Book by Book · Old Testament
A small, quiet story about loyalty that runs against the grain of its harsh times.
Ruth is set in the days of the judges, a violent and unsettled stretch of Israel's history, but it tells a story scaled to one family. Naomi loses her husband and both sons in a foreign land, and she turns home to Bethlehem with nothing. Her daughter-in-law Ruth, a Moabite and an outsider to Israel, refuses to leave her, and goes with her into a country and a people not her own.
What follows is mostly ordinary kindness. Ruth gleans in the fields to keep the two of them fed. A landowner named Boaz notices her, protects her, and treats her with a generosity the law allowed but did not require. In time he becomes her kinsman-redeemer, and Ruth the foreigner is woven into the family of Israel. The book closes by naming her great-grandson: David.
Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people.
— Ruth 1:16 (ESV)
It is one of the most quoted lines in the Bible, often at weddings, though Ruth says it to her mother-in-law on a hard road with no guarantee of welcome at the other end. The whole book turns on people choosing loyalty and kindness when nothing forced them to, and on a stranger being received rather than turned away.
We think about that a fair amount, because the thing we build is, in a sense, a front door. The first question someone asks a church's website is often a quiet one, asked by a newcomer who does not yet know the language or the customs, who is not sure they belong. How that question is met says a great deal.
So we tried to build something that meets the stranger plainly: answering from what the church has actually said, admitting when it does not know, and handing a person to someone real when the moment calls for more than information. Hospitality to the outsider is not a feature to add later. In this book, it is the point.
A foreigner's loyalty, an old man's kindness, and a family that made room.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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