The Jewishness of the Babatha Archive
region , they left local customs , such as marriage and law of succession , to indigenous traditions . However , at this time , Jewish rabbis had not yet completed the Mishnah — a book of Jewish laws written by scholars throughout the second century and codified at the beginning of the third .
Figure 4 . Talmud Readers by Adolf Behrman ( 1876 – 1942 ). Licensing : this media file is in the public domain in the United States . 6
Because of this , there is a trend in Jewish historical study of the second century CE to claim that rabbinic influence had no significant impact on the lives of Jews . This claim relies , in part , on the assumption that by this time the Roman legal system had influenced most Jews , and that this was the reason they wrote their documents in Greek . However , this claim fails to consider that the Romans may have not been familiar with the local indigenous dialects of their provinces . They were , however , very familiar with the Greek language since they had annexed Greece centuries earlier . Some Roman provinces , such as Egypt , were also familiar with the Greek language , since Alexander the Great ( 356 – 323 BCE ) had conquered it in the fourth century BCE . Professor of Calvary Baptist Theological Seminary Larry R . Thornton stated that Alexander ’ s founding of cities , minting of money , training of soldiers , encouraging intermarriage , and funding Greek arts and sciences all contributed to the enduring Hellenization of the regions he conquered . 7 This is likely the reason why the Romans chose to use a language their provinces understood : Greek . However , knowledge of the Greek language was not as
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