Ruth and Naomi

The event

A severe famine drove a Bethlehem family — Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two sons — to seek refuge across the Jordan in Moab, where the sons eventually married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. Tragedy followed: Elimelech and both sons died, leaving Naomi without husband, sons, or security in a foreign land, and she resolved to return home to Bethlehem alone.

Ruth, though a foreigner with every reasonable incentive to remain among her own people, made one of Scripture's most quoted pledges of loyalty: "Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God" (Ruth 1:16). Back in Bethlehem, Ruth supported herself and Naomi by gleaning leftover grain in the fields, where she happened upon the land of Boaz, a relative of Elimelech, who showed her unusual kindness because of what he had already heard about her devotion to Naomi.

Through Naomi's guidance and Boaz's willingness to act as kinsman-redeemer — publicly agreeing before the elders at the city gate to buy back the family's land and marry the widow to preserve Elimelech's family line — Ruth and Boaz were married, and their son Obed became the grandfather of David. Set against the chaos and violence that fills so much of the judges period, Ruth's short, tender story is a quiet testimony to God's providence working through ordinary faithfulness — and, centuries later, that same Moabite great-grandmother's name appears in the genealogy of Christ himself (Matthew 1:5).

Dating

Ruth 1:1 places the story broadly "in the days when the judges ruled," without naming a specific judge or famine. Working backward from the book's closing genealogy — Ruth to Obed to Jesse to David, who was born around 1040 BC — most evangelical chronologies place the events of Ruth sometime in the 1100s BC, though the exact judge-era window cannot be pinned down with confidence.

Scripture references

• Ruth 1:1-4:22