CONCLUSIONS

One of the great questions about these documents from the Judaean desert from the time of their discovery has been just how “Jewish” the law signified in them was.⁷⁹ The external indicators discussed here - of language, dating formulae, physical form and witnessing - while not in and of themselves probative, help to point in certain directions.

78 Also P Mur 18, in which the provision to pay a 20 percent fine on an interest-free loan even if the sabbatical year intervened can be interpreted as “displeasing to the rabbis” but “reconcilable with the biblical prohibition”: S Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (2001) 68-69 (n 78).

79 For example, on P Yadin 18 alone, see U Yiftach-Firanko, “Judaean desert marriage documents and ekdosis in the Greek law of the Roman period”, in Katzoff and Schaps, Law in the Documents (n 8) 67, 67 note 2; on the law of succession, see H M Cotton and J Greenfield, “Babatha's Patria: Mahoza, Mahoz �?Eglatain and Zo'ar” (1995) 107 ZPE 126; H M Cotton, “Deeds of gift and the law of succession in the documents from the Judaean desert”, in B Kramer, W Luppe, and H Maehler (eds), Akten des 21. Internationalen Papyrologenkongresses Berlin 13.-19.8.1995 (Archiv fur Papyrusforschung Beiheft 3) (1997) 179; H M Cotton, “The law of succession in the documents from the Judaean desert again” (1998) 17 SCI 115; on marriage contracts, Cotton, “Cancelled marriage contract” (n 12) 65, 77-85; Cotton, “Rabbis and the documents” (n 13) 173-179, Cotton, “Marriage contracts” (n 13); on the law of guardianship, Cotton, “Guardianship of Jesus son of Babatha” (n 32) and T Chiusi, “Zur Vormundschaft der Mutter” (1994) 111 ZSS (rA) 155, 178-196.

80 For gentile courts, see above n 34, although note that these Jews continued to adhere to their own religious ordinances, see Cotton, “Bar Kokhba revolt” (n 4) 134 and notes 7-8. The late use of Greek for documents from Judaea - the earliest that can be certainly dated are P Yadin 11 and P Mur 115, both dated to AD 124 - has suggested to A M Rabello, “Civil justice in Palestine from double-documents is compatible with the Roman, the Greek and the Jewish worlds, although a full inner text points more decisively towards the Romans than towards the others. The use of more than three witnesses is compatible with all three worlds as well, but the numbers seven and five point more distinctly towards Roman practices and models, while two and three map well onto local Jewish custom and may even have been a deliberate choice of Jews in the fervour of rebellion in AD 66-70 and 132-136. At one end of this spectrum, in Arabian double-documents, we find chiefly the Greek language, Roman dating formulae, the most Latinisms, the fullest doubled-documents with the most witnesses, and the clearest attempts to edge as close as possible to a new system of law and a new legal authority. In Hebrew documents of the revolts we find revolutionary dating formulae, mixed evidence about inner texts in doubled-documents, and the clearest conformities with what the rabbis would later say was the way to behave.

In other words, these external indicators seem to serve as guidelines for understanding both the audience and the type of law used within each. Does provenance also provide some sort of guideline? Ze'ev Safrai has recently concluded that the halakhah (the rabbis' law) was stressed in the Hebrew documents; that the documents in Aramaic “roughly” corresponded to the demands of the halakhah; and that the Greek documents “reflect[ed] a legal practice different from that manifest in the Jewish sources”, although not incompatible with it.^[164] He then maps these differences on to the geography of Palestine, observing that the rabbis are notably unhappy with the Jews outside the land of Israel in the territory called the Rekem - Jews defined by the rabbis as “erring converts” or “converts and those who err”, and who were lamentably dependent on gentile, that is Roman, courts. Once Safrai identifies the area around Mahoza - where Babatha and Salome (although not their husbands) come from - as the Rekem, all falls into place for him: although Jews, they are the furthest away from rabbinic practice.^[165] The other Nahal Hever documents, in Greek and Aramaic, are closer, and the P Murab’bat documents in Aramaic and Hebrew, which derive (he believes) mostly from refugees from Ein-Gedi, are the closest of all: “the differences in the degree of correspondence to the rabbinic halakhah”, he concludes, “are not dependent solely upon the language of the document, but also upon the place where it was written”.^[166] But some of the geographical details of this argument do not line up the way they need to, and the rabbis' marginalised position between the two revolts makes the argument's reliance on the later halakhah problematic.^[167] Another way to come to the same conclusion, not so vulnerable to the vagaries of (not always attested) provenance, is to look at the physical form of a document - not just its language, but also its dating, doubling and witnessing.

The dynamic of Romanisation in Judaea and Arabia such a composite picture conveys is one that leaves an enormous amount of room within its frame for personal choice - of documentary form, of law followed, and, potentially, of court. In the shadings of its colours such a picture also suggests a range of responses to the presence of the Romans, as well as the tantalising possibility that the picture's dark corners of legal stand-offishness corre­late well with political indifference (or hostility) and, in this case, singular religious commitment. Finally, Roman documentary preferences seem to be clearly outlined on the canvas, a gleaming, four-strand rope easily perceptible amidst the purposeful swirls of varying responses and local law. These prefer­ences give focus and centre to the picture, present the eye with something to follow, and thereby provide one model of how Romanisation - voluntary, not imposed - worked.

Publications of Documents:

P Dura=C B Welles, R O Fink, and J F Gilliam, The Excavations at Dura­Europos. Final Report V. 1. The Parchments and Papyri (1959).

P Mur = P Benoit, J T Milik, and R de Vaux, Les Grottes de Murabba’at (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert II) (1961).

P Hever = H M Cotton and A Yardeni, Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek Documen­tary Texts from Nahal Hever and Other Sites (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXVII, 1997).

P Jericho, P Sdeir, P Se’elim = J Charlesworth, N Cohen, H Cotton, E Eshel, H Eshel, P Flint, H Misgav, M Morgenstern, K Murphy, M Segal, A Yardeni and B Zissu, Miscellaneous Texts from the Judaean Desert (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXXVIII, 2000).

P Yadin= (1) N Lewis, The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters. Greek Papyri (Judaean Desert Studies) (1989).

(2) Y Yadin, J C Greenfield, A Yardeni and B A Levine, The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of the Letters. Hebrew, Aramaic and Nabataean-Aramaic Papyri (Judaean Desert Studies) (2002).