Money Rules All – Financial Motives in the Babatha Archive

The Babatha Archive is a collection of legal texts, procedural or personal, most of which are written in Greek and present a probe into everyday life of persons of Jewish descent living at the beginning of the second century CE in the province of Arabia. Studying the Archive is not only valuable for legal history, but it also casts light on the relationship between the Jewish population of the era and the Roman administration, which is important for the study of the Second Temple Judaism as well. In the article, we want to introduce those papyri of the Archive that are the result of the expression of the will of the parties involved, whether by contract or another legal act. For these reasons we study papyri P. Yadin 5 (depositum), 11 (mutuum), 17 (depositum), 18 (marriage contract), 19 (donatio), 20 (concession of rights), 21 and 22 (emptio-venditio). At times we refer to other papyri that address similar situations. We want to point out the financial motivation for drawing these documents and with it also the need for securing the validity and enforceability of the obligations included in the selected documents.