72 CHAPTER TWOsome of them joined a revolt intended in part to restore the temple and the
authority of the Torah in Judaea—if that is ho wBabatha’s papers reached the
Judaean desert. The legal force of the Torah in pre-70 Galilee, Peraea, and
Idumaea^57 probably occupied an intermediate position, for these districts dif-
fered from both Judaea and Roman Arabia in important ways. In Judaea, the
temple staff exerted tight control, both formally and informally. It is likely that
many of the large landowners in Judaea were the wealthier priests, like Jose-
phus, or others who derived their fortunes from conditions created by the
economic attractiveness of the temple and city of Jerusalem. They thus had an
interest in supporting a bureaucracy of scribes and judges who would mediate
between the temple and laws of the Torah, on the one hand, and the practice
ofthevillagersontheother.Therewasalargeclassofsuchpotentialmediators
available because the poorer part of the priesthood was vast and concentrated
in Judaea, and its members often had some learning and had been assigned
by the Torah itself a special role as legal authorities; they also enjoyed the
prestige associated with Temple service.
In Arabia,on the otherhand, priests andexperts inthe Torah hadno official
role of any sort; the great powers in the district were not wealthy Jewish priests,
but members of the Roman administration and army. Local scribes, arbitra-
tors, and so on, whether Jewish or pagan, had to master the language and
norms of Roman and local Nabataean legal and administrative practice. The
Torah, devoid of real power, was left only with its symbolic role, though in a
district like Babatha’s Zoarene, whose population was heavily Jewish, this may
have been no small matter.
Galilee and Peraea were under less direct control of the temple and its staff
than Judaea. Local bureaucrats were often appointees of the local Herodian
rulers.^58 Josephus, in his account of his own experiences in Galilee, takes it
for granted that the real power in the district was in the hands of the country
landowners; but these men, unlike their Judaean counterparts, often lacked
close ties to the central institutions, though from Josephus’s account we know
that some of them maintained alliances with prominent Jerusalemites. Their
personal religious predispositions will thus have varied greatly. The future
rebel leader, John of Gischala, for example, seems, if we discount Josephus’s
vituperation, to have been a pious Je w with a large clientele. Other great
(^57) Idumaea was administratively associated with Judaea during the first century and so may
have had a closer association with the Temple than Galilee; it is not impossible that P. Murab.
18 was drawn up in Idumaea; it is, by contrast, not unlikely that Babatha and company, whose
practice of civil law owed little to biblical legislation, were of Idumaean origin.
(^58) Local bureaucrats may have had very little power. Interestingly the Babatha archive shows
that Babatha never took her many suits and complaints to local judges and arbitrators, but always
to the Roman governor and his staff. Can we extrapolate from this to pre-70 Palestine? Probably
not. Josephus considered the circuit riding of Herod Philip, who ruled a mostly pagan kingdom,
especially noteworthy. SeeAnt18.106–7; Goodman, “Babatha’s Story,” 171–72.