Ruth 2:8-23 – “Never give up on hope”
By James Galbraith
First Baptist Church, Port Alberni.
June 23, 2007
Text
Ru 2:8 So Boaz said to Ruth, “My daughter, listen to me. Don’t go and glean in another field and don’t go away from here. Stay here with my servant girls. 9 Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the girls. I have told the men not to touch you. And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.”
Ru 2:10 At this, she bowed down with her face to the ground. She exclaimed, “Why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me—a foreigner?”
Ru 2:11 Boaz replied, “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. 12 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. ”
Ru 2:13 “May I continue to find favor in your eyes, my lord,” she said. “You have given me comfort and have spoken kindly to your servant—though I do not have the standing of one of your servant girls.”
Ru 2:14 At mealtime Boaz said to her, “Come over here. Have some bread and dip it in the wine vinegar.”
When she sat down with the harvesters, he offered her some roasted grain. She ate all she wanted and had some left over. 15 As she got up to glean, Boaz gave orders to his men, “Even if she gathers among the sheaves, don’t embarrass her. 16 Rather, pull out some stalks for her from the bundles and leave them for her to pick up, and don’t rebuke her.”
Ru 2:17 So Ruth gleaned in the field until evening. Then she threshed the barley she had gathered, and it amounted to about an ephah. 18 She carried it back to town, and her mother-in-law saw how much she had gathered. Ruth also brought out and gave her what she had left over after she had eaten enough.
Ru 2:19 Her mother-in-law asked her, “Where did you glean today? Where did you work? Blessed be the man who took notice of you!”
Then Ruth told her mother-in-law about the one at whose place she had been working. “The name of the man I worked with today is Boaz,” she said.
Ru 2:20 “The LORD bless him!” Naomi said to her daughter-in-law. “He has not stopped showing his kindness to the living and the dead.” She added, “That man is our close relative; he is one of our kinsman-redeemers.”
Ru 2:21 Then Ruth the Moabitess said, “He even said to me, ‘Stay with my workers until they finish harvesting all my grain.’ ”
Ru 2:22 Naomi said to Ruth her daughter-in-law, “It will be good for you, my daughter, to go with his girls, because in someone else’s field you might be harmed.”
Ru 2:23 So Ruth stayed close to the servant girls of Boaz to glean until the barley and wheat harvests were finished. And she lived with her mother-in-law.
Review
We have seen the two women at the heart of this story arrive back in Israel safe and sound, after a journey fraught with danger.
Naomi, the older of the two, has lost hope in anything but simply surviving from day to day. She’s alive and back home, but she sees a sad and empty life ahead.
Ruth, Naomi’s daughter in law, is still hopeful of a better future. She has set out to work, so that the women would not be reduced to begging or worse.
She is out in the fields, gleaning the leftovers of the harvest. It’s brutally hard work, but she has applied herself well and caught the attention of Boaz, the landowner of the field.
When he learns about her hard work and love for Naomi, he’s moved. This was a day and age where people pretty well looked out for themselves, so such love and faithfulness to another stood out. Being a God-fearing man himself, he’s encouraged at the story of this selfless woman.
This is a good thing, because Boaz is also a relative of Naomi,
and as such can play a redeeming role in the lives of both women.
We’ll see in this story what can happen when we don’t lose sight of hope.
Story
An act of Kindness - Verses 8-14
Boaz starts by calling her over to provide what help he can for her.
He first asks her to stay in his field for gleaning, implying that she is a most welcome addition those making a living from his fields.
The fact that he rephrases it and says it again in the same breath shows that he’s not just being polite - he really wants here to stay put. He’s saying STAY HERE.
In doing so, she will be consider as one of the servant girls.
We might say “big deal”, not to many of us aspire to be servant girls!
But in their small, close-knit community this raises her stature greatly; she’s to be given the same respect as a employed labourer and not just treated as a working beggar.
He has changed her act of gleaning from a handout into a job given by him, making it a responsibility rather than an act of charity.
This would increase her stature even more - rather than just being a gleaner she’s working directly for Boaz, a man of standing in the community.
He also orders his men to leave her alone, showing her that he cares for her welfare, and that his invitation is not some deceptive trap.
A man like Boaz would have these orders standing amongst his men already, but he lets her know this to assure her that he’s on the up and up.
His last allowance is his most gracious, giving her permission to refresh herself from the water jars prepared for the harvesters.
The pace she had worked at already showed that she was willing to work as hard as she could and that she wanted to gather as much as she could.
However, she was no match for the hot sun over the fields.
