During the harvest, [the law] forbids owners to gather up the bits which fall from the sheaves and similarly advises that in harvesting something should be left behind unreaped.^[1] By this it gives excellent teaching to owners in the practice of generous sharing by leaving some of their property for those in need and providing the poor with a chance for food.

Do you see how the law proclaims simultaneously the justice and goodness of God, who provides food unstintingly for all? Again, in the grape harvest the harvesters are forbidden to go back and cut anything that has been left over or to collect fallen grapes. The same rules are applied to olive gatherers.^[1] In fact the principle of tithing crops and flocks was an education in honoring the divine. We are not to be totally absorbed by profit but to share humanely with the neighbor as well.

Let no one deny the hireling the wage he is owed, since we too are hirelings of our God, and from him we look forward to the reward of our labor. And if you indeed, whatever type of businessman you are, deny your hireling a monetary payment that is a perishable trifle, you shall be denied the reward of heaven that has been promised. You shall not defraud, as the law says, the hireling of his pay.

To speak evil of the deaf is to disparage one who is absent and does not hear. To put a block before the blind is to do a thing that is proper of itself but which affords an occasion of scandal to one who fails to understand the propriety of it.

You shall not be partial to the poor, a precept given lest under pretext of showing pity we should judge an unjust judgment. For each individual is to be judged not by his personal importance but by the merits of his case. His wealth need not stand in the way of the rich man, if he makes a good use of it; and poverty of itself can be no recommendation to the poor if in the midst of squalor and want he fails to stay away from wrongdoing.

Long before Christ it had been said, You shall not covet;^[1] long before it had been said, You shall love your neighbor as yourself, a phrase which, as the apostle says, expresses the fulfillment of the whole law.^[2] And as no one loves himself unless he loves God, the Lord says that the whole Law and the Prophets depend on these two commandments.^[3]

A person who does not divide with his needy neighbor what is necessary to him proves that he loves him less than himself. The command is to share two tunics with one’s neighbor:^[1] he could not have spoken of a single tunic, since if one is shared no one is clothed. Half a tunic leaves the person who receives it naked, as well as the person who gives it.

Fruitbearing trees are works that bring forth virtues. We circumcise trees^[1] when we are suspicious of how weak our first efforts are and do not approve of the first fruits of our work. We call the fruit that grows unclean and do not take it as our food. When the first fruits of good works are praised, it is proper that this fruit should not feed the soul of the worker. Otherwise the praise we receive is plucked, and the fruit of our work is eaten out of season. So one who receives praise from a human mouth for a virtue just undertaken eats the fruit of a tree he has planted before its time. Truth said this through the psalmist: It is vain for you to rise before dawn; rise up after you have sat down.^[2] To rise before dawn is to rejoice in the night of this present life, before the clear light of eternal rewards appears. We should first sit down and then rise up rightly, because whoever does not willingly humble himself now will not be exalted in the glory to come.