Akiva ben Joseph

The traditional life of Akiva is one of the best known stories in rabbinic literature, and it is a story about beginning late. He is a shepherd in the employ of a wealthy man, unlettered and by his own later report hostile to scholars. The daughter of his employer, Rachel, agrees to marry him on condition that he go and study, and her father disinherits her for it, so that they live in such poverty that she sells her hair.

The moment of decision is placed at a well. He sees a stone hollowed by dripping water and reasons that if something soft can wear away something hard by persistence, then words can wear a way into a mind that has resisted them. He goes to study at forty, stays away twelve years, returns, hears his wife defending the arrangement to a neighbour, and goes back for twelve more. He returns at the head of an enormous body of disciples, and when she pushes through the crowd to reach him he tells them that what is his and what is theirs is hers.

His scholarly achievement is the arrangement of material. The oral traditions had accumulated without order; Akiva sorted them by subject, and the tradition compares him to a labourer who fills his basket with whatever he finds and then sorts it at home. Judah ha-Nasi compiled the Mishnah a century later on the structure Akiva had made, which is why an anonymous opinion in it is generally taken to be from his school.

Akiva's method held that nothing in the Torah is accidental, so that a repeated particle or an untranslatable word is there to teach something. His colleague Ishmael resisted this with the principle that the Torah speaks in the language of human beings and that ordinary idiom should not be squeezed. The disagreement is one of the founding arguments of rabbinic interpretation and both positions survived. Akiva also held that love your neighbour as yourself is a great principle of the Torah, and defended the Song of Songs as the holiest of the writings, saying that all the writings are holy but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.

When Simon bar Kosiba raised the revolt against Rome in 132, Akiva supported him and applied to him the verse that a star shall step forth out of Jacob, from which the name Bar Kokhba, son of a star, derives. Not everyone agreed. The tradition preserves the reply of Yohanan ben Torta, that grass would grow from Akiva's cheeks before the son of David came. The revolt was crushed, and the name preserved in the rabbinic sources afterwards is Bar Koziba, son of a lie.

In the persecution that followed, teaching Torah was prohibited, and Akiva continued and was arrested and executed. The Talmudic account has him reciting the Shema while his flesh was raked with iron combs, telling his students that he had wondered all his life how to fulfil the command to love God with all one's soul and was now able to, and dying on the word one. That account is a martyrology preserved in later sources rather than a contemporary record, and the atlas notes it as such.