Ruth 2: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Ruth goes out to gather the grain left behind by the harvesters, and she comes to a field belonging to Boaz, a relative of Naomi's husband Elimelech. Boaz asks who she is, tells her to stay with his young women workers, orders the young men not to touch her, gives her food at mealtime, and tells his workers to let handfuls fall for her and not to scold her for gleaning among the sheaves. Ruth brings home about an ephah of barley and tells Naomi whose field it was; Naomi asks the LORD to bless him and says Boaz is a close relative, one of their next of kin. Ruth keeps gathering with the women of Boaz until the end of the barley and wheat harvests, and lives with her mother-in-law.

Claim by Claim

1. 2:1
   • Naomi had a relative through her husband.
   • This relative was a man of substance and standing.
   • He was of the family of Elimelech.
   • His name was Boaz.
2. 2:2
   • Ruth the Moabitess spoke to Naomi.
   • Ruth asked to go to the field.
   • Ruth asked to glean among the ears of grain.
   • Ruth said she would glean behind someone in whose eyes she found favor.
   • Naomi told her to go.
   • Naomi called Ruth her daughter.
3. 2:3
   • Ruth went and came and gleaned in the field behind the reapers.
   • By chance she came to the portion of field belonging to Boaz.
   • Boaz was of the family of Elimelech.
4. 2:4
   • Boaz arrived from Bethlehem.
   • Boaz said to the reapers that the LORD be with them.
   • The reapers answered him that the LORD bless him.
5. 2:5
   • Boaz spoke to his servant who was set over the reapers.
   • Boaz asked whose this young woman was.
6. 2:6
   • The servant set over the reapers answered.
   • He said she was a Moabite young woman.
   • He said she returned with Naomi from the country of Moab.
7. 2:7
   • The servant reported that she asked to glean and gather among the sheaves behind the reapers.
   • The servant said she came and has remained from the morning until now.
   • The final clause about her resting a little in the house or shelter is obscure in the Hebrew and its meaning is uncertain.
8. 2:8
   • Boaz spoke to Ruth.
   • Boaz asked whether she had heard him.
   • Boaz called Ruth his daughter.
   • Boaz told her not to go glean in another field.
   • Boaz told her not to leave this place.
   • Boaz told her to stay close by his young women.
9. 2:9
   • Boaz told her to keep her eyes on the field the reapers are reaping.
   • Boaz told her to follow after the young women.
   • Boaz said he had commanded the young men not to touch her.
   • Boaz told her that when she is thirsty she should go to the vessels.
   • Boaz told her to drink from what the young men have drawn.
10. 2:10
    • Ruth fell on her face.
    • Ruth bowed to the ground.
    • Ruth asked Boaz why she had found favor in his eyes.
    • Ruth asked why he should take notice of her.
    • Ruth said she was a foreigner.
11. 2:11
    • Boaz answered her.
    • Boaz said he had been fully told all that she had done for her mother-in-law.
    • Boaz said this was since the death of her husband.
    • Boaz said she left her father and her mother.
    • Boaz said she left the land of her birth.
    • Boaz said she went to a people she had not known before.
12. 2:12
    • Boaz asked the LORD to repay her work.
    • Boaz asked that her wages be full from the LORD, the God of Israel.
    • Boaz said she had come to take refuge under the wings of the God of Israel.
13. 2:13
    • Ruth said she wished to find favor in Boaz's eyes.
    • Ruth called Boaz her lord.
    • Ruth said Boaz had comforted her.
    • Ruth said Boaz had spoken to the heart of his maidservant.
    • Ruth said she was not like one of his maidservants.
14. 2:14
    • Boaz spoke to Ruth at mealtime.
    • Boaz told her to come near.
    • Boaz told her to eat of the bread.
    • Boaz told her to dip her piece in the sour wine.
    • Ruth sat beside the reapers.
    • Boaz held out roasted grain to her.
    • Ruth ate.
    • Ruth was satisfied.
    • Ruth had food left over.
15. 2:15
    • Ruth rose to glean.
    • Boaz commanded his young men.
    • Boaz said she may glean even among the sheaves.
    • Boaz said they must not shame her.
16. 2:16
    • Boaz said they should pull out stalks for her from the bundles.
    • Boaz said they should leave the stalks behind.
    • Boaz said she would glean them.
    • Boaz said they must not rebuke her.
17. 2:17
    • Ruth gleaned in the field until evening.
    • Ruth beat out what she had gleaned.
    • What she gleaned came to about an ephah of barley.
18. 2:18
    • Ruth picked up the grain.
    • Ruth went into the city.
    • Her mother-in-law saw what she had gleaned.
    • Ruth brought out what she had left over after she was satisfied.
    • Ruth gave it to her mother-in-law.
19. 2:19
    • Her mother-in-law asked her where she gleaned that day.
    • Her mother-in-law asked her where she worked.
    • Her mother-in-law said blessed be the one who took notice of her.
    • Ruth told her mother-in-law with whom she had worked.
    • Ruth said the name of the man with whom she worked that day was Boaz.
20. 2:20
    • Naomi spoke to her daughter-in-law.
    • Naomi said he is blessed by the LORD.
    • Naomi said he has not abandoned his kindness to the living and to the dead.
    • It is ambiguous whether the one who has not abandoned his kindness is the LORD or Boaz.
    • Naomi said the man is near of kin to them.
    • Naomi said he is one of their redeemers, who has the right to redeem for the family.
21. 2:21
    • Ruth the Moabitess spoke.
    • Ruth said Boaz also told her to stay close by his young men.
    • Ruth said Boaz told her to do so until they had finished all his harvest.
22. 2:22
    • Naomi spoke to Ruth her daughter-in-law.
    • Naomi called Ruth her daughter.
    • Naomi said it is good that Ruth go out with Boaz's young women.
    • Naomi said this is so that Ruth not be accosted in another field.
23. 2:23
    • Ruth stayed close by the young women of Boaz to glean.
    • She did so until the end of the barley harvest and the wheat harvest.
    • She lived with her mother-in-law.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

