Pe'ah 013

2:
The sages made their explication of the rules and regulations outlined in our present mishnah (and the rest of the chapter) dependent on the demand of the Torah. When the Torah [Leviticus 19:9] legislates:

3:
It would probably have been much more convenient for the farmer who had larger tracts of land to delineate a portion of his total holdings as Pe'ah. The sages in our mishnah will not permit this. The poor have the right to their Pe'ah in each individual 'field' that the agriculturalist works, for the Torah says 'your field' and not 'your fields'. This would mean that the poor could be spread out over several fields, thus making it easier for each of them to harvest a reasonable amount. It would also mean that the poor had the right to harvest from each kind of crop that the farmer had in his holdings and not just one.

4:
Our present mishnah seeks to define the term 'field'. What constitutes the end of one field and the beginning of another? Our mishnah gives a list of ten physical phenomena, any one of which could be seen as denoting the limit of a field.

5:
The first is a wadi that runs by the land. I have translated the Hebrew term 'naĥal' as wadi here, even though such a translation is supported only by some of the classical commentators. One possible rendition would have been 'barren land': this is the interpretation that some of sages gave to the biblical phrase in Deuteronomy 21:4 which describes the land "which is neither ploughed nor sown" on which the calf was to be decapitated in expiation of bloodshed. [For a fuller understanding of this very brief and therefore somewhat cryptic note see Sotah 9:4 – Sotah 099 – in our archives. (You can use this link.)] But, since this would be impossible to differentiate from "fallow land" which comes later in the list most of our classical commentators understand the term in its usual sense of a channel of water. However, it seems clear that our mishnah is not referring to 'obvious' limits to fields, and therefore most authorities understand the term 'naĥal' here has referring to a wadi – a water channel which sometimes has water in it and sometimes does not, depending on the season: even if the channel does not contain running water at this moment it still serves to separate one field from another, even if from the farmer's point of view there is but one field with the same crop which just happens to have a wadi running through it.

To be continued.

Reuven Boxman writes:

Harvesting is but a small part of the labor required to produce a crop. What about tilling, sowing, weeding, cultivating, watering etc.? Was there any mechanism or custom by which the non-landed class shared in these activities?

I respond:

I believe that in the periods relevant to our discussions most agricultural work was done as a family business; at the very most a clan business. While, obviously, there must have been large estates, I think we must bear in mind always the average person who would have a small plot of land just outside the town or village in which he and his family lived. Almost invariably this plot of land was an inheritance. While there would be nothing in law to prevent the peasant farmer hiring hands as did his much richer rural counterpart, I think that the rule of custom would have demanded that most of the work on his land be done by himself, his children, his servants and his other dependents. Furthermore, recall that Ruth did not seek remunerative work in the fields of Boaz, even as someone very distantly related to him, but sought to exercise her rights as an indigent person.

Yet more of your queries and comments next time.