Bar Kokhba Letters and the Babatha Archive

Two Sites, Two Excavations, Two Countries

Two separate caches are routinely run together and should not be. The first came from Wadi Murabba'at, then in Jordanian territory, where the Ta'amireh Bedouin found the caves in October 1951 and four of them were explored in January and February 1952, in a dig whose full account R. de Vaux published. The finds ran from the Chalcolithic to the Arab period and included, as a contemporary account of the dig put it, "Biblical texts, phylacteries, profane letters, contracts, literary and historical works, administrative, civil and military documents" in "Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Arabic." Among them were letters from the leader of the revolt himself. The site had been an insurgent outpost, and the headquarters of one of his officers.

The second cache came from Nahal Hever, on the Israeli side, in two seasons under Y. Yadin. In March 1960 his team, working the cliffs above the ravine, found a bundle of letters tied together in a waterskin — the Bar Kokhba letters proper. In the following season they found a concealed crevice holding a leather purse with thirty-five legal documents in it, all belonging to a woman named Babatha. The cave has been called the Cave of Letters ever since. A caution on the years: the letters are consistently dated to 1960, and the Babatha purse is usually placed in the 1961 season, but the accounts available here disagree about the second date, and Yadin's own excavation report could not be opened, so this article does not state it flatly.

A Commander Who Needed Palm Branches

The letters are administrative, short, and startlingly ordinary. One from Wadi Murabba'at runs, in the translation published with the excavation: "From Simeon ben Koseba to Yeshua ben Gilgola and the men of your company, greeting! I call heaven to witness against me that, if you do not break off (relations) with the Galileans whom you have liberated each and all, I will have you clapped in irons... as I have done already with Ben Aphlul. Simeon ben Koseba, Prince of Israel." Even that is contested — an alternative reading of the crucial clause makes it a threat on the Galileans' behalf rather than against them, and the published translator flagged the alternative himself. A second Murabba'at letter, from the administrators of Beit Mashko, is about a disputed cow, and it is usually quoted only for one line of it: "What is more—alas!—the gentiles are drawing close to us." It does not end there. It goes on: "I would have gone up and rendered you assistance—yet, because you ever send good news, I did not do so. Farewell to you and all the house of Israel!" Six men then sign it.

The most-quoted of the Nahal Hever letters is a supply order. Shimon writes to a man at Qiryat Arabaya to send two men with two donkeys to Yehonathan son of Ba'yan and to Masabala — his officers at En Gedi — to bring back palm branches and citrons, and to gather myrtle and willow locally, "because the population is large." Those are the four species carried at the Feast of Tabernacles, prescribed in Leviticus 23:40. In the middle of a losing war, a commander is arranging for his men to keep a festival. There is a Greek letter making a similar request; the writer names himself Soumaios and apologises for writing in Greek, and whether Soumaios is the commander himself is disputed. The letters were addressed to real officers at a real oasis, and the same oasis produced the burnt Leviticus scroll five centuries later.

What the Letters Do Not Prove

These documents are constantly enlisted to establish two things they cannot carry. The first is the leader's name. The documents themselves call him Shimon ben Kosiba and date by "the liberation of Israel by the ministry of Simeon ben Koseba, Prince of Israel." "Bar Kokhba" is not in them. It is an epithet, and the Jewish Encyclopedia states its status precisely: "Bar Kokba, the hero of the third war against Rome, appears under this name only among ecclesiastical writers: heathen authors do not mention him; and Jewish sources call him Ben (or Bar) Koziba or Kozba." The epithet is a pun on Numbers 24:17 — "a star will come out of Jacob" — reported as R. Akiva's, in a passage of the Jerusalem Talmud that also records the reply: "Rabbi Yohanan ben Torta said to him, 'Akiva, grass will grow on your cheeks and still the Son of David will not have come.'" That passage was written down generations after the events and it preserves the objection alongside the acclamation.

The second is the archive's own size and shape, which are softer than the round numbers suggest. The Babatha purse is usually said to hold thirty-five documents dated between AD 94 and 132, but the ranges given in accessible sources differ by two years at each end, and no accession number for the purse or for the letters could be traced at the holding museum. The letters are usually counted as fifteen; a scholarly catalogue of every letter from the Judean Desert lists sixteen for this group, one of them too fragmentary to edit. None of that touches what the documents are worth. Babatha's papers — marriage contracts, land registrations, a guardianship dispute over her son, kept in Greek, Aramaic and Nabataean — are the fullest surviving record of the legal life of any ordinary Jewish woman in antiquity, and she is known only because she took them into a cave and did not come out.

