68 CHAPTER TWOmay be implied in a clause of P. Yadin 18.^45 Especially ingenious scribes and
judges may have been able to reconcile even such apparently illegal practices
with biblical requirements.^46
It may be helpful at this point to introduce a more complex definition of
Torah (which owes something to the work of Joseph Blenkinsopp). “Torah”
does of course refer to the Pentateuch, but it had a rather broader meaning,
too, referring to the entire body of traditional Jewish legal practice, which
variedfrom placeto placeand timeto time,andalsoinrespecttothe closeness
of its relationship with the Pentateuch (which is not to deny that by the first
century the Pentateuch wasthenormative canonical legal text). Local judges,
teachers, scribes, and so on, who were as far as most Judaeans were concerned
the representatives of Torah, whether or not they were learned men who had
studied the Pentateuch and learned ho wto interpret it, necessarily had to
confront all sorts of traditional local practices, which some of them may have
sometimes tried to reconcile with the Pentateuch. To put it more formally,the
“Torah” was a series of negotiations between an authoritative but opaque text
and various sets of traditional but not fully authorized practice. It is this, and
nomore,butalsonoless,thatthesymboliccentralityandpracticalimportance
of the Torah in ancient Palestinian Jewish society implies. In what sorts of
actual behavior this negotiation resulted, we are rarely in a position to know.^47
The Torah in JudaeaRarely, but not never: the one substantially extant legal document from pre-
70 Judaea, P. Murab. 18, provides a remarkably explicit illustration of the
complex relationship between prescription and practice: it is an acknowledg-
ment of debt, written in Aramaic, in which the debtor agrees that in the event
of his failure to repay his interest-free loan by a certain date, he will be subject
to a 20 percent fine.^48 He furthermore agrees to repay the debt even if the
(^45) See N. Lewis,The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: Greek
Papyri(Jerusalem: IES, 1989). (= Babatha Archive, or “officially” P. Yadin), no. 18, with com-
ments of A. Wasserstein, “A Marriage Contract from the Province of Arabia Nova: Notes on
Papyrus Yadin 18,”JQR80 (1989): 115; T. Ilan, “Notes and Observations on a Newly Published
Divorce Bill from the Judaean Desert,”HTR89 (1996): 195–202, with the response of A.
Schremer, “Divorce in Papyrus Se’elim Once Again: A Reply to Tal Ilan,” with Ilan’s response
immediately following,HTR91 (1998): 193–204.
(^46) Despite Josephus’s explicit statement that Salome’s divorce of Costobar violated Jewish law.
(^47) Let me just add parenthetically that I am not arguing for the antiquity of the Pharisaic
paradosis ton pateron(“tradition of the fathers”) or the rabbinicTorah shebe’al peh(“oral Torah”)
but for diverse patterns of behavior, all of which seemed to their practitioners to conform with
the Torah and all of which were in some way by the first century more or less related to the
Pentateuch—even if by no more than the naked claim that they were.
(^48) ...la’ dy zabinat[in the slightly unusual sense of “pay” rather than the common “purchase”]
‘ad zim[nah]/ denah, ’apra‘unak behumash. H. Eshel and E. Eshel, “Fragments of Two Aramaic
Documents Which Were Brought to the Abior Cave during the Bar Kokhba Revolt,”EI 23