Eighty-five verses, one kinsman-redeemer, and the pattern that Revelation 5 depends on. The types in the Book of Ruth, and what each one is a picture of.
Ruth is eighty-five verses, set “in the days when the judges ruled” (Ruth 1:1), and it is one of only two books of the Bible named for a woman. At the literary level it is a love story. At the prophetic level it is the clearest working model in Scripture of what a redeemer is and what redemption costs, and without it the seven-sealed scroll of Revelation 5 cannot be read properly.
Every detail is deliberate. The names, the famine, the harvest season, the shoe, the six measures of barley. The story really happened, and it also carries a pattern (Hosea 12:10).
The type
Stands in the role of the goel, the kinsman-redeemer (Leviticus 25:25, Leviticus 25:47-55). He is an anticipatory analog of Christ: not Christ, but a figure whose office tells us what our Redeemer had to be. He greets his reapers with “The LORD be with you” (Ruth 2:4), and he is, in the frame of the story, the lord of the harvest.
The bride
The Gentile brought in (Ruth 1:4; Ruth 2:10). She pictures every sinner first, and beyond that the Church itself: redeemed out of destitution, brought into favor she has no claim to, and taken as the redeemer’s bride (Ephesians 5:25-27).
The nation
Stands for Israel. She is exiled from the land (Ruth 1:1-5), and it is her exile that puts Ruth in the way of redemption. The land is redeemed back to her (Ruth 4:9), and the child is laid in her lap (Ruth 4:16).
The Law
The Mosaic Law (Ruth 3:12; Ruth 4:1-8). He has no name in the text, which is the point. He is able to redeem the property but unwilling to take the bride, and he yields his shoe rather than perform (Ruth 4:6-8). The Law could not redeem us: “by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20; see also Romans 8:3; Galatians 3:21).
The Spirit
(Ruth 2:5-6) He is the one who brings Ruth to Boaz’s notice, in the pattern of Abraham’s unnamed servant sent to find a bride for Isaac (Genesis 24). “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself” (John 16:13).
The contrast
Not a type but the contrast. She weeps, she kisses, she turns back to her people and her gods (Ruth 1:14-15), and she goes off the pages of Scripture into oblivion. The same circumstance that sent her home is what made Ruth stay.
The Law of the kinsman-redeemer sets out conditions (Leviticus 25:47-55; Deuteronomy 25:5-10), and each one is answered in Christ.
“He took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16; also Hebrews 2:14-15).
“Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him” (Hebrews 7:25).
It was never compulsory, and the nearer kinsman proved it by declining (Ruth 4:6). Christ, “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2; Romans 3:24).
“He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8-11).
Boaz met all four out of his own substance (Ruth 4:9-10). Christ met them with his own blood: “not with corruptible things, as silver and gold… but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18-19; Hebrews 9:12).
Moab began in the incest of Lot and his daughter (Genesis 19:36-37). Moab hired Balaam to curse Israel (Numbers 22:1-8; Numbers 23-25). Moab worshipped Chemosh (Numbers 21:29; 1 Kings 11:7, 1 Kings 11:33), and that worship included burning children on an altar (2 Kings 3:26-27). Four prophets pronounced judgment on the nation (Isaiah 15-16; Jeremiah 48; Ezekiel 25:8-11; Amos 2:1-3). And the Law shut the door in a single sentence.
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.
Deuteronomy 23:3, read aloud again in Nehemiah 13:1-3
Ruth is a Moabitess. That is not incidental color, it is the whole problem the book exists to solve. She stands for cursed sinners, alienated from God, with the Law itself barring the way (Ephesians 2:11-13).
How does she get in? Not by amendment and not by descent. She throws herself on the mercy of God: “thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God” (Ruth 1:16-17). She swore by the name of the LORD and not by Chemosh. The Law excludes; grace includes those who come by faith. The prophet had already said as much: “Neither let the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to the LORD, speak, saying, The LORD hath utterly separated me from his people,” for “mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people” (Isaiah 56:3, Isaiah 56:6-7).
Four of the five women in the Messiah’s genealogy carry a history that would have disqualified them (Matthew 1:3, Matthew 1:5-6).
Committed incest with her father-in-law.
A Gentile harlot.
An outcast Moabitess.
An adulteress.
They are in the line by sovereign grace and by nothing else (2 Peter 3:9).
Judgment
(Ruth 1:1) One of thirteen in Scripture, and this one falls on Israel while Moab, just across the Dead Sea, is unaffected. A local famine is not weather, it is the hand of God, exactly as the covenant warned (Leviticus 26:18-20; Deuteronomy 28:23-24). The setting fits the years of Midianite oppression under Gideon, when the produce of the land was destroyed (Judges 6:3-4). It is the judgment that drives the family out and the mercy that eventually draws them home (Ruth 1:6).
