, and they bless the woman coming into his house.

May the LORD make the woman entering your home like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel.

She is a Moabite widow, and Bethlehem has just set her beside the two women who built up the house of Israel, out loud, at a public gate, with the whole town listening. They wish him prosperity in Ephrathah and a name in Bethlehem, and then they reach for Perez.

That last piece is stranger than it looks. They ask that his house become like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah. Perez was born out of a chapter of Genesis that does nobody in it any credit, and the elders reach for it anyway, because Perez is where Boaz's own line came from.

What they are saying, roughly, is that their own line started in a mess and God built something out of it. They are saying it over a Moabite widow, at the gate, in front of whoever happened to be passing through.