Wherever You Go: Ruth’s Leap into the Unknown

An Elul journey through the Book of Ruth · Part One

This is Elul, the Hebrew month when the Jewish people search their hearts and get ready for the High Holy Days, starting with Rosh Hashanah. In synagogues all over the world the shofar sounds on weekday mornings all month long, like heaven’s own alarm clock. And here’s a sweet one: the four Hebrew letters of Elul, אלול, are the first letters of Ani l’dodi v’dodi li, “I am my beloved’s, And my beloved is mine” (Song of Solomon 6:3). The whole month is about coming home to the One who loves you. The Hebrew word for that is teshuvah (t’shoo-VAH). We usually translate it “repentance,” but at heart it means “return.”

So this month, we at Christian Friends of Leket Israel want to take you on a devotional journey through the Book of Ruth. And I promise you, it’s a book about returning. Just wait.

Somewhere this morning, a woman is sitting in her car in the driveway of a smaller house that doesn’t feel like hers yet.

Maybe she’s newly widowed and still figuring out which bills come when. Maybe she’s moved halfway across the country to be near the grandbabies and left behind the church where she’d taught Sunday school since her own kids were in diapers. Or maybe the doctor said a word this week that she’s still learning to spell.

There are times we get hit with circumstances that force a complete leap into the unknown. And a leap like that never comes with just one feeling, does it? There’s hope in it, and anticipation, maybe even a little excitement. But fear and trepidation climb right into the car too, and they all ride together. A new start, a new beginning, whether we asked for one or not.

If that’s you, I want you to meet a young woman who took one of the biggest leaps in the Bible. She took it on foot, and she didn’t pack a return ticket.

A princess on the refugee road

Ruth was a Moabite. When famine hit Bethlehem, a man named Elimelech took his wife, Naomi, and their two sons to Moab, on the far side of the Dead Sea. Elimelech died there. The boys married Moabite girls, and Ruth became the wife of Mahlon. About ten years later both sons were gone too. Three widows, three graves, and not one grandbaby.

Can I tell you something most of us never heard in Sunday school? The ancient rabbis taught that Ruth was royalty. Ruth Rabbah, the old rabbinic commentary on this book, says she was a daughter of Eglon, king of Moab. (Yes, that Eglon, from Judges 3. It isn’t a breakfast-table story. Read it later.)

So in Moab, Ruth was a princess. By the end of chapter one, she’s a refugee.

When Naomi heard that “the LORD had visited His people by giving them bread” (Ruth 1:6), she started for home with both daughters-in-law beside her. Somewhere on that road she stopped and begged them to go back to their mothers’ houses and find new husbands. She said it again, and then again. Orpah finally kissed her goodbye and went.

But “Ruth clung to her” (1:14). That Hebrew word, davkah, comes from the same root Genesis uses when a man leaves his father and mother and is “joined to his wife” (Genesis 2:24). And then Ruth said it:

“Entreat me not to leave you,
Or to turn back from following after you;
For wherever you go, I will go;
And wherever you lodge, I will lodge;
Your people shall be my people,
And your God, my God.
Where you die, I will die,
And there will I be buried.
The LORD do so to me, and more also,
If anything but death parts you and me.”Ruth 1:16–17

We read that at weddings. But ladies, she said it to her mother-in-law! Those of you who are mothers-in-law yourselves, go ahead and read it twice.

What was running through her mind

Use your holy imagination with me. Walk a few miles of that road beside her. What do you suppose she was thinking?

What does this new world have in store for me? She had never laid eyes on Bethlehem. All she had to go on were Naomi’s stories.

Will there even be food? In Hebrew, Bethlehem is Beit Lechem (bayt LEH-khem), the House of Bread. And the House of Bread had run out of bread! That’s how this family ended up in Moab in the first place. Naomi had heard that God was giving bread again, but would there be any for a foreign widow who owned nothing and knew nobody?

What about the culture? If the rabbis are right, Ruth grew up in a palace where they bowed to Chemosh, the god of Moab. Now she was walking toward a people who kept a Sabbath and ate by rules she’d never heard of. They believed in the One true God, a God nobody could carve out of wood or stone, and most of what she’d learned at her father’s court was about to count for nothing.

