v 19. So Ruth told her mother-in-law about the man in whose field she had worked. She said, “The man I worked with today is named Boaz.” “May the Lord bless him!” Naomi told her daughter-in-law. “He is showing his kindness to us as well as to your dead husband. That man is one of our closest relatives, one of our family redeemers.”
Can’t you just hear the wheels turning in Naomi’s mind!
It seems that Naomi and Ruth still owned some family land through their late husbands. It could only be handed over to a person in the family, and there was a distinct order of precedence amongst those who were called ‘Family Redeemers’. In that order, Boaz was not the first in line to make an offer for it. Moreover, as the property came down through a widow, there was an obligation to take on responsibility for the widow also.
These were practices designed to keep property in a family, and prevent take-overs by unscrupulous landlords who were trying to expand their ownership of land. The underlying principle was simple; God had given them the land and it had been divided up fairly between families. These families therefore had a long-standing right to use the land. If for some reason it had to be sold outside the family, then in the year of Jubilee (every 50 years) the family had a right to reclaim it. Leviticus 25:23-28 sets out the rules for property transfer in the year of Jubilee.
Anyway, Boaz was not first in the queue for the property and the writer of the history has set the scene for an old-fashioned love story!
—