Chesed, the engine of the book
Chesed is the loyalty a person keeps when no law compels it. The word falls three times in Ruth and each time it is a hinge. Naomi releases her daughters-in-law with a blessing, 'Jehovah deal kindly with you, as ye have dealt with the dead, and with me' (1:8). Naomi recognizes the same loyalty in God when she hears whose field Ruth gleaned in, 'who hath not left off his kindness to the living and to the dead' (2:20). Boaz names it in Ruth at the threshing floor, 'thou hast showed more kindness in the latter end than at the beginning' (3:10). Human loyalty and God's own loyalty are described with one word, and the book lets the reader see them running together.
Ruth 1:8 · Ruth 2:20 · Ruth 3:10
Providence under an ordinary surface
God speaks to no one in Ruth and performs no miracle. What the narrator says instead is that Ruth 'came and gleaned in the field after the reapers: and her hap was to light on the portion of the field belonging unto Boaz' (2:3), the flattest possible description of the turn the whole book rests on. Naomi has already said aloud who is at work, having heard 'how that Jehovah had visited his people in giving them bread' (1:6). Ruth is Scripture's clearest case of God governing history through harvest law, a field boundary, and one man's decency.
Ruth 1:6 · Ruth 2:3 · Ruth 4:13
Empty, and filled
Naomi states the book's problem in her own words at the gate of Bethlehem: 'I went out full, and Jehovah hath brought me home again empty' (1:21), and asks to be called Mara instead of Naomi. Nothing in the book argues with her. The answer comes as an event rather than an explanation, when the women tell her that her daughter-in-law 'is better to thee than seven sons' (4:15) and she takes the child into her own lap (4:16).
Ruth 1:20-21 · Ruth 4:15-16
The wings of refuge
Boaz blesses Ruth for having come to Israel's God, 'under whose wings thou art come to take refuge' (2:12). One chapter later Ruth asks him for the same thing in the same word, since kanaph carries both the wing of a bird and the skirt of a garment: 'spread therefore thy skirt over thy handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman' (3:9). The man who prayed the blessing is asked to become the answer to it, and he does.
Ruth 2:12 · Ruth 3:9
The outsider brought all the way in
Ruth is called the Moabitess at 1:22, 2:2, 2:21, 4:5, and 4:10, so her origin is still being repeated in the chapter where she is married and bears a son. She names herself the same way at Boaz's feet, 'seeing I am a foreigner' (2:10). What changed her standing was a confession she made on a road, 'thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God' (1:16), and the book carries her from that sentence to a place in Israel's royal line without ever pretending she was born inside it.
Ruth 1:16 · Ruth 2:10 · Ruth 4:10
The law kept, and then exceeded
Israel's harvest law left the corners and the dropped grain for the poor, the sojourner, and the widow (Leviticus 19:9-10; Deuteronomy 24:19). Ruth asks for more than that, to 'gather after the reapers among the sheaves' (2:7), and Boaz grants it and adds to it, telling his men to 'pull out some for her from the bundles' (2:16). Chapter 4 shows the same movement in law rather than in grain: Boaz takes on a redemption the nearer kinsman was free to decline, and does it in front of ten elders at the gate.
Ruth 2:7 · Ruth 2:16 · Ruth 4:9-10
