Al-Tusi followed Tahdhib with a shorter companion work, al-Istibsar, built specifically to isolate and resolve the hadith that appeared to contradict one another, leaving Tahdhib as the fuller, more discursive of the pair. Al-Tusi's own career shaped how both books were received: forced from Baghdad after sectarian unrest in 1055 CE, he relocated to Najaf in southern Iraq, and his scholarship there helped establish Najaf as the leading center of Twelver Shia legal study, a position the city has held in some form ever since. Tahdhib and al-Istibsar travelled with that institutional weight behind them, and later generations of Najaf-trained jurists built extensive commentary and gloss literature, the hawashi, directly onto both texts.
Together with Kafi and Man La Yahduruhu al-Faqih, Tahdhib closed the formation of the Four Books by the mid-eleventh century, after which no further work was added to the core canon, even though hadith scholarship, biographical evaluation of narrators and legal commentary on all four books continued, and continues, without interruption into modern seminary curricula. Modern printed editions run to roughly ten volumes and about thirteen thousand hadith, making Tahdhib more than twice the length of al-Istibsar and, by that measure alone, the largest single work among the Four Books.