Then Boaz said, ‘On the day you buy the land from Naomi, you also acquire Ruth the Moabite, the[a] dead man’s widow, in order to maintain the name of the dead with his property.’

At this, the guardian-redeemer said, ‘Then I cannot redeem it because I might endanger my own estate. You redeem it yourself. I cannot do it.’

(Now in earlier times in Israel, for the redemption and transfer of property to become final, one party took off his sandal and gave it to the other. This was the method of legalising transactions in Israel.)

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Footnotes

  1. Ruth 4:5 Vulgate and Syriac; Hebrew (see also Septuagint) Naomi and from Ruth the Moabite, you acquire the