Introduction The Mishnah continues to bring disputes between Beth Shammai and Beth Hillel, in which Beth Shammai took the lenient position.
Beth Shammai says: [produce pronounced] ownerless with respect to the poor [only] is counted as ownerless. But Beth Hillel says: it is not counted as ownerless unless it is made ownerless also with respect to the rich, as in the year of release (. This section discusses the process whereby a person announces that something he owns is legally ownerless. One of the important consequences of such an action is that if the item is a food product he need not separate tithes before he eats it. In other words if a person has some produce he may pronounce it ownerless and eat from it without tithing. Of course, he runs the risk of having other people come and take it from him. According to Beth Shammai one could partially pronounce his produce ownerless by declaring that only the poor may partake of it. Beth Hillel disagrees and says that pronouncing something legally ownerless must be complete. Beth Hillel learns this from the precedent set by the laws of the “year of release”, or the shmittah (seventh) year. During the seventh year all produce grown in the fields is ownerless and anyone may enter any field and eat from it, both rich and poor. Beth Hillel says that just as seventh year produce is ownerless and available to anyone, so too all produce must be available to all.
If all the sheaves of the field were of one kav each and one was of four kavs, and it was forgotten, Beth Shammai says: it does not count as forgotten, And Beth Hillel says: it counts as forgotten. There are a number of agricultural rights given by the Torah to the poor. One of them is the right to collect the harvested sheaves forgotten in a field (Deuteronomy 24:19). The dispute here is over the definition of a forgotten sheaf. According to Beth Shammai if all of the sheaves were one kav in volume and the forgotten sheaf was four times that size, and he left the large sheaf in the field, it is not considered forgotten. The reason is that four separate sheaves that are left together are not considered to be forgotten. In other words, if four separate sheaves are left in a field we can assume that the owner never came to collect them, and not that he came to collect them and left them behind. Beth Shammai says that if one sheaf is the size of four sheaves of that field we can consider it to be four separate sheaves and it is not considered forgotten. Beth Hillel holds that since it is really only one sheaf, we can assume that he did forget it, and hence it already belongs to the poor.