When you reap your harvest in your field, and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go again to get it. It shall be for the foreigner, for the fatherless, and for the widow, that Yahweh your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.
To leave a forgotten sheaf in the field for the poor (shikchah)
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
כִּי תִקְצֹר קְצִירְךָ בְשָׂדֶךָ וְשָׁכַחְתָּ עֹמֶר בַּשָּׂדֶה לֹא תָשׁוּב לְקַחְתּוֹ לַגֵּר לַיָּתוֹם וְלָאַלְמָנָה יִהְיֶה
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו להניח עומר השכחה, והוא אמרו ושכחת עומר בשדה לא תשוב לקחתו לגר ליתום ולאלמנה יהיה, הנה אמרו יהיה הוא הצווי להניחו והוא עשה כמו שאמר בלקט ופאה תעזוב אותם שהוא עשה כמו שבארנו, וזו אינה נוהגת מן התורה אלא בארץ. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו במסכת פאה. (כי תצא, מתנות עניים פ"א):
That is that He commanded us to leave over the forgotten [produce]. And that is His saying, "and you have forgotten a sheaf in the field, do not turn back to get it; it shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow" (Deuteronomy 24:19). Behold, His saying, "it shall be," is the command to leave it. And it is a positive commandment; like it is a positive commandment when He said, "Leave them," with the gleanings and the corner, as we explained. But by Torah law, it is only practiced in the Land [of Israel]. And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Tractate Peah. (See Parashat Ki Tetzeh; 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 case law — "if X, then Y"
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
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
- Sifre Deuteronomy 283 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.179-181 affirmed it
Josephus
- Ant. 4.231-233 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 These Hammurabi provisions regulate field tenancy, debt secured against crops, and the cultivator's harvest entitlement; they reflect the general ANE proprietary framework in which the harvest belongs wholly to owner/tenant, with no built-in welfare claim arising from inadvertent loss. The contrast with shikhchah's conversion of forgetfulness into a poor-law entitlement is an inference from the absence of any comparable welfare provision rather than from an explicit contrary rule. Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§49-52 (field-lease and crop-as-loan-repayment provisions) Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. (Scholars Press, 1997)
- hittite laws Hittite agricultural laws regulate field trespass, negligence in cultivation, and damage to standing crops; they assume the cultivator or owner holds full entitlement to all harvest yield with no provision converting accidentally-overlooked produce into a welfare right for the poor, illustrating the broad ANE proprietary default against which the shikhchah forgotten-sheaf obligation stands in contrast Relationship to the parallel: polemical contrast §§111-115 (field cultivation, trespass on unplanted fields, and negligence in agriculture) Hoffner, The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition (Brill, 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.