Ruth 4:1
Then went Boaz up to the gate, and sat him down there: and, behold, the kinsman of whom Boaz spake came by; unto whom he said, Ho, such a one! turn aside, sit down here. And he turned aside, and sat down. Then went Boaz up to the gate, and sat him down there: and, behold, the kinsman of whom Boaz spake came by; unto whom he said, Ho, such a one! turn aside, sit down here. And he turned aside, and sat down.
Ruth 4:1 belongs to the beautiful, brief, wonderfully interesting story of Ruth, a little pastoral tale from the time of the judges whose close brings out the ancestry of the Lord Jesus, into which a Moabite woman is brought. The book was probably written by Samuel, or in the early days of David, perhaps by Nathan the prophet.
City gates were places of judgment where magistrates and judges sat each day to hear and decide complaints and litigation, and where councils of war were held. Ancient walled cities built for defense had at each gate an extra half-circle wall outside, leaving a crescent-shaped space where seats were erected for this work. Boaz going up to the gate and sitting down illustrates that custom, and the same custom explains Lot sitting in the gate of Sodom as filling a post of honor and influence as magistrate and judge in the place of his duty.
Boaz going up to the city gate and sitting down is a formal legal meeting to settle the Goel obligation, calling the nearer kinsman who has a better right than himself to turn aside and sit. With ten elders of the city called to sit as witnesses, he begins the public proceedings to settle the family's inheritance and the kinsman's right concerning Ruth. Boaz knows the family relationships better than Naomi and knows this other man must first be given the right to redeem.
The law carried out at the gate is that the right to redeem a person or inheritance lost through poverty or bondage falls not merely to one near of kin but to the one nearest of kin by blood-relationship who is able. Land rights were governed by the law connected with the Jubilee, as seen when Boaz addresses the nearer kinsman at the town gate about the redemption of property. The kinsman-marriage custom kept a dead man's inheritance in Canaan from passing out of his family, for if a man died without an heir his property would go into other hands, but if his brother or near kinsman married his widow the firstborn would be counted as the heir of the one who died so the homestead was retained.
In this verse that law is applied to the redemption of Elimelech's land, also described as Naomi's inheritance, and to the marriage of Ruth the Moabitess to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance. The near kinsman is a type of Christ showing God's care for the Seed. Fallen humanity has lost its inheritance and is itself in bondage and cannot redeem itself or its inheritance, so the right falls to Jesus Christ as the only one in the universe who is able, who took part of the same flesh and blood as man in order to become his nearest kin by blood-relationship and thus his redeemer. That redemption points forward to Christ, who had the right to redeem and gave His life to do so.
Through this work the Moabitess Ruth became one of the progenitors of Christ according to the flesh, chosen to belong to the family line through which Christ came. The passage gives a picture of the sweet, simple home life among the children of Israel. This whole kinsman-marriage arrangement will be unnecessary for those accounted worthy to obtain the resurrection from the dead, because they cannot die anymore and each person's inheritance in the restored new earth will remain unimpaired throughout eternity.