How Gasters Exempla Showed God Uses What Looks Useless

Two tales sit close together in The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster's 1924 anthology of medieval Jewish folktales. The first is the love story of R. Akiba and his wife Rachel, who chose a poor shepherd over wealthy suitors. The second is the famous tale of King David learning the value of gnats, spiders, and fools.

Both tales make the same structural argument. The most consequential turns in a life are often delivered by what the world had previously dismissed as useless.

The Shepherd and the Heiress

Exempla 148 recounts R. Akiba's life arc. He began as a desperately poor shepherd tending the flocks of Kalba Shebua, one of the richest men in Jerusalem. Kalba Shebua's daughter, recognizing in the shepherd what her father did not, fell in love with Akiba.

She refused to marry any of the wealthy suitors her father proposed. She betrothed herself instead to Akiba on the condition that he would commit to studying. Her father expelled her from the house. She moved in with Akiba's mother. The neighbors, recognizing her noble background, brought her work secretly so she could earn a small income.

Akiba kept his promise. He studied. Over years and then decades, he became one of the greatest scholars of the rabbinic tradition. When the wealth he had not begun with finally came to him through Torah, he commissioned a large crown for his wife set with many precious stones. His children asked why he gave her such valuable presents. He answered that he could never repay her adequately.

The teaching the Exempla preserves is structural. The wife's recognition of the shepherd as worth marrying, made when no one else in Jerusalem could see what she saw, was the decisive act in producing the rabbinic sage the tradition would later remember. The shepherd looked useless to her father. He was not.

The Gnat, the Spider, and the Fool

Exempla 418 records David's question to the Holy One. David asked what good there was in gnats, spiders, and fools. The Holy One did not answer in words. The Holy One answered with three subsequent events.

The first event came when David fled from Saul and hid in a cave. A spider quickly covered the cave opening with its web. Saul, examining the cave, saw the intact web and concluded that no one could have entered without breaking it. David escaped because a spider had built a wall.

The second event came when David crept into a cave where Saul and Abner were sleeping. David was reaching for the cruise of water near Saul's head when Abner stretched his enormous legs in his sleep, pinning David. A gnat then stung Abner. Abner lifted his leg in reflex. David escaped.

The third event came when David, fleeing into Philistine territory, came before the king of Gath. To save his life, David simulated madness. The king, judging him a fool, refused to receive him as a fugitive and let him go. David survived by appearing to be exactly the kind of person he had once questioned the value of.

The teaching is that the Holy One's economy uses what looks dispensable. Gnats save kings. Spiders shelter prophets. The appearance of foolishness saves lives. David's earlier question contained an implicit dismissal. The three events were the Holy One's correction.

Why the Exempla Preserved the Pairing

The Exempla's editorial decision to include both tales reflects the medieval Jewish appetite for teachings that arrive in pairs. A single story can be dismissed as an interesting case. Two stories arguing the same principle from different angles become a structural argument. Gaster preserved the pairing, and the principle the pairing teaches, because the principle continues to be useful for the reader who carries it forward.

What the Two Tales Together Argue

Read the two passages together and the editorial logic of Gaster's Exempla becomes legible. The collection preserves both the Akiba shepherd-story and the David gnat-story because both teach the same principle from different directions.

The first teaches what the world dismisses can be the source of greatness. The second teaches what the world dismisses can be the means of survival. Together they form a single argument. The Kabbalist or rabbinic student who reads the Exempla is being trained to take seriously the people, creatures, and circumstances that the surrounding culture has already written off.