Her name meant "pleasant," and Naomi felt nothing in her life matched it. Gill paraphrases: why call me Naomi "when there is nothing pleasant and agreeable in me, nor in my circumstances." She had gone out "full," which Keil & Delitzsch explain as rich in a husband and two sons, not in money, and she had come back without them. Her question is a lament, a cry of grief: the name she carried seemed to argue with what God had allowed.

The women's reply is not recorded, and the chapter closes: "So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter in law, with her" (Ruth 1:22). The book answers her question over time. Ruth's son is born, and the women say to Naomi, "Blessed be the LORD, which hath not left thee this day without a kinsman" (Ruth 4:14). They even say, "There is a son born to Naomi" (Ruth 4:17), using the name she had set aside.

Each name in this verse carries meaning. Naomi means "pleasant"; Mara means "bitter" (Ruth 1:20). "The Almighty" is the title Naomi uses for God here (Ruth 1:20-21). "Testified against me" uses the Hebrew verb anah with "against". Keil & Delitzsch say it means God had borne witness against her "by word and deed," and they reject the old rendering "He hath humbled me." The difference matters: "testified against me" pictures God as a witness against her, while "humbled me" would only describe her being brought low.

Naomi's lament is honest, and it is aimed at God. Matthew Henry says that though the cup of affliction was bitter, she owned, that is, acknowledged, that it came from God. Gill likewise sees her acknowledging the hand of God and submitting to it. She calls Him by two names, "the LORD" and "the Almighty," and she still believes He rules over her life, even when that rule feels bitter.

What Naomi could not see is the one standing beside her. She says she came home "empty," but Ruth had come with her (Ruth 1:22), and the women would later say Ruth was "better to thee than seven sons" (Ruth 4:15). God's answer to her emptiness was already walking with her.