text · B0047
Halachot Gedolot הלכות גדולות
The great code of the geonic era — Halachot Pesukot grown to full stature, covering the Bavli's practical law tractate by tractate. Its preface counted the 613 commandments for the first time, opening a genre (and a debate: the Rambam's Sefer HaMitzvot is one long argument with the BeHaG's count).
I. Who
- Hebrew
- הלכות גדולות
- Also known as
- BeHaG
- Era
- geonim
II. When
- Traditional
- by Rav Shimon Kayyara; placed by Sefer HaKabbalah in the mid-8th c., by the geonim's own tradition after Yehudai
- Civil (computed)
- 4500–4610 AM · 740–850 CE
- Academic
- c. 825–850 CE, Babylonia (Basra), building on Halachot Pesukot
- Duration
- ≈110 years
- Precision
- disputed
IV. What
- Language
- Babylonian Aramaic and Hebrew
- Redaction
- By Shimon Kayyara (Shimon Kayyara), a Babylonian scholar outside the gaonate. The work absorbs Halachot Pesukot (Halachot Pesukot) nearly whole and expands it into a full Talmud-order code; it circulated in two recensions — the Babylonian printed text and the fuller "Spanish" recension (ed. Hildesheimer).
- Structure
- A comprehensive halachic code arranged largely by the Bavli's tractates, prefaced by an introduction that includes the first known enumeration of the 613 mitzvot as a worked list.
V. How do we know
| Claim | Evidence | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tradition names Shimon Kayyara as the author; the dating is classically disputed — Avraham ibn Daud's Sefer HaKabbalah places him in the mid-8th century before Yehudai Gaon, while the geonim's own testimony and modern scholarship reverse the order, dating the work c. 825–850 with Halachot Pesukot among its sources. | tradition reconstruction | ★★★☆☆ | |
| The work's preface contains the earliest known enumeration of the 613 mitzvot as an itemized list — the head of the minyan-hamitzvot genre; the Rambam's Sefer HaMitzvot frames its own root-principles explicitly against the BeHaG's counting choices. | tradition | ★★★★☆ | |
| The book survives in two substantially different recensions — the printed Babylonian text and the longer Spanish recension published by Hildesheimer — and the relationship between them, like the work's use of Halachot Pesukot, is a fixture of geonic-literature scholarship. | reconstruction | ★★★☆☆ |
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