Ruth 4: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Boaz goes to the town gate, calls over the nearer relative and ten elders of the city, and offers him the chance to buy Naomi's parcel of land; the man agrees, then withdraws when Boaz raises the matter of Ruth and the dead man's name, and he pulls off his shoe to confirm it. Boaz declares before the elders and the people that he has bought Elimelech's property and taken Ruth as his wife, and they answer that they are witnesses and speak a blessing over him. Ruth bears a son, the women bless the LORD and speak to Naomi about the child, and the neighbor women name him Obed. The chapter ends with a family line running from Pharez to David.

Claim by Claim

1. 4:1
   • Boaz went up to the gate.
   • Boaz sat down at the gate.
   • The kinsman-redeemer of whom Boaz had spoken passed by.
   • Boaz told him to turn aside and sit down there.
   • Boaz addressed him without using his name, calling him something like 'such a one'.
   • The man turned aside.
   • The man sat down.
2. 4:2
   • Boaz took ten men from the elders of the city.
   • Boaz told them to sit down there.
   • They sat down.
3. 4:3
   • Boaz spoke to the kinsman-redeemer.
   • Naomi had returned from the country of Moab.
   • Naomi was selling a parcel of land.
   • The parcel of land had belonged to Elimelech.
   • Boaz called Elimelech 'our brother'.
4. 4:4
   • Boaz said he had determined to disclose the matter to the kinsman.
   • Boaz told him to buy the land in the presence of those sitting there and in the presence of the elders of the people.
   • Boaz said that if the kinsman would redeem it, he should redeem it.
   • Boaz said that if the kinsman would not redeem it, he should tell Boaz so that Boaz would know.
   • Boaz said there was no one to redeem it besides the kinsman.
   • Boaz said he himself was next after the kinsman.
   • The kinsman said he would redeem it.
5. 4:5
   • Boaz spoke.
   • Boaz said that on the day the kinsman bought the field from Naomi's hand, he must also acquire it from Ruth the Moabitess.
   • Ruth was a Moabitess.
   • Ruth was the wife of the dead man.
   • The purpose of the acquisition was to raise up the name of the dead man upon his inheritance.
6. 4:6
   • The kinsman-redeemer said he could not redeem it for himself.
   • The kinsman said that redeeming it would ruin his own inheritance.
   • The kinsman told Boaz to redeem it for himself in his place.
   • The kinsman repeated that he could not redeem it.
7. 4:7
   • In former times in Israel, matters of redemption and exchange were confirmed by a set custom.
   • A man would pull off his sandal and give it to the other party.
   • This act served as attestation in Israel.
8. 4:8
   • The kinsman-redeemer told Boaz to buy it for himself.
   • He pulled off his sandal.
9. 4:9
   • Boaz spoke to the elders and to all the people.
   • Boaz said they were witnesses that day.
   • Boaz said he had bought all that belonged to Elimelech.
   • Boaz said he had bought all that belonged to Chilion and Mahlon.
   • Boaz said he bought it from the hand of Naomi.
10. 4:10
    • Boaz said he had also acquired Ruth the Moabitess to be his wife.
    • Ruth was the wife of Mahlon.
    • The purpose was to raise up the name of the dead man upon his inheritance.
    • The purpose was that the name of the dead man not be cut off from among his brothers.
    • The purpose was that the name of the dead man not be cut off from the gate of his place.
    • Boaz said they were witnesses that day.
11. 4:11
    • All the people at the gate and the elders said they were witnesses.
    • They asked the LORD to make the woman coming into Boaz's house like Rachel and like Leah.
    • They said Rachel and Leah both built the house of Israel.
    • They told Boaz to prosper in Ephrathah.
    • They told Boaz to become renowned in Bethlehem.
12. 4:12
    • They asked that Boaz's house be like the house of Perez.
    • Tamar bore Perez to Judah.
    • They asked this to come about through the offspring the LORD would give Boaz from this young woman.
13. 4:13
    • Boaz took Ruth.
    • Ruth became his wife.
    • Boaz had sexual relations with her.
    • The LORD gave her conception.
    • She bore a son.
14. 4:14
    • The women spoke to Naomi.
    • The women blessed the LORD.
    • The women said the LORD had not left Naomi without a kinsman-redeemer that day.
    • The women said that his name should be proclaimed in Israel.
15. 4:15
    • The women said the child would be a restorer of Naomi's life.
    • The women said the child would sustain her in her old age.
    • The women said Naomi's daughter-in-law, who loves her, had borne him.
    • The women said the daughter-in-law was better to Naomi than seven sons.
16. 4:16
    • Naomi took the child.
    • Naomi laid the child in her bosom.
    • Naomi became a nurse to the child.
17. 4:17
    • The neighbor women gave the child a name.
    • The neighbor women said a son had been born to Naomi.
    • They called his name Obed.
    • Obed is the father of Jesse.
    • Jesse is the father of David.
18. 4:18
    • These are the generations of Perez.
    • Perez fathered Hezron.
19. 4:19
    • Hezron fathered Ram.
    • Ram fathered Amminadab.
20. 4:20
    • Amminadab fathered Nahshon.
    • Nahshon fathered Salmah.
21. 4:21
    • Salmon fathered Boaz.
    • Boaz fathered Obed.
22. 4:22
    • Obed fathered Jesse.
    • Jesse fathered David.

