Lives of Scripture

Boaz first appears greeting his own harvesters with 'The LORD be with you' — his character established before anything else is said of him (Ruth 2:4). Noticing Ruth gleaning among the sheaves, he learns she is the Moabite widow who returned with Naomi, and responds with generosity beyond what the law required: he tells his workers to let extra grain fall for her and instructs the men not to touch or humiliate her (Ruth 2:8-16). When Naomi later sends Ruth to the threshing floor at night to ask him, in the coded language of custom, to act as a close relative, Boaz responds with restraint — he blesses her for not pursuing a younger man, but discloses a nearer kinsman has the first legal right of redemption, resolving to settle the matter properly in daylight (Ruth 3:6-13). At the city gate, Boaz assembles ten elders as witnesses and formally offers the nearer relative the right to redeem Elimelech's land, and with it, the obligation to marry Ruth. The kinsman declines, confirming the transfer by removing his sandal (Ruth 4:1-8). Boaz then redeems the land and takes Ruth as his wife before all the witnesses, and the community blesses the marriage by invoking Israel's own founding-mother stories (Ruth 4:9-12). Their son Obed becomes grandfather to Jesse and great-grandfather to David, and Matthew's genealogy of Jesus names Boaz explicitly in Christ's ancestral line — himself, by Matthew's account, the son of Rahab, the Canaanite woman of Jericho (Ruth 4:13-22; Matthew 1:5).