This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Bahya ibn Paquda argued in his one surviving work, the Judeo-Arabic Duties of the Heart, that Jewish law as traditionally studied thoroughly covers the duties of the limbs, outward ritual and legal observance, but had comparatively neglected the duties of the heart, inward states such as humility, trust in God, sincerity and love. That distinction between outward observance and inward disposition is documented as the organizing argument of the entire book rather than one theme among several treated with equal weight.
He set out to systematize those neglected inward duties in ten gates, a documented structure that gave an area of religious life previously addressed only in scattered remarks its own sustained, organized treatment for what the record identifies as the first time in this literature. Writing as a rabbinic judge in Muslim Iberia, probably Zaragoza, he built that systematic treatment on rabbinic sources without treating them as sufficient on their own to cover the inward duties he had identified as neglected.
That a practicing judge identified a documented gap between the duties of the limbs and the duties of the heart in the legal tradition he served, and answered it with a ten-gate structure covering what earlier legal writing had left comparatively unaddressed, marks Duties of the Heart as a documented case where a working judge's own diagnosis of a gap in the law produced a wholly new devotional literature to fill it.