Ruth Chapter 3 verse 14 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 14. - And she lay at the place of his feet until morning: and she arose ere yet a man could distinguish his neighbor. In the original it is "the places of his feet" (see ver. 4). Time would rapidly fly past. Sleep there would be none to either the one or the other. In mutual modesty they guarded each other's honor. Thoughts and feelings, narratives and projects, would be freely interchanged. Their mutual understanding would become complete. At length there began to be the first faint tinge of paleness streaking into the dark. Ruth arose, and prepared to depart. It is added, For he had said, - or, more literally, "And he had said," - Let it not be known that 'the' woman came to the threshing-floor. This has been to critics a puzzling clause. The conjunction in the foreground, a mere copulative, has occasioned difficulty. It is thoroughly Hebraistic. But of course it does not here introduce to notice something merely added to what goes before, of the nature of a parting injunction or request addressed to Ruth. The articulated phrase "the woman," as distinguished from "a woman," the expression in King James's version, renders such an interpretation impossible. The Targumist explains thus: "and he said to his young men." But the whole tenor of the preceding narrative proceeds on the assumption that there were no servants on the premises or at hand. Other Rabbis, and after them Luther and Cover-dale, interpret thus: "and he said in his heart," or, "and he thought." Unnatural. The difficulty is to be credited, or debited, to simplicity of composition, and the habit of just adding thing to thing aggregatively, instead of interweaving them into a complex unity. In the course of their many interchanges of thought and feeling, Boaz had expressed a desire, both for Ruth s sake and for his own, that it should not be known that she had come by night to the threshing-floor. The narrator, instead of introducing this expression of desire in the way in which it would directly fall from the lips of Boaz, "Let it not be known that thou didst come," gives it in the indirect form of speech, the oratio obliqua, as his own statement of the case. It is as if he had introduced a parenthesis or added a note in the margin. The ἅπαξ λεγόμενον טָרְום -instead of טֶרֶם- was most probably not a later form, as Berthean supposes, but an older Hebrew form that had died out of use long before the days of the Masorites.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(14) One could know another.--Literally, a man could recognise his friend; i.e., before daylight, in the early dusk.A woman.--Literally, the woman--i.e., this woman. Thus it is of Ruth, not of himself, that Boaz is here thinking. A sensible man like Boaz knows "that we must not only keep a good conscience, but keep a good name; we must avoid not only sin but scandal." (Henry.)