O Lord, bring back the one who is faint with love

Isaac Ibn Ghiyath

Mid- to Late 11th Century

O Lord, bring back the one who is faint with love, who constantly bewails the broken pledge.

The day her beloved forsook her, she refused all comfort. She put her hands on her head and silently submitted to the hands of her enslaver. She has been wayward; she has carved her home in the treacherous cliffs of time. For this her eyes grow dim with…

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This poem was written in the form of a muwashshaḥ, or “girdle poem” (shir ezor), a strophic form with a complex rhyming pattern that first appeared in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) among Arabic and Hebrew poets. This form was initially used for secular poetry, but soon Hebrew poets began to compose religious and even liturgical poems using it. This example plays cleverly on the traditional allegory of the Song of Songs as depicting the love between the people of Israel (the female lover) and God (the male beloved). The translator has formatted the poem as prose paragraphs.

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Related Guide

Early Medieval Liturgical Poetry (Piyyut)

7th to 12th Century

Creator Bio

Isaac Ibn Ghiyath

1038–1089

Isaac ben Judah Ibn Ghiyath was a leader of Andalusi Jewry and an accomplished poet, halakhist, and exegete. The descendant of an old Jewish family of Lucena, a Spanish city with a large Jewish population at the time, Ibn Ghiyath came to head the academy there after the death of Isaac al-Fāsī (Rif) and wrote a treatise on the laws of the festivals as well as a commentary on the Talmud. His piyyutim, which incorporate scientific and philosophical concepts, were significant early steps toward the use of Hebrew for scientific writing. His halakhic writings drew from both geonic and Andalusi authorities, particularly Samuel ha-Nagid (993–1056).

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