Family and Inheritance in Early Judaism

The laws of inheritance in the Hebrew Bible are fairly straightforward: Sons inherit, and the inheritance is divided among them, with the eldest son receiving a double portion. Daughters only inherit if there are no sons (Numbers 27:5–11). These laws cannot be voided by wills, unlike in ancient Roman or in later English and American law. The Hebrew Bible does not admit the idea that a testator can exercise personal discretion over an inheritance.

It is against the background of these biblical laws that we should view developments and sources from the Greco-Roman era. There is, for example, documentary evidence for what may have been an evasive technique: the deed of gift inter vivos (between living people). Unlike a will, which is a unilateral grant by the decedent, the deed of gift is made while the donor is alive and requires the recipient either to assume support of the donor or to take full possession of their property only after their death. This instrument, called matanah (gift) in Hebrew, was known to the rabbis as a way for property owners to mitigate the inflexibility of biblical inheritance law. All extant documentary deeds transfer property to daughters, suggesting that this was a way to circumvent a system in which women could not inherit.

This was the world of Babatha, a well-to-do, illiterate Jewish woman who lived in a half-Jewish, half-Arab village south of the Dead Sea, in the Roman province of Arabia, between the First Jewish Revolt and the Bar Kokhba revolt (late first and early second century CE). The archaeologist Yigael Yadin discovered Babatha’s personal documents in the cave in the Judean desert to which she apparently fled at the beginning of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132 CE (see Bar Kokhba Letters and Archaeology). Despite living in a cultural environment that restricted women’s legal rights in profound ways, Babatha attained a high degree of legal agency. Some of this she did by exploiting legal loopholes, like the deed of gift. Babatha’s wealth allowed her to negotiate a favorable marriage contract with her second husband, and it gave her the means, and perhaps the clout, to bring her legal affairs and complaints to the Roman courts, which sometimes ruled in her favor. Her case shows that some women of means could own and control property, but she is, for the most part, the exception that proves the rule.