Living under different laws: the Babatha and Salome Komaise archives

The Babatha and Salome Komaise archives contain the legal documents of two Jewish women and their families, dating mostly from c. 94 C.E. to 132 C.E. The community that they attest lived in a small village which was first part of the Nabataean Kingdom but was later incorporated into the province of Roman Arabia in 106 C.E. The documents consequently provide invaluable information about a community’s experience before and after the creation of the province. The laws and traditions in evidence in the two archives are remarkable for their diversity, exhibiting elements of Jewish, Nabataean, Roman and Hellenistic law. This thesis examines this complex legal situation and considers the ways in which people coped with the array of legal options available to them. A ‘ground-up’ approach is adopted, focusing on the people involved in the documents’ creation and use in order to detail how different parties affected the working of law in the area. An overview of the individual documents is provided in The Survey of the Documents. The rest of the thesis is then structured according to the various groups that influenced their formulation and use: The Scribes, Legal Advisors, The Parties, The Alternatives to the Assizes and The Roman Officials. These various contributions are then brought together in the Conclusion to model how law operated in this particular community. The primary contributions of this study are therefore to Roman provincial and legal history, as well as the history of the Jewish people in the inter-revolt period.