As a gleaner she would have to leave the fields to find water to drink, or bring her own, but now she could draw water at the field and keep working.
The water itself would be in large jars at the side of the field – jars that were monstrously difficult to fill – workers would have lug the water from the main well on their backs out to the jars in the field. The work of filling these jars was usually the type of work left for foreigners and slaves.
Boaz could have made Ruth do this work, but instead he allows her to drink from that by all rights she should have been filling.
These benefits may seem like basic human rights to us today,
but they were a blessing hard to fathom for Ruth.
She is understandably shocked at this welcome,
and in searching for a response she humbly acknowledges his generosity.
However, her humility is not born in fear, and she bravely asks Boaz,
“Why me?”, especially since she was a known foreigner.
We’re not sure whether she’s curious or suspicious, but it shows that she’s smart enough to ask the question.
Her words, and more soon to come, show a sense of confidence and “street-smarts” that’s easy to overlook as we talk about her faithfulness and kindness.
She’s no dummy - she’s weathered some hard breaks, and she keeps her eyes open to what’s going on around her.
Boaz respects this, responding to her question with praise for what he’s heard about her. In a small town like Bethlehem it would have been impossible to not know her story.
He is as thorough in praising her as he was in granting her special privileges.
He reminds her that she has given up her homeland and family in order to help a displaced widow find her way home.
She has undertaken hard work in order to sustain her, and she has done all this as a new believer in the same God that Boaz believes
She is grateful again and thanks him, knowing that he has gone far beyond the norm to make her welcome and has also helped her dramatically increase her productivity at work.
Again, her words show a genuine appreciation while still maintaining a sense of her self as a person. She doesn’t grovel or demean herself,
but she certainly shows gratitude and humility.
An Invitation to dinner - verse 14-16
Ru 2:14 At mealtime Boaz said to her, “Come over here. Have some bread and dip it in the wine vinegar.”
When she sat down with the harvesters, he offered her some roasted grain. She ate all she wanted and had some left over. 15 As she got up to glean, Boaz gave orders to his men, “Even if she gathers among the sheaves, don’t embarrass her. 16 Rather, pull out some stalks for her from the bundles and leave them for her to pick up, and don’t rebuke her.”
It is after she leaves him that we get our first hint that Boaz’s interest is more than simply kindness. His generosity during mealtime shows a desire to relate to her, to get to know her better.
When Boaz invites her to the dinner circle she is being elevated to the status of a member of his family. It’s much like a servant being invited to sit down with the family for dinner.
To further the honour, Boaz himself serves her food from his table, giving her enough to bring some back for Naomi.
So in one day of work, Ruth has gone from a foreigner scavenging for food in a stranger’s field to a welcome member of the circle of friends of a wealthy and respected Israeli.
But does she gloat in her new place or sit back on her status? Not one bit.
She eats her fill and then gets back to work, taking advantage of the generous conditions set out by Boaz earlier.
It is most likely that she wants to capitalize on the gleaning early,
in case things go wrong or she gets squeezed out by other gleaners.
Boaz again helps her, but this time he’s going beyond kindness, showing a personal interest in helping her be successful.
He allows her to walk among the completed sheaves of grain, which was a big no-no for the gleaners during the harvest. The gleaners were apt to steal from the sheaves or maybe even make off with a sheaf or two.
Furthermore, the concentration of dropped stalks was at it’s highest here, so the harvesters usually picked these up themselves.
Boaz allows her to go where no other gleaner was allowed, and then double checks with his men to insure that she is not scolded or chased away from this lucrative area.
He also tell his men to drop good stalks on the ground for her to pick up, which was like adding dessert to a fine meal. This is a totally selfless gesture made to help Ruth gather whatever she could carry.
Theses gestures show that Boaz has taken a personal interest in her welfare. They are completely within his rights as a landowner, and no one else is losing out because of Ruth’s special treatment.
Ruth’s come a long way since the morning,
when she ventured into the fields of a man she didn’t know.
As the day ends she’s just about ready to report to Naomi the wonderful news of the day.
Part Three - verses 17-23
When Ruth could glean no longer, she took her kernels of grain to an flat, hard area and beat the husks off them with a stick, leaving the grain of seed behind.
As winds would come on to the field they would pick up the lighter, dried out husks and leave behind the grain.
When Ruth finishes threshing her grain she is left with enough grain to fill almost six milk jugs - 22 litres of grain.
This statistic doesn’t mean much by itself, but compare it to the average daily wage for an full harvester - 1-2 litres for a man and half that for a woman.
In short - she came home with enough to grain to equal almost half a month’s regular wages!