Place
The house of bread, and by way of this book the house of David (Ruth 4:11, Ruth 4:17). “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel” (Micah 5:2). Whether the shepherds of that night stood in Boaz’s field is not stated (Luke 2:8), but the ground is the same ground.
Calendar
Ruth arrives at the beginning of barley harvest (Ruth 1:22), the season of Passover and firstfruits, and she gleans through to the end of wheat harvest (Ruth 2:23), which is Pentecost, fifty days later (Leviticus 23:15-21; Deuteronomy 16:9-12). The Gentile bride is gathered in during the interval between the two. Jewish liturgy requires that Ruth be read at Pentecost. Her right to be in the field at all rests on the law of gleaning (Leviticus 19:9-10; Deuteronomy 24:19-21), which is grace written into the agricultural code.
The threshing floor scene is widely misread. The literal ground first: Boaz was a generation older (Ruth 3:10), and by the custom of the time he would not initiate a proposal to a younger woman. Uncovering the feet and lying down (Ruth 3:4, Ruth 3:7) was the recognized way a woman could make the overture, and Boaz’s response confirms it. There is no breach of virtue anywhere in the chapter. His first act on waking is to protect her reputation (Ruth 3:14).
Underneath the custom, Naomi’s instructions run in four steps (Ruth 3:3), and they are the sinner’s steps.
“Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:5). “Ye must be born again” (John 3:7).
“But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things” (1 John 2:20, 1 John 2:27). Only the Spirit of God can teach us the things of God (1 Corinthians 2:9-10), and this is the neglected half of most people’s Christianity.
She takes off the garments of widowhood and mourning (compare 2 Samuel 12:20). Christ becomes our righteousness, a robe that comes down over the sinner so that God sees us in him (Romans 3:22), “accepted in the beloved” (Ephesians 1:6; Isaiah 61:10).
“Spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman” (Ruth 3:9). God says the same to Israel: “I spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness” (Ezekiel 16:8). The redeemer is not free to act on your behalf until you claim him. “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him” (Revelation 3:20). He does not break the door down.
The six measures of barley Boaz sends back are for Naomi, not Ruth (Ruth 3:15-17), and they are a message. Six is the number of working days before rest (Genesis 1; Exodus 20:11). He will not rest until the matter is settled (Ruth 3:18).
Her standing changes as the book runs.
Boaz takes the case to the gate, in public, before witnesses (Ruth 4:1-2). The nearer kinsman will take the land and will not take the woman (Ruth 4:4-6), because a son born to Ruth would inherit the property he had just paid for. He would lose both the field and the money. So he draws off his shoe, the recognized token of transfer (Ruth 4:7-8), a custom rooted in taking possession of land by treading it (Genesis 13:17; Joshua 1:3).
Boaz buys everything that belonged to Elimelech, Chilion, and Mahlon, and he purchases Ruth to be his wife (Ruth 4:9-10; compare Acts 20:28). He redeems the land for Naomi and takes the Gentile as his bride in the same act. The women of the town say to Naomi that the LORD “hath not left thee this day without a kinsman” (Ruth 4:14-15), and the child born to Ruth is laid in Naomi’s lap and named as a son born to Naomi (Ruth 4:16-17).
Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David (Ruth 4:17, Ruth 4:22; Matthew 1:5).
Land in Israel belonged to God and was granted to the tribes (Leviticus 25:23). It could be leased but not permanently sold, and it returned to the family at Jubilee (Leviticus 25:10, Leviticus 25:25-28). The title deed was a scroll, written inside with the terms and on the outside with the conditions under which a kinsman could redeem it. Jeremiah was told to buy a field on exactly this basis on the eve of the exile, sealed and witnessed, so that his heirs could one day claim it back (Jeremiah 32:6-15).
Then John weeps in heaven, because “in the right hand of him that sat on the throne” is “a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals,” and no one is found worthy to open it (Revelation 5:1-4). The earth has been lost to a usurper. What is needed is not a hero but a kinsman with the right to redeem, who is able, and who is willing, and who will pay the whole price.
The Lion of the tribe of Judah steps forward, and he is “a Lamb as it had been slain” (Revelation 5:5-6). He takes the scroll and the singing starts.
Thou art worthy… for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.
Revelation 5:9-10
Those who waited for the redemption of Jerusalem were not disappointed (Luke 2:38; Hebrews 9:12).
You and I are the beneficiaries of a love story written in blood, on a wooden cross, in Judea.