Generations, remembrance, and the God who gathers what has come apart

A Note to the Reader

This is the second and final part of our journey through Ruth 4. In Part One, we followed Ruth and Boaz to the gate of Bethlehem, where land was redeemed, a name was preserved, and a child was placed into Naomi’s arms.

The story seemed to have reached its destination when that child’s line brought us to David.

Ruth had one more thing to show us.

Now.

Now.

Such a small word. It is easy to pass over. Yet standing there at the beginning of Ruth’s final genealogy, it seems almost to ask us to stop.

Look again.

The story appeared to have finished. Ruth and Boaz had married. A child had been born. Naomi held him against her breast. The women named him Obed, and suddenly the narrator carried us forward:

Obed fathered Jesse.

Jesse fathered David.

David.

The destination had been revealed.

Then:

“Now these are the generations of Perez…”

Now.

Except the Hebrew beneath our English now is even more interesting.

וְאֵלֶּה — weʾelleh

And these…

The word begins with vav: ו

Here vav is doing one of its most ordinary jobs in Hebrew. Attached to the beginning of a word, it commonly functions as the conjunction:

and.

Nothing mysterious or hidden. Simply:

And these are the generations of Perez…

Yet standing where it does, that little and matters.

The genealogy does not float away from the story we have just read. What happened to Ruth and Naomi in Bethlehem belongs to something that began before them and will continue beyond them.

The narrator has taken us forward to David. Now he turns backward.

Beyond Jesse.

Beyond Obed.

Beyond Boaz.

Back to the name the elders had spoken when they blessed Ruth.

Perez.

Then Scripture gives us a word that seems almost impossible after the way this book began:

Generations.

These Are the Generations

The opening chapter of Ruth had seemed to be about the ending of generations.

Elimelech died. Mahlon died. Chilion died.

No children were named. No sons remained to carry the household forward. Naomi left Bethlehem with a husband and two sons and returned with graves behind her and Ruth beside her.

Empty, she called herself.

Scripture simply kept telling the story.

Now the book that began with a family line disappearing into death ends with:

Generations.

Then it begins naming them.

Perez fathered Hezron.

Hezron fathered Ram.

Ram fathered Amminadab.

Amminadab fathered Nahshon.

Nahshon fathered Salmon.

Salmon fathered Boaz.

Boaz fathered Obed.

Obed fathered Jesse.

Jesse fathered David.

Name after name. Generation after generation.

Life moving beyond the boundary where Naomi once believed the story had ended. The story that seemed to have stopped in Moab was moving again.

But there was something else to notice.

The way the word was written.

A Word Written Full

There is something unusual about the word generations here.

In the Hebrew Bible, this particular word appears in this fully spelled form only twice.

Once near the beginning of Genesis. And once here, at the end of Ruth.

The Hebrew word translated generations is:

תּוֹלְדוֹת — tôledôt

Look closely at the spelling:

ת ו ל ד ו ת

There are two occurrences of the Hebrew letter:

ו — vav

Inside tôledôt, these vavs are doing ordinary orthographic work. Hebrew can use consonantal letters to help indicate vowel sounds, and here the vavs help represent the two o sounds in the traditional reading of the word.

Biblical Hebrew permits fuller and shorter spellings of the same word. Scholars commonly describe these as full and defective spellings. Those terms can sound more significant than they are.

“Full” does not mean tôledôt itself means fullness. “Defective” does not mean anything is wrong with the word. They simply describe how it is spelled.

Near the beginning of Genesis, Scripture says:

“These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”

There tôledôt appears in its full form:

תולדות

Both vavs are present.

Elsewhere, the word appears in a shorter form:

תולדת

One vav is absent.

The word is still tôledôt. It still means generations, and its traditional reading can supply the expected vowel.

The ear could hear the familiar word. But the eye could see that something was missing.

The received Hebrew text preserves these differences rather than making every occurrence of tôledôt look alike.

Later Jewish interpreters noticed.

They were accustomed to attending closely to Scripture, even to its very letters. Here they encountered the same letter we have already seen at the beginning of Ruth’s genealogy:

ו — vav

Inside tôledôt, the vavs help represent vowels. They are not conjunctions.

Placed before a word, however, vav often performs that other familiar function:

and.

The functions should not be confused. A missing vav inside tôledôt does not linguistically mean separation, and its presence does not make the word mean restoration.

Still, they wondered.

Why did tôledôt appear full near creation?

Why did its spelling so often appear diminished afterward?

Why, here at the end of Ruth, in the generations of Perez, did they encounter it full again?

תולדות

Generations.

Both vavs present.

The observation did not end with spelling.

Genesis Rabbah looked from the full spelling near creation to the full spelling here in the generations of Perez and connected what had been lost after Adam with the hope of restoration through the line of Perez—a line from which Messiah was expected to come.

The spelling itself does not mean restoration or Messiah. That was the interpretation these readers drew from the pattern they saw in Scripture.

But what a place for them to find the word written full again.

Perez.

The very name from which Ruth’s closing genealogy begins.

The Generations of Messiah

That makes the opening of another biblical book difficult for a Christian reader to miss.

Matthew begins:

“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham.”

Then Matthew begins naming.

Abraham.

Isaac.

Jacob.

Judah.

Perez.

