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In this instance the kinsman handed his shoe to Boaz - that is, ceded his possession to
him. Alike the assembled elders, and those who had gathered around to witness the
transaction, cordially hailed its conclusion by wishes which proved, that "all the city
knew that Ruth was a virtuous woman," and were prepared to receive the Moabitess as a
mother in Israel, even as Thamar had proved in the ancestry of Boaz. It had all been
done in God and with God, and the blessing invoked was not withheld. A son gladdened
the hearts of the family of Bethlehem. Naomi had now a "redeemer," not only to support
and nourish her, nor merely to "redeem" the family property, but to preserve the name
of the family in Israel. And that "redeemer" - a child, and yet not a child of Boaz; a
redeemer-son, and yet not a son of Naomi - was the father of Jesse. And so the story
which began in poverty, famine, and exile leads up to the throne of David. Undoubtedly
this was the main object for which it was recorded: to give us the history of David's
family; and with his genealogy, traced not in every link but in symbolical outline,^338 the
Book of Ruth appropriately closes. It is the only instance in which a book is devoted to
the domestic history of a woman, and that woman a stranger in Israel. But that woman
was the Mary of the Old Testament.
(^1) Comp. such a Missionary Psalm as the 87th; also such passages as Psalm 96:9; Isaiah
44:5.
(^2) Some modern negative critics have even broached the theory -of course, wholly
unfounded - that originally the Book of Joshua had formed with the five books of
Moses Hexateuch.
(^3) The others are the Books of Samuel and of the Kings.
(^4) Or, "across the Jordan of Jericho," i.e., that part of the Jordan which watered Jericho.
(^5) The name Arboth still survives in the Arabah, which stretches from a little farther
south to the Elanitic Gulf of the Red Sea.
(^6) By a peculiar Aramaic interchange of letters, St. Peter writes the name Bosor: 2 Peter
2:15.
(^)