When Jesus is asked, “What is the Greatest Commandment?”¹ He answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might”² and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”³ By this Jesus invokes all of the Decalogue i.e. the Ten Commandments, concluding, “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” It is ecumenical consensus that the first tablet deals with loving God and the second with loving our neighbor.⁴  While there is some debate about the specifics of the first tablet, the second tablet is assented to be God’s written expression of natural law.⁵  Moses’ Law is generally divided into three kinds: the moral law, the ceremonial, and the judicial.⁶ Of these the moral law remains for the Christian, whether as binding,⁷  as a rule and guide of God’s will for the regenerate Christian,⁸ or the source by which our actions are evaluated.⁹ 

However, there are laws other than the ones in the Decalogue that could be called moral. This is given by Jesus’ summing up of the Decalogue outside of the Decalogue itself. Leviticus 19, which Jesus is quoting in His second answer, provides further evidence. In the ESV, the official translation of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and widely popular with Evangelicals, Leviticus 19:9-18 is titled “Love Your Neighbor as Yourself” in order to more directly point to Jesus’ later use in the New Testament. Verse 18 is not separated, suggesting that all of the verses should be dealt with in some way for the love of our neighbor. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops approved NRSV heads the entire chapter under “Ritual and Moral Holiness,” and the NKJV, which follows the same translation philosophy as the KJV, heads chapter 19 as “Moral and Ceremonial Laws.” Other reputable translations approved by various churches are more open-ended, simply titling the chapter as “Various” or “Sundry Laws.” The task then becomes separating the moral law from the ritual and ceremonial laws.

The book of Ruth can help in this endeavor when read as a story of the practical and everyday application of Torah Law. For instance, when Ruth and Naomi return to Israel we learn about gleaning.⁹ While we can infer some things about gleaning from the text, we can also, interestingly enough, go back to Leviticus 19 to get a fuller picture of what gleaning is supposed to be. God commanded the people of Israel to not reap their harvest to the edge of the field, and to not “gather the gleanings.”¹⁰ God concludes by commanding that the Israelites should not “strip their vineyards bare” or “gather the fallen grapes of their vineyards,” as these are to be left “for the poor and for the sojourner.”¹¹ The Lord commands this identically in Leviticus 23:22, and reiterates in Deuteronomy 24:19, commanding Israel that the sheaf forgotten in the field during the harvest is not to be gone back for, as it is for “the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.” He adds the promise that this is “that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.” He expands this command to olive trees, that they should not be beaten over more than once, and the grape vineyards, that they should not be stripped bare.¹² These commands are preceded by the command that Israel “shall not pervert the justice due to the sojourner or to the fatherless, or take a widow’s garment in pledge.”¹³ 

It’s worth noting here that Ruth meets all of these criteria. She is a sojourner in a foreign land, she is effectively fatherless as she has left her father’s house in Moab, and she is a widow. It is also worth noting then that Boaz is not performing a supererogatory action by allowing Ruth to glean. While he is abundantly kind to her,¹⁴ this is because of Ruth’s own kindness to Naomi, which he asks that God repay her for.¹⁵  He himself is bound by the Law. He remembered that he was a slave in Egypt, redeemed from there by God, and that this was why God commanded him in these laws, because he and Ruth were “alike before the Lord.”¹⁶ 

By this Law, the Jewish people are a “light for the nations.”¹⁷ The Law remained in effect even after Israel abandoned theocracy for a monarchy, and even during the several exiles and occupations. In fact, Jewish sages were still working out how to apply it for the diaspora following the destruction of the Second Temple. Their writings are based on an oral tradition going back to Mount Sinai according to Orthodox Judaism. This tradition can be credibly said to go back to the second century B.C., and is certainly contemporaneous to the Apostles and Early Church. These rabbinical sources can be helpful in understanding how the Israelites understood the gleaning laws.  

Rav Idi bar Avin, a rabbi living in the fourth century A.D., enumerates four gifts left to the poor from the produce of a vineyard, three gifts from grain, and two gifts from the fruit of a tree. The oral tradition elaborates that the owner of the field is not able to choose who the gleanings go to, and that even a poor person who owns a vineyard, a field, or a tree is obligated in these laws. If the owner of land does not do this “the court removes them (the gleanings and forgotten produce) from his possession.”¹⁸  Rabbi Meir, a sage of the second century A.D., says that “it (the gleanings) all belongs to the poor.”¹⁹ The influential Maimonides, a Sephardic medieval rabbi and philosopher cited by both Jewish and Christian scholars, goes as far to say in his seminal Mishneh Torah that “One who does not permit the poor to glean, or who permits one but prevents another, or who assist one of them rather than another is considered a robber of the poor.”²⁰ 

The cited Mishnah Pe’ah and Gifts to the Poor in the Mishneh Torah both go into great depth concerning these Torah laws. From these we learn that the gleanings themselves are regarded as “whatever is food, and is looked after, and grows from the land, and is harvested all at the same time, and is brought in for storage”²¹ and the property of the poor. In regards to the owners, the gleanings are compulsorily given, the owners include all those who own land, poor and wealthy, and the amount given “depends upon the size of the field, the number of poor people, and the extent of the field.”²² In short, the gleanings are essentially state welfare. The amount one is taxed depends on the size of one’s field, so the wealthier necessarily give more. To deprive welfare is to steal from the poor, since it is their property, which would be a violation of the Commandment to not steal.²³ 

This follows the principle of St. Thomas Aquinas that moral laws not found in the Decalogue should be able to be reduced back to the Decalogue.²⁴ When the rich man asks Jesus what he must do to merit eternal life, Jesus points him to the moral law found on the second table of the Decalogue. It’s important to note here that the rich man is already keeping these, which would include the gleaning laws reduced to the Commandment against theft. So, Jesus instructs him to sell all his possessions and give them as charity to the poor.²⁵ This, charity, is what it means for us to fulfill the law.²⁶ 

St. Thomas explains that charity is an “added counsel of perfection” that Jesus instituted in fulfilling the Law.²⁷ John Calvin seems to agree, writing in his Institutes that “the whole perfection of the saints consists in charity,” while noting, of course, that this is because our good works can’t reach God, so we are instructed in works towards our neighbor.²⁸  We cannot fulfill the Law ourselves, nevertheless Christ commands us that we “must be perfect, as our heavenly father is perfect.”²⁹ However, St. John Chrysostom warns us, echoing the rabbis that, “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them… the goods we posses are not ours but theirs.” “The demands of justice must be satiated first of all; that which is already due in justice is not to be offered a gift of charity.” As does St. Gregory the Great, “When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice.”³⁰ The sense seems to be here that we cannot fulfill the Law in charity as Christ instructs unless we are first keeping the Law as the principle of the gleaning laws demands.

Our world has changed, we no longer live in the agrarian society these laws were made for. The Shulchan Aruch, the current last word of Jewish Law, acknowledges this. It says that while the diaspora is commanded to hold the gleaning laws, it is no longer customary “because it is likely the poor will be unable to take the gleanings.”³¹ This is certainly true of our society, but the principle of the law remains. We are obligated to deal and reckon with our texts if we are going to claim them, especially when it comes to loving our neighbor. To close with St. Peter, we are to “Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.”³²

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