Marriage Documents of Shelamzion and Salome Komaïse

These two papyrus documents found in the Judean desert offer some insight into marriage in ancient Judaism. The first, P. Yadin 18 (shown in the photograph), comes from the Babatha archive, a collection of personal documents belonging to a woman of that name from the period between the First Jewish Revolt (66–73 CE) and the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE). This contract, which was written in Greek with an Aramaic subscript, belonged to the daughter of Babatha’s second husband (from his first wife), Shelamzion. It speaks to the gifts from her father that Shelamzion brought into her marriage and also to her new husband’s even more significant financial promise to her. 

The second document, P. Yadin 37, was also written in Greek. It dates to 131 CE and documents Salome Komaïse’s marriage to Jesus son of Menaḥem. The amount of her dowry was ninety-six dinars. 

Another document, P. Mur. 116, contains the word dowry but is unfortunately very fragmentary and is not included here. It mentions the enormous sum of two thousand dinars, but it is unclear whether this refers to the sum the bride brought into the marriage or the husband’s divorce penalty. These documents are noteworthy for their variant dowry sums and penalties for divorce because (at least in the later rabbinic system) in the event of divorce, the husband would have been obligated to pay both the divorce penalty and the value of the dowry.