Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 27 (1990) 69-75
BOOK REVIEW
The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters.
Greek Papyri edited by Naphtali Lewis, Aramaic and Nabatean
signatures and subscriptions edited by Yigael Yadin and Jonas C.
Greenfield. Israel Exploration Society: Jerusalem 1989. Pp. xii + 164;
40 plates. ISBN 965-221-009-9. $60 + 10% postage fee (surface mail).
The existence of these documents from the archive of Babatha
(abbreviation: P.Yadin) has been known since their discovery's
announcement by Yigael Yadin in 1961. Several of the papyri (15, 18,
27-30) have previously appeared in full or in partial editions. Others
have been known through excerpt (verbal and photographic) or in
summary, most fully in Yadin's book, Bar-Kokhba (New York 1971).
Consequently, nearly all the archive's documents have been long familiar
to scholars and to the general public--but only at second hand. Now at
last, through the hand of Naphtali Lewis, taking up where H. J. Polotsky
left off, the substantially larger part of the archive, the Greek, has been
brought to full publication. Still awaiting final edition by Jonas
Greenfield (with Ranon Katzoffs legal commentary) are six Nabatean
and three Aramaic documents. Also still under study are Aramaic,
Nabatean and Hebrew inscriptions.
Summaries by Yadin and others have made the outlines of the life of
the archive's principal figure, Babatha, well-known.1 She was born and
lived most of her life in the first third of the second century at Maoza, a
village on the south shore of the Dead Sea. Her father had settled and
acquired property there, especially palm groves, toward the end of
Nabatean rule. Babatha was widowed and left with a very young son in
A.D. 124. In 128 she remarried to a propertied man, Judah son of
Eleazar, residing in Maoza, but originating from En-Gedi, an oasis near
1E.g., H. J. Polotsky, "The Greek Papyri from the Cave of Letters," IEJ 12 (1962)
258-62; Nelson Glueck, Deities and Dolphins: The Story of the Nabataeans (New York
1965) 8-9; Yadin, Bar-Kokhba, esp. chapt. 16, pp. 233ff.; N. Lewis, "Two Greek
Documents from Provincia Arabia," ICS 3 (1978) 100-14; G. W. Bowersock, Roman
Arabia (Cambridge, MA, 1983), esp. chapt. VI.
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