Textual Archipelagos: Towards New Methods for the Study of Jewish Society in Roman Palestine

This essay proposes new evidentiary models for the study of Jewish society in Late Antiquity based on textual corpora considered to be outside of the conventional rabbinic canon - such as magical literature, manuals of divination, and liturgical and occasional poetry in Hebrew and Aramaic. It argues that it is helpful to look at this evidence as a kind of archipelago, a cluster of outcroppings of deeper cultural production; that the relationships between those outcroppings are barely detectible below the surface; and that some new developments in the study of Late Antiquity, such as the study of lived religion, material approaches to textual sources, and social network theory can help us assess the opportunities and limitations of this point of view. This approach is illustrated through the case of Aramaic poetry for weddings from late antique Palestine.