Who Was Ruth in the Bible? The Moabite Widow Who Became David’s Great-Grandmother

Ruth was a widow from Moab who would not leave her mother-in-law, and she became the great-grandmother of King David. She went with Naomi to Bethlehem, gleaned in the field of Naomi’s kinsman Boaz and married him; their son Obed was David’s grandfather. Her story is the Book of Ruth, four chapters set “in the days when the judges ruled”.

Christians know her as one of the few women named in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, and Jews read her book every year at the feast of Shavuot. The Hebrew lexicons explain her name as “friend” or “friendship”, and a friend is what she was. When Naomi came home from Moab saying, “I went out full, and the LORD hath brought me home again empty,” walking beside her was a foreign daughter-in-law who had no reason to come. The book tells how that empty woman was filled again, and most of the filling comes through the faithfulness of people like Ruth.

The book follows one family through four chapters, each set in a different place.

Chapter	Where	What happens
1	Moab, then the road to Bethlehem	A famine, three deaths, and Ruth’s vow to stay with Naomi
2	Boaz’s barley field	Ruth gleans; Boaz protects and feeds her
3	The threshing floor at night	Ruth asks Boaz, her kinsman, to marry her
4	The town gate	Boaz redeems the family land and marries Ruth; Obed is born

Famine, three deaths and a vow (Ruth 1)

A famine drove Elimelech, a man of Bethlehem, to Moab with his wife Naomi and their sons Mahlon and Chilion. There Elimelech died, and his sons married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth, “and they dwelled there about ten years.” Then both sons died too, and Naomi “was left of her two sons and her husband.”

When she heard that “the LORD had visited his people in giving them bread”, Naomi set out for home, and both young widows went with her. On the road she urged them to turn back: “Go, return each to her mother’s house: the LORD deal kindly with you, as ye have dealt with the dead, and with me.” She had no more sons for them to marry, she told them. Orpah kissed her and went back, but “Ruth clave unto her,” and when Naomi pressed her once more, Ruth answered:

Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.

Ruth 1:16–17 (KJV)

These are the book’s most famous words, and they are a daughter-in-law’s promise to her mother-in-law. In them Ruth gives up her country and her people, takes Naomi’s God as her own, chooses her grave, and seals it all with an oath in the name of the LORD, the God of Israel.

The two women came to Bethlehem “in the beginning of barley harvest.” The town knew Naomi, and she told them, “Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.” “I went out full,” she said, “and the LORD hath brought me home again empty.”

Gleaning in Boaz’s field (Ruth 2)

The law of Moses left part of every harvest for the poor. The reapers were not to clear the corners of a field (Leviticus 19:9) or go back for a forgotten sheaf: “it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow” (Deuteronomy 24:19). Ruth was both a stranger and a widow, so she went out to glean behind the reapers. “Her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging unto Boaz, who was of the kindred of Elimelech,” the book says.

Boaz, “a mighty man of wealth”, noticed her and asked who she was. He told her to stay in his field and ordered his young men not to touch her, and she asked him why: “Why have I found grace in thine eyes, that thou shouldest take knowledge of me, seeing I am a stranger?” He had heard, he said, how she had left “thy father and thy mother, and the land of thy nativity” for a people she did not know, and he blessed her in the name of “the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.”

At mealtime he fed her, and he told the reapers to let fall handfuls on purpose for her to pick up. When Naomi heard the name Boaz, she said, “Blessed be he of the LORD, who hath not left off his kindness to the living and to the dead”, and told Ruth: “The man is near of kin unto us, one of our next kinsmen.” Ruth gleaned in his fields “unto the end of barley harvest and of wheat harvest”.

The threshing floor (Ruth 3)

When the harvest was over, Naomi set out to find Ruth a husband and a home. Boaz would be winnowing barley on the threshing floor that night, she said, and Ruth was to wash, anoint herself, wait until he had eaten and lain down, and then “uncover his feet, and lay thee down.” Ruth did all of it. At midnight he woke, afraid, and found a woman at his feet, and she told him who she was: “I am Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman.”

With those words she was asking him to marry her. The Hebrew word for “skirt” is kanaph, which also means a wing, and it is the same word Boaz had used in the field when he blessed her for trusting under God’s wings (Ruth 2:12). Ezekiel uses the same picture for the LORD taking Jerusalem as his own: “I spread my skirt over thee … and thou becamest mine” (Ezekiel 16:8).

Boaz blessed her for her “kindness” in not going after young men, “whether poor or rich”, and promised to do all she asked, “for all the city of my people doth know that thou art a virtuous woman.” But another kinsman stood nearer than he and had the first right. Boaz swore that if that man would not act, he would, and he sent her home before dawn with six measures of barley: “Go not empty unto thy mother in law.” Naomi told her to wait, “for the man will not be in rest, until he have finished the thing this day.”

At the town gate (Ruth 4)

In the morning Boaz sat down at the gate. When the nearer kinsman passed, Boaz called him over, gathered ten of the elders of the town, and put the matter to him: Naomi was selling the land that had belonged to Elimelech, and the kinsman had the first right to redeem it. The man said he would. Then Boaz told him the rest: “What day thou buyest the field of the hand of Naomi, thou must buy it also of Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of the dead, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance.”

At that the kinsman drew back: “I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I mar mine own inheritance.” He drew off his shoe, as the custom was, and the book stops to explain that custom to its readers as “the manner in former time in Israel concerning redeeming and concerning changing.” Boaz called the elders and all the people to witness that he had bought everything that was Elimelech’s, and that he had taken “Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon” as his wife. The people blessed the marriage: may the LORD make her “like Rachel and like Leah, which two did build the house of Israel”.

