Gazelle desired in Spain

Isaac Ibn Mar Saul praises his lover’s beauty, for which he yearns, using stock phrases drawn from the medieval Arabic poetic tradition. This is one of the first medieval Hebrew love poems, and its imagery was echoed by later Jewish poets. The poet’s love interest is unambiguously male, as he repeatedly compares his beloved to biblical men: Joseph, Adoniah (a son of King David), David, and Uriah (a Hittite soldier, whom David had killed in order to marry Uriah’s wife Bathsheba). The poem concludes with a supplication taken directly from Isaiah. The clever inclusion of out-of-context biblical quotations in secular poetry, and especially love poetry, was much favored among the Jewish poets of al-Andalus; it allowed the witty juxtaposition of contrasting worlds and suggested that loving itself could be a religious practice of sorts.