“Whose Girl is That?” (Ruth 2:5)

The series starts here. Get your free Biblical Hebrew Starter Kit here!

Reminder: The Monday literature series is a benefit for premium subscribers.

⁵ Boaz said to the boy in charge of the reapers

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר בֹּ֨עַז֙ לְנַעֲר֔וֹ הַנִּצָּ֖ב עַל־הַקּֽוֹצְרִ֑ים

We presume that this נַ֫עַר ná’ar is a fully-grown man — like Sam the piano player in “Rick’s Café Américain” or the boys in the expression “See what the boys in the back room will have.” Baby Moses in his basket on the Nile (Exod 2:6) is a na’ar, but so is this perhaps young man who has a position of some responsibility. He is the foreman of the gang of workers who are doing the harvesting, like Joseph, who in Gen 37:2, at age 17, was a na’ar along with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, the two somehow lesser-ranking wives of his father.

The word describing this particular young man’s role is הַנִּצָּ֖ב ha-nitzav ‘the one who is stationed’. Someone has positioned him at this (metaphorical) post where he is expected to “stand” (as נצב n‑tz‑b literally means), just as Abraham’s servant “stands” by a spring (in Genesis 24) to see whether God will send him a fiancée for Isaac or, indeed, as YHWH stands over Jacob (in Gen 28:13) while he dreams of angels going up and down the ramp to heaven. My student Marc Fishkind understood nitzav in our verse as a way of saying that this boy was supposed to be “on top of” things.

If this were a news item, we would want the reporter to go back and get some more information:

• Is this Boaz’s son? Some other relative?

• Is he a permanent employee, in charge of harvesters who work seasonally and move elsewhere when the barley and wheat harvests are done?

• What exactly are his responsibilities?

• In fact, this character will disappear from the story after he has made a fool of himself at the end of v. 7 (stay tuned). The word in this phrase that matters most, as we will see as soon as we read what Boaz actually says to him, is that the narrator is calling him a na’ar.

“Whose girl is that?”

לְמִ֖י הַנַּעֲרָ֥ה הַזֹּֽאת׃