Is this for good, or just until things settle down? Naomi’s family went “to dwell in the country of Moab” (1:1), but the Hebrew verb there, lagur (lah-GOOR), means to stay somewhere as a foreigner for a while, not to put down roots. They were only going to wait out the famine. That temporary stay turned into ten years and three graves.

And underneath all of it, I suspect, sat the question every woman asks when she walks into a room full of strangers: Will they accept me?

She didn’t have a single answer. What she had was her mind made up. The road was unknown to her, but it was not unknown to God.

What the rabbis heard in her vow

The Jewish people have treasured this little book for well over two thousand years, and they still read it aloud in the synagogue every year at Shavuot, the harvest festival we know as Pentecost. (If you’ve ever been to a Shavuot celebration, you know it comes with cheesecake, blintzes, and this four-chapter scroll.) Shavuot remembers the day God gave the Torah at Mount Sinai, and Ruth’s vow was her own personal Sinai.

The Talmud even imagines how the rest of that roadside conversation went (Yevamot 47b). Naomi warns her, “We don’t walk past a set distance on the Sabbath.” Ruth answers, “Wherever you go, I will go.” Naomi says, “We’ve been given 613 commandments.” Ruth answers, “Your people shall be my people.” Naomi says, “We may not worship idols.” And Ruth answers, “Your God, my God.”

She knew what it would cost, and she said yes anyway. No wonder Jewish tradition holds her up as the model convert. Here’s a little Hebrew arithmetic for you, too. The letters of Ruth’s name, רות, add up to 606. The rabbis say every Gentile is already bound by seven laws God gave to Noah’s descendants, so when Ruth took on 606 more, she had all 613 commandments of the Torah. I just love that.

In that same old commentary, Rabbi Ze’ira points out that Ruth is a strange book to find in the Bible at all. There’s not one law in it, nothing about clean and unclean, permitted and forbidden. So why was it written? His answer: to teach how great is the reward of chesed.

Say it “CHEH-sed,” with a little gravel in the back of your throat. Your Bible translates it “kindness” or “lovingkindness,” but it’s bigger than that. Chesed is love that stays when it has every reason to leave. Love with its work boots on. And nobody in Scripture laces up those boots quite like Ruth.

She “returned” to a place she’d never been

Remember Elul, the month of teshuvah? Get this. In the Hebrew of Ruth chapter one, some form of the word “return” (shuv) shows up twelve times. Naomi returns. Naomi keeps telling the girls to return. Orpah returns. Then the chapter closes like this: “So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabitess her daughter-in-law with her, who returned from the country of Moab” (1:22).

Ruth returned? Honey, she had never been there!

That’s the teshuvah Ruth made. She came home to a home she’d never seen, because home was now wherever the God of Israel was. And the question of permanent or temporary? She settled that before she ever saw Bethlehem: “Where you die, I will die, And there will I be buried.” Naomi’s family had gone to Moab for a season. Ruth went to Bethlehem to stay.

When Naomi saw that Ruth “was determined to go with her” (1:18), she quit arguing. That word comes from the Hebrew root amatz, to be strong and courageous. It’s the same root God used with Joshua as he stood at the Jordan, looking across at a land he had never lived in: “Be strong and of good courage… for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go” (Joshua 1:9).

Wherever you go. Sound familiar?

That root turns up again at the end of Psalm 27, the psalm prayed every day of Elul: “Be of good courage, And He shall strengthen your heart” (27:14). The same psalm promises, “When my father and my mother forsake me, Then the LORD will take care of me” (27:10), and the Hebrew verb behind “take care of me” means to gather in, like a harvest. Ruth had left her father and mother behind in Moab. God was about to gather her in, in the middle of a real harvest.

So hear me, friend. Ruth told Naomi, “Wherever you go, I will go.” God has made His people an even better promise: wherever you go, I am already with you. Whatever you’re walking into this year, you won’t be the first one there.

The road is unknown to you. It is not unknown to Him.

The mother of royalty

Now walk into Bethlehem with Ruth. The whole town turns out, and the women ask, “Is this Naomi?” Naomi, still drowning in grief, tells them, “I went out full, and the LORD has brought me home again empty” (1:21).

