The aim of this book is to study ‘legal pluralism’ and ‘multi-legalism’ in a significant group of legal papyri written in Greek and Aramaic and published between 1989 and 2002. The documents belonged to at least two Jewish women, Babatha and Salome Komaise, who lived most of their lives in the Roman province of Arabia but fled into adjacent Judaea in the early 130s at the time of the Bar Kokhba rebellion. In her research, Kimberley Czajkowski is not venturing into untrodden territory. The two small archives have inspired a vast number of more or less competent scholarly publications, including a collective volume of essays, R. Katzoff and D. Schaps (eds), Law in the Documents of the Judaean Desert (2005), while C.’s bibliography also contains, for example, no less than twenty works by Hannah Cotton alone on the topic. Most of these studies have tried to determine how far the papyri reveal elements of Jewish, Nabatean, Hellenistic or Roman law (9–14). Therefore, C. is careful to maintain that her approach is different: rather than studying the ‘legal systems’ emerging from the documents, she is interested in the ‘legal culture’ in which these people lived and acted. It is not quite clear to me whether the conceptual difference between the two approaches is really important, a difference which C. herself amicably mitigates in the end (199–200). This is not the first book I have reviewed where an explicitly progressive theoretical introduction leads to solid rather than revolutionary conclusions.

In practice, C. investigates the parties’ social relationships, literacy, legal knowledge and economic situation, and how these affected the way people used legal remedies to defend their interests (2–3, 17–24). The individual chapters focus on the scribes, legal advisors, the parties themselves, the available choice of tribunals and the Roman officials potentially involved. It is worth noting that these papyri, together with the Gospels, Acts and Rabbinic literature, make Palestine the third region of the early Roman Empire, after Italy and Egypt, where we have some evidence of the social and legal circumstances in which ordinary people lived.

Language plays an important role in C.’s analysis. It may have determined the use of scribes, because Aramaic, both in Jewish and Nabataean script, was used in Arabia even after it had been made a Roman province in a.d. 106 (71–9). Although both women were illiterate and their spoken language was certainly Aramaic, it seems that in their written records Babatha and her family shifted to Greek between a.d. 122 and 124. The reasons for using either Aramaic or Greek are discussed by C. adeptly and at length, though without clear conclusions (109–24). The choice of language may have depended both on individual motives and on the document's purpose. Its intended use in a Roman court may have been an obvious factor (114–15, 121–4).

The documents occasionally contain terminology derived from Roman law, such as stipulatio and an actio tutelae adapted into Greek. C. of course does not claim that Babatha herself had any legal experience, but rather that she was able to find scribes or legal experts who had at least some familiarity with the legal system officially meant for only Roman citizens. The reasons for this again remain speculative (88–106, 124–32). I readily agree with C.’s view that there was a choice of local and Roman tribunals available in Arabia (162–5). Even the governors tried to judge according to local custom or law, as far as such could be determined. However, the indigenous norms could be supplemented or even overruled by principles of Roman law if the governor considered them more appropriate. This general picture is supported by literary evidence and by documents from Roman Egypt (167–87).

In sum, C. is certainly right in arguing that it is not easy to tell which legal system (Roman, Hellenistic or Jewish) appears in any single document or even whether it was a relevant question from the parties’ point of view. There were innumerable factors behind every document, from the competences of the scribe to the principals’ real intentions, which are never sufficiently attested in our evidence. That is why C.’s analyses of the individual documents mostly result in scenarios which are quite plausible as such, but purely hypothetical. The book's general reasoning appears to me sound, sometimes even verging on the self-evident, and the text seems free of significant errors. C. has thus produced a reliable study which serves as an ideal introduction to a vital set of evidence.