The Babylonian Talmud in Selection: Zeraim (Agriculture): The Portion of the Poor (Tractate Peah)

This is a selection from the Babylonian Talmud — specifically from the tractate Peah — drawn from the Mishnaic legal tradition and compiled in a 1944 English anthology by Leo Auerbach. The text sets out the rabbinic law governing Peah, the obligation for landowners to leave the corners and gleanings of their fields for the poor, along with related agricultural charity laws such as Forgotten Sheaf and Poor-man's Tithe. The bulk of the selection is precise legal reasoning: rabbis debate what constitutes a field boundary, which crops are subject to the law, when fallen grain belongs to the poor versus the owner, and what wealth threshold disqualifies a person from receiving charity. What distinguishes the text is its combination of granular procedural detail — down to whether grain that falls from the inside versus outside of a sickle belongs to the poor — with explicit moral and spiritual stakes, warning that judges who take bribes will go blind and that those who feign poverty will eventually suffer the afflictions they faked. The named disagreements among authorities (Rabbi Akiba, Rabbi Ishmael, Rabbi Yehuda, Rabbi Simon) illustrate how Talmudic law is not monolithic but preserved as an ongoing dispute between competing interpretive traditions.

The Babylonian Talmud in Selection: Zeraim (Agriculture): The Portion of the Poor (Tractate Peah)

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