Pe'ah 057

1:
I hope that my translation of this mishnah makes clear that it is replete with certain colloquial technical terms whose meaning is nowadays far from clear. What is clear is that it seeks to define under what circumstances a bundle of cereal crop which has been left uncollected becomes subject to the law of shikheĥah and when it does not. In other words, at what stage could that uncollected bundle of cereal crop possibly become the property of the poor and under what circumstances. What follows seems to be the purport of our mishnah as explained by Rambam in his commentary on this mishnah.

2:
The custom was to reap the wheat and to stack it in many heaps spread all over the field, waiting for them to be collected into one place. From that one place they would be removed from the field to the threshing-floor.

3:
If the wheat was bundled into heaps above the ground these heaps were called 'hat-heaps' – probably because their shape brought to mind the shape of a hat. Another way to hoard the wheat was to dump it into holes in the ground. In our translation this kind of heaping we called 'stock-heaping' though the Hebrew word in such a context is what is called (from the Greek) "hapax legomena" [‘απαχ λεγωμενα]: since this this the only instance of the word being used in this way (and since it is obviously a colloquialism) its exact meaning must remain uncertain. (Rambam – and the Gemara – possibly very fancifully, connects the word with one that appears in Deuteronomy 32:32.) Yet another method of heaping the wheat seems to have been by fashioning the heaps into a round shape. While the Hebrew word used means a 'cake' Rambam suggests that it refers to a rounded flat-topped heap that looks like a mill-stone; Rabbi Ovadya of Bertinoro suggests that it looks like a cake straight out of the oven. The fourth term used, which I translated as 'haystacks' seems to refer to that: the shaping of bundles of wheat into the shape of a haystack.

4:
As long as the crop is being moved from the place where it was reaped to one of these forms of temporary heaping the law of shikheĥah does not apply because the removal is only temporary in any case: the final destination of these heaps is the threshing-floor where it will be processed into flour etc. So if one of these bundles is overlooked where it was dumped by the reaper the poor cannot claim that it is shikheĥah because it can still be removed from there to the threshing-floor which is its final destination. But if the crop is already being removed from the field to the threshing-floor any heap or bundle which was overlooked by the workers becomes the property of the poor.

This concludes our study of the fifth chapter of this tractate.

In Peah 055 I wrote: When one indigent person sells his field to another indigent person…

Ze'ev Orzech writes:

I hesitate to ask the obvious: if one person owns a field and the other person has enough money to buy it, how can they be called "indigent?" Is it possible that the sums we're talking about still leave the persons involved below the poverty-line annual income, or that both of them find themselves in the situation of the traveler you discussed earlier this week, i.e., with a temporary cash-flow problem or "land poor?"

I respond:

Either of the situations suggested by Ze'ev could apply. We must always bear in mind that in many cases these 'fields' were very small indeed. In Peah 034 I wrote:

From this it follows that the fact that one possessed a patch of land did not guarantee that one's income would be above the poverty-line. (The definition of 'poverty-line' will be given at the very end of this tractate.)

More of your queries and comments tomorrow.