Naomi: The Woman Who Came Home Empty

A woman of the years before Israel had a king

Naomi (Hebrew נׇעֳמִי) belongs to the era before the monarchy, placed at around 1451 BC to 1095 BC on the era reckoning that follows Ussher's chronology (1650). Her whole footprint in Scripture is twenty verses, and all of them stand in one book: Ruth. She first appears at Ruth 1:2 as the wife of Elimelech and the mother of Mahlon and Chilion. She is a person the Bible introduces by her household rather than by her ancestry, and the story that follows takes her from a foreign country back to Bethlehem and then to a cradle.

Named, then bereaved

The opening is spare and terrible. "The name of the man was Elimelech, and the name of his wife Naomi. The names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion, Ephrathites of Bethlehem Judah. They came into the country of Moab and lived there. Elimelech, Naomi's husband, died; and she was left with her two sons" (Ruth 1:2-3). Four names, a move, a grave. The narrator gives Naomi no speech here, only a status: left.

Her first recorded words are an act of release. "Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, 'Go, return each of you to her mother's house. May Yahweh deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me'" (Ruth 1:8). She presses it again: "Go back, my daughters. Why do you want to go with me? Do I still have sons in my womb, that they may be your husbands?" (Ruth 1:11). Notice what she is doing. She is arguing herself out of company, calculating what she has to offer and finding nothing. Her kindness and her emptiness speak with the same voice.

"Don't call me Naomi"

The return to Bethlehem is the longest scene she has, and it is a public one. "So they both went until they came to Bethlehem. When they had come to Bethlehem, all the city was excited about them, and they asked, 'Is this Naomi?' She said to them, 'Don't call me Naomi. Call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and Yahweh has brought me home again empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since Yahweh has testified against me, and the Almighty has afflicted me?' So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, with her, who returned out of the country of Moab. They came to Bethlehem in the beginning of barley harvest" (Ruth 1:19-22).

The town says her name and she refuses it. She asks to be called by a different one. And the charge she brings is not vague misfortune: she names Yahweh as the one who emptied her, testified against her, afflicted her. Scripture records the complaint without correcting it on the spot. The narrator, however, sets one detail beside her word empty: Ruth the Moabitess came with her, and they arrived at the beginning of barley harvest.

Small words that move the story

In the next chapter she is the one who knows the family map. "Naomi had a relative of her husband's, a mighty man of wealth, of the family of Elimelech, and his name was Boaz. Ruth the Moabitess said to Naomi, 'Let me now go to the field, and glean among the ears of grain after him in whose sight I find favor.' She said to her, 'Go, my daughter'" (Ruth 2:1-2). Two words of permission, and the harvest field opens.

Beyond the scenes with quoted speech, Naomi is carried through the book in brief mentions and references: Ruth 2:6, Ruth 2:20, Ruth 2:22, Ruth 3:1, Ruth 4:3, Ruth 4:5, Ruth 4:9 and Ruth 4:14. They are short, and their contents are not opened here, but they show that her name keeps surfacing as the book moves toward its close.

A son is born to Naomi

The last we see of her, she is holding a child. "Naomi took the child, laid him in her bosom, and became nurse to him. The women, her neighbors, gave him a name, saying, 'A son is born to Naomi'. They named him Obed. He is the father of Jesse, the father of David" (Ruth 4:16-17). The women of Bethlehem, who once asked "Is this Naomi?", now use her name without hesitation and attach a son to it. The woman who said she came home empty ends the book with a child at her breast, and the narrator traces that child forward to Jesse and to David.

Where the honest edges are

Her bitter speech at Ruth 1:20-21 is not tidied up by the text and should not be tidied up by us. She accused the Almighty of afflicting her, in front of a whole town, while the daughter-in-law who had returned with her out of the country of Moab stood at her side unmentioned in the accounting (Ruth 1:22). That is what she said, and Scripture kept it.

What we are not told

What we do not know is more than we might expect. Scripture does not name her parents. No tribe or people is given for her; the word Ephrathites at Ruth 1:2 is attached to the man and his two sons. We are told nothing of her age, her death or her burial. The book of Ruth is her only witness, and no New Testament passage naming her is listed, so this article draws no line beyond the pages of Ruth. What stands is the record itself: a woman emptied, a woman returned, and a child laid in her bosom whose line runs on to Jesse and to David (Ruth 4:16-17).