Empty. With Ruth standing right beside her.

This girl gave up her country, her family, her gods, and her crown, and her mother-in-law just told the whole town she came home with nothing. I don’t think Naomi meant to wound her. Grief doesn’t see straight. But some of you know exactly what it’s like to be the blessing nobody has noticed yet.

Ruth didn’t argue, and she didn’t head back to the palace. And look at the very next words: they arrived “at the beginning of barley harvest” (1:22). In Israel the barley harvest starts around Passover, when the Jewish people remember their own great leap into the unknown, out of Egypt. Ruth’s new beginning was on God’s calendar all along.

And her fear that they’d never accept her? Before this story is over, one of the leading men of Bethlehem will tell this Moabite refugee, “all the people of my town know that you are a virtuous woman” (3:11). In Hebrew that’s eshet chayil (EH-shet KHAH-yil), a woman of valor. Those same two Hebrew words open the famous poem in Proverbs 31, where your Bible says “a virtuous wife,” and in many Jewish homes husbands still sing that poem to their wives at the Shabbat table every Friday night. Ruth is the only flesh-and-blood woman in the whole Bible who gets called one. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

She would become the great-grandmother of King David. The Talmud says she lived long enough to see her great-great-grandson Solomon take the throne, and the rabbis gave her a title: imah shel malchut, the mother of royalty. A thousand years later, from that royal line and in that same little town of Bethlehem, came the Messiah. Matthew made sure her name was written into the family tree of Jesus (Matthew 1:5).

She left Moab a princess. She arrived in Bethlehem a refugee. And the King she followed made her the mother of kings.

So whatever you’ve had to lay down to get where you are, hear me: you haven’t lost your place. You’re in the messy middle of a story God is still writing.

Chesed still has its work boots on

Remember Ruth’s question about food? Here’s what she couldn’t have known on that road. Centuries before she was born, God had already written her grocery list into His Law. He told Israel’s farmers to leave the corners of their fields, and the dropped and forgotten grain, “for the poor and the stranger” (Leviticus 19:9–10) and “for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow” (Deuteronomy 24:19). The Hebrew word for those gleanings is leket. Stranger and widow? Ruth checked both boxes.

Rashi, the great medieval Jewish commentator, noticed where God put that law. Leviticus 23 walks through the feasts of Israel, and tucked between Shavuot and Rosh Hashanah is a single verse about leaving gleanings for the poor and the stranger (23:22). Rashi says it’s there to teach that whoever leaves them properly is counted as if he had built the Temple and offered his sacrifices in it.

Between Shavuot and Rosh Hashanah. That’s exactly where we are on the calendar.

That commandment never expired. Today Leket Israel, the National Food Bank, gleans surplus produce from hundreds of Israeli farms, millions of pounds of it a year, and delivers it to widows, Holocaust survivors, and struggling families across the land. Same fields and same chesed, only now it’s trucks instead of baskets. When Christians help make that happen, we’re standing where Boaz stood, making sure today’s Ruths find bread in the House of Bread.

Something to ponder

What leap is sitting in front of you right now? Which of Ruth’s questions keeps you up at night: what’s ahead, whether there’ll be enough, whether you’ll belong, whether this is forever? What would it look like, in this season of return, to take your next step trusting that where you’re going, God has already been?

A prayer for today

“Father, You see the road in front of me, and You know I’ve never walked it. I’m carrying hope and fear in the same suitcase, and You know that too. Thank You that Ruth’s unknown was never unknown to You. Give me her courage. Wherever You lead, I will go. Gather me in the way You gathered her, and open my eyes to the chesed You’ve already packed for my journey. Make me somebody’s Ruth, the one who stays. And let me leave something in the field for the next woman who walks into town with nothing. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

K’tivah v’chatimah tovah (k’tee-VAH v’khah-tee-MAH toe-VAH), dear one. May you be written and sealed for a good year.

Featured image: Jacob Pynas, Ruth Decides to Go with Naomi to Bethlehem (Ruth 1:14–16), between 1610 and 1650. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The images inside this article are credited beneath each one.