41 Facts About Rabbi Akiva

Akiva ben Joseph, known as Rabbi Akiva, was a leading Jewish scholar and sage, a tanna of the latter part of the first century and the beginning of the second.

Rabbi Akiva was a leading contributor to the Mishnah and to Midrash halakha.

Rabbi Akiva is referred to in Tosafot as Rosh la-Hakhamim.

Rabbi Akiva was executed by the Romans in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt.

The first name of Rabbi Akiva's wife is not provided in earlier sources, but a later version of the tradition gives it as Rachel.

Rabbi Akiva stood loyally by her husband during the period of his late initiation into rabbinic studies after he was 40 years of age, and in which Akiva dedicated himself to the study of Torah.

Besides Eliezer, Rabbi Akiva studied under Joshua ben Hananiah and Nachum Ish Gamzu.

Rabbi Akiva was on equal footing with Gamaliel II, whom he later met.

Rabbi Akiva remained in Lod as long as Eliezer dwelt there, and then moved his own school to Beneberak.

Rabbi Akiva lived for some time at Ziphron, modern Zafran near Hamath.

Rabbi Akiva offered to marry him if he would agree to begin studying Torah, as at the time he was 40 years old and illiterate.

Rabbi Akiva drove his daughter out of his house, swearing that he would never help her while Akiva remained her husband.

Rabbi Akiva would make a living by cutting wood from the forest, selling half for his wife's and children's wellbeing, and using the other half for keeping a fire burning at night to keep himself warm and to provide light thereby for his own studies.

Rabbi Akiva returned twelve years later escorted by 24,000 disciples.

Besides these, Rabbi Akiva had many disciples whose names have not been handed down, but the Aggadah variously gives their number as 12,000,24,000 and 48,000.

However, Rabbi Akiva was just as firmly convinced that the power of the patriarch must be limited both by the written and the oral law, the interpretation of which lay in the hands of the learned; and he was accordingly brave enough to act in ritual matters in Rabban Gamaliel's own house contrary to the decisions of Rabban Gamaliel himself.

Rabbi Akiva filled the office of an overseer of the poor.

Rabbi Akiva's death occurred after several years of imprisonment, which places it at about 132, before the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolution; otherwise the delay of the Romans in executing him would be quite inexplicable.

The death of Rabbi Akiva is usually rendered as some redacted form of three separate versions of the circumstances.

Each version shares the same basic plot points: Rabbi Akiva defies the Roman prohibition on teaching Torah, the consul Turnus Rufus orders his execution, Rabbi Akiva is flayed alive, and his final words are the Shema prayer.

The most common version of Rabbi Akiva's death is that the Roman government ordered him to stop teaching Torah, on pain of death, and that he refused.

Consistent as Rabbi Akiva always was, his ethics and his views of justice were only the strict consequences of his philosophical system.

Rabbi Akiva was instrumental in drawing up the canon of the Tanakh.

Rabbi Akiva stoutly defended the canonicity of the Song of Songs, and Esther.

Rabbi Akiva probably provided for a revised text of the Targums; certainly, for the essential base of the Targum Onkelos, which in matters of Halakha reflects Rabbi Akiva's opinions completely.

Rabbi Akiva worked in the domain of the Halakha, both in the systematization of its traditional material and in its further development.

The Mishna of Akiva, as his pupil Rabbi Meir had taken it from him, became the basis of the Six Orders of the Mishna.

Rabbi Akiva was responsible not only for systematization of the Halakha, but for hermeneutics and halakhic exegesis, which form the foundation of all Talmudic learning.

Mention has already been made of the fact that Akiva was the creator of a rabbinical Bible version elaborated with the aid of his pupil, Aquila, and designed to become the common property of all Jews.

Rabbi Akiva sought to apply the system of isolation followed by the Pharisees to doctrine as they did to practice, to the intellectual life as they did to that of daily discourse, and he succeeded in furnishing a firm foundation for his system.

Rabbi Akiva thus gave the Jewish mind not only a new field for its own employment, but, convinced both of the immutability of Holy Scripture and of the necessity for development in Judaism, he succeeded in reconciling these two apparently hopeless opposites by means of his remarkable method.

Rabbi Akiva considered friendly discussion with these potential converts as desirable on political as well as on religious grounds, and he permitted not only eating their bread, but intermarriage, considering them as full converts.

When Moses inquired what the purpose of these embellishments were, God explained that a man named Rabbi Akiva would be born in several generations, and that he would be able to deduce halakha from every little curve and crown of the letters of the Law.

However, when one of the students asked Rabbi Akiva for the source of his teaching, Rabbi Akiva replied that it was "A law to Moses at Sinai", and Moses was put at ease.

Legendary allusion to this change in Rabbi Akiva's life is made in two slightly varying forms.

Rabbi Akiva taught thousands of students: on one occasion, twenty-four thousand students of his died in a plague.

Rabbi Akiva ascertained that the royal chamber was adorned with white marble statuary, and, based on the theory that a child is similar in nature to whatever its parents gazed upon while conceiving the child, he exonerated the queen from suspicion.

Rabbi Akiva, being sick, could not return the money at the time appointed; but his bondsmen did not leave him in the lurch.

Later, when Rabbi Akiva arrived to discharge his indebtedness, the matrona not only refused to accept the money, but insisted upon Rabbi Akiva's receiving a large share of what the sea had brought to her.

When, in the course of his travels, he reached the place, Rabbi Akiva sought information concerning the man's family.

Rabbi Akiva was not to be turned from his purpose; he sought the son of the tax-gatherer and laboured long and assiduously in teaching him the word of God.