Genealogy of Jesus: Boaz and Ruth

OT Lesson: Ruth 1:6-18 (KJV)

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 that the Lord had visited his people in giving them bread. Wherefore she went forth out of the place where she was, and her two daughters in law with her; and they went on the way to return unto the land of Judah.

And Naomi said unto her two daughters in law, Go, return each to her mother’s house: the Lord deal kindly with you, as ye have dealt with the dead, and with me. The Lord grant you that ye may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband. Then she kissed them; and they lifted up their voice, and wept.

And they said unto her, Surely we will return with thee unto thy people.

And Naomi said, Turn again, my daughters: why will ye go with me? are there yet any more sons in my womb, that they may be your husbands? Turn again, my daughters, go your way; for I am too old to have an husband. If I should say, I have hope, if I should have an husband also to night, and should also bear sons; Would ye tarry for them till they were grown? would ye stay for them from having husbands? nay, my daughters; for it grieveth me much for your sakes that the hand of the Lord is gone out against me.

And they lifted up their voice, and wept again: and Orpah kissed her mother in law; but Ruth clave unto her. And she said, Behold, thy sister in law is gone back unto her people, and unto her gods: return thou after thy sister in law.

And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me. When she saw that she was stedfastly minded to go with her, then she left speaking unto her.

NT Lesson: Matthew 1:5 (NRSV)

And Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse.

Sermon

Introduction

Good morning. It was quite chilly beginning of the week. Do you know we had a lot of snow last Monday night? It all melted but my homesick was healed. I mean my homesick for Canada, not for Korea. As far as I know, it was the first snow fall this year. Then toward the end of the week, we got a real nice weather. As Samuel is getting better with his language—both English and Korean, I see problems now. At the park Samuel’s shoes came off and he asked me to put his shoes on. But I told him no and asked him to do it by himself because he can. Then Samuel looked at me in the eyes as if he was challenging me and said, “Why? I am your favourite Samuel.” Well, the problem I see here is that he tries to win the arguments all the time. And also Samuel is not obedient, and he must learn from Ruth.

Ruth, a Moabite Woman

So today we will talk about Ruth and Boaz. But before that, I have to remind you that Ruth was not a Jew. She was a Moabite. You probably knew that. “So what?” you may think. But that is actually a huge problem. The purpose of the ancient world genealogy is the justification. In the OT, the authors of the Bible wrote the genealogy of David to justify why David had to be a king. In the gospel of Matthew, the purpose of the genealogy is to show why and how Jesus is the legitimate Messiah because there were many people claiming to be messiah. In the ancient world, both justification and legitimacy come from the pure blood. Abraham did not choose his daughter-in-law from the local girls. He sent his servant to his home town and ask him specifically to bring a home-town girl. In most dynasties of ancient Egypt, the royals married from within their own family, sometimes with cousins and some other times with siblings. Cleopatra also married initially her own younger brother. That is to preserve the pure blood. Even in the Medieval Europe, the house of Habsburg married within themselves and as a consequence they had bad genetic disorders. At the time of Jesus and in the NT era, the house of Herod ruled over Israel. The people hated it but they had to submit and surrender to the Roman sword. People hated the house of Herod because they were not Jews but Edomites. Being the pure blood, pure Jew was a key thing for David’s justification of taking the throne from the previous king, and for Jesus’ legitimacy to be the Messiah. So the authors of the Bible were supposed to hide those gentile women in the genealogy. On the contrary, both Old and New Testaments mention ONLY the gentile women—Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth.

King George VI

Boaz who married Ruth, I made a joke previously that he was ruthless before the marriage. His mother is Rahab about whom we talked last Sunday. Boaz is biologically only 49% Jew—not even half. It is one per cent less because of Tamar who is seven generations up from him. Boaz married Ruth and had a son whose name is Obed. And because the mother of the boy was not a Jew, he is only 24% Jew—not even a quarter. Just for living as one of many normal citizens, it is not a problem. But it is a different story when you want to justify your legitimacy to be the king. Recently the Queen of England died. When her father became a king, England was not doing well with Germany because of Hitler. The king was originally to be King Albert, but he eventually became King George VI because Albert was too Germanic. When we care about the names even in modern days, in the ancient world, the importance of the pure blood was beyond what we can suppose.

And in the case of Ruth, it was more problematic because she was not just another gentile but a Moabite. Moses wrote in Deuteronomy 23:3, “An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the Lord for ever:” The very commandment of God says not to the tenth generation, and Ruth and Boaz were the third generation. The grandfather of Boaz was the contemporary of Moses. In the ancient world, this is a kind of information you must hide at all cost. And yet the Bible brings it to the bright daylight. And this is one of the reasons why I believe that the Bible is true, not like other ancient texts.

Beginning of the Story

I assume that most of you already know the story. But let me briefly summarise anyway for the possible one per cent who may be new to this story. Elimelek and Naomi went to Moab. He died and she married their two sons to the two local girls—Orpah and Ruth. Some people misread it as Oprah, but the name is Orpah. The problem is that both sons died without children. Naomi did not have any other son to provide according to the custom of levirate marriage. This is one of the rare cases where a woman is not blamed. The marriage contract is void and the girls are free to go without penalty and find other guys. Many scholars assume that Orpah and Ruth were probably mid twenties. So it was not terribly late for them to marry again and have babies. So Orpah left. But Ruth stayed. Orpah made a wise choice. There was nothing to blame her for. But Ruth made a spiritual choice that she said to her mother-in-law, “your God is my God.”

