Ruth 1:8-18
Where you go, I will go
Naomi releases them twice and argues her own case for why staying makes no sense. Orpah kisses her and leaves. Ruth clings to her and swears by the LORD with a curse on herself if anything but death parts them.
People of the Bible
Ruth
A Moabite widow with no reason to stay, who would not be sent home.
Ruth marries into a family of foreigners who came to Moab because of a famine, and within ten years the father and both sons are dead. Her mother in law tells both daughters in law to go back to their mothers’ houses and find husbands, and means it, and one of them goes. Ruth does not. What she says instead is the most quoted speech in the book and it is a vow of nationality and of burial, not of affection. Then she follows an old woman into a country that has no obligation to her, and goes out to glean behind the reapers in a field she picks by chance.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Ruth
- 01
- 02
Ruth 2:1-13
She happened on the field
She goes out to glean and the narrator says her chance took her to the part of the field belonging to Boaz. He asks who she is and then tells her he has heard everything she did.
- 03
Ruth 2:14-23
Handfuls left on purpose
He tells the young men to pull stalks out of the bundles and leave them for her, and not to reproach her. She beats out an ephah, which is far more than a day of gleaning should yield.
- 04
Ruth 3:1-11
Spread your covering over me
At the threshing floor she uses his own words back to him: he had said she came under the LORD’s wings, and she asks him to spread his wing over her, and names him as a redeemer.
- 05
Ruth 4:13-17
Better to you than seven sons
The women of Bethlehem name the child, which is unusual, and they say it to Naomi about Ruth. Obed is the father of Jesse, and Jesse is the father of David.
Why it matters
The book is four chapters long, it happens during the time of the judges, and nothing miraculous occurs in it at all. What it describes is the law working as it was meant to: the corners of the field left unharvested, the kinsman with a right to redeem, the elders at the gate. A Moabite woman, from a people specifically excluded, becomes the great grandmother of David, and Matthew names her in the genealogy of Jesus.
9 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
