How Women Differed - The BAS Library

Home > Magazines > BAR > March/April 1998

Babatha’s archive, described in the foregoing article by Anthony J. Saldarini, is not the only Jewish woman’s archive found in the Judean desert. Another, much smaller archive, belonging to Salome Komaise, was discovered in nearby Wadi Seelim (according to the Bedouin from whom it was purchased).1 These two archives provide a glimpse into the special problems facing women in the second century C.E. and compare interestingly to three contemporaneous men’s archives excavated from the same area, some of them from the same cave. The Salome Komaise archive consists of just six documents, as compared with the 35 documents […]

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

See Bezalel Porten, “Did the Ark Stop at Elephantine?” BAR 21:03.

Endnotes

Hannah M. Cotton, “The Archive of Salome Komaise Daughter of Levi: Another Archive from the ‘Cave of Letters,’” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 105 (1995), pp. 171–208. Now published in Hannah M. Cotton and Ada Yardeni, Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek Documentary Texts from Nahal Hever, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 27 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 158–237.

The Babatha archive includes not only documents belonging to Babatha but also to her stepdaughter Shelamzion. The archive includes Shelamzion’s marriage contract, a deed of gift and a renunciation of claims.

Cotton, “A Canceled Marriage Contract from the Judean Desert,” Journal of Roman Studies 84 (1994), pp. 64–86.

Naphtali Lewis, The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: Greek Papyri, Judean Desert Studies (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1989), Papyrus 19, p. 85.

Lewis, Documents, Papyrus 20, p. 91.

Yigael Yadin, Bar Kokhba: Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Second Jewish Revolt Against Rome (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), chaps. 9, 11–12. Pierre Benoit, J.T. Milik and Roland de Vaux, Les Grottes de Murabba‘ât: Textes, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).

Unfortunately, the French excavators did not supply data about the circumstances of the find.

Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, vol. 2, Contracts (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1989).