In 1898, the secretary of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, Walter Nash, purchased four fragments of a sheet of papyrus from a dealer in Egypt. Written on them were the Ten Commandments and the Shema.

Dated probably to the second or third century BCE, the Nash Papyrus confirms the statement in the Mishnah that the Ten Commandments and the Shema were recited together as a single unit.

The Mishnah is discussing practices in the Temple; the Nash Papyrus (which may have come from a set of tefillin) shows that the passages were also read as a single unit outside the Sanctuary.

We do not read the Ten Commandments with the Shema any more. Indeed, we never read them as part of our regular liturgy. According to the Talmud they were dropped because of the claims of the minim, the early Christians. They had claimed that the Ten Commandments were the only part of the Torah given to Moses at Sinai.

The rabbis disagreed. The idea that the Ten Commandments were somehow superior to the rest of the Torah was unpalatable. To prove the point the rabbis detached them from the Shema and stopped their daily recital.

The Christian Bible regards both the Ten Commandments and the Shema as fundamental to its faith. In one of the gospels, when Jesus was asked which was the most important commandment, he recited the Shema. And a little over a century later in Dialogue with Trypho, a fictional debate between a Christian and a Jew, the church father Justin quoted the Shema to claim the supremacy of Christianity over Judaism:

The rabbis abolished the daily reading of the Ten Commandments to demonstrate that they were not superior to the rest of the Torah.

They may have wanted to do the same with the Shema, to refute the Christians. But they could not. The very text itself mandates its daily recital, “when you sit in your house and when you walk on the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up”.

Since they could not stop reciting the Shema, they had to do something else with it. They had to elevate it, to ensure that it was seen as an exclusively Jewish text. They had to show that the Shema was Judaism, that the essence of Judaism lay in the Shema.

This is where Rabbi Akiva comes in. He and Justin both lived in the first half of the second century. Akiva may not have read Dialogue with Trypho but he would have been familiar with its argument. It was a difficult time.

The Temple had been destroyed, Judaism was in crisis and Christian preachers were trying to persuade Jews to change their faith. Like Justin, they turned the Shema into a Christian text, to support their arguments.

Akiva took it upon himself to respond. We can see this most clearly in the way he treats the Shema in the Mishnah. The Mishnah is the earliest Jewish law code, it was compiled by Akiva’s students, building on the work of their teacher. A reference in the Talmud suggests that Akiva may even have compiled the earliest version of the Mishnah himself.

And the Mishnah makes no bones about the pre-eminence of the Shema. Its opening section deals primarily with agriculture.

But its first chapters are not about agriculture at all. They ask: “From when do we read the Shema in the evening?” In the Mishnah, the product of Rabbi Akiva’s school, the opening words and the very first laws are about the Shema.

Akiva spent much of his life in an ideological battle with early Christianity. He challenged the Christian theologies of love and suffering. He pioneered the phrase “beloved is suffering”. It is an odd remark, it sounds more Christian than Jewish.

When Akiva first said it, his teacher Rabbi Eliezer was astonished. But Akiva knew what he was doing. Christianity says that Jesus suffered to redeem the world.

But the idea of redemption through suffering comes from the prophet Isaiah, who wrote about God’s “suffering servant”. By stressing the idea that suffering is beloved, Akiva wanted to reclaim Isaiah’s Jewish theology, to prevent it being appropriated by Christianity.

There is a famous passage in the Jerusalem Talmud where Akiva proclaims Bar Kochba as the Messiah. He has been criticised for it. But we can read his statement, “This one is the King Messiah”, differently. Perhaps his emphasis was not on the word “Messiah” but on the phrase “this one”.

Perhaps he was saying: “This one (and no other) is the Messiah.”
In other words, Akiva may have been less interested in proclaiming Bar Kochba as the Messiah, than in denying that anyone else was.

The most powerful evidence for Akiva’s advocacy of the Shema comes from the story of his death at the hands of the Romans. As they were torturing him he recited the Shema. He told his students that all his life he had waited to fulfil the Shema’s commandment to love God “with all your soul”.

Now he could fulfil it. According to the Talmud he prolonged his uttering of the word “One”, until his soul left his body. As he uttered his final word “One”, a voice descended from heaven and said: “Happy are you, Rabbi Akiva, that your soul left your body as you uttered: ‘One’.”

Dr Freedman’s latest book is ‘Britain’s Jews’, published by Bloomsbury. He writes a regular column on harryfreedman.substack.com