Halakhot Pesukot הלכות פסוקות
The first attempt to say not 'here is the argument' but 'here is the ruling': the law taken out of the talmudic discussion and set out by subject.
The Talmud does not say what to do. It shows the argument and leaves the reader inside it. While the teaching was oral and a teacher was at hand this sufficed; when the communities scattered across the caliphate it no longer did.
Halakhot Pesukot—'decided laws'—is the first book that takes from the talmudic discussion only the conclusion and lays it out by subject: blessings, slaughter and the signs of unfitness, the festivals. It is ascribed to Rav Yehudai Gaon, head of Sura; he was blind and dictated.
The text's history is not simple. Two manuscript traditions exist: Schlossberg's edition of 1886 from the Oxford manuscript, and the copy David Sassoon brought from Yemen in 1911 and published in 1951, which by its hand is placed in Babylonia or Persia in the ninth or tenth century. Their contents differ slightly. A Hebrew rendering also circulated—Hilchot Re'u, named from its first word.
Which came first, Halakhot Pesukot or Halakhot Gedolot, is unsettled in scholarship: these are usually reckoned earlier, but the reverse has been argued. We do not assign the order.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Rishonim
- Halakhot Pesukot — the law by subject, without the talmudic discussion
Scholarship
- The Schlossberg (1886) and Sassoon (1951) editions — two manuscript traditions and the divergence between them
Basis: documents and evidence.