A Risky Plan
Naomi's confession
Read Ruth 3.
It was my idea to send Ruth to the threshing room floor.
I didn’t see a lot of other choice in our situation, which was becoming desperate.
Photo by Valentín Betancur on Unsplash
A sense of scarcity has defined my life for as long as I can remember. I have a few rose-tinted memories from my early life when we had enough which glimmer among the string of bad luck that I’ve had ever since. Most of my adult life was marked by hunger, famine, grief, and loss. Recently, however, things were beginning to round a corner. I could sense change. The Lord finally sent rain, so there was food again in Bethlehem, and after many years away, I went home.
But even when I saw the fields full of ripening grain, I found it hard to trust this hope. Anyone who deals in agriculture can tell you that farming can be cruel. You must always keep your eyes on the skies. But this year, the harvest was nearly upon us. There was grain to winnow, pile, save in storehouses. This was a cause for celebration! In everyone’s not-so-distant memory, there had not been any crop to harvest. So everyone in Bethlehem in Judah was gearing up for a party.
It was impossible for anyone in the area to miss the excitement in the air as the harvest party drew near – me included. But alongside this joy lived another anticipation that was, day by day, turning into dread. Ruth and I had eaten every day throughout the barley harvest and then, after that, through the harvest of wheat through Ruth’s hard work gleaning in the fields. She was helped by the kindness of Boaz who invited Ruth to work in his field and instructed his harvesters to watch out for her. But this arrangement could not go on forever. The harvest was nearly over, and winter was coming. And with no fields to provide food, Ruth and I would once again be on the verge of starving. What would we do when the skies turned rainy and the weather cool?
I was not so worried about myself – after my long years of life, I figured I would probably be OK. This summer spent in Bethlehem with Ruth reminded me that God had always provided enough for one day, and then the next, and then the one after that. And, to be honest, I was not terribly afraid to trade this life for the next one. There had been days where I would have even welcomed that.
But even if the grain we had set aside lasted us through the lean months until the harvest time came again, I knew that this scrabbling existence, living hand to mouth, was no kind of life for Ruth. She had been so generous to me when she clung to me on the road to Bethlehem, refusing to go back to her mother’s house in Moab, so that she could care for me. I felt the warmth of her care, but also the weight of responsibility that comes from loving someone. I tried to conceal it from Ruth, but from the moment she left the doorstep until the moment I spied her on the road struggling with that day’s bundle, I simply couldn’t relax. I didn’t want to see another summer where she would have to work as hard as she had – up before dawn, labouring in the fields through the long, hot hours, at the mercy of the elements, always looking over her shoulder, never returning much before dark. Every day she bent, gathered, hauled, and threshed, so she could bring me whatever she got that day, and we would scarf down a meal together so she could drop into bed for a few hours before getting up to do it all again. God provided each and every day, but we never had an abundance of food. It was more than I hoped for when I returned to Bethlehem, bereft and empty. But it was not a long-term solution.
So, as the town began to prepare for the harvest party, I spent my days at home, waiting for Ruth to return, the wheels in my head turning, trying to form a plan. And that plan centered on Boaz. Boaz had been more than kind in his treatment of Ruth. He was, I knew the moment Ruth told me his name, our near relative. And it was well within his power to save my family line, to look after me (and Ruth as well) in a more permanent way.
But he had made no move to do so.
Many things in my life had felt inevitable – I had no choice about the famine, when I followed my husband, Elimelek, out of Bethlehem for Moab to find food. I had no choice in the many years of infertility of my daughters-in-law, or in the eventual death of my sons.
However, other things in my life happened by my choice and were wrought by my hands. After Elimelek died, it was my responsibility to find food to feed my sons, and I did what I had to – whatever I had to – to do just that. It was through my persistent searching and negotiation that I found Orpah and Ruth as wives for my sons. And it was, in the end, my decision to return home to Bethlehem when the famine ended, to die among familiar faces.
And then, God gave me the gift of Ruth, who made the free and personal choice not to abandon me. Her decision defied all logic, even going against my own instructions, to travel with me, to stay by my side, and to go out and find food each and every day. And God gave Ruth and me the gift of Boaz.
