Do the gleaning laws allow civil government to coerce individuals or businesses to give up wealth or other private property?/zh

⮜ 已回答的問題

原來的問題（我擅自擴大了範圍）是：

聖經》中的拾遺法是否授權民間政府強迫超市或餐館把他們的廢棄食物送給窮人？

在聖經時代，扔掉完全好的食物的想法對人們來說是一個陌生的概念。只是我們現代的繁榮（在某些國家）讓我們可以奢侈地以這種方式浪費食物。

志願慈善是聖經的一個重要主題。但這個問題不是關於志願慈善的。

食品服務/銷售企業(如超市和餐館)的業主應考慮將多餘的食物提供給有需要的人，而不是將其扔掉。然而，我們也必須認識到這種慷慨行動的內在成本（和風險）。舉例來說，想想看，如果你把上一次節日慶祝晚餐的剩飯剩菜送人，你會付出多少代價（僅從時間上來說）。現在，把這個比例擴大到一整年的餐館晚餐。

The risks for a business owner involve incurring liability if someone becomes sick after they eat food which has passed through the control of the supermarket or restaurant. What if you gave away your Thanksgiving leftovers to some homeless person and got hit with a lawsuit two weeks later because they contracted food poisoning, which they attributed to your negligence in meal preparation?

Biblical law does not authorize the civil government to force this act of generosity upon a restaurant/supermarket owner, just as Biblical law doesn't authorize the civil government to force you to collect your leftovers from your own breakfast/lunch/dinner and distribute them to the poor. Here are three reasons:

1. The Biblical gleaning law is not merely about "waste products/old food" -- it is about allowing hungry people to take perfectly good agricultural products from parts of someone's land, under certain conditions which are specified in the law (Deut. 23:24-25). Biblical gleaning law does not apply outside these scripturally-defined areas:
   • yearly marginal agricultural produce (Lev. 19:9-10)
   • produce from the land/orchards/vineyards which are "rested" in the seventh year (Lev. 25:4-7)
2. Even the Biblical gleaning law was not "civilly-enforced" in the sense that there was a specified civil punishment for a landowner who harvested all of his bunches of grapes, or sheathes of grain. In fact, we know from history that Israel actually did violate this Biblical welfare law by refusing to fallow their land for many Sabbath years in a row. And this Biblical law violation was enforced by God himself (Lev. 26:43), when he exiled them from the land into Babylon.20 He carried those who had escaped from the sword away to Babylon, and they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia, 21 to fulfill YHWH’s word by Jeremiah’s mouth, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. As long as it lay desolate, it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years. 2 Chronicles 36:20-21WEB
   On the other hand, there is a kind of "negative enforcement" of this law, because the civil government cannot be used to charge a gleaner with "trespassing" or "theft" either. The most a property owner can do is make the gleaner leave, and he cannot recover any small amount of food which was gleaned lawfully.
3. According to Biblical law, an animal that was found to have died "of itself" (without the blood being drained at death) was unclean for Israelites to eat (there wasn't necessarily anything unhealthy about it: the "uncleanness" was ceremonial). What did the law say to do with this "wastage"? 21 You shall not eat of anything that dies of itself. You may give it to the foreigner living among you who is within your gates, that he may eat it; or you may sell it to a foreigner; for you are a holy people to YHWH your God. You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. Deuteronomy 14:21WEB
   The owner of the dead animal could either give it to the sojourner at the gates (this is typically where people would beg for food) or sell it to a foreigner. Notice that this law does not specify any involvement by civil government.