Ruth.
Ruth’s Loyalty
The line gets read at weddings constantly. The situation it was said in was far bleaker than that. The woman who said it had no obligation to say anything at all. She was a foreigner with nothing to gain.
Which woman in the Old Testament was known for her loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi?
👉 Ruth.
She was told to go home, twice
Naomi had left Bethlehem years earlier because of a famine, with a husband and two sons. They settled in Moab, which was foreign territory with a long and hostile history against Israel.
The husband died. The sons married local women, Orpah and Ruth. Then both sons died too.
That left three widows and no men, in a world where a widow with no household had almost no way to feed herself.
Naomi decided to go back. On the road she stopped and told both daughters-in-law to return to their own mothers. She was blunt about why. She had no more sons to offer them and no prospect of any. Staying with her was a dead end.
Orpah went. The text does not criticise her for it. It was the reasonable thing to do.
Naomi told Ruth again to follow her. Ruth refused, and said the line about where you go I will go.
Then they walked to Bethlehem together, and the women of the town came out to greet Naomi. She told them not to call her Naomi any more. Call me Mara, she said, which means bitter.
That is the part the wedding readings leave out.
Gleaning, and a sandal
Ruth kept them alive by gleaning. The law required harvesters to leave the edges of a field, and anything they dropped. The poor and foreigners were allowed to collect it. It was a legal right, and it was also hard, hot work at the bottom of the social order.
The field she ended up in belonged to Boaz, a relative of Naomi’s dead husband.
What follows involves an old custom about family land and who has first claim on it. There was a nearer relative than Boaz, and he had first refusal. He said yes to the land and no once Ruth came with it.
The deal was sealed in front of the town elders when he took off his sandal and handed it over. That was how a transfer was made binding. The book pauses to explain the custom to its own readers. It had already gone out of date by the time anyone wrote it down.
A footnote inside the Bible.
Ruth and Boaz married. Their great-grandson was David. A Moabite widow ends up in the family line, and the New Testament opens by listing her by name.
What we can take from this
Most loyalty is not one dramatic decision. It is a lot of ordinary days that nobody watches.
The famous line is a single sentence on a road. It is the smallest part of what Ruth actually did.
The rest was months of bending over in other people’s fields in the heat, collecting leftovers. Then going home to a woman who had renamed herself after her own bitterness.
Nobody was filming that. There was no moment in it worth reading at a wedding.
That is roughly what looking after someone actually consists of. The version people repeat is the sentence. The version that costs something is the fortnight after, and the fortnight after that. The person you are doing it for is not especially grateful, because they are not in a state to be.
Ruth also had a clean exit and knew it. Orpah took it and the book does not think less of her. Staying was not the only decent option, which is what makes it a choice rather than a duty.
One thing worth sitting with
Naomi asked to be called bitter in front of the whole town, and in the same breath said she had come back empty.
Ruth was standing right there. The story records it without comment, and never has Naomi take it back.
Something on near you
The gleaning laws existed so that people with nothing had somewhere to go that was not charity.
Plenty of communities still run the modern version. Walkn on Water lists 980 churches across New Zealand. Find one near you