Babatha's papers
Roman provincial registration, and the legal world an ordinary Jewish family lived in, survive in that family's own papers.
Confirmed by the groundManuscriptAD 94–132
Thirty-five documents a woman bundled in a leather purse and hid in a cave before the Bar Kokhba revolt, and never came back for: her marriage contracts, her son's guardianship dispute, court summonses, and a land declaration made to the Roman census of AD 127, dated by the consuls of that year.
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
- Found
- The Cave of Letters, Nahal Hever, above the Dead Sea, 1961 — Yigael Yadin's expedition
- Now held at
- Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Shrine of the Book)
- Language
- Greek, Aramaic and Nabataean
- How it reached us
- Dug up, or still standing where it was built.
What it shows
Sixty years after the Gospels' setting and in the neighbouring province of Arabia. It shows how a census declaration was actually made and worded — useful for reading Luke 2, and no evidence for the events of Luke 2.
How historians use it
A cornerstone of Roman legal and social history in the East, and the usual comparison in discussions of the census in Luke.
In Scripture
Sources
- Lewis, The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters (1989)
- Cotton, "The Guardianship of Jesus son of Babatha", JRS 83 (1993)
These summaries are written in English for now. Translations follow.