Ruth: A Woman of Nobel Character

Alright ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to balance things out a bit. As of late, it seems like I’ve been bashing women a lot. I can’t say I really feel that’s the case but it’s probably how things will be perceived. How I see it personally is that I’m just trying to find the truth. More than anything else, I identify as a Veritasian. Someone who seeks truth above all else. It’s often painful but that much can’t be helped, unfortunately.

So, to make up for any perceived sense of bias, today I wanted to talk about Ruth. Ruth is one of the most noble women to ever live. The book of Ruth in the Bible is a good read. For the sake of time, I’m going to paraphrase the whole thing here, but it’s worth reading the full story. So back around the same time when the clown show known as Judges was taking place, there was a famine. A man named Elimelek, his wife Naomi, and their sons Mahlon and Kilion, moved to the land of Moab. There the sons got married to Moabite women named Ruth and Orpah.

Some time passed (about a decade from start to finish) and Elimelek, Mahlon, and Kilion all died. After hearing the famine in Israel is over, Naomi decides she is going to go home. She told both Orpah and Ruth to go back to their parents. At first, the girls say they’ll stay with her but eventually, Orpah is persuaded by Naomi to go home. Ruth, however, decides to stick with Naomi despite her protestation.

Specifically, she says, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”

And at this point, we get our first glimpse into why Ruth is such a great woman. Presumably, both Orpah and Ruth had intact families. I would imagine they probably had both parents living and additional siblings. Naomi had no one. She was all alone in the world. So, although Ruth could have gone home to her family, she decided to sacrifice that to stay with Naomi. Ruth stood to gain nothing from doing this. In Ruth 1:11, Naomi spells this much out. She explicitly states that the girls have no positive expectations of coming with her. So here we see Ruth taking a personal loss for the sake of her mother-in-law Naomi.

This demonstrates compassion nearly beyond comprehension. It would be like my wife dying before we have any kids and then me moving in with my mother and father-in-law to take care of them. I like to pretend that I’m a good person. I have a hard time imagining that I’d do something like that. If I did, it would be solely thanks to the grace of God. So, yeah, Ruth is already demonstrating that she’s a better person than I am.

Back in Israel, Naomi and Ruth arrive near Bethlehem as the barley harvest is starting. There they start living the poverty life. Naomi seems to be retirement age, so Ruth is the one doing all the heavy lifting. She spends her time out in the fields collecting leftover grain so she and Naomi can eat.

This shows us another thing about Ruth. She has a work ethic. She’s not the kind of woman who is lazy or who sits on her butt at home. As a consequence of her labor, Boaz, a man of standing and a relative of Naomi, sees Ruth picking up leftovers in a field he owns.

They talk and Ruth gains the respect of Boaz. Specifically, he says, “I’ve been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband—how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with a people you did not know before. May the Lord repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.”

Boaz then goes on to give her special treatment. He allows Ruth to work with the women he employs while they’re finishing up the grain harvest. Discussing this later, Naomi concludes that this is an act of God being favorable to them. Previously, she was rather salty about the death of her sons and husbands. So, things go on like that for a while until Naomi gets the idea to fix Ruth up with Boaz. The goal would be to find Ruth a family, so she has someone to provide for her too when she’s old.

According to that end, Ruth sneaks into the threshing floor. There she finds Boaz, who was eating and drinking before lying down to go to bed. When she finds him, she seems to climb into bed with him. The text says, “Ruth approached quietly, uncovered his feet, and lay down.” According to the commentaries and such, it appears that doing this was a way for a woman to propose marriage to a man in that culture. It carries no inappropriate or suggestive connotations.

After waking up and discovering this, Boaz agrees but says they need to follow the proper protocol. He sends Ruth off with some barley when it’s morning. While she’s doing that, Boaz heads into town. There he talks to the man who has first rights to Ruth on account of being a closer relative of the family than Boaz himself was. Talking to that man, he didn’t want anything to do with Ruth, so he, in the presence of witnesses, gave the right of redemption to Boaz.

So, Boaz takes Ruth as a wife. Together they have a child named Obed. Obed is the father of Jesse who is the father of David. And that’s how the story wraps up. Ruth is then later mentioned in the book of Matthew, specifically in Matt 1:5-6. Ruth is one of only four women mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus (along with Tamar, Rahab, and Bathsheba). Of the four, Ruth is the greatest.

Tamar tricked Judah into impregnating her. Judah married off his oldest son Er to Tamar, but he was wicked, and he died. Then Onan was married to Tamar, but his pullout game was strong on account of not wanting children who wouldn’t be his under the law. God didn’t like that, so he killed Onan. That’s how Tamar ended up needing to trick Judah into doing the deed with her. So, Tamar is perhaps clever, but I wouldn’t exactly call her noble and Judah is kind of a loser for putting her in the situation in the first place.

Rahab was a prostitute. She helped Israelite spies escape the city of Jericho. For doing this, she and her family were spared when the Israelites destroyed the city. I probably wouldn’t call her a noble woman either. If anything, she was good at figuring out which way the wind was blowing.

Last but not least, we have Bathsheba… I dislike her a lot. She was married to Uriah the Hittite. One night, King David sees her bathing on her rooftop and thinks she is beautiful. He sends for her, and she sleeps with him, and she gets pregnant. Meanwhile, while she’s screwing King David, Uriah, her husband is fighting in a war that David started. Once David and Bathsheba find out she’s pregnant David sends for Uriah to have him return from the front immediately. The hope was that Uriah would sleep with Bathsheba upon his return and the adultery could be hidden that way.

Unfortunately, Uriah is a more noble person than David. Instead of going home to bed his wife, he sleeps on the steps of the palace because, “The ark and Israel and Judah are staying in tents, and my commander Joab and my lord’s men are camped in the open country. How could I go to my house to eat and drink and make love to my wife? As surely as you live, I will not do such a thing!” So next David tries to get him drunk. That doesn’t work either. So, to solve this problem, David sends Uriah back to the front with a letter for Joab. The letter said, “Put Uriah out in front where the fighting is fiercest. Then withdraw from him so he will be struck down and die.” It’s pretty damn cruel to have a man deliver his own damn death warrant.

Joab did what he was told, and Uriah died. So that’s Bathsheba’s story. I might revisit the whole saga at a later date because I think the full story is quite interesting. The key takeaway is that she committed adultery and it led to her husband being murdered by the damn king. So, she sure as hell isn’t a noble woman.

So yeah, of the four women in Jesus’ genealogy, Ruth is the only one who isn’t a degenerate. She is one of the very few people in the Bible for whom not much bad can be said. That’s something you start to realize once you get into the Bible. You can tell it’s true because all of the people in it suck which is consistent with real people. As a kid, you want to look up to King David. Especially after you read the story of David and Goliath. However, a longer look reveals that he’s just as much of a scoundrel as the rest of us. He’s a broken, flawed, and deeply sinful human being and despite that, God still forgave him. That’s the most important theme of the whole book. Despite all of us always screwing everything up, God always seems to forgive us.

Getting back to Ruth, the traits that make her a noble woman are her humility, her modesty, her work ethic, her self-sacrifice, and her compassion. All women would be wise to take note of this and act accordingly. Most of you probably won’t so in that case, I would then direct you to Eve, Tamar, Rahab, Bathsheba, Jezebel, Delilah, Athaliah, and Sapphira. I’m sure things will go as well for you as they did for them.