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her heart and accuses him of slaying her! “Hurry up and heal me” (l. 131).
This buffoonery ends when Sahar realizes that Kima truly loves him and
wants him to join her in the palace in the capital. His dream has finally
materialized! Any desire for revenge because of his erstwhile distress is
dispelled upon his arrival at the palace. If the reader thinks that Sahar
has suffered sufficiently, then s/he errs. Sahar continues to be challenged
by the unapproachable Kima, who speaks in autoerotic terms of her own
beauty, teasing him: “Kima is beautiful / Beautiful to the sight and beauti-
ful in height” (ll. 267–68).
Their much-too-prolonged traumatic courting, both in public and in
private, Sahar’s frustration and anguish, Kima’s coquetry, plotting, and
torment, “I’ve stalked him in my net” (l. 285), take their toll on Sahar.
Although he has played the so-called courtly lover who must protect
his lady’s virtue, he has paid a terrible price. When Kima finally relents,
she invites him to the palace and promises him love (dodim) instead of
“wanderings” (nedodim), but not before marriage. It is through Kima,
the coquette, that Jacob ben Elazar preaches abstinence before marriage.
This would be the Jewish way to conduct one’s sexual life. It is Kima who
speaks of “rules and precepts” ’eleh ha-huqqim ve-ha-torot (l. 308) that one
must observe in courting!^67
Love Fulfilled
Although Kima has led Sahar on a not-so-merry chase, not everything is
serious in their love affair, as in Sahar’s whimsical comic swimming scene.
He must gain entrance to his love’s magnificent glass palace, surrounded
by water on all four sides and, in language strongly reminiscent of the
chaotic abyss prior to creation as well as the Israelites’ crossing of the Sea
of Reeds, Sahar is ready to disrobe and swim, but is afraid to do so for
fear of drowning (ll. 321–24)! The brave Sahar who had swum ashore in
order to escape a shipwreck and black giants, who had allowed himself to
be outwitted by Princess Kima and her father, the king, finds himself in
perilous circumstances, death by drowning, not what one would expect
from a chivalrous hero. But, as in Sippor and Masos’s tale, all is not well
with Kima and Sahar. Even before they are allowed to marry, the two lov-
ers, who continue to sing of each other’s beauty and bemoan their mutual
entrapment, now begin to talk about love and strife (ll. 390–91), amid the