Ruth in the Barley Fields

Early morning in the fields outside Bethlehem. Reapers swing their sickles. Behind them, bent low, a young foreign woman picks up the stalks they have dropped, one by one. She has no idea that this field will change her life.

This is the time of the judges, long before Israel had a king. A famine had driven a Bethlehem family to the land of Moab, across the Dead Sea. There the father, Elimelech, died. His two sons married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth, and then the sons died too. Naomi, the mother, decided to go home. Ruth refused to leave her. Where you go I will go, she said. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Now the two widows have arrived in Bethlehem at the start of the barley harvest, with nothing. No husband, no land they can work, no food.

Ruth says to Naomi, let me go to the fields and glean, picking up leftover grain behind someone who will be kind to me. Go, my daughter, says Naomi. And the book of Ruth says, almost with a smile, that her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging to Boaz. It just so happened. Boaz is a wealthy man of standing, and he is a relative of Naomi's late husband. Soon Boaz himself arrives from Bethlehem. He greets his workers: the Lord be with you. And they answer: the Lord bless you. Then he notices the stranger. Whose young woman is that? She is the Moabite who came back with Naomi, says his foreman. She asked to glean, and she has been working since morning with hardly a rest.

Boaz walks over to Ruth. Listen, my daughter, he says. Don't go to glean in any other field. Stay close to my young women. I have told the men not to touch you. And when you are thirsty, drink from the water jars. Ruth bows to the ground. Why have I found favour in your eyes, she asks, that you should notice me, when I am a foreigner? Boaz answers that he has heard everything she has done for Naomi since her husband died, how she left her father and mother and her homeland to come to a people she did not know. And he blesses her. “The LORD recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee of the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.”

At mealtime Boaz invites her to sit with the reapers. He hands her roasted grain, and she eats until she is satisfied, with some left over. Then, quietly, he tells his young men: let her glean even among the sheaves. Pull out some stalks from the bundles on purpose and leave them for her. That evening Ruth beats out what she has gathered, and it comes to about an ephah of barley, a huge amount for one day. Naomi's eyes widen. Where did you glean today? Blessed be the man who took notice of you! And when she hears the name Boaz, Naomi's heart lifts. The Lord has not stopped showing kindness, she says. This man is one of our close relatives, one of our redeemers. Ruth keeps gleaning in his fields until the end of the barley and wheat harvests.

Gleaning was not charity at the farmer's whim. It was part of God's law. Leviticus told Israel's farmers not to reap to the very edges of their fields, and not to go back and pick up what had fallen. Those leftovers were for the poor and for the foreigner. Deuteronomy adds the widow and the orphan, and says that if you forget a sheaf in the field, you must leave it. Ruth was a poor foreign widow. The law had her in mind. Boaz went beyond it.

Ruth's day in the barley fields is in the book of Ruth, chapter two. These fields lay around Bethlehem, the same fields where, centuries later, shepherds would hear angels sing. So here is a question to carry with you. Boaz noticed someone others might have ignored and quietly made room for her. Who could you notice, and how could you leave a little extra for them?