I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading. I had been using One Year Bible Online, but it was time for a change.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Ruth 1-4.

    There are many good lessons for us in the Book of Ruth. There is the statement of great love and commitment which Ruth made to Naomi:

Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord punish me severely if I allow anything but death to separate us!

Then at the end of the passage we have the genealogy of David, where we discover that David is descended from three women of who are examples of non-traditional faithfulness. Those three women are Tamar,the daughter-in-law of Judah, Rahab, the prostitute who hid the spies in Jericho, and now Ruth, the Moabite.
    However, the thing which struck me today was Naomi’s comment when she discovered that Boaz had invited Ruth to follow his harvesters throughout the harvest. Naomi told Ruth that she might be harassed if she went to other fields, but that she would be safe in Boaz’ fields. This follows earlier comments where Boaz told the young men working for him to make it easier for her to gather grain and to not give her a hard time. We usually focus on Ruth when we read this book, and rightly so. However, Boaz is a model of how men should treat women. Throughout the entire book Boaz behaved appropriately towards Ruth, when he clearly found her attractive and was in a position to take advantage of her (even at one point where Ruth put herself even further into his power by sneaking into the threshing floor while Boaz was sleeping and no one else was there).