Ruth and the Barley Harvest at Bethlehem

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A woman is walking across a field with her head down, and she is the only person in it who is not allowed to be there.

That is not quite true. She is allowed. There is a law that says she is allowed. But nobody has told her that, and nobody has told the reapers, and she has her scarf pulled low and her eyes on the ground, and every time she bends to pick up a handful of dropped barley she glances over her shoulder to see if someone is going to shout. The sun is climbing. The reapers are singing something rude about a goat. And a man on a fine grey donkey has just ridden in at the gate of the field, and he is looking straight at her.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is from the Book of Ruth, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and which is one of the shortest and gentlest books in the Bible. A few of the small conversations, and most of the weather, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

The Book of Ruth begins with a sentence that sets the whole thing in its time. It says that this happened in the days when the judges ruled. That is a long way back. It is before there were any kings in Israel, before Jerusalem was anybody's capital, and a good while before anybody wrote a psalm for the temple. The judges were a rough sort of leader, who turned up when there was trouble and went home when it was over. The book of Judges, which comes just before Ruth in most Bibles, is not a restful read. People break promises, tribes fight each other, and the whole thing ends with the sentence that everybody did what was right in his own eyes.

Ruth is the other side of that. Ruth is what was also going on in the same years, in the quiet places, among people who were not in the history books at all. It is a story with no battle, no miracle in the sky, and no king. It has a famine, a funeral, a walk, a harvest, a night on a threshing floor, a conversation at a town gate, and a baby. And those turn out to be enough.

The story opens in Bethlehem. Bethlehem was a small hill town, a few hours' walk south of Jerusalem, and its name means house of bread, which is either a fine joke or a fine piece of planning. The hills around it are good barley country. In a year with rain, the slopes are green in winter and gold in the spring, and the whole town smells of warm grain. But in the year our story starts, the rain did not come. And then it did not come again. A famine fell on the land, and in a farming village a famine is not a headline. It is a quiet that gets into every house. The jars get lighter. The meals get smaller. People start to look at one another's children and count.

There was a man in Bethlehem called Elimelech, and his wife was called Naomi. Her name means pleasant, which is a lovely thing to be called and, as we shall see, a lot to live up to. They had two sons, Mahlon and Chilion. And when the famine had gone on long enough, Elimelech did what a father does. He decided that his family would not starve in the house of bread, and that they would go where there was food.

The nearest place with food was Moab. Moab was the country on the other side of the Dead Sea, to the east, high up on a plateau with its own rain. You could see it from the hills near Bethlehem on a clear day, a long blue wall across the water. It was not a friendly neighbour. The people of Moab and the people of Israel had a long history of arguments, and the Law had hard things to say about it. So this was not a casual move. It was a family choosing to live among people who were not their own, because the alternative was worse. I think we can all understand that. People have been packing up and crossing borders for bread since the first border.

So they went. They loaded what they could carry, and they said goodbye to the hill town and the family land, and they came down, and across, and up the other side. And in Moab they settled. They found a house. They found work. Naomi learned where the good market was, and which neighbour talked too much, and how to say good morning in a Moabite accent without making the baker laugh.

And then Elimelech died.

The book says it in one short sentence. It does not linger. Elimelech, Naomi's husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. That was hard, and it was a hard thing to be, a widow in a foreign land. But she had her boys. And the boys grew up, and the boys married. They each married a Moabite woman. One was called Orpah. The other was called Ruth.

And they lived like that for about ten years.

Now I would like you to notice what the book does not say. It does not say that Naomi was cold to her daughters-in-law. It does not say that the household was unhappy. It does not give us any of the quarrels that mothers-in-law are supposed to have in the jokes. What we find out later is that these three women loved each other very much. You do not hear it in the telling of the ten years. You hear it afterwards, when the thing that tests it comes. But I like to imagine those ten years as ordinary, and good: the three of them in a kitchen, with the bread, and the smoke, and the long evenings, and Naomi telling the girls about a hill town where it rained properly in the winter, and Ruth saying, one day I will see it.