2:1

The Hebrew phrase behind "important man of great wealth" (gibbor hayil) covers property, social standing, and personal quality all at once; elsewhere in the Bible it describes a warrior. It marks Boaz as a substantial figure in the town, not simply a rich one. "Family" here means the clan, the extended kin group within a tribe that held land together and was expected to look after its own.

2:2

Gleaning was a legal provision for the poor. Israelite law forbade owners from harvesting the very edges of a field or going back for what the reapers dropped, leaving that grain for widows, orphans, and foreigners to gather by hand. It was hot, slow, low-status work, and in practice depended on the landowner tolerating you, which is why Ruth speaks of finding someone who will look on her kindly. (Where the King James says "corn," it means grain in general, as British English still does; maize was unknown in the ancient Near East.)

2:3

"Her hap was to light on" is old English for "as it happened, she ended up in." "Hap" means chance, the same root as in "happen" and "perhaps." Fields were not fenced off individually; a long open stretch was farmed in strips by different owners, so a gleaner could wander into one man's section without knowing whose it was.

2:4

Printed in small capitals, LORD stands for the personal name of Israel's God, written in Hebrew with four consonants usually transcribed YHWH. Jewish readers said "the Lord" aloud rather than pronouncing it, and English Bibles have kept that substitution ever since. The greeting exchanged here is an ordinary courtesy between an employer and his workers, roughly the weight of "good morning."

2:5

Boaz is not asking her name. He is asking which household she belongs to (whose daughter, whose wife, whose servant) because an unattached woman working in a field was an anomaly and someone was normally answerable for her.

2:6

Moab was a small kingdom on the plateau east of the Dead Sea, close enough to Bethlehem for famine refugees to reach but a long-standing rival of Israel, and Israelite tradition was openly hostile toward Moabites. The foreman identifies Ruth by nationality rather than by name; the label is doing work in the sentence.

