What is the significance of Ruth in Israel’s story and the Davidic royal line?
Question 03087
The book of Ruth is four chapters long and tells a story set during the period of the judges. It could be read simply as a moving account of loyalty, loss, and redemption within an Israelite family. But the genealogy at its close, tracing a line from Perez through Boaz to David (Ruth 4:18-22), signals that something larger is at stake. Ruth is not incidental to the biblical story; she stands at a decisive hinge in the narrative of Israel’s royal history and, by extension, in the lineage through which the Messiah would come.
Ruth Against the Background of the Judges Period
The opening verse places the story with deliberate precision: “In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land.” The book of Judges ends in darkness, with civil war, moral collapse, and the repeated refrain that “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Against this background, Ruth’s story stands out with unusual clarity. Here is a Moabite woman who, out of loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi, binds herself to Israel’s God with the remarkable declaration of Ruth 1:16-17: “Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” This is conversion language; Ruth is not merely choosing family loyalty but embracing the God of Israel.
The significance of Ruth’s ethnic identity cannot be missed. Moabites were excluded from the assembly of Israel to the tenth generation by the law of Deuteronomy 23:3, given the hostility shown by Moab to Israel in the wilderness period. That a Moabite woman should become an ancestor of David, and through David an ancestor of the Messiah, is a deliberate statement about the scope of God’s redemptive purposes. Grace reaches further than ethnic privilege allows.
Boaz as Kinsman-Redeemer
The legal and theological heart of the book turns on the institution of the kinsman-redeemer, the Hebrew go’el. Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 25 establish the obligation of a close male relative to redeem property that had been sold due to poverty, to redeem a relative from debt-slavery, and in the case of the levirate custom to marry a widow in order to continue the family line and preserve the deceased’s inheritance in Israel. Boaz is identified as a kinsman of Naomi’s deceased husband Elimelech, which makes him a potential redeemer for both the land and for Ruth.
The scene at the threshing floor in chapter 3 is often misread through modern sensibilities. Ruth’s approach to Boaz, uncovering his feet and lying down, was not an improper act; it was a culturally understood appeal to his obligation as kinsman-redeemer. The phrase “spread your wings over your servant” (Ruth 3:9) echoes Boaz’s earlier blessing on Ruth, in which he prayed that the God of Israel would reward her by sheltering her under His wings (Ruth 2:12). Ruth is asking Boaz to be the concrete means by which God’s protection becomes tangible. Boaz’s response is honourable, immediate, and entirely consistent with his character throughout the narrative.
The legal transaction at the gate in chapter 4, where Boaz acquires the right to redeem by the unnamed nearer kinsman’s refusal, uses the full weight of Israelite social and legal custom to establish that what follows is entirely above reproach. The child born to Boaz and Ruth, Obed, is legally Naomi’s heir, and Naomi adopts him as her own son. The women of Bethlehem declare that Ruth, who loves Naomi and is worth more than seven sons, has provided for her what no son could. This is a story of extraordinary human faithfulness becoming the instrument of God’s greater purpose.
The Davidic Line and Its Messianic Significance
The genealogy of Ruth 4:18-22 is not decorative. Running from Perez, the son of Judah and Tamar (another Gentile woman, another irregular but providentially significant union), through ten generations to David, it places the book of Ruth within the grand narrative of God’s covenant promise to Abraham that through his seed all nations would be blessed. David’s line would produce the Messiah, and that line ran through a Moabite woman who chose Israel’s God in a moment of bereft loyalty.
Matthew 1:5 confirms this, naming Ruth in the genealogy of Jesus Christ alongside Tamar, Rahab, and Bathsheba. These are women, all Gentiles or associated with irregular circumstances, whose inclusion in the Messiah’s lineage signals something about the nature of the kingdom He would bring. God has always been working with and through those whom the religious categories of the age would exclude. Ruth’s presence in the genealogy of Matthew 1 is not an embarrassment to be explained away; it is a theological statement about the breadth of God’s redemptive purposes from the beginning.
So, now what?
The book of Ruth stands as a demonstration that no life lived in faithful response to God is insignificant within His larger purposes. Ruth did not know she was standing at a pivot-point in the history of Israel’s royal line. She knew a widow who needed loyalty, a God who was worth following, and a kinsman with the character to honour his obligations. God worked through all of this to preserve and extend a lineage that would one day bear the One who is Himself the true go’el, the redeemer of His people.
“The LORD repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.” Ruth 2:12