Then both of the sons died.

The book does not say how. It does not say it was a sickness, or an accident, or anything. It just says that Mahlon and Chilion both died, and the woman was left without her two sons and without her husband. There were three widows in one house, and no men, and no money, and no land of their own in Moab. In the world of the judges, a woman without a man to speak for her had very few ways to eat.

Naomi had heard something. News travels, even over a lake. Somebody had come through from the west, a trader perhaps, or a cousin, and had said that the Lord had visited his people and given them bread. The rain had come back to Bethlehem. The barley was growing again.

So Naomi decided to go home. She got up, and her two daughters-in-law got up with her, and the three of them set out from the place where they had been living, on the road back toward the land of Judah.

I want you to picture them. The sun is going down on a dry road, and three women are walking in a line. Nobody is saying much. Naomi is in front, a little stooped, a woman who went east with a husband and two boys and is coming back with neither. The two younger ones are walking behind her. Orpah has a bundle on her head. Ruth has a bundle on her back. And somewhere between the house they have left and the border they have not yet reached, Naomi stops, and turns round, and tells them to go home.

She is not being unkind. This is the great kindness of her life. She says to them, go back, each of you, to your mother's house. She does not say to your family, or to your people. She says to your mother's house, which is a warm phrase, and a very feminine one, and it means: go back to where you will be looked after. And she says, may the Lord deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. And she says, may the Lord grant that you find rest, each of you, in the house of a husband.

And then she kisses them. And they all begin to cry.

I don't think there is a sadder moment in the whole book. These are women who know exactly what is being asked. If they go with Naomi, they go to a country that does not like Moabites, with a mother-in-law who has nothing to give them. If they go home, they may marry again, and have children, and a roof. The sensible thing is to go home. Naomi is perfectly right. She is also breaking her own heart.

They say they will go with her. She says no. She says, why would you? Do I have more sons in my body who could be your husbands? Am I going to have a baby tonight? Go home, my daughters. I am too old to have a husband. And even if I did, and even if I had sons by morning, would you wait for them to grow up? No, my daughters. It is more bitter for me than for you.

That is not a joke, though it has the shape of one. She is telling them the whole truth, and it is a bleak one, and she is telling it for their sake. And they cry again.

And then Orpah kisses her mother-in-law. Orpah says goodbye. And Orpah turns round, and goes home.

I want to be fair to Orpah. In some tellings she gets treated as the one who failed, and I do not think the book says that. She does what Naomi has asked her to do. She goes back to her own people, to her own mother, with the blessing of the woman she loves. It is a hard goodbye and a reasonable one, and nobody in the story blames her. She just goes, and we do not hear of her again, and I like to think she was happy.

But Ruth did not move.

Naomi looked at her. She said, look, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods. Go back after her.

And Ruth said the thing she is remembered for.

She said, do not press me to leave you, or to turn back from following you. For where you go, I will go. And where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts me from you.

It is one of the most beautiful speeches in Scripture, and it was said by a young woman on a dusty road, to her mother-in-law, who was telling her to go home. She says it plainly. She says it with no grand gestures. She is not promising anything glamorous. She is promising to be there. And the book gives us a little line afterwards that I have always liked. It says that when Naomi saw that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped speaking to her about it.

Anyone who has ever been in an argument with someone who has made up their mind will know exactly what that means.

So the two of them went on together, and they came to Bethlehem.

When they came into the town, the whole town was stirred. The book says that the women asked, is this Naomi? And I can hear them. It is the sound of a small place seeing someone it has not seen in ten years and not quite recognising her. She went away with a husband and two boys. She has come back thin and weathered and wearing a widow's cloak, with a foreign girl beside her.

And Naomi said, do not call me Naomi. Call me Mara.

