Before Heaven and Earth were created

This lengthy piyyut, excerpted here, was part of the liturgy for the holiday of Shavuot. It presents a dialogue between a father and daughter, representing God and the Torah, in which God suggests a series of suitors for the Torah. The patriarchs are rejected, one after the other, by the Torah. Though criticism of these fgures was not unheard of in rabbinic thought, this poem contains especially sharp rebukes. At a certain point, the piyyut was removed from the liturgy, possibly out of fear that Christians might fnd it and use its arguments in their polemics against Jewish tradition. The italicized words indicate where an alphabetical acrostic appears in the Hebrew.