Who Was Boaz in the Bible?

Who was Boaz?

The book of Ruth is four chapters of compressed prose that scholars often call one of the most perfectly constructed short narratives in world literature. Its setting is the period of the judges — a time when the broader Israelite narrative is chaotic and violent — but the story of Ruth and Boaz unfolds in a different register entirely: quiet, local, scrupulously attentive to legal obligation and human kindness. Boaz is introduced in Ruth 2:1 as "a mighty man of wealth" — the same Hebrew phrase used of Gideon in Judges 6:12 (gibbor hayil), which can mean warrior, powerful man, or man of substance. He was a kinsman of Naomi's dead husband Elimelech. By the time we meet him, he is already old enough to call Ruth "my daughter" (Ruth 2:8) and young enough to have the energy and standing to conduct the legal transaction at the city gate. He is a man of substance and reputation in Bethlehem. The backstory matters. Elimelech and Naomi had left Bethlehem for Moab during a famine, and there their two sons had married Moabite women — Orpah and Ruth. Then Elimelech and both sons died, leaving three widows. Naomi resolved to return to Bethlehem and urged both daughters-in-law to go back to their own families, to their own gods, to their own chances of remarriage. Orpah wept and went. Ruth refused — in one of the most celebrated speeches in all of Scripture: "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God" (Ruth 1:16). She came to Bethlehem as a Moabite, a foreigner, with nothing but loyalty and empty hands. Under Mosaic law, the poor had the right to glean — to follow the harvesters through the fields and gather what was left or dropped. Ruth went to glean, and she "happened" (the Hebrew suggests providential irony) to end up in the field belonging to Boaz. Boaz arrived from Bethlehem to check on his harvest and immediately noticed the foreign woman working steadily among the reapers. He asked who she was. When he heard her story — that this was the Moabitess who had returned with Naomi from Moab, who had left her own family and her own land to care for a widowed mother-in-law — he went to her directly. What Boaz does next reveals the measure of the man. He tells Ruth not to go glean in any other field. He has spoken to his young men not to touch her. She should drink from their water vessels when she is thirsty. He then gives instructions to his reapers — privately, away from Ruth — to deliberately pull out stalks from the bundles and leave them for her. He is manufacturing a better gleaning experience than the law required, without making her feel like a charity case. Ruth asks why he would show such kindness to a foreigner. Boaz's answer explains everything: he has heard about her. Her loyalty to Naomi is known throughout Bethlehem. The LORD recompense thy work, he says, and a full reward be given thee of the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust (Ruth 2:12). He uses the word wings — the same word used for the wings of the divine spirit brooding over the waters in Genesis 1:2 — and the same word Ruth will later use when she goes to him at the threshing floor: "spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman" (Ruth 3:9). She is asking him to be her goel — her kinsman-redeemer. The concept of the goel is central to understanding Boaz. In Israelite law (Leviticus 25, Deuteronomy 25), a kinsman-redeemer had the responsibility to buy back property sold under financial duress and to marry the widow of a kinsman who had died without sons — a practice called levirate marriage — to continue the dead man's name and inheritance. Boaz was a kinsman of Naomi's family, but there was a nearer kinsman with the first right of redemption. The scene at the city gate in Ruth 4 is a masterpiece of legal procedure and narrative suspense. Boaz called the nearer kinsman — referred to only as "such a one" — before ten elders as witnesses. He presented the case: Naomi was selling the land of Elimelech; as nearest kinsman, would he redeem it? The man said yes. Then Boaz added the complication: to acquire the field, the redeemer must also take Ruth the Moabitess as his wife, to raise up the name of the dead. The man declined. He could not redeem it without impairing his own inheritance. He removed his sandal and gave it to Boaz — the legal formality of transferring the right of redemption. Boaz declared before the elders: he was acquiring the field and taking Ruth as his wife, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance. The elders blessed him. He and Ruth were married. Ruth conceived and bore a son, and the women of Bethlehem named the child Obed — "they gave him a name, saying, There is a son born to Naomi" (Ruth 4:17). Obed was the father of Jesse. Jesse was the father of David. And David is the ancestor of Jesus of Nazareth. Matthew 1:5 names Boaz in the genealogy of Jesus, and names his mother as Rahab — the Canaanite woman from Jericho who hid the Israelite spies. If that tradition is correct (and it is accepted by most Christian interpreters), Boaz was himself the son of a foreign woman who had entered Israel by faith, which would explain much of his particular sensitivity to Ruth's situation. He knew what it meant to be an outsider received by grace. Boaz has been read across the centuries as a type of Christ — the kinsman-redeemer who at cost to himself takes on the obligations of those who cannot meet them, restoring what was lost, raising up what had fallen, and gathering into his family those who had no claim on belonging.

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