Mara means bitter. It is a bleak thing to say, and she goes on to say it plainly. She says, I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty. The Almighty has dealt bitterly with me. Why call me Naomi, when the Lord has afflicted me?

I want to pause on this, because it is a thing the book does not hurry past. Naomi is not pretending. She is not being brave. She is telling her old neighbours exactly how she feels, and she is telling it to God as well, in front of everyone, and nothing in the book suggests this is wrong. The Scriptures have a lot of room for this kind of honesty. The psalms are full of it. You are allowed to be bitter in front of God. It is part of how you stay in the conversation.

What Naomi has not noticed, and the book has, is that she is not empty. She has said that she came back with nothing. And standing right beside her, with a bundle on her back, is a young woman who has just crossed a border for her sake. The writer lets that sit there, quietly, as the reader works it out.

And then comes one more sentence, which is the hinge of the whole story. It says that they came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.

That is the whole weather forecast. It is the beginning of spring. It is the time of year when the first barley is ready and every able person in the district is out in the fields with a sickle. After a famine, a barley harvest is as close to a festival as a farming village has, and for two penniless widows, arriving on the first day of it was either a very good accident, or not an accident.

Now, there was a law.

It is worth knowing about, because everything that happens next depends on it. In the Law of Moses, a landowner was told not to harvest right to the edge of his field. He was told not to go back over it a second time to pick up what he had missed. Whatever fell from the reaper's hand, or stood in the corners, or lay in the furrows, was to be left behind. And it was to be left for the poor, and for the foreigner, and for the widow and the orphan. It was called gleaning. The Law said, I am the Lord your God.

It is a very clever bit of social planning. It is not charity, where a rich man decides to be generous and can stop when he is tired of it. It is a built-in share, so that the poor do not have to ask, and the rich do not have to give from their hand, and nobody has to be humiliated. A landowner who kept the law was simply leaving the corners alone. The poor came along behind the reapers, and they picked up what was theirs.

But a law is only as good as the people who keep it. In some fields the reapers were generous. In some fields they were not. In some fields a gleaner who did not know the foreman would be sent off with a flea in her ear. And Ruth, who was a Moabite, a foreigner, and a stranger, with no family name in the town, did not know whose field would be kind.

She said to Naomi, let me go to the field. Let me glean among the ears of grain, behind someone in whose sight I find favour.

And Naomi said, go, my daughter.

That is the whole conversation. Short, simple, trusting. Naomi, who has just said that God has dealt bitterly with her, sends this girl off to look for a field, and the girl goes. And I think there is a lesson in it somewhere: that even in her bitterness, Naomi did not stop looking after Ruth, and Ruth did not stop looking after Naomi.

So Ruth got up, and walked out of the town, and went to the barley fields, and followed behind the reapers.

The book then says something that I think is one of the great understatements in the Bible. It says: and she happened to come to the part of the field belonging to Boaz, who was of the clan of Elimelech.

She happened to. That is the sentence. A woman who has never seen the place before wanders into one field out of the hundreds around Bethlehem, and the field is owned by her dead father-in-law's relative. The writer does not say, and God arranged it, or, and an angel led her. The writer says she happened to. And then he lets the reader see, over the next three chapters, that nothing about it was chance.

I find that moving. The Lord is hardly mentioned in this book. There is no burning bush, no voice from the cloud. And yet the whole thing is held in his hand. That is how he works in most of our lives, I think. Quietly, sideways, through a field that someone happened to walk into.

The sun was well up when Boaz arrived.

He was not a young man. The book calls him a man of standing, which is a polite way of saying he was wealthy, respected, and at ease in his own fields. He had the look of someone who has been to the same market for thirty years and knows everybody's grandmother. He came out from the town, riding past the olive trees, and when he came to the barley, he did what a good landowner does. He greeted his workers.

And the book gives us the greeting. It says that Boaz said to the reapers, the Lord be with you. And they answered, the Lord bless you.

