Ruth 1:22, commentary and pictures

So Naomi's sojourn in Moab came to an end and she returned to her former home, after famine had driven Elimelech with Naomi and their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, from Bethlehem-judah, also called Ephrath, to dwell in Moab, the sons had married the Moabite women Orpah and Ruth, and Elimelech, Mahlon and Chilion had died. Ruth came with her because she was steadfastly minded to go with Naomi and had vowed not to leave her but to go where she went, lodge where she lodged, take her people for her people and her God for her God, and stay with her till death parted them. Naomi returned old, poor, and without a son to preserve the family inheritance and name, and Ruth's choice to accompany her in dutiful filial love gave Naomi hope because she still had kinsmen in Bethlehem who might redeem the inheritance.

Naomi and Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, came together to Bethlehem from out of the country of Moab, and they came in the beginning of barley harvest in the spring of the year, an opportune time that fixes the time of year of their arrival and completes their return. The return belongs in and near the close of the time of the judges, in the days of the judges. It belongs to a brief pastoral and charming story that brings to view the private life of a devoted family in troublous times and shows the result of abiding faith in God and a consistent life.

The arrival points forward to what the rest of the story reveals, for Ruth's coming to Bethlehem led to her marriage to a kinsman of Naomi. By that marriage she became the mother of Obed, the grandfather of David, being herself the grandmother of David, and entered the genealogical line whose ending gives the ancestry of Jesus and includes Ruth, a Moabite woman. In that human lineage Jesus of Nazareth was proved a direct lineal descendant of Abraham, and Ruth as the believing Moabitish maiden left a lasting record of dutiful filial love and gave to posterity a lineage of kings through her great-grandson David.