The first books after the Talmud

The Talmud was completed about 500 CE, and for more than two hundred years after that nothing was written. The Savoraim edited and explained what they had received; they composed no books. The reason is not idleness: while the teaching passed from mouth to mouth and a teacher stood at hand, a book was unnecessary and even undesirable—the Oral Torah is not written down.

What ended this was simple and external. After the Muslim conquest the Jews found themselves in one state from Spain to Persia—and scattered across it. A community at Kairouan or Cordova had no one to ask: the teacher was a thousand miles away. What remained were letters—and books.

The first was the She'iltot of Rav Achai of Shabcha, about 750: some hundred and ninety discourses following the weekly portions, each with a commandment, a question upon it, aggadah and an answer. It is not yet a code; it is a recorded sermon—law and aggadah together, as they were heard.

After that it went differently. The Halakhot Pesukot, ascribed to Rav Yehudai Gaon, head of Sura, who was blind and dictated, take from the talmudic argument only the conclusion and lay it out by subject. The Halakhot Gedolot of Rav Simeon Kayyara go further still: the law arranged by its own structure, covering the whole field at once. Which of the two came first scholarship has not settled—the Halakhot Pesukot are usually reckoned earlier, but the reverse has been argued.

There was a second cause besides distance. These are the years of the Karaite schism: the Karaites say there is no tradition, only Scripture. A code one can take in hand and produce is a direct answer to that, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica calls the Halakhot Gedolot outright a book against the Karaites.

And one consequence outlived all three: it is in the Halakhot Gedolot that the six hundred and thirteen commandments are first enumerated. Maimonides will tear that enumeration apart and make his own, Nachmanides will defend the older one, and the argument over what counts as a commandment has run ever since.

On these three books everything later stands: the Rif, the Mishneh Torah, the Arba'ah Turim, the Shulchan Aruch. Two hundred years of silence ended with the law being written down for the first time.