I love that. It is how this man begins his day. Not with a list of orders, not with a complaint about the weather, but with a blessing, and they give it back. You can tell something about a place from how people greet each other at work.

And then Boaz looked across the field and saw a woman he didn't know.

He asked his foreman, whose young woman is that?

And the foreman answered. He said, she is the young Moabite woman who came back with Naomi from the country of Moab. She said, please let me glean and gather among the sheaves after the reapers. So she came, and she has been on her feet from early morning until now, except that she sat down for a little in the shelter.

I'd like you to hear what that says. The foreman has noticed her. He has watched her work all morning. He has seen that she asked permission first, which is a thing the Law did not require of her, but which is a kind of courtesy, and he has seen that she has barely stopped. He tells her story in four sentences, and not one of them is unkind. This is a well-run field.

Boaz went over to her. He did not shout across the barley. He walked up and spoke to her directly, which already tells us a good deal. And what he said was this: now, listen, my daughter. Do not go to glean in another field, or leave this one. Stay close to my young women. Keep your eyes on the field they are reaping, and follow them. I have told the young men not to touch you. And when you are thirsty, go to the vessels and drink from what the young men have drawn.

Think about that. She is a foreigner with no standing at all, and he is offering her the safest corner of his field, a promise of protection, and a drink of water from his own jars. It is all quiet, practical, and entirely proper. And it is enough that Ruth falls on her face, bows to the ground, and says: why have I found favour in your eyes, that you should take notice of me, when I am a foreigner?

Boaz tells her.

He says, it has been fully told to me, all that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband. How you left your father and mother and the land of your birth and came to a people that you did not know before. May the Lord repay you for what you have done, and may you have a full reward from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.

Under whose wings. It is a bird image, and it is a warm one. A hen with chicks. An eagle over the nest. A girl who left everything is being told that she has not left God behind. She has, without quite knowing it, walked under his wings. And Boaz, who has heard the whole story from the town, has been quietly watching to see whether anyone would say something kind to her. And since no one has, he will.

Ruth says, I have found favour in your eyes, my lord, for you have comforted me and spoken kindly to your servant, though I am not one of your servants.

I have always loved that last bit. She is not one of his servants. She has no claim on him at all. And she knows it, and she says it, and that makes his kindness more remarkable, not less.

At mealtime Boaz called to her again. He said, come here, and eat some bread, and dip your morsel in the wine vinegar.

It is a small detail, and I love it. It was a field meal. The bread was the flat bread of the harvest, and the vinegar was the sharp sour wine that the workers dipped it in to make it taste of something in the heat. It sounds a little like having a sandwich and a pickle. She sat down beside the reapers. And he handed her roasted grain, and she ate until she was full, and she had some left over.

I like that, too. She had some left over. She took it away to save. Because she was not eating for herself alone.

When she got up to glean again, Boaz gave quiet orders to his young men. Let her glean even among the sheaves, and do not reproach her. And pull out some stalks for her from the bundles, and leave them for her to glean. Do not rebuke her.

Do you see what he has done? The Law said he had to leave her the corners. He has gone further. He has told his men to let her into the sheaves, where the good grain is, and even to drop some on purpose. And he has done it so quietly that she will never feel it as charity. She will just feel that it is a good field to glean in, and that the reapers are, somehow, very clumsy this morning.

That is the kind of kindness that does not humiliate anyone. It is a bit like a friend who always seems to have picked up the bill without you noticing. It gives you the thing and lets you keep your dignity.

So Ruth gleaned in the field until evening. And when she had beaten out what she had gathered, which means she threshed it with a stick on the ground, it came to about an ephah of barley.

An ephah is a measure of about, well, the books disagree. It is somewhere between half a bushel and a full one. It is a great deal for one woman to gather in a single day. It is, in fact, an enormous haul. The people of Bethlehem who heard about it must have thought the harvest was very kind to the girl.

