Ruth 2

The chapter opens by quietly setting a piece on the board the reader can see and Ruth cannot. And Naomi had a kinsman of her husband's, a mighty man of wealth, of the family of Elimelech… Boaz (v. 1). Before Ruth takes a single step toward the fields, we are told who is waiting at the other end of her day. The phrase a mighty man of wealth renders a Hebrew expression that means more than money; it speaks of substance, standing, capability - a man of weight in the community. And the words of the family of Elimelech are doing the deepest work of all, for Elimelech was Naomi's dead husband.

This is not a stranger with full barns; this is family, a man bound to Naomi's house by blood and so bound, under Israel's law, by obligation. The reader holds this knowledge like a lit candle while Ruth walks out into the dark of an ordinary morning, knowing nothing except that she is hungry and that the poor are allowed to glean.

Ruth is the one who moves. Let me now go to the field, and glean ears of corn after him in whose sight I shall find grace (v. 2). She does not wait to be rescued; she takes up the one provision Israel's law made for people like her. The harvest laws commanded that a landowner not reap to the very edges of his field nor go back over it for what was dropped, but leave the corners and the gleanings for the poor and stranger (Lev. 19:9-10; Deut. 24:19). Gleaning was legal, but it was lowly and exposed - bending all day behind the reapers for whatever they missed, at the mercy of how the workers treated you.

Notice the humility in Ruth's words: she does not presume on anyone's kindness but hopes to find someone in whose sight she might find grace. The Hebrew word is chen, favour - the kindness you cannot demand and can only receive. This is the prayer of the destitute: not for what is owed, but for a kind eye to fall on her.

Then comes one of the most loaded sentences in the Old Testament, and its power is in how plain it sounds: her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging unto Boaz (v. 3). The KJV word hap means chance, luck, accident - and the Hebrew is just as casual, as if to say her happenstance happened to happen. From Ruth's side of things it is pure coincidence: she had no map to Boaz's field, no way of knowing one furrow from another, no idea whose ground she had wandered onto.

But the reader, who heard Boaz named only two verses ago, sees the whole shape of it at once. There is no luck here. The same God who is never named as acting in this book is acting in every line of it, and the studied casualness of the wording is the point: He works most often not by splitting seas but by arranging the small turns of an ordinary day so that a hungry woman “happens” to bend down in exactly the field where grace is waiting.

What she calls chance the story calls providence - the hand of God moving, unseen, beneath the surface of an errand to gather grain.

The first words we ever hear from Boaz tell us the kind of man he is: The LORD be with you (v. 4). He comes from Bethlehem into his own field, and the thing on his lips is not a command or a complaint about the pace of the work but a blessing - and his workers answer him in the same coin: The LORD bless thee. A whole world is sketched in that exchange. This is a household where the name of the LORD passes warmly between master and laborers, where work is done under blessing rather than under the lash.

It is no small thing that the man into whose field providence has steered Ruth turns out to be a man whose ordinary speech is shot through with the awareness of God. Then his eye falls on the one person in the field who does not belong: Whose damsel is this? (v. 5). He notices the stranger. The overseer's answer is careful and kind - she is the Moabitess who came back with Naomi, who asked leave to glean, and who has worked steadily from the morning until now with scarcely a rest (vv. 6-7).

Every detail is a quiet defense of her: she is not idle, not presumptuous, not entitled. She asked; she labored; she is a worker. The stranger has been seen, and what is seen is her diligence.

Boaz turns from speaking about Ruth to speaking to her, and what he gives her runs far past anything the law could compel. He does three things at once. He tells her to stay - Go not to glean in another field… abide here fast by my maidens (v. 8) - granting a homeless gleaner a settled place under his protection rather than the daily uncertainty of begging from field to field. He guards her body: have I not charged the young men that they shall not touch thee? (v. 9).

A foreign widow gleaning alone among hired men was exposed to harassment and worse, and Boaz throws a wall around her with a word. And he opens his own provision to her thirst: when thou art athirst, go unto the vessels, and drink of that which the young men have drawn. Stop and measure how much of this the gleaning law never asked. The law said the poor could gather the leftovers; it said nothing about a landowner offering a stranger a guaranteed place, a personal guard, and water his own workers had drawn.

This is not law being obeyed; it is grace overflowing the banks of the law. Long before Boaz ever stands up in the gate to redeem her in chapter 4, he is already, here in the field, treating her like one of his own.

Ruth's answer is to fall to the ground in wonder: she fell on her face, and bowed herself to the ground, and said unto him, Why have I found grace in thine eyes, that thou shouldest take knowledge of me, seeing I am a stranger? (v. 10). She does not argue with the kindness or wave it off; she receives it - and she names, with disarming honesty, exactly why it astonishes her. Seeing I am a stranger. She is a Moabitess, a daughter of a people long at odds with Israel, with no birthright in this land and no claim on this man.

That he should take knowledge of her - notice her, single her out, care what becomes of her - cannot be something owed; it can only be gift. There is a quiet theology in her question. The word she reaches for is the same word she used at the start, chen, grace: the favour that is never earned and never demanded but only given. Ruth grasps what is happening to her with a clarity that itself is a kind of grace: she knows she is receiving what she has no right to receive, and instead of pride or entitlement, her response is to bow her face to the ground.

Boaz answers her wonder by telling her that her story has reached him before she ever entered his field: It hath fully been shewed me, all that thou hast done unto thy mother in law since the death of thine husband (v. 11). And notice what he sees when he looks at her. Not a foreigner to be tolerated, not a poor widow to be pitied, but a woman of remarkable loyalty - one who left thy father and thy mother, and the land of thy nativity, and art come unto a people which thou knewest not heretofore. The words deliberately echo the call of Abraham, who was told to get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house (Gen. 12:1).

