Ruth 3:9
And he said, Who art thou? And she answered, I am Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman. And he said, Who art thou? And she answered, I am Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman.
Ruth 3:9 belongs to the brief, beautiful pastoral story of Ruth from the time of the judges, whose ending brings out the ancestry of the Lord Jesus, into which Ruth the Moabite woman is brought. The Hebrew word for redeemer can also mean kinsman, because the redeemer had to belong to the family whose inheritance he preserved and whose name he perpetuated, and had to be a near kinsman. The family duty of a Goel could belong to a more distant relative and not only to a brother, and it included preserving the deceased kinsman's family and inheritance, and in the verse Ruth calls on Boaz as a near kinsman to fulfill that duty, and Boaz was willing to take on the obligation, although a closer relative had the prior right to do so.
The near kinsman is a type of Christ, who cares for and redeems His people. Christ became humanity's Redeemer by becoming a near kinsman according to the flesh, taking human nature and becoming one with the human family as a brother to sinners, even the lowest among them. The hope of salvation from sin rests upon this manifestation of God in the flesh in the person of His Son, the coming of the Son of man as the seed of the woman.