She carried it into the town, and she showed it to her mother-in-law. And she also brought out the food that she had saved from her lunch.

Naomi looked at all of it. And she said, where did you glean today? And where have you worked? Blessed be the man who took notice of you.

Ruth told her. She said, the name of the man I worked with today is Boaz.

And Naomi said, blessed be he by the Lord, whose kindness has not forsaken the living or the dead.

Something has changed in Naomi's voice. For the first time since the road, she is talking about the Lord's kindness, and not his bitterness. She has just heard a name, and she knows what it means. She says, the man is a close relative of ours. He is one of our redeemers.

I should explain redeemers.

In the Law of Moses, land was not meant to be lost forever. Every family had a share, given in the days of Joshua, and if a family got into such debt that they had to sell it, the nearest male relative had the right, and the duty, to buy it back. That man was called the redeemer. The old word is go'el, which means someone who stands in for the family. If a man died without a son, the redeemer might also marry the widow, so that the dead man's name and land would not disappear from Israel.

It was a kind of insurance, held by relatives rather than companies. And it meant that when Naomi said, he is one of our redeemers, she was not just saying he is a cousin. She was saying, there is a way back for us. Our family is not finished.

Notice how slowly she says it. This is a woman who thought her story was over. She is picking up a thread.

And Ruth said, he even said to me, you shall keep close by my young people until they have finished all my harvest.

Naomi said, it is good, my daughter, that you go out with his young women, so that nobody will meet you in another field.

So Ruth stayed close to the young women of Boaz, gleaning until the end of the barley harvest and the wheat harvest. And all that time, she lived with her mother-in-law.

That is two months, give or take. Two months of mornings. Out at dawn, home at dusk. Two women in a little house, eating the barley, and counting the days. I think this is the part of the story we tend to skip, because nothing happens. Nothing dramatic. They are just getting through. And the writer tells it in a single line, because that is how most of life goes. A great deal of it is just getting up and going to work and coming home and being kind.

But the harvest does not last forever. Barley gives way to wheat, and wheat gives way to the threshing floors, and one evening Naomi sat down with Ruth and said something brave.

She said, my daughter, should I not seek some security for you, so that it may be well with you?

Look at that. This is Naomi, who a few weeks ago said call me bitter. She is thinking about somebody else's future. She is a woman with every reason to turn inwards, and she has turned outwards instead. She has looked at this girl who followed her home, and she has decided that Ruth is not going to spend her life picking up other people's grain.

And she has a plan.

She says, is not Boaz our relative, with whose young women you were? See, he is winnowing barley tonight at the threshing floor.

Now, a threshing floor was a flat, hard circle of ground on a windy hill, where the harvested grain was beaten and then tossed in the air with forks, so the breeze would carry off the chaff and the heavy grain would fall. It was done in the evening, when the wind got up. And at the end of the work the owner would eat and drink, and since there were thieves about, he would often sleep right there beside the heap.

So Naomi told Ruth what to do. She said, wash yourself and anoint yourself, and put on your best clothes, and go down to the threshing floor. But do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. When he lies down, notice the place where he lies. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down. And he will tell you what to do.

Now, we have to be careful here, because that is a strange instruction to modern ears. It sounds, to us, like something it is not. I would like to say very plainly that nothing improper takes place in this scene, and the book is at pains to say so. What Naomi is describing is a ritual of asking. In that world, to lie at the feet of a man and to ask him to spread his cloak over you was a way of saying, I am a widow, you are a redeemer, will you redeem me? It was a formal request for protection and marriage, acted out in the dark so that nobody in the village would have to see her ask. It was bold. It put all the risk on Ruth. If Boaz were a different sort of man, she could be shamed, or sent away, or worse. Naomi knew that. She sent her anyway, because she trusted him, and Ruth went because she trusted Naomi.

And Ruth said, all that you say I will do.

