House of Bread

For any of you who have been following the Ruth Bible Study that I've been teaching over the past year, you know that there are several things in the book of Ruth that point forward to Christ and His work.

In fact, two whole sessions, numbers one and four, deal specifically with this topic. Session one, in a nutshell, deals with Christ setting us free from the curse of the law. Ruth, being a Moabite, was specifically marked out by the law for exclusion in certain areas. Yet, despite this, she is an ancestor of Christ. I'm afraid you're going to have to listen to the whole lesson (roughly 50 minutes long) to get the whole picture on this point, as I simply don't have the time to type it all out again for this blog. Email me if you want the link to the Ruth Study.

Session four draws some parallels between the law of the kinsman-redeemer, personified in the book of Ruth by Boaz, and Christ as our kinsman-redeemer. In fact, the kinsman-redeemer is probably one of the most significant themes in the whole book of Ruth. Sadly, the importance of the role of the kinsman-redeemer seems to get minimized in our desire to create a fairytale romance between a "beautiful" Ruth and a "dashing" Boaz. (Session six debunks this scenario, again, I don't have time to type all of that out here.)

But there is another little detail in the book of Ruth that is often overlooked in its significance. It can be found in the very first verse.

Ruth 1:1

"Now it came to pass, in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehem, Judah, went to dwell in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons."

Notice that our story begins, and ultimately ends, in the sleepy little town of Bethlehem. Bethlehem is hardly famous as the setting of Ruth and Boaz's story, but rather for being the setting of another, more famous, story: the place where Mary gives birth to Jesus.

Before you let this detail go with a little, "huh, that's neat," and nothing further, let me tell you what the word Bethlehem actually means.

The literal translation for Bethlehem is "House of Bread."

OK, so what does that have to do with anything?

Perhaps I am making too much over a little connection I see between Bethlehem as the "House of Bread" and some of the events that unfolded there. I'll let you be the judge.

One would assume that if a place is named the House of Bread, then a great deal of bread must come out of there one way or another. And since we know that Bethlehem was a farming town, what with all of those fields that Ruth goes out to glean in and all that, this name seems to make perfect sense. But could there be more to it than that?

Remember that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. And consider what Jesus calls Himself in John chapter 6.

John 6:35

"And Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst."

Jesus, the bread of life, is born in Bethlehem, the House of Bread. Coincidence? Perhaps, but I tend to think there are few, if any, coincidences in Scripture. I think the name of Bethlehem had a double meaning from the beginning, but nobody would have realized it for a very long time.

Consider too the irony of Bethlehem, the House of Bread, at the beginning of the book of Ruth. A famine was consuming the land, and this in fact was the motivation behind Elimelech picking up and moving his little family to Moab, at which point Ruth, the Moabite, enters the story and ultimately, the lineage of Christ. The House of Bread was full of hunger.

But the bread of life, Christ Jesus, who was born in Bethlehem, the House of Bread, will erase all hunger forever.

Neat, huh?