Babatha

Her archive of legal and business documents, found in the Cave of Letters, is a rare testimony to the life of a Jewish woman in antiquity.

A rare exception surfaced in 1961, in the same cave as Bar Kochba's letters: the archive of Babatha, a young Jewish widow of the second century CE, discovered by Yigael Yadin. The documents, dated from 93 to 132 CE, deal with her marriages, the fight over support for her child and her business affairs. Stored in a crack of a remote cave, they show how little has survived about Jewish women in antiquity.1 Documents from the revolt began to surface in the 1950s, and in 1961 and 1962 came the greatest find: fifteen letters between Bar Kochba and his men, in a Judean desert cave where some of them had hidden. The archaeologist Yigael Yadin named it the 'Cave of Letters'. The letters reveal the leader's real name, Shimon Bar Kosiba; the other two names were nicknames, and Bar Kozeba a mockery. The cave also held skeletal remains, one of them a child's, textiles among the oldest of the Roman era and the papers of a woman named Babatha.2