And it was once again time to reclaim some agency in my own story. I saw an opportunity to do just that if we could convince Boaz to take an even greater interest in Ruth’s well-being. And the only way I could think of to do so was to let Ruth go.
“My dear daughter,” I said, “isn’t it about time I arranged a good home for you so you can have a happy life? And isn’t Boaz our close relative, the one with whose young women you’ve been working? Maybe it’s time for us to make our move.”1
Photo by Kelsey Chance on Unsplash
Our move” (which, of course, was my move, but one that Ruth would have to carry out) was to have Ruth find her way into the harvest party, dressed in her finest among the revelers. She was to trade her widow’s weeds for party clothing – and hopefully that would give the message that she was available once again. She was to find Boaz and wait until he was in high spirits – having eaten well at the buffet and had his share of drink – and then to watch where he went to lie down for the night. And then, when it was dark, I told her to slip under the covers with him and let him take it from there.
It was a risky move, full of danger for Ruth. If it went wrong… well… I could hardly bear to think of what might happen if it went wrong. In the middle of a raging party, anyone could take a fancy to Ruth and attack her as she hung around the threshing room floor. And even if Ruth and Boaz conducted themselves uprightly, the possibility of wagging tongues could ruin her reputation here in Bethlehem forever. If the wrong person saw her, Ruth stood to lose what little community she had gained here. She would certainly never have been welcomed to glean from Boaz’s fields ever again, and we would lose the one thing that had kept us afloat.
I was betting everything that Boaz himself would not, upon finding Ruth there beside him in the middle of the night in the middle of a raging party, take advantage of her himself. By this time, I trusted him enough that I thought it was worth the gamble. Still, I was not naïve – human appetites combined with high spirits loosened by merrymaking during a long-anticipated party always have the potential to make people do things they might not normally do, even people of the highest character at all other times. Things would have to go perfectly to avoid ruining Ruth’s reputation or prevent her from being harmed.
If we had many other choices, I never would have even countenanced such a thing. But our need was as real as it had ever been. I could think of no other course of action.
Ruth, who is quite capable of speaking her mind and asserting her will, agreed to this plan. And as I sent her off that night, I could feel my heart pounding. I prayed in earnest, as much as I’ve prayed in a very long time, that God would be good to her, just as God had done thus far in Bethlehem. I willed the Lord’s protection to watch over her throughout that fateful night, that maybe Ruth would finally get the hope and future that she deserved.
I couldn’t sleep a wink and my churning stomach did not begin to still until the next morning, just before daybreak, when I finally saw Ruth on the path toward our home. Breathlessly, she told me what happened on the threshing floor.
She’d followed my instructions – but only to a point. Instead of letting Boaz direct the action when he discovered her laying down beside him on the threshing room floor, Ruth took charge.
She told him: “take me under your protecting wing. You’re my close relative, you know, in the circle of covenant redeemers – you do have the right to marry me.”2
She said this outright, no waiting for him to get the hint or suggest this course of action on his own. She didn’t want to leave what might happen to chance. She broke pretty much every rule of etiquette, and asked Boaz to fulfil his duty to my late husband, Elimelek, asking him to save my family.
Our gamble paid off. Boaz was delighted by Ruth’s proposal. And, to prove it, before he sent her off in the earliest morning before anyone could see her and get the wrong idea in their head about what had transpired between them, he unloaded a large measure of barley for her to bring home to me.
But there was a wrench in my plan.
Boaz was one of our kinsmen redeemers, but he was not the closest one. Boaz told Ruth that there was another relative who was closer to my family than he was – and it was actually this other relative’s duty to provide for us. I had no idea that there was anyone else waiting in the woodwork. And you could understand why for, since I’d returned to Bethlehem, this man had never made any kind of move to help us – which is why I’d had to send Ruth off to the threshing room floor in the first place. Boaz promised Ruth that he would settle the matter as soon as possible, but, while I was able to breathe a sigh of relief when Ruth returned to me unharmed, I was still not quite able to rest easily.
Only time would tell how our story worked out. For the moment, I would have to simply pray…and wait.
Photo by Xu Haiwei on Unsplash
Ruth 3:1, The Message.
Ruth 3:9, The Message.