Moses sees Rabbi Akiva (Menachot 29b)

Moses sees Rabbi Akiva teaching the Oral Torah, and later meeting his fate at the hands of the Romans, in a sugya (passage) in the Babylonian Talmud. The sugya appears in tractate Menachot (29b), which generally deals with Temple offerings. Jewish commentaries have drawn many lessons from this story, on topics ranging from rabbinic authority to interpretive innovation to the justification of human suffering (theodicy).

Context

The sugya assumes familiarity with several aspects of rabbinic beliefs and practice. The opening assumes that God reveals the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai and that this revelation incorporates the Oral Torah of rabbinic teachings, not just the written scripture of the Hebrew Bible. The opening also refers to the "crowns" (tagim) on letters for the calligraphy of a Torah scroll. Readers are expected to know that Rabbi Akiva, a leading sage of the early rabbinic period, was known for his interpretive creativity, and that he was one of the ten martyrs who were tortured and killed by Romans during the Bar Kokhba revolt. Finally, it is helpful to know that there is a category of Jewish law that is authoritative because it is said to be a law given to Moses at Sinai.

Academic and religious responses

David Halivni-Weiss sees the sugya as an exemplar of a minimalist position on divine revelation, leaving space for rabbinic interpretation. He states the the story is often misunderstood:

Though this story is sometimes interpreted to support the claim that each succeeding generation has an equal share in revelation, and that contemporary exegesis is not beholden to the past, it actually expresses the contrary notion that the arguments and details worked out by scholars like R. Akiba were grounded upon principles that had been revealed to Moses at Sinai.

Kromhout and Zwiep (p.145) see the sugya as justifying the rabbi's "maximum freedom in developing Jewish law" by opening up the distance between revelation at Sinai and midrash (interpretation), though Jewish thinkers such as Semuel da Silva viewed God as the direct author of both Written and Oral Torah.