Rabbi Akiva began his life illiterate and ended it the greatest Torah teacher of his generation. The bridge between the two was a woman named Rachel.
Rachel was the daughter of Kalba Shebua, one of the three richest men in Jerusalem. Akiva was a shepherd tending her father's flocks. She saw something in the silent herdsman that no one else did. She offered to marry him on one condition — that he agree to study Torah. On that promise, she betrothed herself to him in secret, refusing the rich husbands her father presented.
Kalba Shebua learned of it and drove her from the house. He vowed he would give her nothing. She went to live with Akiva's mother, penniless. Neighbors, knowing she belonged to the highest family of the city, quietly brought her work. Part of what she earned, she sent to Akiva — to support him while he studied.
Akiva was forty years old when he first sat down to learn aleph and bet. He did not believe he could succeed. One day, sitting by a fountain in Lod, he saw a great stone with a hole drilled through its center. He asked a bystander what had made the hole. "The rope of the bucket," he was told. "Every day for years, the rope drags across the stone."
Akiva stared. "If a soft rope can bore through hard stone," he said, "cannot the words of Torah — which are as hard as iron — bore into my heart, which is flesh?"
He began. Once a mocker in the market laughed at Rachel: "Her hair will turn grey before that shepherd becomes a scholar." She showed Akiva that people laugh once or twice and then lose interest. He gave himself to Torah, body and soul.
He gathered hay each day, selling half for food and burning half to warm his study. Neighbors complained of the smoke and offered to buy the second bundle so he could afford oil. Akiva declined. "This hay," he said, "is three things at once — my light, my heat, and my food. I cannot give up any of them."
After twelve years he returned to Jerusalem with two thousand pupils. The whole city poured out to meet him. Kalba Shebua was among them. Not recognizing his son-in-law, he asked Akiva to annul his old vow against his daughter, for she was starving.
"And what if her husband had become a scholar?" Akiva asked.
"If he could only say a blessing over the bread, I would give him half my fortune."
"I am the man."
Kalba Shebua embraced him and thanked the Lord.
As Akiva approached his old house, Rachel came out to meet him and fell at his feet to kiss them. The two thousand students, not knowing who she was, moved to push her away. Akiva stopped them. "Leave her alone," he said. "Everything you have learned from me, and everything I know, belongs to her. It is the wisdom of a woman that builds a house."
Ketubot 62b and Gaster's Exempla #148 preserve this story. The stone was worn through by a soft rope. The scholar was built by a patient wife.