When she presents this bounty, along with the leftovers from dinner that she had saved for Naomi, the older woman simply has to know how she came across such good fortune.
Hearing the name of Boaz stirs her heart even more, far more, in fact, than seeing the surplus of grain. It stirs a hope that had seemed dead with in her.
When she returned home to Israel she had fallen in to despair,
seeing nothing but her losses and bemoaning her cruel fate.
But when she learns that Ruth has hit it off so well with Boaz
she remembers that Boaz has a very special relationship to her and, through Naomi’s dead son, Ruth herself.
Think back to the levirate law we talked about a couple of weeks ago.
If a man died and left a wife behind with no children, the legacy of the man was in danger of passing away forever. A brother of the man was obligated to marry the woman and have children with her, so that the deceased man’s name and family would not disappear.
If there was no brother available, another relative was to marry the woman so that she could bear a son, who would then bear the name of the deceased husband. This would preserve the man’s legacy so that, in the words of the Old Testament, “his name will not be blotted out from Israel”.
This relative was called the “kinsman-redeemer”, because he was related to the deceased man and he was redeeming his name from being erased from history.
It was usually the closest brother who would fill this role, but there was not one, it passed down the ranks of kin. We don’t know where Boaz sits on this chain, and we’ll later see that he’s not the only one who qualifies as a kinsman-redeemer. He’s close, though, possibly a first or second cousin.
To Naomi, hearing this news about Ruth meeting Boaz is literally like feeling God smiling on you. She had woke up to face a day of filled with nothing but waiting for Ruth to get home.
She’s been so blessed by this woman that she’s probably hurting for her.
After all, Ruth was a young woman, and she’s giving up far more than could be expected to help Naomi.
Now Naomi sees a light at the end of the tunnel - a really bright light - in the person of Boaz.
- He can afford to support the two women,
- he had a legitimate claim to become Ruth’s “kinsman-redeemer” and
- he seems to have taken a real interest in her.
Hope has now taken a very tangible form, and Naomi’s spirits are on the mend.
Ruth takes this news in stride, and the end of the chapter shows her continuing to work in the fields, through not just one but two harvest - barley and wheat.
That’s a good note to end on.
She, too, has hope, but hope does not take the place of good old work.
A dream is only that while you’re sleeping on it,
and she wasn’t going to feed herself with wishful thinking.
If she continued to work at the rate she had that first day,
she would have built up quite a little nest egg by the end of the harvest.
It was perfectly legitimate for these women to sell their grain they collected, and in doing so they were converting food into currency which would get them through the hard times in-between the harvests.
Is there an applicable point in all this? - I certainly think so.
Never give up on hope.
Naomi had gone so far into her depression that she wanted to change her name to “sorrow”. She had figured that God wanted nothing to do with her, and couldn’t understand why Ruth would be so persistent in her love.
But God saw through her bitterness into a heart needing mending and began to bring glimmers of hope to her life in order to restore her slowly.
He brings hope through the person of Ruth, who steadfastly seeks to keep her mother in law off the streets and safe and secure.
He brings hope by giving her opportunities to work hard and be rewarded for hard work.
He brings hope through the kindness of Boaz, who takes a real shine to this new woman in his life.
He brings hope that there may be more for both Ruth and Naomi than merely existing day to day.
When we are being battered down by the difficulties of life,
we need to know that the hope we place in God can be sure and certain.
We may feel like Naomi, ready to just give up and exist day to day.
Or we may approach hardship like Ruth, who has suffered tragedy as well but still keeps moving and working and hoping for more.
God will respond to the hope that we place in him. We may not always realize how he is working, but we can trust that he is working on our behalf.
I think that the story of Naomi and Ruth bears a great similarity to those who are or have battled cancer – let me explain.
We know that cancer is a terrible disease that will claim many of our loved ones. But is we simply give up and let it win, a cure will never be found.
If Naomi had been left alone to wallow in her grief,
she would receive the answer to her loss of hope – nothing.
So people get up and get moving, just like Ruth, in the midst of her tragedy, got up and got moving.
She went and worked in the fields.
Today, to fight cancer, we do Relays for life and Terry Fox runs and many other things.
Some of what happened to her happened because of her hard work,
Some of it because of the kindness of others,
and some because God was working in the background,
bringing things together that she didn’t even realize.
Well, the same can be said of fighting cancer, or any tragedy we may face.
Some of our successes will come simply because we simply got moving,
some success will be because of the kindness of those who help,
and others will come because God will bring things together that we can’t even see right now.
If we give up,
we don’t give God a chance to make true our hope in Him and His love.
Never give up on hope.
