70 CHAPTER TWOat the southern tip of the Dead Sea, mostly in the 120s and early 130s. To
judge from the names of witnesses and property owners listed in the docu-
ments, the population was mixed, Jewish and Nabataean, with the Jews per-
haps slightly more numerous.^52 Babatha’s family had close ties in Engeddi,
Judaea, but Maoza itself was situated in the new Roman province of Arabia;
before 106 it had been ruled by the Nabataeans. It was thus in an area that
had not been under the jurisdiction of any Jewish authority since the days of
Alexander Jannaeus (reigned 103–76B.C.E.), if then (seeAnt13.397). We may
speculate that Babatha’s grandparents had come to Arabia from Judaea or
Idumaea at the time of the Great Revolt, but perhaps there had “always” been
Jews there.
The private la wof the documents is of interest for the present purpose
mainly because, unlike P. Murab. 18, though not devoid of Jewish influence,
it betrays noexplicitconcern with Jewish law—this despite the fact that the
two scribes who wrote the papyri, most of the parties, indeed probably most
of the population of the town, were Jewish. Yet despite their neglect of Jewish
civil law, the Jews of Maoza, at least the literate ones, were conscious of being
different from theirneighbors. Or perhaps a more rigorous formulation would
be that there were among those of Jewish origin some who retained a sense of
separateness, which they indicated by using Judaean (as well as some Arabic,
Greek, and even Latin) names and writing in Judaean rather than Nabataean
script (Jews who did not follow such practices would be invisible in the evi-
dence). What are we to make of this contradiction? Wasserstein argued that
these documents should be seen as mere formalities, that the Greek marriage
contracts, for example, were made for the benefit of the government registry
office; the Jews most likely hadketubbotwritten as well. Why then did Baba-
tha save only the Greek contracts but not theketubbot?^53 While A. Was-
serstein’s insistence on interpreting the documents in light of the la wof the
papyri of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt and not that of the rabbis is surely
correct, we must conclude that it was the local version of Roman provincial
civil law, with its mixture of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern, including in
this case Jewish, elements that actually governed the economic and in most
respects familial lives of the Jews of Maoza.^54 The Jewish elements wereem-
(^52) Bowersock,Roman Arabia(Cambridge:Harvard University Press,1983), pp.76–89, thought
he could infer from the documents a growth in the Jewish population of the town between the
90s and the 120s, and that a deed drawn up for Babatha’s father in the 90s indicated that he had
just arrived in the town from Judaea. But this is just guesswork. The documentsdemonstrate
nothing about changing demographic patterns, only the trivial point that plots of land constantly
changed hands.
(^53) Cf. N. Lewis, “The Babatha Archive: A Response,”IEJ44 (1994): 245.
(^54) Among the Jewish elements may be exaction of a penalty on an interest-free loan (see
above); appointment of two guardians for an orphan, rather than the one guardian required by
Roman law, though this is problematic, since one of the appointees was apparently pagan. A full