That is her whole reply. Seven words in my translation, and she goes.

So Ruth went down to the threshing floor, and did just as her mother-in-law had told her. Boaz ate and drank, and his heart was merry, which means he was content and in good spirits, not that he was in any way the worse for wear. He went to lie down at the end of the heap of grain. And Ruth came softly, and uncovered his feet, and lay down.

Now it is the middle of the night. The wind has dropped. The stars are enormous. The big heap of barley is a darker shape in the dark. And somewhere in the middle of the night, the man shivered, and turned over, and found that there was a woman lying at his feet.

He said, who are you?

She said, I am Ruth, your servant. Spread your cloak over your servant, for you are a redeemer.

I would like you to hear the dignity of that. She does not say, please, I have no one. She says, you are a redeemer. She names his duty, and his right, and gives him the chance to do it. And she uses the same image he used himself, in the field, because now she is the one asking. Under whose wings, he said. Spread your cloak, she says. She has taken his own words and handed them back. It is the neatest thing in the book.

And Boaz said, may you be blessed by the Lord, my daughter. You have made this last kindness greater than the first, in that you have not gone after young men, whether poor or rich.

He is saying: you could have chosen anyone. You chose me, an older man. It is a compliment, and a tender one, and he is not at all offended. He is, I think, rather moved.

He says, and now, my daughter, do not fear. I will do for you all that you ask, for all my fellow townsmen know that you are a worthy woman.

A worthy woman. That is the word the book uses about Ruth, and it is the same word used in the book of Proverbs for the strong wife, the woman whose price is far above rubies. The whole town has noticed. The whole town knows.

But then he says something I think is a mark of his character. He says, and now it is true that I am a redeemer. Yet there is a redeemer nearer than I.

He could have kept quiet. He could have said yes, and married her the next morning, and nobody would have known the difference. But there is another man in the family who has the first right, and Boaz will not take what is not his to take. He says, stay tonight. In the morning, if he will redeem you, good. Let him do it. But if he is not willing, then, as the Lord lives, I will redeem you. Lie down until morning.

So she lay at his feet until morning. And she got up before one person could recognise another. Because Boaz said, let it not be known that the woman came to the threshing floor. He is protecting her name, and his own, so that nothing in the town will be whispered about her.

And before she left, he said, bring the cloak you are wearing and hold it out. And he measured out six measures of barley, and laid it on her, and she went into the city.

Six measures. It is a good deal. It is, I think, a heavy load for one woman, and she will have been walking home in the grey dawn, bent under the barley, with her heart going like a drum.

Naomi was waiting. When Ruth came in, she said, how did you fare, my daughter?

And Ruth told her everything that the man had done for her. And she said, he gave me these six measures of barley, for he said, you must not go back to your mother-in-law empty-handed.

Do you hear that? Empty-handed. That was Naomi's own word at the town gate. I came back empty. And Boaz, who was not there, who never heard her say it, sends back the barley with a message that says: she is not to be empty. He answers her bitterness without ever knowing he has done so. It is lovely.

Naomi said, wait, my daughter, until you learn how the matter turns out. For the man will not rest but will settle the matter today.

Boaz went up to the town gate.

In those days, the gate was where the business of a town was done. It was not just a door in a wall. It was a kind of public room, with stone benches on either side, where the old men sat in the morning and settled whatever needed settling. Land sales. Disputes. Marriages. If something was said at the gate in front of witnesses, it was done.

Boaz sat down there. And just as he sat down, the other redeemer, the nearer one, came walking by. The book calls him only, friend, so I will call him the friend. Boaz called out to him, come over, friend, sit down here. And the friend came and sat.

Then Boaz took ten of the elders of the city, and said, sit down here. And they sat.

I can see the little scene. A bench, a morning, ten old men with their sticks and their cloaks, and two relatives in the middle. It's a small-town council. And there's a strong chance that one of the old men had to be woken up to come.

