This study analyzes the legal reasoning of ordinary Jews living in second century BCE Hellenistic Egypt, as we know it from their petitions to the officials of the Jewish
This goal for the book, quite frankly, is rather modest, at least compared with what I set out to do when I began the project in the fall of 2016. Recognizing that the petitioners to the officials of the Jewish
The first development was the recognition that clarifying the legal context for the petitions was going to be a project of greater magnitude than I thought. I soon realized what should have been obvious from the start: to understand how each petitioner formed her argument and the degree to which he may have been shaped by Jewish customs and norms meant understanding typical Ptolemaic legal frameworks and perspectives on the kinds of issues addressed in the petitions. In short, I needed to immerse myself in a range of topics addressed by the specialized subdiscipline of juridical papyrology, an area of study new to me. Likewise, I realized I need to be able to explain the legal background for the petitions to readers who would be as unfamiliar with the subfield as I was at the start. The time necessary to familiarize myself was daunting, and the space in a volume such as this required to explain the legal backgrounds to readers is considerable. Trimming my sails to attend to what I finally decided to address here was, as it turns out, necessary. And alas, even having limited the focus of my work so severely, I remain wary that I – still an outsider looking in on the world of juridical papyrology – have not managed to get it quite right, neither fully appreciating the complexity of the issues addressed nor communicating that to my readers. But there comes a point when one simply has to submit one’s case to the jury, so to speak, and hope for the best.
The second development came early in the project when I had the ambition to develop and present in a single volume a study of the petitions in their complete context – not just the legal setting, but the social, historical, economic, and political context of the Herakleopolite nome in the decades around the middle of the second century BCE. Even with so limited a temporal and geographical scope, completing that remit would have added another long delay in getting the most important part of this study into print – my argument regarding the dependence of many of the petitioners on Jewish norms and customs. Indeed, attempting to complete that background picture did delay the project by a lot – I spent much of a free year of study collecting, translating, and analyzing around 200 documentary texts that provide the information available to paint that portrait. In no way do I consider that time wasted: the large database I acquired through that study contributed key components to the body of knowledge I needed to appreciate the legal background for the petitions in the
Add to these two developments the simple fact that ethnicity is itself a large and complex field of research fraught with conflicting views and competing theories, and the wisdom of trying to do in a single study what I initially had in mind begins to look like foolishness instead. I hope that in sidestepping that errand I have managed to avoid looking the fool after all.
So, let the reader be warned: this study is limited in its ambition to clarifying the legal reasoning of the petitioners to the officials of the Jewish
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A brief note on abbreviations and my use of the recently published Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, Volume IV.
In lieu of an abbreviations list I direct readers to two sources: for those related to Jewish studies, see The SBL Handbook of Style, 2nd edition (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014) and for those related to papyrology, see Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic, and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca, and Tablets, edited by John F. Oates, et al., available online and continuously updated at
I offer a word on my use of the splendid new book, Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, Volume IV, edited by Noah Hacham and Tal Ilan (Oldenbourg: Walter de Gruyter, 2020) (= CPJ IV). As a contributor to the volume I provided translations of P.Polit.Iud. 1–7 (in some cases lightly adjusted by the editors), as well as some of the commentary on those texts. I continued my work on the petitions for quite some time after completing my work for CPJ IV; as a result some of what I have to say about P.Polit.Iud. 1–7 in this book differs from what I said of those petitions in CPJ IV. I have not tried to address those differences in this volume, in large part because CPJ IV arrived in my hands as I was completing the present work, but also out of deference to readers who will no doubt be using CPJ IV alongside this book; I respect readers to make their own judgments in this regard. I do note in introducing each of the petitions treated here the corresponding section of CPJ IV, citing each by its number (e.g., CPJ IV 563 = P.Polit.Iud. 7).
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Lastly and most happily, I acknowledge and thank the many people who assisted me along the way.
