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 fallen grapes for the poor (peret)
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וּפֶרֶט כַּרְמְךָ לֹא תְלַקֵּט לֶעָנִי וְלַגֵּר תַּעֲזֹב אֹתָם
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להניח מה שיפול ויתפרד מן הענבים בבצירתם לעניים. והוא אמרו יתברך ופרט כרמך לא תלקט לעני ולגר תעזוב אותם. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת פאה. ואינה נוהגת מן התורה אלא בארץ. (קדושים תהיו, מתנות עניים פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to leave over for the poor, that which falls and breaks off from the grapes when we harvest them. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying, "and you shall not gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger" (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 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 Binding
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Binding in principle
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 90-94 affirmed it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.231-233 affirmed it
The Qur'an and hadith
- Q 6:141 carried a parallel
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's orchard and vineyard provisions treat the produce as the owner's or tenant's property and regulate liability and yield-sharing with no provision converting incidental harvest loss into a welfare entitlement for the poor; the peret positive obligation inverts this by assigning fallen individual grapes to the poor Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§59-65 (orchard/garden/vineyard cultivation, produce, and tenancy) 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.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.