“ ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field, neither shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest.
To leave the corner of one's field unharvested for the poor (peah)
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וּבְקֻצְרְכֶם אֶת־קְצִיר אַרְצְכֶם לֹא תְכַלֶּה פְּאַת שָׂדְךָ לִקְצֹר
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להניח פאה מהתבואות והאילנות והדומה להם, והוא אמרו יתעלה תעזוב אותם אחר זכרו הפאה. ונתבאר במסכת מכות (דף ט"ו:) שהפאה היא לאו הנתק לעשה. אמנם הלאו אמרו לא תכלה, והעשה אמרו תעזוב אותם. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת פאה, ודין תורה שלא תהא נוהגת אלא בארץ. (קדושים תהיו, מתנות עניים פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to leave over the corner of the produce, the trees and that which is similar to them. And that is His, may He be exalted, saying, "you shall leave them" (Leviticus 19:10), after His mentioning, the corner. And it is explained in Tractate Makkot (Makkot 15b) that the [law of the] corner is a negative commandment that is rectified by a positive commandment. Indeed, the negative commandment is His saying, "you shall not wholly reap" (Leviticus 19:9); and the positive commandment is His saying, "you shall leave them." And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Tractate Peah. But by Torah law, it is only practiced in the Land [of Israel]. (See Parashat Kedoshim; Mishneh Torah, Gifts to the Poor 1.)
Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.
Literary form: a prohibition
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Recorded as practiced today
- Binding in the land of Israel
Classical halakhic consequences
The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.
Imposed by a court
No court-imposed penalty is recorded.
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
No ritual remedy is recorded.
How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment
The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.
- Orthodox Binding
- Conservative Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Binding
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
How later traditions received this commandment
How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.
Rabbinic aggadah
- Ruth Rabbah 5:4 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.131-132 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.231-239 affirmed it
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- code of hammurabi Hammurabi field laws assume total owner sovereignty over standing and harvested crops with no provision mandating corner-leaving for the poor; the peah positive obligation directly inverts this proprietorial assumption by making a portion of standing grain a legally enforceable entitlement of the poor Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§42-58 (field-cultivation and agricultural damage laws) Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
- instruction of amenemope Amenemope urges mercy toward the poor, warns against encroaching on the vulnerable, and insists the land ultimately belongs to God rather than the landowner, providing an Egyptian wisdom parallel to the ethical motivation behind peah though without any legal mandate for corner-leaving Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Chapters 6-8 (warnings against moving boundary stones; care for the vulnerable) Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II (UC Press, 1976), pp. 146-163
Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks
One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.
This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.