That spiritual choice was a stupid choice to be honest in the earthly eyes. I said repeatedly that there was no job for women in the ancient world. Of course they worked enormous amount of chores and labours at home and at the fields, but those were all non-paying free labours. Even in America, the money making jobs for women were not that common in the old days. Women’s workforce dramatically increased during the WW2. Many men went to Europe and there were more things to do in the homeland as well such as making ammunition and administrating jobs. And then women stayed in the job market after the war. Now in the ancient world, two women living together means that there are two mouths to feed and no income. They had three options—prostitution, begging, or starvation to death. They did not want to die. Naomi was too old to be a prostitute. Begging at her home town was too shameful for her because everybody in the town knows her. So she sent instead her daughter-in-law out for collecting the left over grains in the fields, which is same as begging. By the Torah, the farm owners had to leave small amount of grains so that the beggars can come and collect them. The mother-in-law asked Ruth to do a shameful thing, and yet Ruth obeyed. That was not an easy thing.

Levirate Marriage

And then a huge opportunity came to the two women—the levirate marriage. The levirate marriage was not the unique thing in ancient Israel or Middle East. It was somewhat common especially among the ancient nomadic tribes—those people who were not settled but moved around. As people began to settle and switched from nomadic life style to agriculture, the levirate marriage either slowly changed or disappeared. That was the case in Israel and also in ancient Korea. Last written record of levirate marriage in Korea was about two thousand years ago, and then it disappeared completely as the ancient Koreans settled and began to farm the land. The exact custom of levirate marriage was slightly different by the cultures and regions. At some cultures, it was strictly among the brothers. But obviously in the ancient Israel, that included the cousins as we see in the book of Ruth.

Anyway, Ruth met a guy named Boaz and for some reason he was single and childless. Needless to say he was quite rich, owning the farm lands here and there. Now Naomi realised that Boaz is her deceased husband’s relative, and thus eligible for the levirate marriage with her daughter-in-law. But the problem was that the levirate marriage was either changing or disappearing because Israelites has settled after the exodus from Egypt to the Promised land. So still there is something called levirate marriage, but most people does not really care about it. If you keep this custom, people just think that you are really an old school. 

In America, there are some weird laws that nobody cares any more. Here are some examples: The state law of Arkansas says that you cannot walk your cow after 1PM on Sundays. It was enacted in 1882. The state of Connecticut enacted a law in 1948 that a pickle must bounce in order to be sold. In the state of Delaware, it is illegal to whisper in church since 1974. But don’t worry: we are in Indiana, a better state. One last silly law is from Florida that women shall not fall asleep in the salon. So what is going to happen if you do fall asleep in a salon in Florida? Will the police officers come and arrest you for that? I don’t think so. They don’t care about it any more. So the levirate marriage was kind of becoming like one of these practically dead laws at the time of Ruth. And after Ruth, there is no record of levirate marriage in the Bible at all.

Humiliation and Obey

Because of that, Naomi got a headache—“How can I enforce this dead custom to this rich guy?” And the strategy that Naomi took was the sex appeal, not a gentle way but a more horrible way than you can ever think of. I bet you cannot guess it by reading the translated English Bible. And I cannot say it from the pulpit as well. I’ve been saying weird words from the pulpit many times, but this is definitely not something I can explain or mention from the pulpit. If you want to know what this is, please come to the Bible study coming Saturday. I just changed the topic of the Bible Study this week. So I am going to talk about the levirate marriage and the book of Ruth more in detail. Anyway, what Naomi told her daughter-in-law, Ruth, to do was an extremely humiliating thing.

One of my father’s younger sisters killed herself when she you a teenager because a stranger—a guy—grabbed her by her wrist. Even that kind of physical touch was unbearable humiliation in the Korean culture about eighty years ago, not even hundred. In the light of that, we can tell that it was way worse in the Middle East several thousand years ago. But what the mother-in-law asked to do was not a simple wrist grabbing, but an extremely humiliating thing, which Ruth might have thought, “I would rather kill myself.” But Ruth obeyed. And this obedience is the very greatness of Ruth. 

Conclusion

In Matthew 8, Jesus said to his Jewish followers about a Roman centurion, “I tell you the truth, I have not seen faith like this in all Israel.” This centurion may be a gentile, but his faith was greater than any other Jewish people in all the land of Israel. Likewise Ruth may be a gentile, but her obedience was greater than any other Jewish people in all the land of Israel. And God made it clear through the prophet Samuel that the obedience is what God desires the most from us. “Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.” Ruth obeyed at all cost. Through the obedience, she was saved and became the ancestor of king David as well as the Messiah and Saviour of the whole world even though she was an unworthy gentile.

Friends, we may be unworthy as well like Ruth. But let us learn from her and obey God’s words like she did. Because through obedience we are saved. Through obedience, we remain in the grace and love of God. Through obedience, we are now the family of the Saviour. And through obedience, we will enter the kingdom of God someday where we will meet all our families and friends. Amen.