The Name That Remained

Part One: Ruth 4

A reflection on Ruth 4, redemption, inheritance, and the God who gathers a future from what seemed finished

Morning came.

Somewhere in Bethlehem, Ruth waited. She had done everything she could do. She had left Moab. Clung to Naomi. Worked the fields. Gone down to the threshing floor. Spoken the words Naomi had not told her to speak:

Spread your wing over your servant,

for you are a redeemer.

And Boaz had answered:

Do not fear.

He had also told her something she had not known.

There was another nearer redeemer.

So Ruth had returned to Naomi carrying six measures of barley and a promise whose fulfillment now rested beyond her reach.

Naomi had looked at the grain.

He will not rest, she said, until he has settled the matter today.

So Ruth waited.

Boaz did not.

At the Gate

He went up to the gate.

In the days when the judges judged and there was no king, the gate was more than the opening through which people entered and left a town. It was where elders sat. Disputes were heard. Transactions became public. Names and reputations were known.

There is something fitting about Boaz going there now. Only hours earlier, in the darkness, he had told Ruth:

“All the gate of my people knows that you are a woman of ḥayil.”

Ruth was not there that morning, but her character had arrived before her. The gate already knew her name.

So Boaz sat down.

Then the narrator gives us one of those little words I have learned to notice:

Behold.

The nearer redeemer was passing by.

Again, providence in Ruth does not arrive with thunder. No angel blocks the road. No voice speaks from heaven. A man simply happens to be walking past the gate at precisely the moment Boaz is sitting there waiting for him.

Boaz called out:

“Turn aside. Sit here.”

He addressed him in a peculiar way.

Pelōnî ʾalmōnî.

Mr. So-and-so.

Such-and-such.

The narrator does not tell us his name.

That is worth hearing.

Boaz gathered ten elders of Bethlehem.

“Sit here.”

They sat.

Then Boaz began with land.

Naomi, he explained, was disposing of the family interest in the field belonging to Elimelech.

The legal details belong to a world distant from ours, and the story does not explain all of them. The concern, however, is clear enough. Something belonging to Elimelech’s household stood in danger of passing beyond it. And this man was close enough to act.

Boaz told him:

Redeem it.

The man answered:

“I will redeem it.”

For one brief moment, the matter seemed settled. The land could be recovered. The family property could remain within the larger kinship circle.

Then Boaz told him what else stood inside the field.

Ruth.

The Moabite widow of Mahlon.

And with Ruth came an obligation larger than property:

“to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance.”

Suddenly, Mr. So and So reconsidered.

“I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I impair my own inheritance.”

The story never tells us exactly what calculation changed his mind.

The financial obligation may have become too great. A future son associated with the dead man’s line may have complicated what would eventually happen to the property. There may have been other concerns the narrator assumes his first hearers understood. We should not accuse the man of motives Scripture never gives him. The narrator does not call him wicked. He had the right to decline. And he did.

But the reason he gives is worth noticing.

My inheritance.

He could not risk what belonged to him in order to preserve what belonged to the dead.

So he turned to Boaz:

“Redeem it for yourself.”

And removed his sandal.

It was an old custom. So old, apparently, that the narrator pauses to explain it. In matters of redemption and exchange, the removal and transfer of a sandal confirmed the transaction.

This is not quite the humiliating sandal ceremony described in Deuteronomy for a man refusing levirate duty.

No woman removes his sandal.

No one spits before him.

No public formula of shame is pronounced.

The man simply relinquishes his right.

And Boaz receives it.

There before the elders, one man steps away.

Another steps forward.

Then Boaz speaks about land and

about names.

“You are witnesses today.”

He names Elimelech, Chilion and Mahlon.

The men who had died in Moab were not there to speak for themselves. But their names were spoken at the gate of Bethlehem.

Next, Boaz named Ruth.

“Ruth the Moabite, the wife of Mahlon, I have acquired as my wife…”

He then explained why:

“to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance, that the name of the dead may not be cut off from among his brothers and from the gate of his place.”

The name of the dead.

Naomi had once wondered whether ḥesed had abandoned the living and the dead. Now, at the gate of Bethlehem, we begin to see what kindness toward the dead can look like.

The dead cannot protect their land. They cannot defend their household. They cannot carry their own names into another generation. They cannot ask someone to remember.

So the living remember for them.

Boaz would not allow death to have every last thing it had taken. The men were gone, yet their names would not be allowed to disappear with them.

Suddenly the man sitting across from Boaz becomes strangely important. The man who had worried that redemption might endanger his inheritance had relinquished the opportunity to preserve the name of another.

And what was his name?

The story never tells us.

Pelōnî ʾalmōnî.

Mr. So-and-so.

We should be cautious here.

Ruth does not tell us that God erased his name as punishment. The man may simply function anonymously because his personal identity is irrelevant to the narrator. Yet the literary irony is difficult not to notice.

The man who protects his own inheritance disappears from the story without a name.

Boaz, who spends what is his to preserve another man’s name, is remembered.

Ruth, who surrendered homeland and security rather than abandon Naomi, is remembered.

The dead man whose name seemed destined to disappear is spoken again at the gate.