Scripture references

• Numbers 24:17 — "A star will come out of Jacob" — the verse behind the epithet Bar Kokhba, "son of the star"
• Leviticus 23:40 — The four species the commander's letter orders sent to his camp
• 1 Samuel 24:1-2 — En Gedi, the oasis where his two officers were stationed

Sources

• Holding institutionIsrael Exploration Society: The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters, vol. 2, Greek Papyri — Israel Exploration Society, Jerusalem · The excavating body's own record of the material it dug and published. Read in full. Its description: "Documents, artifacts and human skeletal remains were found in caves in the cliffs overlooking Nahal Hever, a canyon near the Dead Sea. Among the documentary finds were letters written by Bar Kokhba, the legendary leader of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome (ca. 132 CE) and the archive of Babata, a Jewish woman living at that time." The volume itself — N. Lewis, Y. Yadin and J. C. Greenfield (eds), 1989, ISBN 965-221-009-9 — is the official edition of the Greek papyri in the archive, and was NOT opened here. This is the closest thing to a holding-institution record that could be found for these documents: neither the Israel Museum nor the Israel Antiquities Authority publishes an object page for them, which is why this article carries no inventory numberSupports: That the letters and the Babatha archive came from the Nahal Hever caves, and the official edition of the Greek papyri
• Primary textG. Graystone, "The Dead Sea Scrolls — II. Wadi Murabba'at" — Scripture 7:3 (1955), 66-76 · A contemporary account of the 1951-52 excavation, written two years after it, with translations of both published Murabba'at letters and of the revolt's dating formula. Read in full. The two letters quoted in section two are from here, including the translator's own note that the crucial clause of the first has an alternative reading. The scan is supplied for free educational use and may not be resold or rehosted, so it is linked and quoted briefly rather than reproduced. Its footnotes cite R. de Vaux, "Les Grottes de Murabba'at et leurs documents", Revue Biblique 60 (1953), 245-267, which was not openedSupports: The 1951-52 excavation, the range of the finds, and the text of the two Murabba'at letters, including the close of the second one and its six signatures
• Primary textJewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906), "Bar Kokba and Bar Kokba War" — Funk and Wagnalls, New York, 1901-1906; public domain · Read in full. Source for the sentence quoted in section three on the name — that it "appears under this name only among ecclesiastical writers" while "Jewish sources call him Ben (or Bar) Koziba or Kozba" — and for the derivation of the epithet from R. Akiva's reading of Numbers 24:17. A gloss of Koziba as "son of the lie" is widely repeated and is NOT printed in the article, though this source does carry it. What it says is that "Others believe that Bar Koziba was a contumelious appellation ('Son of Lies') bestowed after the unfortunate issue of the revolt", while judging it "more likely that it was simply the name of his father". It is left out of the article because the same source prefers the other derivation, not because nobody prints itSupports: The forms of the name and the origin of the epithet
• ReferenceCenter for Online Judaic Studies, "Bar Kokhba Letter, 132-135 CE" — Center for Online Judaic Studies · Read in full. Carries the translation of the four-species letter, the object record giving the Israel Museum as its home, and the caution repeated in section two: "The author of that letter, Soumaios, has usually been identified as Shimon bar Kosiba, but this is disputed by some scholars." Its translation is credited to Y. Yadin's Bar-Kokhba (1971), which is in copyright and was not opened; section two therefore paraphrases the letter's content and quotes only the short phrase "because the population is large"Supports: The content of the four-species letter and the dispute over the Greek one
• ReferenceCenter for Online Judaic Studies, "Jerusalem Talmud Ta'anit 4:6 (68d-69a): Rabbi Akiva and Bar Kokhba" — Center for Online Judaic Studies; translation credited on the page to S. Berrin · Read in full. The source of R. Yohanan ben Torta's reply quoted in section three. Two cautions carried into the article: the page's own citation of the verse is mistyped, and the correct reference is Numbers 24:17; and this is the only text of the passage that could be opened here, so it is quoted from one edition rather than checked against a secondSupports: The rabbinic report of Akiva's acclamation and the objection recorded beside it
• Scholarship"A Preliminary Survey of Letters in the Judaean Desert Documents" — Deposited in the University of Trieste's OpenstarTs repository; the author is not named in the body of the copy read here · A catalogue of all forty-two letters from the Judean Desert, entry by entry, with language, measurements, correspondents and contents. Read in full. Source for the language counts, for the sixteen entries in the Bar Kokhba group, and for the fragmentary state of the last of them. Cited with the honest caveat that no author, journal or year appears in the copy that was readSupports: The count of letters, their languages, and why the usual figure of fifteen is soft
• ScholarshipY. Yadin, The Finds from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters — Yigael Yadin, Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1963; and Yadin, "Expedition D — The Cave of the Letters", Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962) · The excavation reports. NEITHER was opened: the Internet Archive's copy of the 1963 volume is lending-restricted. They are cited because everything this article says about the two Nahal Hever seasons ultimately rests on them, and because the disagreement over whether the Babatha purse was found in 1960 or 1961 is exactly the kind of thing they would settleSupports: The excavation of the Cave of Letters
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Cave of Letters

Further reading

• Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906): Bar Kokba and Bar Kokba War
• Center for Online Judaic Studies: Bar Kokhba Letter, 132-135 CE
• Wikipedia: Cave of Letters

Reflect

Babatha carried her legal papers into a cave and never came back for them. What would you have taken?