You shall not glean your vineyard, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the foreigner. I am Yahweh your God.
To leave the defective grape clusters for the poor (ollelot)
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְכַרְמְךָ לֹא תְעוֹלֵל
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להניח מה שיש בכרם כשיבצור אותו לעניים הנקרא עוללות, ובא הכתוב גם כן תעזוב אותם אחר זכרו העוללות. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת פאה. ואינה נוהגת אלא בארץ. (קדושים תהיו, מתנות עניים פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to leave over that which is called ollalot (incomplete clusters) for the poor when we harvest the vineyard. And Scripture comes [to say], "Leave them," after it mentions the ollalot (Leviticus 19:10). 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 flat, unconditional command
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 Binding, with modification
- 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.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Virtutibus 91-94 affirmed it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.231-232 affirmed it
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 6:141 carried a parallel
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.