Rabbi Akiva's Dilemma

IT WOULD SEEM THAT there should be no problem concerning whether or not God has knowledge of everything. After all, the Bible and the Quran depict God as speaking to, caring for, and rewarding or punishing specific individuals. Moreover, if God created the world, he should have knowledge of what he has created. Why then did one of the most important teachers of the Mishnah, Rabbi Akiva, bother to utter the apparent dilemma: ‘All is foreseen; yet freedom is given’? The first clause would have been obvious to his audience. The second clause seems to be an emphatic response to the objection that if God knows everything, how is human choice possible? Rabbi Akiba explicitly asserts that there is no problem in believing in both divine omniscience and the possibility of choice. The dilemma is indeed only apparent. In the latter clause Rabbi Akiva removes this doubt and affirms that although God knows everything, we still have choice.

Rabbi Akiva's dictum is puzzling and intriguing: puzzling because rabbinic literature is almost silent on this issue; intriguing since it stimulates us to ask what motivated Rabbi Akiva to enunciate this apparent dilemma. Was the saintly rabbi bothered by a theological conundrum?Was he responding to some question raised by an anonymous doubter? Rabbinic literature contains examples of rabbis responding to questions raised by non-Jews, some of whom are introduced as philosophers. It is therefore not idle to speculate what is behind his categorical affirmation of both divine omniscience and human freedom.

Some scholars have argued that the mishnaic teachers were not isolated intellectually from the Graeco-Roman world, that one can detect in their sayings echoes at least of themes in Greek and Roman philosophy. Without commenting here upon the alleged influence of the latter upon rabbinic thought, we can definitely say that the apparent dilemma between divine omniscience and human freedom was well known and discussed in ancient philosophy. Indeed, Aristotle laid the philosophical foundations for virtually all subsequent philosophical and theological treatments of the subject in chapter 9 of his treatise On Interpretation. Now, it is important to realize at the outset that Aristotle was not concerned at all with the specific issue of divine omniscience; in fact, the term ‘god’ does not appear at all in this chapter.