Taking From Your Neighbor's Field

In some parts of America, if one was to walk through someone else's field where corn or grapes have appeared and take them, eating them as one walks, one might get killed by gunfire or at least threatened with being shot.  Mosaic Law actually allows this and by extension condemns treating this the same as theft.  To take a handful of grapes from your neighbor's vineyard or to take standing kernels from their field and eat them at that very moment is specifically allowed and encouraged.  Deuteronomy 23:24-25 touches on these two exact scenarios, clarifying that the real moral limitations of the consumer is to not use tools to take or store more than can be eaten or implicitly carried along by hand.

Similarly, Leviticus 19:9 says to avoid two things: harvesting at the very edges of one's fields, the most accessible parts to others, and combing through the harvest area a second time to gather fallen grapes or other crops.  These are to be left for the poor and for foreigners.  Obviously, if someone lived in isolation from others, there would be no obligation to do this since there are not poor or foreigners, as the text specifies, expected to roam around, but this is very much contrast to the utter unwillingness to share resources or truly aid the poor that many evangelicals are marked by.  To not do this when one lives in a community with others is sinful, just as others walking through to take all of one's crops involuntarily would go beyond what is permissible according to Deuteronomy 23:24-25.

If a community actually abided by Deuteronomy 23:24-25 and Leviticus 19:9, the poor would have a much easier time surviving, and surviving with comfort at that.  Foreigners, newcomers to a land and potentially without personal connections, would not have to resort to begging or sins like theft to obtain enough food to satisfy them at a given time.  They would be in the wrong to take more than they can immediately consume, but they would indeed not go hungry as long as there were fields producing edible substances from the natural world.  Mosaic Law is, once again, very explicitly egalitarian, in this case with regard to Israelites and Gentiles, natives and foreigners, and the rich and the poor.

Abundance of agricultural production is to be openly accessible to the poor, to foreigners, and to friendly visitors, but not at the expense of someone's own food or financial security.  No one is overlooked or treated as anything less than a full bearer of God's image under these laws, as is the case with the rest of Yahweh's commands in the Torah.  Yes, Mosaic Law is very pro-foreigner, but not supportive of irrational philosophies or the sinful actions of what were then the foreign nations around Israel.  It also explicitly safeguards the poor, who could so easily be tossed aside or overlooked when abundance in fields is kept hidden or withheld from the destitute or financially struggling among the locals.