This reading names the soil tool: the harrow dragged behind an ox or a tractor to crush clods and level a field after ploughing. It doubles as a verb, 耙地 meaning to harrow ground. The long-handled hand rake for leaves and grain is the other reading, 耙.
mistakes
One graph, two farm tools, and the reading is what tells them apart: bà crushes soil, pá gathers leaves and grain. Field work therefore takes bà, so 耙地 is to harrow a field and is never read with pá. The same soil tool is also written 杷.
Left 耒 - pictograph of a wooden plough handle with its foot-rest crossbar, and the indexing radical. For this reading it does the semantic work directly: a 耙 is dragged over ploughed ground to break clods and level the soil, which sets it beside 耕 to plough and 耘 to weed.
Right 巴 is borrowed for sound only, bā giving bà in this reading and pá in the other. The same phonetic frames 把 to grasp, 爸 dad and 吧, the sentence-final particle. None of its own meaning reaches the harrow.