I completed this study over too many years’ time – it was delayed not just because of the (serendipitous) miscalculations as to scope and purpose I just described, but also because of expanded and diversified teaching responsibilities, sporadic administrative duties, a compulsion to activism in times of political and environmental threat, and happily, Mitzi’s and my introduction to being grandparents. Over such a long time one acquires many debts to those who supported a work such as this – directly with financial support or scholarly cooperation, and indirectly with kindness and patience for someone obsessed in the interstices of daily life with something so strange as the legal imagination of Jews who quarreled among themselves over two millennia ago. Let me do my best to thank those to whom I owe so much.
With respect to funding support, my thanks go first to the American Council of Learned Societies for granting me an ACLS Fellowship that permitted me to take a full-year leave from teaching while remaining in residence in Portland in 2016–2017. Without the Council’s generous support I would never have completed this project and would certainly not have the database of nearly 200 translated documentary texts that will serve as the foundation for another study. As I said above, my use of that year was a serendipitous miscalculation; as a consequence, the ACLS fellowship promises to bear even more fruit than I promised in obtaining it!
I also received support from the American Philosophical Society, which provided a Franklin Research Grant for work in the summer of 2012 at the European institutions which hold the papyri of the
The scholarly community that has aided my research is large and diverse.
My thanks go to those who welcomed me into the archives where the
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Tal Ilan and Noah Hacham for inviting me to assist with the edition of the
Ruth Duttenhöfer, charged with editing the Boethos archive for P.Yale IV, gave me access to her work on the texts in prepublication form. While those texts receive only passing mention in this book, what I learned from reading Duttenhöfer’s work and wrestling with the texts she comments on was invaluable for me in formulating an approach to the
I am grateful to Rodney Ast and Patrick Sänger, the organizers of the Hengstberger Symposium “Minderheiten und Migrationshphänomene” held in Heidelberg in July 2011, for the invitation to participate and present my work on the papyri in the symposium; to Jens Schröter and his co-organizers of the conference, “Torah, Temple, Land: Ancient Judaism(s) in Context,” held in Berlin in October 2018, for the invitation to participate and present my work on the papyri at their conference; to organizers of the 25th and 27th International Congresses of Papyrology held in Ann Arbor and Warsaw respectively for accepting my participation in their conferences; and to the organizers of sessions held at the Catholic Biblical Association, the Society of Biblical Literature’s annual and international meetings, and the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies where I also shared my research and received helpful feedback.
I am especially grateful that I was able to publish three articles related to the archive in Festschriften for two mentors, John Collins and James VanderKam, and I am especially honored by John’s galvanizing interest in – and critique of – my work on the papyri. His devotion to the evidence of texts first and last – over theory and method – exemplifies the best in scholarship; when I hold fast to that approach, I like to think that I do my best scholarship.
Not to be omitted from those I thank are James M.S. Cowey and Klaus Maresch for their fine edito princeps of the
My gratitude also goes to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, whose comments helped me improve the book in significant ways, and who encouraged me to follow my impulse to be more modest in my claims in some instances. I only hope they will forgive me for those instances where I bent only slightly to that impulse and their advice, preferring to let stand speculation that some might judge too rash.
Of course, many thanks are also due to Karina Hogan and René Bloch, the chief editors of the Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism Series. They more than anyone else suffered from my repeated delays in getting this manuscript finished. Thank goodness their patience outlasted my slowness in finishing. Likewise, thanks are due to Peter Buschman of Brill for his patience and helpfulness as an editor.
I would be remiss if I did not thank my colleagues and friends at Lewis & Clark who, though working in fields distant from my own, were more than willing to indulge me on occasion as I shared my thinking about these texts: John Fritzman, Gordon Kelly, Paul Powers, and Nick Smith.
There is one person outside of academe, though, to whom I owe my greatest debt of gratitude – for her kindness, patience, presence, and love: Mitzi, my partner in making a life together, raising a family, and now grandparenting. To her I dedicate this book, the one I am most proud to publish so far. She ensures that such professional pride stays firmly in its proper place, far behind in importance all the other riches that come from our life together.
Throughout this study I use the standard method for citing documentary papyri established in the Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic, and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca, and Tablets (ed. John F. Oates et al.), available and continually updated at
For this view see, among others, Lawrence Rosen, Law as Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); see also Oscar G. Chase, Law, Culture, and Ritual: Disputing Systems in Cross-Cultural Context (New York: New York University Press, 2005).