2:7

The end of the foreman's report is obscure in the Hebrew, and translations differ sharply: it may say she has rested only briefly, or that she has scarcely sat down at all. The "house" or "shelter" is probably a rough hut or lean-to at the edge of the field where workers took shade.

2:8

"My daughter" is a form of address used by an older man to a much younger woman. It signals protective goodwill and a difference in age and standing; it does not mean they are related, and Boaz does not yet mention the kinship at all.

2:9

The word translated "touch" covers striking, harassing, and sexual assault. Boaz's order to his men, and Naomi's warning in verse 22, assume that a foreign woman gleaning alone in someone else's field was in genuine physical danger. The jars are water jars; ordinarily the gleaner, not the hired staff, would have to fetch her own.

2:10

Ruth uses the strongest of the several Hebrew words for an outsider: not a resident foreigner with some recognized place in the community, but a stranger with no claim on anyone. Bowing face to the ground was the standard gesture of a person of no standing before a person of high standing.

2:11

The King James says "the land of thy nativity," which simply means the country where she was born.

2:12

The Hebrew word for "wings" is also the word for the corner or hem of a garment, and spreading the corner of one's garment over a woman was a recognized gesture of taking her under one's protection in marriage. The image here is of a bird sheltering its young; Ruth will turn the same word back on Boaz in the next chapter.

2:13

Ruth calls herself by the term for the lowest grade of female household servant, and then says she does not even rank with the women of that grade in his household: she has no place in it at all. The distinction is one of legal and social standing, not of politeness.

2:14

The "vinegar" is sour wine, or a sour-wine sauce, that field workers dipped bread into; it was part of the ordinary harvest ration rather than a flavoring. "Roasted grain" is fresh grain heads parched over a fire, a staple food at harvest time. Being invited to eat with the hired reapers, rather than scavenging behind them, is a marked step up in Ruth's position.

2:15

The sheaves are the cut stalks already bound into bundles, and they belonged to the owner; a gleaner who went among them could be accused of theft, which is what "do not shame her" guards against. Boaz is granting Ruth considerably more than the gleaning law required.

2:16

Boaz tells his men to stage the accident, to pull stalks out of the bound bundles and drop them where Ruth will find them, so that what she picks up counts as gleaning and she need not take it as charity.

2:17

Beating out the grain means threshing it with a stick to separate the kernels from the husks and straw, work normally done later on a threshing floor. An ephah is a dry measure of roughly two-thirds of a bushel, about 22 liters, which in barley weighs somewhere between thirty and fifty pounds. This is an extraordinary day's gleaning, perhaps a couple of weeks' food for two women, and far more than a gleaner could normally expect.

2:19

"Wroughtest" is the old form of worked. Naomi is asking where Ruth spent the day.

2:20

The Hebrew word behind "kindness" (hesed) means loyal, committed care shown by someone under no obligation to show it; it runs through the whole book. "To the living and to the dead" means Naomi and Ruth on the one hand, and their dead husbands on the other, whose family line and name a kinsman could still preserve. The Hebrew leaves it ambiguous whether the one who has not stopped showing kindness is the LORD or Boaz. "One of our nearest kinsmen" translates a specific legal term, go'el, often rendered kinsman-redeemer: the closest male relative, who had the duty of buying back land the family had lost, ransoming relatives sold into slavery, and acting for the family in matters of blood and inheritance. It is a role with obligations attached, not just a description of how closely two people are related.

2:21

Ruth reports Boaz as saying "young men," though in verse 8 he said "young women." The Hebrew word can cover a workforce of either sex, and Naomi's reply in the next verse quietly puts the women back in. Whether Ruth is paraphrasing loosely or the text preserves two different memories of what was said is disputed.

2:22

A woman gleaning alone in a strange field could be hurt or chased away. In Boaz's field the workers had orders to leave Ruth alone.

2:23

Barley ripened first and wheat a few weeks later; together the two harvests ran roughly from April into June. Ruth therefore works in Boaz's fields for something like seven weeks, and the chapter ends with nothing further having come of it.