The Relationship Between Roman And Local Law In The Babatha And Salome Komaise Archives

Using a division between substantive and formal law as the key element for understanding the applicable law in papyri, this study offers a new understanding of the distinct parts Roman and local law played in the legal reality of second-century Arabia.

Using a division between substantive and formal law as the key element for understanding the applicable law in papyri, this study offers a new understanding of the distinct parts Roman and local law played in the legal reality of second-century Arabia.

In the early second century CE, two Jewish women, Babatha and Salome Komaise, lived in the village of Maoza on the southern coast of the Dead Sea, which came under direct Roman rule in 106 CE. The archives these two women left behind provide a tantalizing glimpse into the ways in which the inhabitants of this region interacted with their new rulers and how this affected the practice of law in this part of the Roman Empire. The papers provide details of the women's property, marriages, and disputes, and are remarkable in their legal diversity: Nabataean, Roman, Greek, and Jewish legal elements are all in evidence. Consequently, identifying the supposed 'operative law' of the documents has proven a highly contentious task, with scholarly advocates of each of these traditions have failed to reach any true consensus. This volume proposes a change in focus: instead of attempting to idenify the 'legal system' behing the documents, it seeks instead to understand the 'legal culture' of the community that produced them. Through a series of case studies of the ways in which the people involved in the creation of the papyri variously perceived and approached their legal transactions, it argues that concentration on these different agents' understandings will ultimately help scholars to better understand the actual funtioning of law and justice both in this particular village and in other small communities in the Roman Empire --Back cover.

In this volume, Elif Hilal Karaman examines the lives of Ephesian women in their historical and social contexts, considering in particular their roles as mothers, wives, teachers, and individuals in the private and public spheres. She presents Greco-Roman and early Christian sources relevant to Ephesus and relating to women, including more than 300 Ephesian inscriptions, and analyses them comparatively. By doing this she illuminates the impact of early Christianity upon the roles of women. The evidence presented demonstrates the extent to which early Christian authors utilized Greco-Roman cultural elements to construct a social background for the nascent Christian communities for whom they wrote. Elif Hilal Karaman's work thus advocates for the interpretation of early Christian texts in conversation with local archaeological and literary evidence in order to develop more nuanced understandings of the social and historical contexts of these important works.

This volume of collected essays reflects on various aspects of language, text, and interpretations of war and peace in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple Jewish literature, with special close attention set on the Qumran War Scroll.

This is the fourth and fi nal volume of Lester L. Grabbe's four-volume history of the Second Temple period, collecting all that is known about the Jews during the period in which they were ruled by the Roman Empire. Based directly on primary sources such as archaeology, inscriptions, Jewish literary sources and Greek, Roman and Christian sources, this study includes analysis of the Jewish diaspora, mystical and Gnosticism trends, and the developments in the Temple, the law, and contemporary attitudes towards Judaism. Spanning from the reign of Herod Archelaus to the war with Rome and Roman control up to 150 CE, this volume concludes with Grabbe's holistic perspective on the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period.

Babatha's Orchard tells a story that has gone untold for nearly two thousand years. It is a story that would have perished with the last person familiar with its details-the Jewish woman Babatha, daughter of Shim'on ben Menahem. Babatha was probably killed or enslaved by Roman soldiers at the end of Shim'on ben Kosiba's revolt in 135 CE, when they captured a cave in a wadi running into the western shores of the Dead Sea in which she and other Jewish fugitives had been sheltering. In 1961, a team of archaeologists discovered a cache of possessions that Babatha had carefully hidden before her life or freedom was probably taken by the Romans. Among them were thirty-five legal documents dated from 94 CE to 132 CE, written on papyrus in Aramaic and Greek, relating to Babatha and her family, and the leather pouch in which they had been kept. In this work, Philip F. Esler examines the first four documents of the archive in chronological order-Papyri Yadin 1-4, the first from 94 CE and the second, third and fourth from 99 CE, and all drafted in Nabatean Aramaic. Although from the land and time of the Bible, they reveal a tale of domestic life. It is the story of how, around December 99 CE, Shim'on, Babatha's father (but probably before she was born), unexpectedly came to acquire an irrigated date-palm orchard in his village of Maoza, on the southern shore of the Dead Sea, in the kingdom of Nabatea. Esler undertakes a close reading of P. Yadin 1-4, with occasional reference to wider contextual issues from the Dead Sea region and other parts of the ancient Mediterranean world.

The present volume presents a selection of studies by Ranon Katzoff on Jews in the ancient Roman world. Common to them is that they deal with Jews in liminal situations - confronted with non-Jewish, mainly Roman, laws, places, government, and modes of thought. In these studies - in which texts in Greek and Latin and rabbinic texts (all in translation) elucidate each other - Jews are shown to be rather loyal to their Jewish traditions, a controversial conclusion. The first two sections concern law. Section one searches the remains of popular Jewish culture for evidence on the degree to which rabbinic law really prevailed, through the study of Judaean Desert documents, mainly those of Babatha. Section two sifts through rabbinic law for traces of Roman law. Section three comprises studies of Jews in, to, and from the city of Rome, and section four a miscellany of studies on Jews confronted with non-Jewish life.