Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ruth · About this commentary
A Son Is Born to Naomi
Ruth 4:13-17
13 So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife; and he went in to her, and Yahweh enabled her to conceive, and she bore a son. · WEB
God acts for the second and last time in the book, and the women of the town tell Naomi she is no longer empty.
Yahweh enabled her to conceive, and she bore a son. This is the second and final time the narrator reports God doing something himself. The first was giving bread Ruth 1:6. Between those two acts lies everything the book actually narrates — a woman's loyalty, a man's decency, a legal proceeding at a gate — and the book presents all of it as the same providence.
The women's blessing goes to Naomi rather than to the mother. Blessed be Yahweh, who has not left you today without a goel H1350. The redeemer they mean is the infant, so the word that has run through four chapters lands on a newborn.
He shall be to you a restorer of life and sustain you in your old age — which answers, item by item, what Naomi said she had lost.
Then the sentence that overturns her arithmetic completely: your daughter-in-law, who loves you, is better to you than seven sons. Seven sons was the idiom for a complete family 1 Samuel 2:5. The woman who came home empty is told she has more than the fullest household in the language.
And the neighbors name him: Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David.
settled What this mark means