Ruth, a Moabitess, has made an Abraham-like departure - leaving everything familiar to bind herself to Naomi's people and Naomi's God, with no promise of reward and every reason to expect hardship. Boaz has weighed that, and it is her costly faithfulness, not her need, that fills his sight. He looks past her scarcity to her character, and what he finds there moves him to bless.

Ruth's reply circles back to the same word she began with, but its weight has changed: Let me find favour in thy sight, my lord (v. 13). At the start of the chapter, favour - chen, grace - was a hope she carried out to the fields, a thing she prayed someone might show her. Now it is something received, and her words turn to gratitude. And listen to what she names as the gift: not the grain, not the water, not the protection first of all, but the kindness of his speech.

Thou hast comforted me… thou hast spoken friendly unto thine handmaid. The Hebrew behind spoken friendly is literally to speak to the heart - warm, reassuring words that reach the inner person. Boaz's tongue has done as much for Ruth as his provision; he has spoken to her heart. And still she keeps her humility intact - though I be not like unto one of thine handmaidens. She does not let the kindness inflate her; she receives it as gift while remembering she has no claim on it.

Gratitude and humility together: she takes the grace fully, and presumes upon it not at all.

When the workers break for the midday meal, Boaz does not leave the gleaner standing at a distance; he calls her in. At mealtime come thou hither, and eat of the bread, and dip thy morsel in the vinegar (v. 14). The fare is plain - bread, a sour-wine dip to soften and flavor it, roasted grain - but the honor is enormous. A foreign widow who came to gather scraps is seated beside the reapers, inside the circle of the household, at the table of the master's own workers.

And Boaz serves her himself: he reached her parched corn, passing food into her hand. She did eat, and was sufficed, and left - she ate her fill and there was still some over. That little phrase quietly tells the whole story of the day: the one who set out hoping to gather a few dropped ears is now eating until she is satisfied with food to spare, at the table of the man whose field she “happened” to enter.

He is establishing her, meal by gesture by word, as one who belongs under his care.

After the meal, when Ruth rises to work again, Boaz goes further still - and he does it where she cannot hear. Let her glean even among the sheaves, and reproach her not (v. 15): ordinarily a gleaner kept well back from the bound bundles, but Boaz tells his men to let her in close, into the richest part of the harvest. Then the deepest kindness of all: let fall also some of the handfuls of purpose for her, and leave them, that she may glean them (v. 16).

They are to pull grain from the very sheaves and drop it deliberately in her path - not to scatter it carelessly, but to leave it on purpose, so that she will gather it thinking it merely fell. This is generosity that hides itself. He arranges her abundance without letting her feel like a charity case, so that her dignity is kept whole even as her basket is filled. The result lands at evening: it was about an ephah of barley (v. 17) - somewhere near thirty pounds of grain, far beyond what an ordinary day of gleaning could ever yield.

What looked like a humble day of gathering scraps has become a day of overflowing provision, enough to feed two widows for a long while - and Ruth never saw the hands that made it so.

Ruth carries the day's harvest home, and the sheer size of it speaks before she does: her mother in law saw what she had gleaned (v. 18). An ephah of barley laid down in the doorway is not the take of an ordinary gleaning day, and Naomi knows it. Ruth also brought forth, and gave to her the food she had saved from her own meal - even her gratitude turns outward, sharing the leftovers of the kindness she received.

Naomi's questions come quick and warm: Where hast thou gleaned to day? and where wroughtest thou? blessed be he that did take knowledge of thee (v. 19). She blesses the unknown benefactor before she even hears his name - she can read the kindness in the size of the basket. And then Ruth speaks the name, set deliberately at the very end of her sentence like the turn of a key: The man's name with whom I wrought to day is Boaz. The whole chapter has been waiting for that name to land in Naomi's ears.

The name changes everything, and Naomi sees it all in an instant. Blessed be he of the LORD, who hath not left off his kindness to the living and to the dead (v. 20). This is the woman who came home from Moab insisting she be called Mara, bitter, certain the LORD's hand had gone out against her. Now, for the first time in the book, she blesses the LORD - and notice the careful grammar of her praise.

The he who has not left off his kindness is, in the same breath, both Boaz and the LORD; the kindness of the man and the kindness of God have become impossible to tell apart. Naomi had thought God had stopped being good to her house; the ephah of barley and the name of Boaz tell her she was wrong - His kindness has been at work the whole time, reaching even to the dead, to the lost line of Elimelech and her sons.

Then she names the thing the reader has known since verse 1: The man is near of kin unto us, one of our next kinsmen. The word is goel - redeemer. Boaz is not merely a generous landowner; he is family, a man with both the right and the duty to redeem Naomi's emptied house. What looked like a chance day in a random field is suddenly revealed as the opening move of redemption. Hope has a name now, and the name is a kinsman.

The chapter closes not with a sudden reversal but with a season of being kept. Ruth reports Boaz's further word - keep fast by my young men, until they have ended all my harvest (v. 21) - and Naomi, who only verses ago was naming herself bitter, now gives counsel like a woman whose hope has begun to stir: It is good, my daughter, that thou go out with his maidens, that they meet thee not in any other field (v. 22).

Stay where you are safe. Stay under his covering. And Ruth does, gleaning beside Boaz's maidens unto the end of barley harvest and of wheat harvest - through the whole long span of the season, weeks of harvest - and dwelt with her mother in law. The book that opened in famine and funerals ends this chapter in a steady rhythm of provision: a foreign widow, once empty, now fed and guarded day after day, safe under the eye of a kinsman who is also a redeemer.

The redemption is not finished - that waits for the threshing floor and the gate - but it has surely begun. Ruth came to Bethlehem with nothing; by the end of this chapter she is seen, fed, protected, and quietly woven into the household of the LORD's people.