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c h A p t e r 1 1 Change and Continuity in Late Legal Papyri from Palaestina Tertia: Nomos Hellênikos and Ethos Rômaikon hAnnAh m. cotton This short study relies almost exclusively on the documentary evidence contained in four documents, all written in Greek. Two of them—P.Yadin 18 and 65—were written in Arabia in 128 and 131 ce, respectively.1 The other two—P.Nessana 18 and 20—were written in Palaestina Tertia in 537 and 558 ce, respectively.2 Palaestina Tertia included at the time those parts of Arabia and Judaea that in the early second century belonged to two different Roman provinces. Indeed, all four were written under Roman rule in the area. The early two documents record marriage settlements entered into by Jews, as the names, but not much more, attest. Nothing in the two Greek marriage contracts from Arabia reflects what came to be the normative Jewish marriage contract, commonly known as the ketubah—above all, they lack the formula that would place them solidly in a Jewish framework and under the sanction of Jewish law: “that you will be my wife according to the law of Moses and the Jews” (‫לאנתה‬ ‫לי‬ ‫תהוה‬ ‫די‬ ‫ויהודאי‬ ‫מושה‬ ‫)כדין‬. And it is not as though the formula could not be expressed in Greek. However, we do find this formula in the opening lines of three Aramaic marriage contracts from the Judaean Desert: Mur 20 and 21 and P.Yadin 10.3 Thus, if the rabbinic marriage contract had by then developed its own special form, it seems not to have become normative.4 Therefore, I maintain that these two documents, P.Yadin 18 210 Chapter 11 and P.Hever 65, albeit written by and for Jews, nevertheless can be legitimately used, not least for lack of other evidence, to trace continuity and change in legal practice and formulas in this part of the Roman world over the centuries. Something similar was attempted in a recently published article on “Continuity of Nabataean Law in the Petra Papyri: A Methodological Exercise.”5 Starting from the observation that the law of succession reflected in secondcentury Jewish papyri written in Arabia and found in the archives from Nahal Hever is neither Jewish law nor Roman law, I concluded that this must have been Nabataean law.6 Furthermore, it would seem that the latter had survived into the sixth century and resurfaced in the recently discovered—and so far, only partially published—P.Petra of the sixth century. I would like to examine one instance of the Greek legal tradition that had become the common law—a legal koine, if you wish—of the Roman Near East, just as the Greek language became its lingua franca, without ousting the Aramaic legal tradition or the use of Aramaic in its various dialects in daily life. Seemingly paradoxical, the advent of Rome brought with it a considerable intensification of the process of Hellenization in the Near East, as attested in the written corpus as well as in material culture, a claim made long ago, especially by Fergus Millar in “The Problem of Hellenistic Syria,” where he draws attention to the limits of Hellenization.7 Despite the fact that the majority of legal documents found in the Judaean Desert are in Greek, the peculiar circumstances responsible for the preservation of the legal contracts from Judaea and Arabia—the flight of the Jews from their villages to the caves of the Judaean Desert—would make it unsafe, and probably wrong, to say, even if the figures support it, that by the second century ce, the Aramaic legal contract had been altogether ousted by the Greek contract.8 On the contrary, the Aramaic legal contract remained alive and vibrant in the Roman Near East—at least in some form—for centuries to come, as must be inferred from the running commentaries in Hebrew on its formulas in the Mishnah and the Tosefta.9 It would resurface, for example, in the late contracts of the Cairo Genizah. There are virtually no firmly dated legal documents from our area in any script or language between the last document from the Babatha archive (132 ce)10 and the sixth century: a gap of 380 years separates the latest legal document in the Babatha archive, P.Yadin 27 of 132 ce, from the first safely dated legal contract from Nessana, P.Nessana 16 of 512 ce; and over 400 years separate it from P.Petra 1, of 537 ce.11 But the...

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