Beginning the Journey of Ruth

In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land. So a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. The man’s name was Elimelek, his wife’s name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there.

Now Elimelek, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth. After they had lived there about ten years, both Mahlon and Kilion also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband. - Ruth 1:1-5

Most often in the ancient world, women only showed up in literature as ornaments for the men who were the main characters. But not this book. The book of Ruth is one of the two books of the Bible named for women. The men die off in the first few verses and it’s clear that the book is by and for women.

Unlike the book of Job, which is a parallel book of the Bible dealing with suffering, Naomi had the added suffering of being vulnerable as a woman in a patriarchal society: widows were taken advantage of regularly (which is why God’s Word spoke so directly about their protection). The litany of suffering in these first few verses is intense, and it’s a reminder to us that suffering and spiritual complaint is not foreign to God’s people and that it’s not off limits as the subject of theology and conversation.

Naomi suffered a famine, was an immigrant, lost her husband, lost her children, and lost her income and financial stability. Any one of those things has the potential to wreck our faith - but all five together?!

And yet, as we learned yesterday, “God loves to take the despised people, the displaced people, and put them at the center of his redemptive mission in the world.” (Kristy Garza Robinson, Hermanas).

Take some some time to reflect on starting this journey through the book of Ruth. How close to suffering are you? How close are you to massive suffering, like the kind described in these first few verses? How close is God to your suffering? To the world’s suffering?