Boaz

Boaz is a landowner of Bethlehem in the book of Ruth who becomes the husband of Ruth and the father of Obed, and so the great-grandfather of King David. His name is usually understood to mean something like “in him is strength,” though the etymology is not certain and scholars have proposed other derivations.

The narrative of Ruth introduces him as a man of standing in the town, and the text says he owned a field in which Ruth happened to glean (Ruth 2:3). He greets his reapers with “May Yahweh be with you” (Ruth 2:4), and he tells Ruth he has heard of her loyalty to Naomi and of her leaving her own land for a people she did not know (Ruth 2:11). He protects her, feeds her, and lets her stay with his young women through the barley and wheat harvests (Ruth 2:23). In Ruth chapter 4 he acts as a kinsman-redeemer: he negotiates at the city gate with a nearer relative who declines, and he buys the field from Naomi together with Ruth the Moabitess “to raise up the name of the dead on his inheritance” (Ruth 4:5), with the sandal ceremony described at Ruth 4:7–8. The legal background is the redemption of family land and the levirate duty set out in Leviticus 25:25 and Deuteronomy 25:5–10.

The genealogies name him three times over: Salmon fathered Boaz and Boaz fathered Obed (Ruth 4:21; 1 Chronicles 2:12), and Matthew’s Gospel gives the same line with the added note that Boaz was born to Salmon “by Rahab” and that Obed was born to Boaz “by Ruth” (Matthew 1:5); Luke’s genealogy lists Boaz without those maternal names (Luke 3:32). The name Boaz is also that of one of the two bronze pillars of Solomon’s temple, the left one, while the right was called Jachin (1 Kings 7:21; 2 Chronicles 3:17); that is a naming of an object, not a reference to the Bethlehemite.

Christian tradition has widely read Boaz as a type or foreshadowing of Christ, the redeemer who takes a Gentile bride, and the book is often preached on that line. Jewish interpretation has concentrated on different questions: the book’s place in the Writings and its reading at Shavuot, Boaz as a model of kindness and communal responsibility toward the stranger and the poor, the legal mechanics of redemption, and the rabbinic tradition that identifies Boaz with the judge Ibzan (Bava Batra 91a), an identification the biblical text does not make. Readers in historical-critical tradition treat Boaz chiefly as a literary and social figure within the book’s own setting, and they differ over how far the genealogy in Ruth 4 and the temple pillar name are historically connected to the narrative.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.