SEM TOB'S PROVERBIOS MORALES was preserved in five fifteenth-century manu-scripts. One of these manuscripts, housed today by the Cambridge University Library as Ms. Add. 3355, contains a fragment in Hebrew aljamiado of the so-called “Coplas de Yoçef,” which is a fourteenth-century example of an aljamiado tradition that began in the thirteenth century with works such as “Cuando el rey Nimrod al campo saldriya.” Like this poem, “Coplas de Yoçef” also centres on an Old Testament Patriarch, Joseph, whose life is narrated in forty-two quatrains of what was originally a much longer work. The versification employed in “Coplas de Yoçef” finds parallels with works composed by anonymous thirteenth-century Jewish cuaderna vía poets, including the manipulation of the zéjel strophic form through the construction of quatrains with estribillos that vary greatly, but that always end with the name “Yoçef” (Joseph), as in the following examples:

As is evident in González Llubera's transcription into Castilian of the Hebrew aljamiado, the composer of “Coplas de Yoçef” utilized consonant rhyme (-ado, -era, -ath) to distinguish the initial three verses in each quatrain as in “Cuando el rey Nimrod al campo saldriya” and “Cuando a Yerušaláyim vide en tanta fatiga.”