His literary work extended especially to compendious treatises, in which he availed himself of the thorough and comprehensive studies of his predecessors, but from which he extracted with care only their most essential and valuable contents.
Nobody escaped his criticism, which consisted not merely in the pointing out of faulty passages, but in a trenchant and ruthless analysis of their errors."
A contemporary and rival of Moses ibn Gikatilla, he is better known in his time for his works of halakha than for those of biblical exegesis and grammar.
He adopts an intermediate attitude between that of Saadia Gaon and Abraham ibn Ezra, whom he greatly influenced.
[2] His works include: Isaac ibn Barun also mentions a grammatical treaty, which has since been lost.
[6] Judah ibn Balaam authored the liturgical poem Bezikhri 'al mishkavi, recited by the Sephardic congregations during the Selihot and during the Days of Awe.
A treaty on the rules and accents of the masses, the Hidayat al-Qari (in Hebrew, Horayat ha-Ḳore, Help to the reader), was generally attributed to him.
It has since been shown that the book was written by Aaron of Jerusalem, a grammarian earlier than Ibn Balaam by a century.