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procreation is a murderer and diminishes the Divine Image, for it says, One who spills blood of a human, for the sake of the human his blood will be spilt, for in the image of God, He made the human, and as for you, be fruitful and multiply.
Rabbi El'azar ben Azariah said to him, "Ben-Azzai, words are fine when accompanied by practice. There are those who interpret well and behave well, and those who behave well but do not interpret well. You interpret well, but do not behave well." Ben-Azzai said to them, "What shall I do? My soul desires Torah. Let the world continue by the efforts of others!"
(Tosefta Yevamot 8:7; compare Babylonian Talmud Yevamot 63b)
The absolute and contradictory demands of marriage and commitment to study of Torah remained one of the great unresolved tensions of rabbinic culture. The text thematizes that tension by "personifying" its poles. 1 The Rabbis are commenting on the biblical text: "One who spills blood of a human, for the sake of the human his blood will be spilt, for in the image of God, He made the human. And as for you, be fruitful and multiply." Rabbis Akiva and El'azar disagree on the interpretation of the context.
1. This is to be taken as neither an assertion nor a denial of the biographical, historical "reality" of these Rabbis and their discourse, but only as an interpretation of the function that the text plays, in my reading, in rabbinic culture.

 
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Rabbi Akiva understands that the clause referring to the "image of God" has to do with the murderer who diminishes the human image of God, while Rabbi El'azar reads it as pertaining to the continuation of the text and thus referring to procreation. Ben-Azzai reads the entire text as one context and thus derives his strong principle that non-procreation is equivalent to both murder and diminishment of the Divine Image. Rabbi El'azar, quite naturally, attacks the celibate Ben-Azzai for hypocrisy, to which Ben-Azzai replies that much as he would like to be able to fulfill the commandment, he cannot, because his soul has such desire (the verb used is exactly the verb used in erotic contexts) for study. All of his erotic energy is devoted to the love of Torah; there is none left for a woman. 2 This reading, however, seems merely to imply that Ben-Azzai is a complicated hypocrite. We must read him, therefore, to be saying that he knows that he ought to be performing the commandment to be married; indeed, he knows that he is both a murderer and a diminisher of the Divine by not doing so, but his lust for Torah will not let him. His argument is the exact analogue of the self-justification of the lecher who says he knows that he should not be a-whoring, but he cannot help himself. 3 In fact, Ben-Azzai's self-defense is modeled on that kind of statement, and the erotic terminology used by Ben-Azzai, the terminology of desire, strengthens this reading. In this story, then, we find the perfect representation of the extreme internal conflict set up by contradictory demands that one be married, have children, and also devote oneself entirely to Torah. Both Ben-Azzai's self-justification and Rabbi El'azar's condemnation of him are left to stand in the text, suggesting how lively the contest was in rabbinic times. But it should be emphasized that Ben-Azzai is a limit case, truly an exception that proves the rule. Virtually all of the other Rabbis are represented as married; marriage was a nearly obligatory norm for the Rabbis as well as for the populace, but also obligatory for the Rabbis was constant attention to Torah.
The privileging of virginity in the Church and some late-antique Jewish religious groups allowed for the division of humanity into two classes: the religious, who were able to be wholly devoted to the spirit, and the householders, who married and reproduced (Fraade 1986, 26668; An-
2. On Ben-Azzai's self-justification, see also Daube (1977, 3738).
3.