Return, and May Yahweh Deal Kindly
6 Then she arose with her daughters-in-law, that she might return from the country of Moab; for she had heard in the country of Moab how Yahweh had visited his people in giving them bread. 7 She went out of the place where she was, and her two daughters-in-law with her. They went on the way to return to the land of Judah. 8 Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go, return each of you to her mother’s house. May Yahweh deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. 9 May Yahweh grant you that you may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband.” Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voices, and wept.
God's first act in the book is bread, and Naomi's first act is to release the two women who owe her nothing.
She had heard that Yahweh had visited his people in giving them bread. This is the first of only two places where the narrator reports God doing something directly; everything else in the book happens through people. And what he does is end a famine — the same shortage that opened the story, closed in a clause.
Naomi turns to her daughters-in-law and tells them to go back. The instruction costs her everything practical: two widows returning to Bethlehem would have been two more workers and two more claims on the future.
Her blessing is the book's first use of its central word. May Yahweh deal kindly with you — hesed H2617, covenant loyalty that goes beyond what is owed — as you have dealt with the dead and with me. She asks God to do for them what they have already done for her, which means she is naming hesed in two Moabite women before she asks for it.
And the rest she prays for is domestic: that each may find rest in the house of her husband. That word will return in Ruth 3:1, when Naomi sets out to find it herself.
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