Two Stalks, Not Three

It was barley harvest in Beis Lechem, and Rus went out to the fields to collect the gleanings left for the poor. The verse says that she went and came. Chazal explain that she walked back and forth along the road, again and again, until she found decent people to walk beside. Then she came to the field of Boaz.

Boaz arrived from town and asked the overseer of his reapers: whose young woman is this? Chazal wonder at the question, for it was not his way to ask about women. He asked, they explain, because he saw wisdom and Torah in the way she gleaned. When two stalks fell together, she took them; when three fell together, she left them, for the halachah is that three stalks are not gleanings and still belong to the owner. He saw modesty too. The other women bent low to gather and laughed with the reapers. Rus gathered the standing stalks while she stood and the fallen stalks while she sat, so that she never had to bend over, and she kept to herself.

The overseer told Boaz that she had worked since morning and rested only a moment. The Midrash adds that she took very little, hardly enough for herself, let alone for Naomi waiting at home. Boaz told her to glean in no other field, and quietly told his young men to pull stalks from the bundles and drop them in her path, without letting her feel ashamed. That evening she beat out what she had gathered, about an ephah of barley, and carried it home to her mother-in-law.