West Semitic and Judean Brides in Cuneiform Sources from the Sixth Century B.C.E. New Evidence from a Marriage Contract from Āl-Yahudu

The rural community of Al-Yahudu in southern Babylonia has yielded a most interesting group of cuneiform legal documents some of which raised the Moussaieff private tablet collection. In the above-mentioned articles I publish two of them, namely a marriage contract and an inheritance division. It is shown that the parties involved in these legal transactions and most of the witnesses were of Judean descent as revealed by their Yahwistic, Hebrew and Aramaic names. It is further argued that these Judean deportees must have assimilated relatively well into their Babylonian environment considering the fact that they drew up their legal documents in Akkadian even those documents that dealt with internal family affairs, such as marriage and inheritance. For transactions of the latter kind we might have expected them to have used their native language (and script)., viz. Hebrew or Aramaic. The articles further elaborate on the community's marriage practices and the living conditions of immigrant families in Babylonia where the father had either died or was not available for other reasonsstatus: publishe