RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 71beddedin the system, and we cannot be sure that the legal practice, even of
the local pagans, lacked them.
About the ritual practice of the Jews of Maoza we know nothing. Nowhere
in the papyri so far published is there any mention of the Sabbath, festivals,
food regulations, the sabbatical year, synagogues, or any other Jewish institu-
tions. Several papyri report actions that violated Jewish law, though the viola-
tions are all surprisingly ambiguous, except perhaps the premarital cohabita-
tion implied in P. Yadin 37; even Babatha’s oath by the Tyche of the emperor
(P. Yadin 16, a land registration document) is reported in the document itself
to be a Greek translation of what Babatha supposedly said in Aramaic. There
is no way of knowing whether she really swore by thegada deKesar. There
are no ascertainable cases of intermarriage.^55 Nor, to judge from papyri on
which Semitic dates are given, was business conducted on Jewish holidays,
though the statistical sample is too small to be conclusive; in any case, it is
not known whether the Jewish liturgical and Semitic civil calendars were in
agreement.^56
In GalileeThe legal lives of the Jews of pre-70 Judaea, to extrapolate with admitted reck-
lessness from P. Murab. 18, were characterized by a high degree of explicit
tension between Pentateuchal prescription and local practice (i.e., the Torah
significantly influenced their legal activities), while those of the Jews of post-
106 Roman Arabia were characterized by no such tension, as far as we know;
the Torah, in other words, is invisible in the documents so far published. This
isnottodenytheprobabilitythattheTorahretainedfortheseJewsitssymbolic
force and affected their behavior in some ways; this may explain why in 132
consideration will have to await publication of the second volume of the archive. In the mean-
time, Lewis’s legal comments on the Greek papyri require supplementation and revision, for
which, see Wasserstein, “A Marriage Contract”; M. Broshi, “Agriculture and Economy in Roman
Palestine according to Babatha’s Papyri,”Zion55 (1990): 269–81; M. Goodman, “Babatha’s
Story,”JRS81 (1991): 169–76; B. Isaac,“The Babatha Archive: A Revie wArticle,”IEJ42 (1992):
62–75; T. Ilan, “Premarital Cohabitation in Ancient Judaea: The Evidence of the Babatha Ar-
chive and the Mishnah (Ketubbot 1.4),”HTR86 (1993): 247–64; H. Cotton, “The Guardianship
of Jesus Son of Babatha: Roman and Local La win the Province of Arabia,”JRS83 (1993): 94–
108.
(^55) Goodman’s suggestion (“Babatha’s Story”) that Babatha daughter of Simon herself was not
Jewish is special pleading.Simon could be a Greek name, as Goodmanargues, but in the Semitic
documents it is invariably transcribed as ShM‘WN—a name attested only among Jews, as far as
I am aware.
(^56) These same qualities characterize the more recently published “archive of Salome Ko-
maise,” also from Maoza in the 120s and 130s; see H. M. Cotton and A. Yardeni,Aramaic,
Hebrew, and Greek Documentary Texts from Nahal Hever and Other Sites, Discoveries in the
Judaean Desert 27 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), nos. 60–73, with introduction on pp. 158–65.