There are ways of preserving ourselves that can make our lives smaller.

There are also ways of giving ourselves away that allow something of us to remain.

The Women Who Built Israel

The elders answered:

“We are witnesses.”

Then something remarkable happened.

They blessed Ruth.

The woman who had once entered Bethlehem known simply as:

the Moabite.

The foreign woman.

The widow.

The gleaner behind the reapers.

The woman who had wondered why anyone would notice her.

Now the men at Bethlehem’s gate said:

“May YHWH make the woman who is coming into your house like Rachel and Leah, who together built the house of Israel.”

Rachel.

Leah.

The mothers of Israel.

They not only made room for Ruth at the edge of the community; they spoke of her as someone through whom Israel itself might continue to be built.

The foreigner had become family.

Then they named another woman.

Tamar.

“May your house be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah.”

It was an unusual blessing. But Ruth belonged to an unusual family story.

Tamar too had been widowed. Her future too had been endangered. The men responsible for preserving her household had failed her. Tamar too had acted boldly when the ordinary structures around her offered no future.

Her story was not Ruth’s story, yet Bethlehem remembered her. And now, as Ruth entered the house of Boaz, the elders reached backward into Judah’s complicated family history and brought Tamar forward to stand beside her.

One a widow from long ago.

Another a widow from Moab.

Two women whose courage became part of preserving a line that might otherwise have disappeared.

And from Tamar had come:

Perez.

That name would return before the chapter was finished.

YHWH Gave Her Conception

Boaz then took Ruth as his wife.

For one of the few times in the book, the narrator draws back the veil and tells us explicitly what YHWH did.

“YHWH gave her conception.”

Ruth bore a son.

Ten years in Moab had passed without the story mentioning a child. The narrator never tells us why.

It does not call Ruth barren.

It does not blame Mahlon.

It does not call their childlessness judgment. The silence should remain silence.

We are told that now there was a child. The narrator wants us to know that this life was received as gift.

YHWH gave conception.

Ruth bore a son.

Then the women of Bethlehem returned. The same women who had watched Naomi walk into Bethlehem at the end of chapter one. They had looked at the grieving woman standing before them and asked:

“Is this Naomi?”

They had heard her answer:

Do not call me Pleasantness.

Call me Bitterness.

I went away full.

YHWH has brought me back empty.

They had not argued with her then. They had allowed grief to speak.

Now they spoke again. This time they blessed YHWH.

“Blessed be YHWH, who has not left you this day without a redeemer.”

And strangely, they were speaking to Naomi.

Ruth had married Boaz.

Ruth had borne the child.

Yet somehow Naomi’s story was being restored too.

The women said the child would become:

“a restorer of life.”

The Hebrew carries a word we have heard throughout Ruth.

Šûḇ.

Return.

Naomi had returned. Orpah had returned. Ruth had refused to return from following Naomi and instead returned with her to Bethlehem.

Again and again, the book had asked:

Who will return?

Where will they return?

What can return after so much has been lost?

Now a child is placed before Naomi and called:

one who will return life to you.

Not return Elimelech, Mahlon or Chilion.

Scripture does not pretend one human life can simply replace another.

The graves in Moab remained. But death had not been permitted to make the future empty forever.

Life had returned.

Then the women said something that Naomi in chapter one could scarcely have imagined.

They spoke of Ruth.

“Your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is better to you than seven sons, has borne him.”

Who loves you.

At last someone named what had been moving through this story all along.

Ruth had called it clinging.

Boaz had called it ḥesed.

Now Bethlehem called it:

love.

And then:

better than seven sons.

Seven sons represented an almost unimaginable fullness in that world.

Sons meant household.

Continuity.

Strength.

Inheritance.

Future.

Naomi had lost two and believed herself empty.

Now the women of Bethlehem looked at the foreign daughter-in-law who had walked beside her all the way from Moab and said, in effect:

Look again.

Ruth had been standing beside Naomi when Naomi said she was empty. The story had not corrected her then.

Grief sometimes sees only the shape of what is missing.

Now Bethlehem helped her see the shape of what remained.

Ruth could not replace Naomi’s sons. She was not asked to. She was something else entirely.

A daughter who loved her.

In a culture that knew how to count the value of sons, the women made an astonishing calculation:

Ruth was better than seven.

A Son Has Been Born to Naomi

Naomi took the child. She placed him against her breast. And she became his caregiver.

The woman who had entered Bethlehem saying:

empty

now held life against her chest.

Not everything had returned. But something had begun that death could not prevent.

Then the women said perhaps the strangest sentence of all:

“A son has been born to Naomi.”

No.

A son had been born to Ruth.

Everyone knew that. The narrator had just told us. The women were not confused about biology.

They were speaking about restoration.

The household Naomi believed had ended in Moab had a future again.

The woman who had said:

I have no sons

now heard Bethlehem announce:

A son has been born to Naomi.

And the neighborhood women gave him a name.

Obed.

One who serves.

Then the narrator tells us something the women standing around Naomi could not possibly have understood in its fullness.

Obed would father Jesse.

And Jesse would father—

David.

A king.

—

©️ Gilda Wray. All rights reserved.