Akiva's Halakhah
Admirable as is the systematization of the Halakhah by Akiva, his hermeneutics and halakhic exegesis—which form the foundation of all Talmudic learning—surpassed it.
The enormous difference between the Halakhah before and after Akiva may be briefly described as follows: The old Halakhah was, as its name indicates, the religious practice sanctioned as binding by tradition, to which were added extensions, and, in some cases, limitations, of the Torah, arrived at by strict logical deduction. The opposition offered by the Sadducees—which became especially strenuous in the last century BC.—originated the halakhic Midrash, whose mission it was to deduce these amplifications of the Law, by tradition and logic, out of the Law itself.
It might be thought that with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem—which event made an end of Sadduceeism—the halakhic Midrash would also have disappeared, seeing that the Halakhah could now dispense with the Midrash. This probably would have been the case had not Akiva created his own Midrash, by means of which he was able "to discover things that were even unknown to Moses" (PesiḲ., Parah, ed. S. Buber, 39b). Akiva made the accumulated treasure of the oral law—which until his time was only a subject of knowledge, and not a science—an inexhaustible mine from which, by the means he provided, new treasures might be continually extracted.
If the older Halakhah is to be considered as the product of the internal struggle between Phariseeism and Sadduceeism, the Halakhah of Akiva must be conceived as the result of an external contest between Judaism on the one hand and Hellenism and Hellenistic Christianity on the other. Akiva no doubt perceived that the intellectual bond uniting the Jews—far from being allowed to disappear with the destruction of the Jewish state—must be made to draw them closer together than before. He pondered also the nature of that bond. The Bible could never again fill the place alone; for the Christians also regarded it as a divine revelation. Still less could dogma serve the purpose, for dogmas were always repellent to rabbinical Judaism, whose very essence is development and the susceptibility to development. 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, thus Judaizing the Bible, as it were, in opposition to the Christians.
But this was not sufficient to obviate all threatening danger. It was to be feared that the Jews, by their facility in accommodating themselves to surrounding —even then a marked characteristic—might become entangled in the net of Grecian philosophy, and even in that of Gnosticism. The example of his colleagues and friends, Elisha ben Abuyah, Ben Azzai, and Ben Zoma strengthened him still more in his conviction of the necessity of providing some counterpoise to the intellectual influence of the non-Jewish world.
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