an effort to be fair and not to permit the natural inclination to minimize this tax to prevail.
The law took into account the peculiarities of the vine and date palm harvest and permitted the farmer to harvest and distribute the fruit rather than let it be gathered by the poor; if poor person wished to harvest it themselves, however, permission had to be given(Peah 41,2).
The farmer was protected against excessive crowding of the fields by limiting gleaning to three times per day. The gleaners were protected by an ordinance that forbad anything that could be used as a weapon from being taken into the field(Peah 4.4, 5). The farmer could not favor one poor person over another; the gleanings were on a“first come” basis(Peah 4:9), nor could he set it aside for his relatives(Peah 4:3). Special provisions were made for the elderly and weak among the poor(Peah 8.1). If there was doubt whether a gleaner was actually poor, he was initially believed and questioned later(Peah 8.2). The itinerant poor were permitted to glean(Peah 5.4) with a division of opinion of whether they should make restitution upon returning home(Peah 5.4).
We can see that the corners and the gleanings were understood as an entitlement, that the poor had well-defined rights, and that the courts enforced them. These details were effective for a rural population, but did nothing for the urban poor, so the latter section of this tractate turned to them in a highly original manner to which we shall turn in a moment. Mishnah Peah concluded, as it had begun, with a set of moral injunctions as at the beginning..