Ruth 2:20

Start with what's on the page. Ruth has come home from her first day gleaning with far more barley than one poor foreigner should have gathered, and she has just said the name of the man who made it possible: Boaz ( Ruth 2:19). Naomi's reaction is immediate. Before she explains anything, she blesses him: "May he be blessed by the LORD."

Then comes the line the whole verse hangs on: "who has not withdrawn His kindness from the living or the dead." Notice the word withdrawn. Naomi isn't saying kindness has arrived; she's saying it never actually left. That is a startling thing to hear from the woman who, back in Ruth 1:20-21, told the whole town to call her "Bitter" because "the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me" and "the LORD has brought me back empty."

Here's something easy to miss. In Hebrew, the "who" in that line is ambiguous. It could describe the LORD (the way the BSB reads it, with a capital "His") or it could describe Boaz, the man who has kept showing kindness to Elimelech's family even after Elimelech and his sons died. John Gill Scholars genuinely split on this, and the ambiguity may be the point: Naomi sees God's kindness and Boaz's kindness as one thing, arriving through one pair of hands. The same phrase, "kindness to the dead and to the living," is what Naomi had prayed over her daughters-in-law in Ruth 1:8, and David uses almost the same words in 2 Samuel 2:5 when he blesses the men who buried Saul.

"The living or the dead" means Naomi and Ruth on one side, Elimelech and Mahlon on the other. Kindness to the widows counts as kindness to the dead men they represent. Adam Clarke

Then the second sentence: "The man is a close relative. He is one of our kinsman-redeemers." That word is goel, a family member with legal standing to step in when a relative's land, freedom, or line is about to be lost. Tyndale And notice: "one of." Naomi knows there is someone nearer in line, which is exactly the complication that drives Ruth 3:12 and Ruth 4:1-6.

In the book's story, this verse is the hinge. Chapter 1 is loss, chapter 2 is provision, and here Naomi first sees the possibility that provision could become rescue.

The book opens by placing itself "in the days when the judges ruled" ( Ruth 1:1), so somewhere in the two centuries before Israel had a king, roughly 1200 to 1050 BC. That era was chaotic. The book of Judges ends with the line "everyone did what was right in his own eyes" ( Judges 21:25), and the surrounding chapters describe civil war, rape, and tribal slaughter. Ruth is a small, quiet story set inside that noise.

The author is anonymous. The closing genealogy ends with David ( Ruth 4:22), so most readers assume it was written during or after David's reign, by someone who wanted Israel to know where its greatest king came from.

Bethlehem means "house of bread," and the irony of a famine there is deliberate. Elimelech took his family east, across the Dead Sea, to Moab. Moab was not a neutral neighbor. The Moabites traced their ancestry to Lot's incestuous daughters ( Genesis 19:37), the law barred them from Israel's assembly ( Deuteronomy 23:3), and a Moabite king named Eglon had once squeezed Israel under eighteen years of tribute ( Judges 3:14). For Naomi to come home with a Moabite daughter-in-law was socially awkward at best.

Now picture the economics. Two widows, no sons, no land income, no male protector. In that world, that was a slow death sentence. God's law built in a safety net: landowners had to leave the edges of their fields and the dropped stalks for the poor and the foreigner ( Leviticus 19:9-10). Gleaning was legal, but it was also humbling and sometimes dangerous for a young woman alone, which is why Boaz warns his men not to touch her ( Ruth 2:9).

Behind the word "kinsman-redeemer" stands Leviticus 25:25, where a relative who has lost property to debt can have it bought back by his nearest kin. biblicalarchaeology.org The goel's job, broadly, was to guard the family's survival: its land, its freedom, its widows, even its honor. classic.net.bible.org It is barley harvest, April or May, the first crop after a hungry winter. Naomi came home empty at exactly the moment the fields were filling.

בָרַךְ (bārak), H1288, "to bless." Its root picture is kneeling. Strong's When Naomi says "may he be blessed by the LORD," she is asking God to bend toward Boaz with favor, and in the same breath she herself is bending toward God in thanks. The verb does both jobs.

חֵסֵד (ḥesed), H2617, "kindness." This is the word English keeps failing to hold. It means loyal love, the kindness you owe because you belong to someone and the kindness you give anyway when you owe nothing. Strong's It's the word for God's covenant faithfulness and for a man feeding his dead cousin's widow. Naomi uses it for both at once.

עָזַב (ʿāzab), H5800, "withdrawn." Literally "to loosen, relinquish, let go of." Strong's It's the word for abandoning someone. Naomi is saying God's grip on this family never loosened, even when she felt dropped.

חַי (ḥay), H2416 and מוּת (mût), H4191, "living" and "dead." Plain words, but set side by side they make a claim: God's loyal love reaches people who can no longer do anything for themselves, including the dead.

קָרוֹב (qārôb), H7138, "close." Near, whether in place, in time, or in blood. Strong's Here it's blood.