Boaz put the matter to the friend. He said, Naomi, who has come back from the country of Moab, is selling the parcel of land that belonged to our brother Elimelech. I thought I would tell you, and say, buy it in the presence of those sitting here and the elders of my people. If you will redeem it, redeem it. But if you will not, tell me, that I may know. For there is no one besides you to redeem it, and I come after you.

And the friend said, I will redeem it.

You can imagine Boaz's face. You can imagine what the ten elders were thinking. A field is a field, and a nearer relative has the first right, and here he is, saying yes, in front of the whole town. It looks, for a moment, as though the story has ended in the wrong place.

But Boaz had not finished. He said, the day you buy the field from the hand of Naomi, you also acquire Ruth the Moabite, the widow of the dead man, in order to restore the name of the dead to his inheritance.

I should say what this means. The redeemer who bought the land would have to marry the widow, and her first son would carry the dead man's name, and the land would go to that child and not to the redeemer's own family. So it was a good deal for the land and a poor one for the buyer's own estate. It would cost him the money, and then give the field away.

The friend said, then I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I impair my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption yourself, for I cannot redeem it.

And so he stepped aside. The book, which is always careful about customs, explains that in those days, to confirm a transaction in Israel, one party would take off his sandal and hand it to the other. So the friend took off his sandal, and gave it to Boaz.

I like to imagine that the friend went home with one bare foot, feeling fairly sensible and not at all sorry, and never found out what he had given up. We do not even know his name. He did not do anything wrong. He simply said no to something that was too costly for him, and in doing so, he is a man with no place in the history of the world. The writer treats him with perfect fairness, and with no name at all. It is, in its way, a small and gentle joke.

Then Boaz turned to the elders and all the people and said: you are witnesses this day that I have bought from the hand of Naomi all that belonged to Elimelech, and all that belonged to Chilion and Mahlon. Also Ruth the Moabite, the widow of Mahlon, I have bought to be my wife, to restore the name of the dead to his inheritance, that the name of the dead may not be cut off from among his brothers and from the gate of his native place. You are witnesses this day.

And all the people who were at the gate, and the elders, said: we are witnesses.

And then they blessed her. This is one of my favourite parts. They did not just say, congratulations. They said, may the Lord make the woman who is coming into your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel. May you act worthily in Ephrathah and be renowned in Bethlehem. And may your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah, because of the offspring that the Lord will give you by this young woman.

They gave her a welcome, you see. A foreign woman, a Moabite, the one the Law was most cautious about, and the whole gate of Bethlehem lifts up its voice and says: may you be like Rachel and Leah, the mothers of Israel. It is a kind of adoption. She came in as a stranger, and by the end of that morning she is counted as one of the family.

So Boaz took Ruth, and she became his wife. And he went in to her, and the Lord gave her conception, and she bore a son.

The women of the town came to Naomi. This is a lovely moment. They say, blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without a redeemer, and may his name be renowned in Israel. He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has given birth to him.

More to you than seven sons. In that world, seven sons was the most anyone could wish for. It was a way of saying the perfect number of blessings. And the women of the town say, this one girl is more than that to you.

They are right, of course. Ruth is the one who turned back for her. Ruth is the one who went out into the fields. Ruth is the one who went down to the threshing floor. And Naomi, who said she had come back empty, is now holding a baby.

The book tells us what she did. It says: then Naomi took the child and laid him on her lap and became his nurse.

That is the whole thing. A grandmother, or something like one, with a baby on her lap. It is the end of the bitterness, and the book does not make a speech about it. She just holds him.

And the women of the neighbourhood gave him a name. They said, a son has been born to Naomi. And they called his name Obed.

Now, Obed means servant, or one who serves, and it is a quiet, modest name for a boy. It is not a king's name. It is not a hero's name. It is a name for somebody who will do the work. And the book ends with a short list of who came after him. Obed was the father of Jesse. And Jesse was the father of David.

