One Household

Boaz could redeem Elimelech’s field because he was of Elimelech’s family. The nearer kinsman had the right before him for the same reason: he was closer by blood. In the book of Ruth the circle of the goel is a single family in Bethlehem.

But the redemption Scripture speaks of reaches much further than one family’s field. Jacob spoke of being redeemed “from all evil.” The New Testament speaks of people redeemed from every tribe and nation. If the law of the goel is the frame in which that redemption is understood, then its first condition has to hold on a far larger scale. The one who redeems must be near of kin, and the ones redeemed must belong to the same household he belongs to. Can that be said of the whole human race?

Scripture answers this before it says anything about how redemption is carried out. The answer begins after the flood.

From These the Whole Earth

When the flood had ended and Noah’s family came out of the ark, Genesis records the beginning of every people on earth in one sentence.

Genesis 9:19 These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was overspread.

The verse does not describe many peoples with separate origins. It describes one family spreading outward. Every nation that would later fill the earth goes back to these three brothers, and through them to one father.

The chapter that follows, Genesis 10, lists the descendants of Shem, Ham and Japheth one line after another, and it closes by saying the same thing again.

Genesis 10:32 These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations; and from these the nations were divided in the earth after the flood.

The nations were divided: into lands, into languages, into peoples with their own names. But they were divided out of one family. However far apart they spread, and however different they became, they did not stop being kin.

This is the ground on which the law’s words “the near one to him” can hold for the whole human race. Mankind after the flood is not a collection of strangers. It is one household spread out over the earth.

From One Blood

Many centuries later Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus in Athens and said the same thing to a Greek audience.

Acts 17:24-26 The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people zoe ζωή dzo-ay'(life) and pnoe πνοή pno-ay'(breath) in every way; and He made from one blood every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed kairos καιρός kahee-ros'(appointed-time)s and the boundaries of their habitation,

Paul was speaking to Greeks, not to Israel, and he did not begin by telling them how different they were. He told them where they came from. Every nation, the Athenians included, was made from one blood.

Paul does not say “from one idea” or “from one design,” but “from one blood.” That is the language of kinship, the same thing the law of Leviticus was asking for when it spoke of sheer basar בָּשָׂר baw-sawr', flesh of the same flesh. The whole human race is related by blood.

Genesis and Acts stand far apart in time, but they agree. Genesis traces every people back to the three sons of Noah. Paul traces every nation back to one blood. Between them they settle the first step of the goel’s first condition: the people who need redeeming form a single household.

The same breadth appears at the other end of Scripture. When the new song is sung to the Lamb in Revelation 5, the ones He purchased come “from every tribe and tongue and people and ethnos ἔθνος eth'-nos(nation, Gentile-people).” The nations that were divided after the flood are the nations from which the redeemed are gathered. A household that spread into many peoples is bought back out of all of them. Its reach matches the reach of Genesis 9:19 and Acts 17:26.

Why This Comes First

This matters because of the shape of the law.

In Leviticus 25 the goel is “the near one to him.” A stranger cannot redeem, however rich or kind he may be. If the human race were many families with no blood between them, then a redeemer for one family could never be a redeemer for another. Each would need its own. The story of Ruth would be the whole story: one kinsman, one field, one family.

But Scripture does not describe the world that way. It describes one household. That means a single kinsman of that household could, in principle, be near of kin to every member of it. The first condition of the goel could be met once for all.

There is something else in this. The household of Adam’s race shares one condition. Every member of it is born of flesh and blood, and every member of it dies. The family that needs redeeming is not a family of fortunate people and unfortunate people. It is one family under one condition, and Hebrews will name that condition as the fear of death.

The One Outside the Household

Here lies the difficulty.

The One Jacob called goel was not of this household by birth. In a dream He said to Jacob, “I am the God of Bethel.” At the Jabbok Jacob said, “I have seen God face to face.” He appeared in the form of a man, and He wrestled with Jacob as a man, but as we saw in Chapter 11, that was a form taken for a time. He came to the household; He was not born into it.

By the law of Leviticus, that is not enough. A goel must be sheer basar, flesh of the same flesh, and the One who is God stands outside the household of flesh and blood. He could appear to a man, speak with him, hold him, and bless him. But by the terms of the law He could not redeem as a kinsman unless He became one.

And so He came inside it.

That is exactly what the letter to the Hebrews says. Hebrews does not treat the incarnation as an idea floating free of the law. It sets it in the language of kinship, of brothers and children, of flesh and blood. The household that came from one blood needed a kinsman of its own blood, and the One who stood outside it entered it.

In Hebrews 2:14 two verbs, side by side in one sentence, show the difference between the way we came to share in flesh and blood and the way He did.