Words Worth Explaining

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

4:1

The gate was the gap in the town wall where everyone passed in and out; the open space just inside it served as the town's courthouse and marketplace, so business needing witnesses was done there. In the Hebrew, Boaz does not use the man's name: he says something like "so-and-so," a placeholder for a name the storyteller does not record.

4:2

Legal acts were oral, not written. Elders, the senior heads of families in the town, served as the standing court, and their presence, together with the bystanders, is what made a transaction binding and remembered.

4:3

In Israelite law, farmland belonged permanently to a family line rather than to an individual, so land could not simply be sold off. If poverty forced a family to give up its land, the nearest male relative was expected to buy it back and keep it within the clan; a relative acting in that role is called a redeemer (Hebrew go'el). "Our relative Elimelech" translates a word meaning kinsman broadly, not a literal brother.

4:4

"I come after you" refers to the fixed order of kinship: the duty to redeem fell first on the closest relative, and only passed to the next in line if the closer one declined.

4:5

Alongside redeeming land, custom required a close relative to marry the widow of a man who died childless. The first son of that marriage counted legally as the dead man's son and inherited his land, so the dead man's "name", his line and his claim on the family property, continued. The Hebrew of this verse is disputed: it can mean that the buyer must also acquire the land from Ruth, or that in buying the land he also acquires Ruth as a wife.

4:6

The problem is financial. He would pay for the land himself, but any son born to Ruth would inherit it as Mahlon's heir rather than as his own, so the money would leave his estate permanently and shrink what he could pass to his own children.

4:7

The narrator is explaining a custom already out of date by the time the book was written, which is why the verse pauses to describe it. Handing over a sandal seems to have signaled handing over the right to walk on and possess the land; it worked the way a signature does now.

4:9

Chilion and Mahlon were Naomi's two sons, who died in Moab; Mahlon had been Ruth's husband. Boaz is buying the whole estate of the dead family, not one field.

4:10

A man's "name" here means his line and his recorded standing among the townsmen who met at the gate; if no heir held his land, that standing disappeared from the community's reckoning. Ruth is again labeled a Moabite (from Moab, a neighboring nation east of the Dead Sea with a long history of hostility toward Israel) which makes the legal declaration public about exactly whom Boaz is marrying.

4:11

Rachel and Leah were the two wives of Jacob, and the twelve tribes of Israel descended from them and their servants; to be like them is to be the mother of a whole people. Ephratah is the older name for Bethlehem and its surrounding clan territory. The Hebrew phrase rendered "do well" can mean either grow wealthy or act honorably.

4:12

The reference is to Genesis 38. Tamar was widowed and left without children when Judah failed to give her his surviving son as the custom required, so she obtained a child by Judah himself; that child was Perez, ancestor of the Bethlehem families. The crowd is naming the closest earlier case of a childless widow gaining an heir through a relative.

4:13

Ruth had been married to Mahlon for about ten years in Moab without having a child, which the first chapter mentions and which makes this birth the reversal of everything Naomi lost.

4:14

The relative-redeemer the women mean is the newborn child, who now stands as the family member obliged to protect Naomi. "His name" is ambiguous in the Hebrew and may refer to the child or to the LORD.

4:15

Seven was the round number for a complete family, and sons were a widow's only real security in old age. Saying Ruth is worth more than seven sons is the strongest praise available.

4:16

Placing the child on the lap was a recognized gesture of claiming a child as one's own. The word translated "nurse" means a guardian or foster-parent who raises a child, not a woman who breast-feeds; Naomi is too old for that.

4:17

Naming was normally the parents' act, so the neighbors naming the child is unusual and marks him as the whole town's concern. The name Obed means roughly "one who serves" or "servant."

4:18

Genealogies like this one give a family's legal pedigree rather than a complete list of ancestors, and such lists were often shortened to a set number of names, here ten, from Perez to David. Its purpose is to show where the line running through Boaz ends up.

4:20

Nahshon appears in Exodus and Numbers as the head of the tribe of Judah during the years in the wilderness, which anchors this list to a known point in Israel's past.

4:22

David became Israel's second and most celebrated king. Ending the list with him is the point of the whole book: the foreign widow of chapter one turns out to be his great-grandmother.