Ruth 1 explained

Ruth 1 turns on one Hebrew word, return. Naomi tells her daughters-in-law to go back, Orpah goes back, and Ruth refuses to turn back: "Your people will be my people, and your God my God" (1:16). Naomi comes home calling herself empty (1:21), with Ruth beside her, "in the beginning of barley harvest" (1:22).

The book sets its story "In the days when the judges judged" (1:1), and says no more about when. The book of Judges ends, "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did that which was right in his own eyes" (Judges 21:25). Ruth begins with "a famine in the land" (1:1), and "A certain man of Bethlehem Judah went to live in the country of Moab with his wife and his two sons" (1:1) (tap Bethlehem). Then it moves fast. "Elimelech, Naomi’s husband, died; and she was left with her two sons" (1:3). The sons "took for themselves wives of the women of Moab" (1:4). "They lived there about ten years" (1:4). "Mahlon and Chilion both died, and the woman was bereaved of her two children and of her husband" (1:5). The chapter gives no reason for the famine or for the deaths. It only tells them.

The family left Bethlehem in "a famine in the land" (1:1). Naomi turned back because "she had heard in the country of Moab how the LORD had visited his people in giving them bread" (1:6). It is the first thing the book says the LORD did.

Ruth 1:1 · Ruth 1:6

Ruth 1:4→leads toMatthew 1:5

Ruth is one of "the women of Moab" (1:4), and she tells Naomi, "Your people will be my people, and your God my God" (1:16). Matthew's "book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David" (Matthew 1:1) names her: "Boaz became the father of Obed by Ruth" (Matthew 1:5). How she came to be Boaz's wife is told later in the book (4:13).

שׁוּבshuvsay SHOOV

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "turn back, return". Strong's: "to turn back". It comes twelve times in this chapter, twelve of the fifteen times the book of Ruth uses it. The WEB gives it in several ways: "return" (1:6, 1:7, 1:8, 1:10), "Go back" (1:11, 1:12), "has gone back" (1:15), "to return from following you" (1:16), "brought me home again" (1:21), and "returned" (1:22). Naomi's "Follow your sister-in-law" (1:15) is also this verb, literally "return after your sister-in-law". Ruth, who had come "to a people that you didn’t know before" (2:11), is still called "the Moabite lady who came back with Naomi" (2:6).

Ruth said, "Your people will be my people, and your God my God" (1:16). What has following God cost you, or what might it cost you?