shepherd for his only ewe-lamb. The wife is the ewe, in the biblical parable, as well as in our parabolic life of Rabbi Akiva and Rachel.
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There is another important biblical intertext here, the story of Jacob and his marriages. There also, the hero is a shepherd in love with his master's daughter. There also, the father opposes the match. There also, the shepherd works for two periods of a number of years to win her, and there also, the daughter is named Rachel. Moreover, that shepherd's name, Ya''qov, is an almost perfect anagram of our hero's name, spelt in Hebrew 'Aqyva. We have, accordingly, very strong support for the suggestion that the pattern of Rabbi Akiva's marriage and particularly the shepherd-ewe relationship is being encoded in this story as a marriage ideal for Jews.
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I have gone on at some length to establish the cultural emotional background of the association of husband with shepherd and wife with ewe on which the talmudic story is built. As subservient as the ewe-wife is, she is not denigrated or despised in this encoding. Indeed, she is both loved and honored when she knows her place. The text recognizes her subjectivity; at least in theory she has the power to accept or reject the absence of her husband for study. She chooses, of course, to accept. Indeed, she is the original motivating force for him to go away to study Torah. This moment constitutes a crisis as well as a crux in the story.
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Up until then, Rachel is the agent of the narrative. It is she who "becomes engaged to Rabbi Akiva," she who marries him in the winter, not he who marries her. This is a reflection of the class-coding of the story; she as the patrician holds the upper hand. He is a poor shepherd, while she is the daughter of his master. However, at the moment that he reveals his potential as a Torah-scholar by drawing the proper moral of the incognito advent of Elijah, she exercises her agency for the last time by abdicating it. She sends him to study. From here on, the class code is superseded by the learning code, which is (almost ineluctably) a gender code. At this point he becomes, as it were, her pastor. It is self-understood and beyond question that what a Jewish wife desires is a husband learned in the Torah.
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The love of Rabbi Akiva for her is marked twice in the story, in very powerful ways, in the poignant wish of the poor shepherd to give his
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 | | 33. Some critics have in fact suggested that two originally unconnected texts have been joined here. In good formalist tradition, I will argue that the story is a unity, and the gap in the sujet is homologous with a sharp transition in the fabula.
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| | 34. See also Fränkel (1981, 113) on this point.
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