גָּאַל (gāʾal), H1350, "kinsman-redeemer." The root means to act as next of kin, with the duty to buy back a relative's land or marry his widow. Strong's The noun form, goel, is the same word Job uses in Job 19:25, "I know that my Redeemer lives." It is a family word before it is a religious one.

Be honest about what kind of connection this is. Ruth 2:20 is not a prophecy about Jesus. It is a picture, and a picture that the rest of the Bible deliberately develops.

Start with the goel itself. To redeem a family, you had to be two things: related, and able. You had to share their blood, and you had to have the resources to pay. The nearer relative in Ruth 4:6 was related but unwilling; Boaz was related, willing, and able. Hebrews 2:14-17 says Jesus "shared in their humanity" so that he could stand as our brother, and that he had to be "made like his brothers in every way." That is the logic of the kinsman-redeemer: he became our relative so he could have the right to buy us back. Galatians 4:4-5 says the same thing in a sentence: born of a woman, born under the law, "to redeem those under the law."

Then look at where the story goes. Boaz marries Ruth, they have Obed, Obed has Jesse, Jesse has David ( Ruth 4:21-22). And Matthew 1:5 puts Ruth's name, a Moabite outsider, in the family tree of Jesus. The kindness Naomi blesses in this verse becomes the line through which the Redeemer of the world arrives. desiringgod.org Older Christian readers saw in Ruth, the foreign widow brought into Israel's family by a redeemer's love, an early sketch of the nations being gathered to Christ. Matthew Henry

There is a quieter echo too. Naomi says God's kindness has not been withdrawn "from the living or the dead." In her mouth that means God is still looking after Elimelech's name through his widows. But the Bible keeps pressing that idea further, until Jesus says God "is not the God of the dead, but of the living" ( Luke 20:38) because his loyalty to his people does not stop at the grave. Romans 14:9 says Christ died and lived again "that He might be Lord of both the dead and the living." Naomi's phrase is a seed; the resurrection is the harvest.

Zechariah sang it when John was born: God "has visited and redeemed His people" ( Luke 1:68). Visited, in a field, by a relative who could pay.

Here is what Naomi does in this verse that costs her something. She blesses God before her problem is solved. She is still a widow. Ruth is still a foreigner with no husband. The land is still gone. All she has is one day's barley and the name of a man who might, possibly, help. And she says out loud: God never let go.

That is not nothing, because the last time Naomi spoke about God in public she called herself Bitter and said he had emptied her ( Ruth 1:20-21). She wasn't lying then; she was grieving honestly. But grief can harden into a story we tell about God, and the story becomes "he is against me." Naomi had to let that story go, and she had to do it on the strength of one kind act in one field. desiringgod.org

So the first thing this verse asks of you is to tell the truth about your own story. Where have you decided, maybe years ago, that God's kindness toward you was withdrawn? A loss, a diagnosis, a prayer that went nowhere. You may have good reasons for that feeling. But look at the word Naomi uses: withdrawn, let go of. Has he actually let go? Or has provision been showing up at the edges of the field, in forms too ordinary to count, and you've been calling it luck?

The second thing it asks is harder. Boaz's kindness reached "the dead," people who could never repay him. Who in your life can give you nothing back? A parent who no longer knows your name. A friend's widow everyone else has stopped calling. A family you have a tie to and would rather not. The goel didn't get to choose his relatives. Neither do you. Covenant love is the kind you owe because you belong, not the kind you ration based on return.

And notice the order in Naomi's mouth. Blessing first, then explanation. Try that today. Before you figure out how God is going to fix it, say what you can already see: he has not withdrawn his kindness. Say it out loud, to someone, the way she said it to Ruth. You might find, as she did, that saying it is the beginning of seeing it.

• Lord, I have called you against me in seasons when I felt emptied. Forgive me, and show me the kindness that was there at the edges of the field all along.
• Open my eyes to the people you have sent me, the Boazes in my life, so that I bless you for them instead of calling them coincidence.
• Teach me to say "you have not withdrawn your kindness" before the problem is solved, not only after.
• Make me a redeemer-kind of relative: give me the will and the means to show loyal love to the people in my family who can give nothing back.
• Thank you, Jesus, for becoming my close relative so you could buy me back. Let that truth steady me the next time I feel abandoned.

• Naomi went from "the LORD has brought me back empty" to "the LORD has not withdrawn his kindness." What single piece of evidence would it take for you to make that same move, and has it maybe already arrived?
• Whose kindness toward you have you received as if it came from them alone, without ever tracing it back to God? Name the person and the act.
• "Kindness to the living and the dead." Who in your life is in the "dead" category, unable to repay you, and what are you actually doing for them?
• Naomi blessed Boaz out loud, to Ruth. Who needs to hear you say, today, that God has been kind to you?
• Boaz was "one of" the redeemers, and there was a nearer one who later refused ( Ruth 4:6). Where are you standing in line behind an obligation, hoping someone nearer will take it so you don't have to?