The famous line “your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16) tells of Ruth’s devotion to her mother-in-law Naomi, after Naomi’s husband and sons had all died in Moab. So the two widows returned to Israel, hoping to eke out a living there, now that the famine had ended (1:6).

Ruth began to glean in the barley fields of Boaz, a wealthy land owner, picking up individual grains of barley that the reapers had spilled on the ground while they were cutting and gathering the grain heads. Boaz had heard of Ruth’s devotion to her mother-in-law, and so he instructed his workers to be a little clumsier than usual in binding the bundles of grain, so that more would spill on the ground for Ruth to find (2:15-16). She had found favor in his sight (2:10-14).

The law of levirate marriage required a brother or other near relative to marry a widow to raise up a son for the man who had died, so that his name would not be forgotten (4:10). Boaz was the second-closest cousin, so there was some delay in sorting out whether the closest cousin would fulfill the duty of levirate marriage (3:12-13), but that got taken care of with a public meeting witnessed by the community elders (4:1-6).

We can see that this story got written down a long time after the events took place. The line “this was the custom in former times” (4:7) tells us that this was no longer the custom, and the author writing the story down did not have confidence that the reader would know what the custom used to be. Moreover, the fact that Ruth and Boaz would turn out to be the great-grandparents of King David (4:17), would not be knowable until four generations later.

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In any given moment, we can’t see what long-term effect our actions might have, O Lord. Showing devotion to a mother-in-law, or offering generosity to an immigrant: will these things make any lasting difference? We can only trust that you are at work, behind the scenes and within our actions, to bring your good purpose to fulfillment.

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