Boaz saw a young woman he did not know gleaning in his field, so he asked the servant in charge of the reapers about her. Keil & Delitzsch suggest she did not have the look of an ordinary pauper, a poor person living on charity, so Boaz wondered which Bethlehem family she belonged to. Gill reads the question the same basic way, as asking "whose daughter is she? or whose wife?" Matthew Henry notes simply that Boaz inquired about the stranger and then ordered that she be well treated.

The servant answered directly: "It is the Moabitish damsel that came back with Naomi out of the country of Moab" (Ruth 2:6), that is, the young Moabite woman. He added that she had asked, "let me glean and gather after the reapers among the sheaves," and had "continued even from the morning until now" with only a short rest (Ruth 2:7). Boaz then turned and spoke to Ruth himself (Ruth 2:8).

Gleaning, gathering the grain the reapers left behind, was the way God's law provided for the poor. The Law of Moses told Israel's farmers to leave the gleanings of the harvest "for the poor and stranger" (Leviticus 19:9-10; Deuteronomy 24:19). Even so, Keil & Delitzsch observe, hard-hearted farmers and reapers could put obstacles in the way of gleaners, and Ruth had asked the overseer's permission first (Ruth 2:7). Gill describes the overseer's job: directing the reapers' work, providing for them, and paying their wages.

Boaz's question reads literally "To whom is this young woman?" The word is na'arah, girl or young woman, the feminine form of na'ar, the word used for the servant he asked.

This simple question is where Ruth's story turns. Ruth had gone out hoping to glean "after him in whose sight I shall find grace" (Ruth 2:2), and the text says "her hap was to light on" the field of Boaz, a kinsman of Elimelech (Ruth 2:3). In today's words, she happened to come to his field. Keil & Delitzsch note she came there without knowing who owned it. Gill sees more than chance: what was "hap and chance to her" was by "the providence and direction of God", that is, God's guiding care. Boaz's question begins a chain that ends with Naomi saying, "Blessed be he of the LORD, who hath not left off his kindness to the living and to the dead" (Ruth 2:20).

The answer Boaz received also matters. The servant identified Ruth by two things: she was a Moabite, and she had come back with Naomi (Ruth 2:6). Her foreignness and her faithfulness to Naomi both come up again when Boaz speaks with her (Ruth 2:10-11).