“ ‘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.
Not to gather the gleanings of the harvest
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְלֶקֶט קְצִירְךָ לֹא תְלַקֵּט
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהיר שלא ללקט השבלים הנופלות בשדה בשעת קצירה אבל יעזוב אותם לעניים. והוא אמרו ולקט קצירך לא תלקט. וזה גם כן ניתק לעשה במו שבארנו בפאה. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת פאה. (שם, שם):
He prohibited - not to glean the sheaves that fall in the field at the time of the harvest. Rather one must leave them for the poor. And that is His saying, "you shall not gather the gleaning of your harvest" (Leviticus 23:22). And this too is rectified by a positive commandment, like we explained about the corner. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Tractate Peah. (See Parashat Emor; 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
- Lashes (malkot)
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 Binding
- 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 4:5 expanded it homiletically
- Vayikra Rabbah 34 The catalog describes this reception as: homiletic expansion (general charity/tzedakah context rather than direct leket exposition)
Philo of Alexandria
- De Virtutibus 90 rationalized it Within Philo's treatment of philanthropy (De Virtutibus 90-94), where leaving gleanings and corners is presented as cultivated humanity toward the poor
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.211 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.231 affirmed it
The New Testament
- Matthew 12:1 carried a parallel Disciples plucking grain reflects continued harvest-access custom, though the pericope concerns Sabbath rather than gleaning per se
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 The Hammurabi agricultural cluster regulates tenancy, crop yield, negligence, and flood damage but contains no statutory gleaning entitlement for the poor; the negative leket prohibition, by making owner-collection of fallen stalks a legal transgression, has no positive counterpart in CH — an argument from the silence of the ANE codes rather than a directly contrasting rule Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§42-58 (agricultural tenancy and field-damage laws) Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
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.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
The commandment prescribes corporal punishment for gathering fallen grain stalks from one's own field — conduct that in any modern legal system would at most be addressed through civil restitution. Lashing for a harvest welfare infraction is categorically disproportionate under modern penal standards.
-
Article 7
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
ICCPR Article 7 prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment; judicial flogging for collecting grain that fell during one's own harvest constitutes inhuman or degrading treatment under international human-rights law.
-
general principle
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Rabbinic tradition holds that Sanhedrin corporal jurisdiction lapsed with the destruction of the Second Temple and the disappearance of ordained judicial authority; the malkot sanction for collecting leket is de jure but inoperative in practice.