The Jewishness of the Babatha Archive
this to several different reasons , one of which assumed that since access to reliable Greek scribes may not have initially been commonplace , Jews continued to rely on their own local scribes . 11 Nevertheless , historian Adi Wasserstein observed that rabbinic customs did not oppose the use of non-Jewish legal forms or procedures and perhaps even arranged for incorporating its own rules with non-Jewish ones . 12
At some point between 122 and 124 CE , however , Jewish litigants began to draft many of their legal documents in Greek , on Greek legal forms , but this did not necessarily mean that the Jewish people had abandoned their own legal traditions . While none of Babatha ’ s documents contain the kind of religious language typically stressed in the divine Jewish commandments , it is clear that some of the documents do explicitly reflect the use of Jewish legal customs . This calls into question historian Hannah M . Cotton ’ s strong affirmation that the “ Jewishness ” of the desert archives is expressed only in the Aramaic signatures . 13 Both Cotton and historian Ze ’ ev Safrai have also suggested that Greek was used to enforce the validity of the legal documents in a Greek-speaking court . 14 Historian Tiziana J . Chiusi similarly stated that Babatha might have felt that Roman legal instruments would be more effective in achieving her goals . 15
Oudshoorn questioned some of these conclusions because they never really attempted to address the larger issue : that perhaps Roman and local laws might have been co-equal legal systems and that both systems might have even
Figure 5 . Presentation of The Torah , by Édouard Moyse , 1860 . Museum of Jewish Art and History . Licensed under Creative Commons .
been used contemporaneously . 16 However , although the Jews began to make use of Roman laws , the rabbis did urge them not to totally abandon their own legal traditions , especially since the Romans allowed Jews the freedom to use their own laws . P . Yadin 21 — a contract regarding the sale of dates — seems to represent a strategy that was acceptable in Jewish tradition ( even for Jewish widows like Babatha ). Jewish people were able to legitimately circumvent the legal system by taking matters into their own hands . Because of this , historian Ranon Katsoff stated that scholars should not make blanket statements that the society reflected in the Judaean Desert doc-
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