Words as Swords in the Battle between Prose and Poetry: The Second Story of Jacob ben El‘azar’s Sefer Ha-Meshalim

This essay examines the second story of Jacob ben El‘azar’s Sefer ha-meshalim (Book of stories). Dressed as a debate between a poet and a prosaist, the story partakes in the genre of disputation, widespread across diverse literary traditions, in which two entities, human or otherwise, engage in a quarrel praising their own virtues and pointing out the contender’s faults. Well aware of the arguments regarding the falsehood of poetry in both the Arabic and Hebrew traditions, Ben El‘azar lays out a clever disputation, filled with numerous biblical quotations, in which ambiguity reigns: on many occasions, it is up to the reader to decide whether an argument is convincing, logical, or even true, and to consider what truth means in the context of a mixed-form composition that comprises both poetry and prose. After an introductory essay that covers the main trends of the intellectual background from which this work emerges and unveils key topics to better understand the literary form, themes, and imagery of the tale, we present the first English translation of this story.