Ruth Bible stories for kids
Ruth is the one who would not go back. Her husband has died, so has his brother, so has their father, and her mother-in-law Naomi is walking home to Bethlehem with nothing. Naomi tells both young women to go home to their own mothers, and one of them, with Naomi's blessing and a lot of tears, does. Ruth holds on to Naomi's arm and says the line people still read out at weddings: where you go, I will go.
These three stories are the book of Ruth, about fifteen minutes together, all in full text on this site and all told for ages 3 to 8. Naomi is in every one of them, and a good deal of the time the story is really hers: she goes away full, comes home empty, and finishes with a grandson on her lap.
3 stories, about 15 minutes of listening
Ruth’s story, in order
Ruth and Naomi
Naomi has lost her husband and both her sons in a faraway land, and now she wants to go home to Bethlehem. Where the road splits, she tells her two daughters-in-law to turn back, and each of them has to choose.
Ruth 1, 8 min, ages 3-8
Ruth and Boaz
Ruth goes out early to gather leftover barley so that she and Naomi will have something to eat. She does not know whose field she has walked into, or what its owner is about to whisper to his workers.
Ruth 2, 4 min, ages 3-8
Ruth's Baby Obed
The last time we saw Naomi, she told everyone in Bethlehem to call her Mara because she had come home empty. Now she is holding a baby, and her neighbors have something to say about Ruth.
Ruth 4, 3 min, ages 3-8
Listening through Ruth’s life
Ruth and Naomi is eight minutes from Ruth 1, and the only sad one of the three. A famine sends Naomi's family from Bethlehem to Moab, her husband and both sons die there, and at the fork in the road Orpah turns back and Ruth does not. When they reach Bethlehem, Naomi tells the neighbors to call her Mara, which means bitter. The story ends on the detail the Bible chooses to end on: they arrive just as the barley harvest begins.
Ruth and Boaz is four minutes in a barley field, from Ruth 2, and it is on our list for three-year-olds. Ruth goes out gleaning, picking up what the harvesters leave behind, and happens to walk into the field of Boaz, a relative of Naomi's husband. He tells her to stay close and drink from his workers' water jars, and then quietly tells them to pull stalks out of the bundles and drop them where she will find them. She comes home with about thirty pounds of barley, and Naomi's hand flies to her heart.
Ruth's Baby Obed is three minutes from Ruth 4. Boaz and Ruth marry, they have a son, and the women of the town tell Naomi that Ruth is worth more to her than seven sons. Then the story follows the family forward: Obed's son is Jesse, Jesse's son is David, and the line runs all the way to Jesus, born in the same little town.
Played in order, the three make a story about emptiness being filled one ordinary kindness at a time, with nobody in it doing anything spectacular at all. Every page has a free audio preview, the memory verse from the World English Bible, discussion questions and a prayer, and Ruth and Naomi carries a note for parents about the grief at the start.
Common questions
- Are the Ruth stories suitable for a three-year-old?
- Ruth and Boaz is on our list for three-year-olds, and Ruth's Baby Obed is short and gentle too. Ruth and Naomi is the one to think about first. Three men die at the start of it, named rather than described, and the middle of the story is a family saying goodbye on a road. Plenty of four and five-year-olds take it well, especially with you next to them.
- Is the beginning of Ruth too sad for bedtime?
- It is sad on purpose, and the telling does not hurry past it. Naomi cries, Orpah cries, and Naomi arrives home asking to be called bitter. What carries a child through is that Ruth does not let go of her, and that the story ends with the barley harvest starting. Orpah is not the villain, either: the story says plainly that going back was not a wrong thing, because Naomi had told her to go.
- Which order should we listen in?
- Book order, the way they are listed here. Each one starts by asking whether you remember the last, and Ruth's Baby Obed only really lands if your child has heard Naomi say she came home empty. If you go on to David's stories afterwards, your child will already know whose great-grandson the shepherd boy is.
- What does the Bible say that these stories leave out?
- Ruth 3 and most of Ruth 4. In the Bible, Naomi sends Ruth to the threshing floor at night to lie at Boaz's feet and ask him to spread his cloak over her, and Boaz then settles the matter at the town gate with a closer relative, who gives up his right to redeem Naomi's land and seals it by handing over his sandal. Our telling skips from the field to the wedding and says simply that they fell in love.
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