[Avodah] ALL 24000 died

[Ben Bradley]

Stating historical theories about events reported in the gemara without comparing all relevant data points in Chazal and then adding known external historical dates is prone to be misleading.

This is a case in point.
First - the historical data points. The Bar Kochba revolt was from 132-135. The Hadrianic persecutions lasted from the beginning of the revolt until 138 when Hadrian died.
Next, we can be sure that R Akiva died around the end or slightly after the end of the Bar kochba revolt based of Chazal's reporting of the circumstances around his death.
Now if all the students died during the Bar Kochba revolt, when could the aged Rabbi Akiva, with a couple of years left to live, have 'gone south' and raised more talmidim?
And in any case, we can be certain that the talmidim he is reported to have raised - including Rashbi and R Meir, were already mature talmidei chachamim by the time of the Bar Kochba revolt, they were certainly not young and green. Two relevant data points to this end - firstly we know that Rashbi was a young student at the time of Bo bayom, because the gemara names him as the student who created the problem in the Beis midrash of Kerem bYavneh by asking the question which pitted R Yehoshua against Raban Gamliel. Bo Bayom can be dated to around the year 90 by identifying the relative ages of the various protaganists at the time. That was 40 years before Bar Kochba, so by no stretch of the imagination did Rashbi need 'raising up' around that time. Similarly, R Meir can not have been young and green either in 132-135. Because Rebi was born around then as we can see from his rough age at the writing of the Mishna about 60 years later. And he saw the 'back of R Meir' in his youth. R Meir must have been mature a scholar by the time Rebi was a child.

So, with all respect to R Henkin, It is difficult to the point of impossible to understand the theory that R Akiva's students died in the Bar Kochba revolt if we assume the historical accuracy of his raising his 5 central talmidim afterwards. That may be an assumption, especially since the likelihood of the numbers reported as dying and its cause being literal see very low. R Sheria already hints strongly to that.

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