With no men to provide any support for any of them, Naomi decided to leave Moab and return home to Judea. She urged her daughters-in-law to remain behind in their own homeland of Moab, and eventually that is what Orpah did. However, in a famous line in the Bible, Ruth declares that she will never leave Naomi to return home alone. Perhaps you are familiar with that passionate statement by Ruth:

Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.
Your people will be my people and your God will be my God.
Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.

The two women make their way back to Bethlehem in Judea and upon their return Naomi says that the people should call her Mara and not Naomi. In the Hebrew language, Naomi means “sweet one” and Mara means “bitter one.” Naomi is saying that having lost her husband and both of her sons, and believing that God had somehow turned his back on her, she now felt bitter and hurt and even angry with God. All the sweetness had gone out of her life. One day she was a wife and a mother, and now here she is as a childless widow with only a daughter-in-law from a foreign country to keep her company.

The issue for Naomi and Ruth was not simply the issue of being widows; the real issue was that of being single in a culture that was designed for women to be married. Ancient Israel was a patriarchal society where all authority and power were assigned to men and where women were totally dependent upon some male figure be it a husband, a father or an older brother. Women, along with orphans and foreigners, fit into a kind of protected class of people who were never to be taken advantage of precisely because they had no independent status in society. Widows had no man to provide for them or advocate for them in the society. They were never meant to live alone in that society, and when they found themselves alone something had to be done.

In the book of Ruth the solution that was identified was called the “kinsman redeemer” law. That meant that when a woman’s husband died, another man on the husband’s side of the family was obligated to step up and open his home to receive that women so she should would not be left alone. In the book of Ruth a man named Boaz stepped up and became the kinsman who “redeemed” both Ruth and Naomi by taking them into his house, and he took Ruth to be his wife. They solved the problem of not having one man for every woman by allowing one man to have more than one woman.

That is not a solution for people in the 21st century. We have laws against polygamy or men having more than one wife. Not only that, but there are not many women I know who are prepared to allow another woman into their home as a second wife no matter what the Bible says. I suppose it is possible to find at least one man who would love to play the role of Boaz and make room for another woman in his life, but unless he wants to be on the receiving end of a rolling pin or a frying pan he had better not try it.