Pe'ah 077

1:
I have presented these three mishnayot together because mishnahs 3 and 4 expatiate on mishnah 2 and give it detail. Together they present the second topic to be covered in this chapter: two what extent and in what circumstances may one accept the word of a poor person that produce that he or she is offering for sale or exchange is free from the duty to tithe it.

2:
Earlier on in our study of this tractate we mentioned several times that all produce that the poor received as part of their 'poor dues' was free from all 'taxes'. That is to say that the poor person did not have to give from the produce he had received those dues which had to be given to the priests or to the Levites or to be spent in Jerusalem. In Pe'ah 012 I wrote:

The three mishnayot which we are studying at present are not concerned with the issue of ritual purity but they are concerned with priestly dues. The basic issue is whether a 'colleague' may credit the word of a poor person who is an Am ha-aretz that tithes need not be taken from the produce in question. (Whatever the origin of the rather derogatory term Am ha-Aretz may have been, and whatever its connotation may be in today's parlance, in the tannaïtic context it simply means someone who is not punctilious concerning the minutiae of the laws concerning tithes and ritual purity – laws which were so dear to the sages and their society.)

4:
Mishnah 2 makes two statements. Firstly, if an Am ha-Aretz is offering produce for sale, a ĥhaver may accept the poor man's word that he came by the produce within the framework of the 'poor law' and that the buyer will therefore not have to separate off as tithes ten percent of what he buys. Our mishnah suggests that the seller might claim that he or she came by the produce as gleanings [Pe'ah 047] or 'forgotten sheaves' [Pe'ah 056] or pe'ah [Pe'ah 008] (to which we can add peret [Pe'ah 063] and olelot [Pe'ah 072]). However, our mishnah also adds a rider: this credibility may only be assumed "at their time". This means that when poor people claim that produce is free from the duty to tithe, their word may only be credited during harvest time; at other times of the year this assumption of credibility may not be made. For obvious reasons it is highly unlikely that a poor person will be able to offer for sale grains, fruits or vegetables long after harvest time and still be credited that they are tithe-free.

5:
A brief resumé of the various tithes may be found in Pe'ah 044. One of the tithes that people had to give was called Ma'aser Rishon. This was a tithe that one had to give to the Levite of one's choice. In his turn, the Levite had to give ten percent of what he had received to the priest of his choice. Mishnah 2 states as a rule that when a poor Levite offers for sale produce that was given him as his tithe he may always be believed that he had already given from this produce what was due to the priests: Levites, as a group, were not to be held suspect in this regard.

6:
Another tithe was called Ma'aser Sheni – the second tithe: in the first, second, fourth and fifth years of the shemittah cycle a levy of ten percent of what remained of the produce had to be taken and consumed in Jerusalem or – as was more usual – it had to be 'redeemed' and its value taken and spent on food and drink in Jerusalem. (Thus the second tithe was geared up to boosting the economy of the capital.) However, this tithe was replaced in the third and sixth years of the cycle by the Indigent's Tithe, Ma'aser Ani: this was a levy of ten percent which had to be given to the destitute person of the owner's choice. Our mishnah rules that poor people who claim that the produce that they are offering came to them as part of the indigent's tithe may be believed in those years in which such a tithe was given, throughout the year (since farmers could give the tithe at any time during the year).

To be continued.