Apart from Hebrew liturgical poetry, our knowledge of nonreligious Jewish literature (belles lettres) from before the time of Saʿadya Gaon (882–942) is very sparse. The oldest known pieces are four-line strophes with the simple rhyme scheme aaaa/bbbb, such as the “strophes (ḥaruzot) of the masoretic grammar” included in the masoretic literature of the eighth and ninth centuries, or the anti-traditional Polemics of Ḥīwī al-Balkhī (Ḥayawihi of Balkh, Afghanistan) from the mid-ninth century. Ḥīwī’s strophes questioned the holiness of the Bible and the claim of…