ABSTRACT
Sometime in the tenth century, a Jewish resident of Muslim Spain, the pious and highly regarded Hebrew grammarian, poet, and scholar of the Bible by the name of Isaac b. Mar Shaul, sat down and composed what appears to have been the very first post-biblical homoerotic Hebrew poem. Reflecting the time and place in which he lived, Ibn Mar Shaul naturally and effortlessly culled from the two worlds from whose atmosphere he simultaneously drew air. Ibn Mar Shaul’s poem followed the familiar and well-loved themes, motifs, structure, imagery, rhyme-scheme, and meter of Arabic poetry, the dominant literary style of the day in Andalusia. And yet, the poem was pure Hebrew, each and every word drawn from biblical Hebrew alone. Moreover, while the poem followed the conventions of Arabic love poetry, no typical images drawn from Arab folklore and history made an appearance. Instead, as liturgical poets before him had done, Ibn Mar Shaul peppered his homoerotic secular love poem with references from the Bible.1
