Introduction

This part presents case studies on three specific themes or issues, devot­ing a chapter to each issue.

Chapter 4 deals with law of succession, and in particular the position of the daughter-only child as possible heir to her father's estate.

Chapter 5 deals with guardianship both of minors and of women. Guardianship is a subject that has attracted much scholarly attention over the years, especially as a number of documents in the Babatha archive, P.Yadin 12-15, 27 and 28-30, are all related to guardianship issues. The question that should be raised in this context is whether these documents can provide a general picture of guardianship as an institu­tion, or whether they should be seen as giving guardianship arrange­ments in a specific situation. I will argue for the latter interpretation. Consequently, these documents cannot and should not be used to draw general conclusions as to guardianship of minors in a Roman province. Furthermore, the chapter will look at guardianship of women, a phe­nomenon in the documents frequently associated with a Roman legal influence. However, if one wants to accept the appearance of guardians of women as an adjustment to a Roman legal environment, one would have to explain how this related to the legal context of the documents in general. This question is pressing in the light of Chapter 2, where I have shown that the documents adhere to local law substantively. This suggests that the appearance of guardians should be understood as an adjustment to Roman formal law, leaving the background against which the documents were written untouched. In fact, this can be shown for a number of documents in which guardians of women appear. This is all the more interesting as a striking difference with the situation in Egypt can be observed.

Further proof for the fact that the appearance of guardians of women was in fact indicative only of an adjustment to Roman formal law, can be found in the different terminology employed for the guardian of a minor and the guardian of a woman. Where the Greek text of the papyri uses a single term for both institutions, a fact commonly remarked upon as proof of Romanization, the Aramaic parts of the same documents do not use a single term, but differentiate between the two institutions.

Chapter 6 deals with marriage contracts, or marriage related docu­ments. The main focus will be on the legal background of these docu­ments, not foremost concentrating on phrases or terminology, as has

been done before, but on determining the general legal background of these documents, using the references to law as given in the documents' texts. It will appear that where language and terminology (of single words or phrases) can give confusing evidence as to the applicable law, the references to law in the documents' text present a clearer picture of the legal background against which these documents were written. Especially the marriage documents testify to the development of Jew­ish law in this pre-Mishnaic period: several formulations of obligations were in circulation, which nevertheless formed part of one, Jewish, tra­dition. Clearly, some practices eventually became part of the Mishnah and others did not: the marriage contract as described in the Mishnah looks distinctly like P.Yadin 10, while it has much less in common with P.Yadin 18. What is interesting about this, is the fact that the Mishnah obviously did not always codify the most common practice: P.Yadin 18 comes closer to other oriental and non-oriental marriage contracts than P.Yadin 10 does. Therefore, what we see here is a selection of particular practices that deviate from common patterns. The same goes for the position of the daughter-only child as discussed in Chapter 4 where the ancient oriental laws under discussion all have different arrangements for the position of the daughter-only child than the arrangement even­tually accepted in the Mishnah.