Ruth and Boaz
about 1100 BC, traditional dateTraditional date
A Moabite widow follows her mother-in-law Naomi to Bethlehem, gleans in the fields of Boaz and marries him. Their son Obed is the grandfather of David, and Matthew names Ruth in the genealogy of Jesus.
The book of Ruth is set “in the days when the judges judged”. A famine drove Elimelech of Bethlehem to Moab with his wife Naomi and their two sons. Elimelech died there. The sons married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth, and after about ten years both sons died as well (Ruth 1:1–5).
Naomi set out for home and told her daughters-in-law to go back to their own families. Orpah went. Ruth refused: “where you go, I will go; and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:6–17). The two women reached Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest (Ruth 1:22).
Ruth went to glean behind the reapers, a right the law gave to the poor and the foreigner (Leviticus 19:9–10). She came by chance to the field of Boaz, a wealthy relative of Elimelech. He had heard what she had done for Naomi, and he told his men to leave grain for her (Ruth 2:1–16). Later Naomi sent Ruth by night to the threshing floor where Boaz was winnowing barley. There she asked him to act as the family’s near kinsman, the relative who had the right to redeem its land (Ruth 3:1–13) (Leviticus 25:25).
At the town gate, before ten elders, Boaz offered that right to a closer relative. The man gave it up when he heard that Ruth, the dead man’s widow, came with the land, “to raise up the name of the dead on his inheritance”. Boaz then bought Elimelech’s land and took Ruth as his wife (Ruth 4:1–10). She bore a son, Obed, and the women of the town said, “A son is born to Naomi” (Ruth 4:13–17).
The book ends with a genealogy: Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David (Ruth 4:17–22). Deuteronomy shuts Moabites out of the assembly of Israel (Deuteronomy 23:3); this book makes a Moabite woman the great-grandmother of King David. Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus names her, “Boaz became the father of Obed by Ruth” (Matthew 1:5), and Luke’s runs through Boaz, Obed and Jesse as well (Luke 3:32).
How this is dated
Traditional date. From later tradition or from internal biblical chronology, with no outside anchor.
The book dates its story only to “the days when the judges judged” (Ruth 1:1). Its closing genealogy makes Boaz the great-grandfather of David (Ruth 4:21–22), who became king about 1010 BC (David Becomes King). Three generations before David points to the late twelfth or early eleventh century BC. The year shown is a round figure, not a date given by any source.
When the book itself was written is debated. It explains the handing over of a sandal as a custom of “former time” (Ruth 4:7), so it looks back on the events from some distance. Robert L. Hubbard, The Book of Ruth (1988), argues for the early monarchy; Frederic W. Bush, Ruth, Esther (1996), argues from its language for the years around the exile.
Primary sources
In context
Grows out of
- c. 1375 or c. 1200 – c. 1050 BC, traditional date