Judges, Ruth: Revised Edition (The NIV Application Commentary)

by K. Lawson Younger

Finally, a surprise identification is given. The child is “the father of Jesse, the father of David.” “This surprise is all the more delightful because the narrator at the beginning subtly hinted at some such connection by his identification of the family as ‘Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah’ (1:2).”66 This, of course, was the very clan and city of David used in the introduction to the narrative in 1 Samuel 17:12: “Now David was the son of an Ephrathite named Jesse, who was from Bethlehem in Judah.” It is at this point that the reader can perceive how precarious the situation was: Without Ruth, the line of Elimelek would be extinguished, as, too, the line of Boaz, and hence no David. In addition, the interconnection in this verse of Naomi and the short genealogy of David “brings the world of the women into the world of men as Bethlehem’s women redefine kinship based on genealogical lineage. This short genealogy was strictly speaking neither legal nor biological as Ruth not Naomi is Obed’s biological mother.”67