ing.” When, at dawn, she is going, he bids her bring her veil, and measures six measures of barley in it, saying, “Go not empty unto thy mother-in-law.” The occurrences in the concluding chapter, at the gate of the town, are strikingly ancient, oriental, and Jewish. The nearer kinsman declines to fulfill the duties enjoined by the law, he does not wish to buy the “parcel of land,” or to marry Ruth, “lest he mar his own inheritance;” he makes over the duty to Boaz, giving him his shoe as a token, a singular and very primitive custom; but we are reading now of times before the date of the Trojan war, chronology having placed these incidents in the fourteenth century before Christ. Boaz then calls upon all present to be witnesses to the contract by which he engaged to buy the land, and to marry the widow. “And all the people that were in the gate, and the elders, said, We are witnesses. The Lord make the woman that is come into thine house like Rachel, and like Leah, which two did build the house of Israel: and do thou worthily in Ephratah, and be famous in Bethlehem.” Probably before the six measures of barley were eaten, Ruth entered the house of Boaz as his wife. Naomi went with her; and in time Ruth gave a grandson to the aged widow: “And Naomi took the child, and laid it in her bosom, and became nurse unto it.” “And the women said unto her, He shall be unto thee the restorer of thy life, and a nourisher of thine old age, for thy daughter-in-law which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons, hath borne him.” This child became in the course of years the grandfather of David; Ruth received the honor coveted by every Jewish woman—she was one in the line between Sarah and the Blessed Virgin, the mother of our Lord. It was undoubtedly to record her place in the sacred genealogy, or rather for the sake of that
