Early Jewish Marriage Documents

The archaeological evidence for how Jewish marriage was practiced in antiquity is spotty, but a handful of documents offer some insight.

The Herakleopolite papyri are a collection of legal documents that survive from a community of Judeans living in Hellenistic Egypt in the second century BCE. Most of the documents are complaints about the violation of contracts addressed to a governing body called the archontes. In P. Polit. Iud. 3, the petitioner, Protomachos son of Demetrios, complains that his wife’s father or guardian has failed to give him a portion of a vineyard promised as part of or in connection with a dowry. The situation in P. Polit. Iud. 5 is more difficult to reconstruct because only the upper part of the document is preserved, but it relates to a share in a house given to the petitioner, Polyktor son of Polyktor, by his wife’s mother, possibly in connection with a large dowry of twelve talents that she gave the new couple.

Another set of important texts 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). Babatha was a wealthy landowner, which appears to have made it possible for her to negotiate quite a favorable marriage agreement with her second husband, Judah. This agreement is preserved in an Aramaic document (P. Yadin 10) considered one of the earliest known ketubot. Although the word ketubah in later rabbinic texts refers to the amount of the divorce penalty should the husband divorce his wife (and the document wherein this commitment is established), in this document it may refer to a marriage gift owed to Babatha directly. The other marriage document found in this collection (P. Yadin 18), written in Greek with an Aramaic subscript, belonged to the daughter of Babatha’s second husband (from his first wife), Shelamzion. This document 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. 

Four other marriage documents written in Greek, each containing one or another of the Greek terms for dowry, have also been found in the Judean desert and together have come to be known as the Salome Komaïse archive. One of these documents, P. Yadin 37, 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, 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.