The generations continue.

Hezron. Ram. Amminadab. Nahshon. Salmon.

Boaz.

Obed.

Jesse.

David.

Names we have just encountered at the end of Ruth.

We cannot know whether the particular interpretation of the spelling of tôledôt preserved in later rabbinic literature was already circulating in Matthew’s day. The surviving sources are later, even though rabbinic works can preserve older traditions.

Matthew does not need that later interpretation for the connection to be striking.

Matthew announces Messiah and traces His genealogy through that same Perez-David line.

Jewish and Christian readers would come to different conclusions about whether Messiah had already come. Yet both looked down the same family line.

Perez.

David.

Messiah.

Matthew does something else worth noticing. He names women.

Tamar.

Rahab.

Ruth.

The woman whom Bethlehem once knew primarily by where she came from was not erased from the story when she finally belonged.

Matthew writes:

“Boaz fathered Obed by Ruth.”

Ruth.

Her name crossed the generations.

What Had Been Missing

This may be why the observation about the missing letter feels so at home in Ruth.

Ruth itself has already taught us to notice what is missing.

A husband. Sons. Home. Security.

A future.

A name that seemed to have no generation left to carry it.

Naomi knew what it was to remain recognizable while carrying absence within her.

When she returned to Bethlehem, the women asked:

“Is this Naomi?”

Yes.

She was still Naomi. Yet she knew what their eyes could not immediately see. Her husband and sons were missing.

So she answered:

“Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara… I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty.”

The graves in Moab remained. Bread could not fill their empty chairs, and barley could not undo what had happened.

Restoration in Ruth is not reversal.

The years in Moab remain part of Naomi’s story. Yet grief is no longer permitted to name its ending.

Something had remained too.

Ruth. The land. The name.

The God whose presence had sometimes been almost impossible to see.

Through ordinary acts of ḥesed, things Naomi thought had reached their end began to have a future again.

A foreign woman found a field. A landowner noticed her. Bread was shared. Grain was left behind. A widow asked for shelter. A man used his strength to provide it. A sandal was removed. A dead man’s name was spoken at the gate.

A child was born.

Then:

Generations.

Where Ruth Could See

Ruth could not see how far those generations would go. She could see Naomi, barley, and Boaz.

Then a child.

That was enough.

She had once stood in Boaz’s field and asked:

“Why have I found favor in your eyes, that you should notice me, since I am a foreigner?”

She had been noticed, welcomed, and called daughter.

She was known at the gate as a woman of ḥayil.

Now she was named among the mothers through whom Israel’s story would continue.

Naomi too had once asked for another name.

Mara—Bitterness.

The narrator never took Naomi from her. He continued calling her:

Naomi—Pleasantness.

Now Pleasantness sat with a child against her breast.

The women who once asked, Is this Naomi? could look at her again.

Grief had not disappeared. The dead had not been replaced. What happened in Moab had not somehow become good.

Grief simply did not get the final word.

Nor did famine, Moab, or death.

My God Is King

There is one more name worth remembering.

Elimelech—My God is King.

He died before he could see where the story was going. His name remained behind almost like a question:

Is God still King when everything visible seems to say otherwise?

Elimelech’s name had made a claim—My God is King—that his own death in Moab seemed to contradict. The book that opens with that unanswered claim closes with a genealogy carrying us generations past Elimelech—to David, and eventually to the hope of the King-Messiah.

Ruth never answers with a theological speech. It lets the story answer.

Generations later, the book places before us:

David.

A king no one in chapter one could see coming. Yet even David was not as far as those generations would go.

Matthew carries them forward to Jesus:

the Son of David, the Messiah.

From this side of the generations, something else becomes visible.

Ruth began in the days when Israel had no king. Naomi left Bethlehem—the House of Bread—during a famine, and soon there were graves in Moab. She returned when she heard that the LORD had visited His people and given them bread.

Now the generations carry us farther still—toward a King, and toward One who would call Himself the Bread of Life.

Ruth and Naomi could not see that far.

They could see a child.

Sometimes that is all a generation is given to see—the life immediately before it, while God alone knows how far the story will travel.

The Name That Remained

So we leave Ruth where Scripture leaves her. Living inside the life that had been given to her.

A husband.

A child.

Naomi nearby.

Bethlehem around them.

Fields where she had once gathered another person’s leftovers now part of the landscape she called home.

David belonged to a future she could not see.

She could not see how far the generations would go. Neither could Naomi.

Naomi had once looked at her life and said:

Empty.

The narrator did not argue with her. He turned our eyes toward the barley. At the end, he turns our eyes toward names.

The man at the gate who feared that redemption might endanger his own inheritance disappears from the story without one.

Boaz, who used what belonged to him to preserve the name of another, is remembered.

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

Ruth was remembered too.

The Moabite. The widow. The foreign woman gathering behind the reapers. The woman who once wondered why anyone had noticed her.

Centuries later, Matthew would write:

“Boaz fathered Obed by Ruth.”

The family that seemed to have reached its end had become generations.

And among the names Scripture would carry forward into the genealogy of Messiah was the name of the woman who once stood in a barley field and wondered why anyone had noticed her.

Ruth.

Her name remained.

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©️ Gilda Wray. All rights reserved.

Wray of Light

The Name That Remained