Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

There is a famous story of how Rabbi Akiba, one of the greatest Jewish teachers of all time, went on praying the Shema, declaring his loyalty to the One God and his determination to stand for his kingdom, as the Roman torturers, catching up with Jewish rebels after the Bar-Kochba revolt in AD 135, ran steel combs through his flesh until he died a horrible and lingering death.22 He continued to pray: “Shema Yisrael, Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might . . .” (“soul” here means “life”). His disciples, standing by like Socrates’s friends as he drank the hemlock, asked him in awe and horror how he could go on praying that prayer even now. His answer, recorded much later but reflecting what we know of the man, is a model of wise, humble Jewish thought. All his life long, he explained, he had been troubled by the words in the prayer “and with all your soul.” He wondered what that meant and if he would ever have the opportunity to fulfill that part of the prayer. Now that he finally had the opportunity, he declared, he was going to seize it. This, then, was what it meant to love the One God with one’s life. Akiba died with the word echad, “one,” on his lips: “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one.” Echad. A statement of loyalty. Of loyalty even to the death.