When Ruth bore a son, the women of Bethlehem told Naomi that the child would be “a restorer of thy life, and a nourisher of thine old age: for thy daughter in law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons, hath born him.” Naomi “took the child, and laid it in her bosom, and became nurse unto it.” The neighbours named him Obed, and the book closes with the line that runs from Pharez through Boaz and Obed to Jesse and David.

Her name probably means “friend” or “friendship”. In Hebrew it is Rut, and the standard lexicons take it as a form of re’ut, friendship. Strong’s concordance gives the meaning as “friend” and marks the derivation “probably”; the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon gives it without that hedge, explaining the name as standing for re’ut, “i.e. friendship”. The book itself never explains her name.

The Talmud explains the name another way. It asks, “What is the meaning of the name Ruth?”, and Rabbi Yoḥanan answers that she was privileged to have David descend from her, the David “who inundated the Holy One, Blessed be He, with songs and praises” (Berakhot 7b, in the Koren translation). The Hebrew verb for “inundated”, riva, sounds like Rut, so Rabbi Yoḥanan was playing on the sound of her name and reading it in the light of her great-grandson.

Our English word “ruth” is another word altogether. It means “pity or compassion”, comes from Middle English and the verb rue, and gives us “ruthless”.

A kinsman-redeemer was the relative who stepped in when a family was about to lose its land or its name. The Hebrew word is go’el, from a verb the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon defines as “redeem, act as kinsman”. Strong’s concordance sums up the duty: “to be the next of kin (and as such to buy back a relative’s property, marry his widow, etc.)”. In Ruth the King James Version translates it “kinsman”.

Behind Ruth 4 stand two laws of Moses. One is about land: “If thy brother be waxen poor, and hath sold away some of his possession, and if any of his kin come to redeem it, then shall he redeem that which his brother sold” (Leviticus 25:25). The other is about a man who dies without children: his brother was to marry the widow, “and it shall be, that the firstborn which she beareth shall succeed in the name of his brother which is dead, that his name be not put out of Israel” (Deuteronomy 25:6). Boaz brings the two laws together when he buys Elimelech’s field and marries Mahlon’s widow, so that the land stays with a son who carries the dead man’s name.

Her case does not match the law in Deuteronomy exactly, though. The law names the brother, and Boaz was a kinsman rather than a brother-in-law, for Naomi had already said she had no more sons to give.

Ruth was a Moabite, and the book reminds us of it again and again: she is called “Ruth the Moabitess” five times, and she speaks of herself as “a stranger”. The law of Moses shut her people out: “An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the LORD for ever” (Deuteronomy 23:3).

Jewish law, though, reads that verse as a rule about men. The Mishnah, the rabbis’ study book of law edited at the end of the second century, holds that Ammonite and Moabite men who convert may never marry into Israel, and then adds that the women are “permitted immediately” (Yevamot 8:3). In the words of her vow Ruth had already joined Naomi’s people and Naomi’s God, and My Jewish Learning describes her as the Moabite woman who followed Naomi “into the Jewish people”.

She is there because she was the great-grandmother of King David, and Matthew traces Jesus’ family through David. He names her in a single line: “And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse” (Matthew 1:5). Matthew’s line from Phares to David follows the list at the end of Ruth name for name, in the King James Version’s New Testament spellings: Booz for Boaz, Phares for Pharez, Esrom for Hezron and Naasson for Nahshon.

Besides Mary, Matthew’s list includes only four women: Thamar and Rachab (Tamar and Rahab in the Old Testament), Ruth, and Bathsheba, whom Matthew calls only “her that had been the wife of Urias”, that is, Uriah. Luke’s genealogy passes through the same men, “the son of Obed, which was the son of Booz”, but names no women; it is set out in the genealogy from Noah to Jesus in Luke 3.

John Chrysostom, preaching on the first chapter of Matthew, asked why these women appear at all. Matthew, he said, “has mentioned Ruth also and Rahab, the one an alien, the other an harlot, that you may learn that He came to do away with all our ills.” He read Ruth’s marriage as a picture of Christ and the Church: “Boaz when he saw her neither despised her poverty nor abhorred her mean birth, as Christ having received the Church, being both an alien and in much poverty, took her to be partaker of the great blessings.”

Shavuot is the feast of weeks, which the law ties to the grain harvest: “thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest” (Exodus 34:22). Ruth’s story runs through the same weeks, from the start of the barley harvest to the end of the wheat harvest. Shavuot is also the holiday “celebrating the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai”.

Rabbi Ronald H. Isaacs, writing for My Jewish Learning, notes that in traditional settings the book is read on the second day of the festival, and he gives three explanations for it. The one most often quoted is that Ruth came to Israel around the time of Shavuot, and “her acceptance into the Jewish faith was analogous of the acceptance of the Jewish people of God’s Torah.” The second is that the book ends with David’s genealogy, and “there is a legend that David died on Shavuot.” The third is the harvest itself.

Ruth Rabbah, a rabbinic commentary on the book, records Rabbi Ze’eira’s answer. The book, he observed, holds no laws of purity or impurity, of what is forbidden or allowed. “Why was it written? It is to teach you the extent of the good reward for those who perform kindness” (Ruth Rabbah 2:14). The Hebrew word is hesed, and the commentary reads it in Naomi’s prayer on the road that the LORD would “deal kindly” with her daughters-in-law. In the King James Version, “kindness” comes back when Boaz praises Ruth on the threshing floor (Ruth 3:10).

Only twice in the whole story does the narrator say that the LORD did something: Naomi hears that he has given his people bread, and after Ruth marries Boaz, “the LORD gave her conception”. Everything in between happens quietly, through people’s choices and through what the book calls Ruth’s “hap”, her luck, in finding Boaz’s field. All the while, the characters bless one another in God’s name at almost every turn. And Naomi, who said the LORD had brought her home empty, ends the book with a grandson in her arms.

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