LANGUAGE

Most people who lived in both provinces, Arabia and Judaea, spoke a type of Aramaic as their first language.^[114] Seventy-nine or eighty of the documents (of 158 to 161 total) are written in one form or another of Aramaic - either in the Nabataean script, or in the Jewish script, which was used to write Hebrew as well.

Table 1. Languages of legal documents:^[116]

1. 1(a): unknown origin:

2 Greek (P Hever 66 [ad 99 or 109]; possibly from Philadelphia, DJD 27.240); P Hever 73 [106-107 or 109]).

1.2(a1): Arabia (before AD 106):

6 Nabataean Aramaic (**P Starcky=P Yadin 36 [58-67], *P Yadin 1 [94], *2-4 [99], P.Seā€™elim 2 [100]).

1.2(a2): Arabia (after AD 106):

5-6 Nabataean Aramaic (*P Yadin 6 [119 or 120], *9 [122]; and three or four more, unpublished^[117]).

4 Jewish Aramaic (*P Yadin 7 [written by scribe trained in Nabataean tradition; 120], *8 [123], *10 [124-125]), **P Hever 12 [131]^[118]).

32-33 Greek (22 double, five single, two as a pair [can be counted as one or two], as fully listed in Table 3; *P Yadin 28-30 [Greek copies of Roman legal texts]; and P Hever 68 [nd]).

1.3(a1): Judaea (ad 55-135):

42 (3+39) unknown (either Jewish Aramaic or Hebrew) P Mur 38 (nd), P Hever 345 (nd), 349 (nd); [plus P Jericho 15, thirty-nine fragments in either Aramaic or Hebrew]

66 (46+20) Jewish Aramaic (P Mur 18 [55-56], P Mur 20 [51 or 65],^[119] P Hever 9, 21, 22 [all end of the Herodian period], P Mur 23 [66-70?], 25 [66-70?],^[120] 19 [72],^[121] P Jericho 7 [84], 8 and 12 [first century AD], 2 and 3 [end first/beginning second century], P Mur 21 [first half second century], 27-28, 31-35 [all undated]; P Jericho 6 [Roman period], 13 [116?]; P.Seā€™elim 51 [first or second century]; P Seā€™elim 52 [first or second century]; P Yadin 42-43 [132]; P Hever 32 [113-14],^[122] 26 [134], 7 [134 or 135], 13 [134 or 135], 8 [135, outer text Hebrew], 8a [134 or 135]; P Yadin 47a-b [provenance uncertain, can be counted as one or two; 134]); PSdeir 2 [135], P Seā€™elim 3 [second century AD?]; P Hever 9a, 10, 11, 23, 24, 24a, 25, 27, 31, 34, P Hever 50 + P Mur 26, P Hever 344, 346 [on hide, all undated], and at least twenty fragments).

25-26 Hebrew (P Mur 29 [66-70], 30 [66-70]^[123]), P Hever 348 [on hide; Herodian]); PJericho 9, 10, 11, 14 [all first century AD; 9 and 10 may be the same document]; P Mur 7 [?100-120, almost certainly dated too early, on hide], 22 [131],^[124] P Hever 49 [133, on hide], P Mur 24a-l [133], 36; P Yadin 44-46 [leases of land in Hebrew, all 134].)

21 Greek (Ein-Gedi Pap 1 [90-130],^[125] *P Yadin 11 [124; with Roman centurion], P Mur 115 [124], 114 [before 130],^[126] 116 [first half second century]; P Jericho 16 [128];^[127] P Hever 69 [130]); P Jericho 4 [132-136], 5a-d [fragments of four separate documents], 5e, 17, 18, 19 [fragments of nine separate documents], all ā€œRomanā€.

The use of Hebrew is quite unusual, since - as Hannah Cotton has argued - it appears only in Judaea and only in years of rebellion. Hebrew's use should therefore be understood as an ideological statement (or the consequence of an ideological decree) rather than a language choice that reflected a language that people actually spoke.^[128] This in turn suggests that, in Judaea at least, the language of a legal document could be thought to represent something significant. On this reasoning, documents written in Hebrew - ā€œthe language whose representation symbolized Jewish nationhoodā€^[129] - spoke to observant and/or rebellious Jews, and suggest at the very least that the language of a document might well point to its anticipated audience.

Similarly, the use of Greek was not a reflection of a language usually spoken by the principals in, or witnesses to, a legal document, and these documents also, therefore, probably looked to a special audience. The Babatha archive, combined with other Arabian documents found in the desert and dating after AD 106, shows a pronounced preference for use of the Greek language: thirty- four or thirty-five in Greek, compared to ten or eleven in one or the other form of Aramaic. Babatha herself was illiterate in any language^[130] and most of her witnesses (as in all the documents) wrote their signatures in Aramaic,^[131] so here the choice of Greek for the documents had to be a calculated one, just as the choice of Hebrew in Judaea in time of revolt had been. The audience for these documents was, however, very different from that of the Hebrew documents: it must have been that of a Greek city, a Greek-speaking official, or the Roman courts, in which - as in other matters of governance in the Roman East - Greek was employed.^[132] Only Aramaic is likely not to have been a specific and deliberate choice, since this was the language most people spoke. The implication of this is that Aramaic documents looked no further than the participants' locales, and their own local venues of arbitration or enforcement.^[133]

C.