Ruth1chapter 1

Ruth 1:1-2

in the days when the judges ruled: The book fixes its own date inside the period Judges describes, so what follows runs alongside chapters where every man did that which was right in his own eyes. A famine drives a man out of Bethlehem, which means house of bread, and he goes to Moab, which Deuteronomy 23:3 bars from the congregation to the tenth generation. The names carry the story: Elimelech means my God is king, in a book set when there was no king in Israel, and Naomi means pleasant, which verse 20 undoes.

Ruth 1:3-5

Three men die in three verses and the text gives no cause for any of them. The sons marry Moabite women, which the law discouraged and did not forbid outright in the way Deuteronomy 7:3 forbids the seven nations. Verse 5 leaves the sentence standing on the woman rather than the men, the woman was left of her two sons and her husband, which is the position the rest of the book answers.

Ruth 1:6-7

What turns her homeward is a report that the LORD had visited his people in giving them bread, so the house of bread has bread again. This is the only act of God the chapter reports directly, and it is done offstage in a country she is not in. Everything else in the book happens through ordinary people keeping faith.

Ruth 1:8-9

She sends them back and prays for them in the same breath, and the word behind kindly is chesed, the covenant loyalty word, used here by an Israelite of two Moabite women. What she asks for them is rest, each of you in the house of her husband, which is exactly what Boaz gives Ruth in chapter 3 and what Naomi herself gives up by asking. The kiss and the weeping are the first of two rounds; the second parts them.

Ruth 1:10-13

Naomi argues from the levirate law of Deuteronomy 25:5, that a brother raises up seed to the dead, and shows the law cannot reach them because there are no more sons and will be none. The argument is legally exact and it is meant to release them rather than to persuade them. She ends by putting the whole of it on God, the hand of the LORD is gone out against me, which is the reading of her own life she carries until chapter 4.

Ruth 1:14-15

Orpah kissed and Ruth clave, and the verb behind clave is the one Genesis 2:24 uses of a man cleaving to his wife. Orpah does nothing wrong: she does what Naomi told her twice to do, and the text never blames her. Naomi's last argument names what is actually at stake, thy sister in law is gone back unto her people, and unto her gods, so the choice being put to Ruth is a choice of God before it is a choice of country.

Ruth 1:16-17

Six clauses in rising order, from where she walks to where she is buried, and the middle pair is the hinge, thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. She closes with the covenant oath formula, the LORD do so to me, and more also, and swears it by the name of the God she is adopting rather than by Chemosh. The words are read at weddings and they are spoken here by a widow to her mother in law, on a road, with nothing to gain.

Ruth 1:18

The argument stops because it has been answered, and the verse records the silence rather than an agreement. Naomi says nothing to Ruth for the rest of the chapter, and at verse 21 she describes herself as coming home empty while the woman who refused to leave her is standing there. The book lets that stand without comment for three chapters.

Ruth 1:19-21

The town asks is this Naomi, which tells a reader how much ten years and three graves had changed her. She answers by renaming herself Mara, bitter, against Naomi, pleasant, and gives her reason twice using the name Almighty, which is Shaddai, the name God used of himself to Abraham at Genesis 17:1. I went out full, and the LORD hath brought me home again empty is her own summary and the book will overturn it at 4:14-17 in the mouths of the same women.

Ruth 1:22

She is called the Moabitess here and four more times in the book, so the thing that makes her an outsider is repeated rather than quietly dropped. The closing clause sets the season, the beginning of barley harvest, which is the law of gleaning at Leviticus 19:9 becoming possible and the whole of chapter 2 waiting on it. Matthew 1:5 puts this woman in the genealogy of Christ in the same verse as Rahab.