That is the end of the book, and it is one of the most surprising endings in the Bible. For the whole of the story, we have been watching two poor women. We have been watching a foreign girl pick up spilled grain. And the last sentence quietly says: and the child of this was the grandfather of the greatest king in Israel.

The writer does not say it with a flourish. He just puts it at the end, on the last line, like a signature. Everything in the book, the famine, the funeral, the road to Bethlehem, the gleaning, the night at the threshing floor, was part of how the Lord brought David into the world. And Ruth, the Moabite, who came in from outside, is the great-grandmother of a king.

And Christians read on. In the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, the genealogy of Jesus names Boaz, who was the father of Obed by Ruth. Among the very few women mentioned in that list, Ruth is there, a woman who came from outside the people of Israel, and is counted within it. For Christians, that is the final turn of the story. The line that goes down through David goes down through a Moabite who said, your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

Now. We've come a long way. The sun is down on the threshing floor, and the town gate is quiet, and I think it's time to slow right down.

Let us go back, one last time, to the house in Bethlehem. It is evening. The fire is low, and the day's bread is on the table. There is a baby in a basket by the hearth, breathing in that quick, small way that babies do. And there is an old woman beside him, with her hands in her lap, who once told a whole town to call her bitter.

I do not think she says anything. I think she looks at him for a long time.

Outside, the barley is cut, and the fields are stubble, and the first stars are coming out over the hills. The gleaners have gone home. The reapers have put away their sickles. And Boaz, who is a little tired and very happy, has just come through the door with a jar of water from the well, and has stopped, quietly, in the doorway, because he does not want to wake anyone.

And Ruth is sitting beside the basket, with her hand on the edge of it. She is thinking, if she is thinking anything, about a road, a long time ago, with the sun going down on it. She is thinking of a woman who tried to send her home. And she is thinking that she is, in fact, at home.

The fire settles. The baby sighs. And the whole town of Bethlehem, the house of bread, goes quietly to sleep.

Now, notes for the curious, which we do at the end of every episode, so that you know what you have just been told.

The only source for tonight's story is the Book of Ruth itself. It is four short chapters, and it is Scripture for both the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, and for Jews, who read it every year at the feast of Weeks, which falls in early summer at the end of the grain harvest. Scholars are not certain when it was written down, and they disagree about it, but it is set in the days of the judges, which is a good deal before David. We have told it as the book tells it. Nothing that happens has been changed.

What this episode made up is the colour. The ten years in the kitchen. The reapers singing about a goat, and the grey donkey Boaz arrives on. The foreman's small remarks, the half-joke about the clumsy reapers, the bare-footed friend going home, and the quiet scene at the end by the fire. None of those are in the book. They are an attempt to put flesh on what the book gives us in outline, and I hope they do not get in its way.

A word about two things that were hard to tell. The night on the threshing floor is often misunderstood. The text is plain that it was a formal request for redemption, not anything improper, and that Boaz sent her away before dawn to protect her good name. And the closing line about David and about Jesus is how Christians read the book, as part of a long story that the Lord was telling through quiet people; the book itself simply gives the family tree and stops.

Oh, and one more thing. There is no miracle in this book. Nobody is healed. Nobody sees an angel. The Lord speaks in no one's hearing here; he is named in blessings, in Naomi's complaint, and in one quiet line about conception. But I think it is the clearest picture in the Old Testament of what we mean when we say that he is faithful. He does it through a hard road, a field that someone happened to walk into, a landowner who greeted his workers with a blessing, and a girl who would not go home.

That's the story of Ruth for tonight. She has no single feast day that every church keeps, but her name is in the list of the ancestors of Jesus, and her book is read every year in the synagogue at the feast of Weeks. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And may the Lord, under whose wings Ruth came to take refuge, keep you tonight, and give you rest, and leave a little grain in the corners of your tomorrow. Goodnight, and God bless.

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