“The father of Jesse, the father of David”
A son has been born to Naomi… and they named him Obed. He became the father of Jesse, the father of David. (Ruth 4:17 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A tidy genealogical footnote closing a family story.
The cultural key
The last words detonate the whole book. Everything, the famine, the Moabite marriage, the gleaning, the threshing floor, has quietly been building a bridge to King David, Israel's greatest king, and so (as Matthew's genealogy makes explicit) toward the Messiah. It also means David, and the royal messianic line, carried Moabite blood through his great-grandmother Ruth, the very foreigner the law had excluded. The women credit the child to Naomi: the woman who called herself Mara, 'empty,' now holds an heir on her lap.
Recovered meaning
The domestic story turns out to be national, and then cosmic. A destitute widow and a foreign gleaner stand three generations from the throne of David, which is the point the New Testament seizes when it opens the gospel with 'Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth.'