This work considers the story behind papyri discovered in 1961 in the Cave of Letters by the Dead Sea. The archive contains various contracts and deeds entered into by a Jewish woman named Babatha, daughter of a land owner named Shim'on, at the end of the first century.

Babatha's Orchard tells a story that has gone untold for nearly two thousand years. It is a story that would have perished with the last person familiar with its details--the Jewish woman Babatha, daughter of Shim'on ben Menahem. Babatha was probably killed or enslaved by Roman soldiers at the end of Shim'on ben Kosiba's revolt in 135 CE, when they captured a cave in a wadi running into the western shores of the Dead Sea in which she and other Jewish fugitives had been sheltering. In 1961, a team of archaeologists discovered a cache of possessions that Babatha had carefully hidden before her life or freedom was probably taken by the Romans. Among them were thirty-five legal documents dated from 94 CE to 132 CE, written on papyrus in Aramaic and Greek, relating to Babatha and her family, and the leather pouch in which they had been kept. In this work, Philip F. Esler examines the first four documents of the archive in chronological order--Papyri Yadin 1-4, the first from 94 CE and the second, third and fourth from 99 CE, and all drafted in Nabatean Aramaic. Although from the land and time of the Bible, they reveal a tale of domestic life. It is the story of how, around December 99 CE, Shim'on, Babatha's father (but probably before she was born), unexpectedly came to acquire an irrigated date-palm orchard in his village of Maoza, on the southern shore of the Dead Sea, in the kingdom of Nabatea. Esler undertakes a close reading of P. Yadin 1-4, with occasional reference to wider contextual issues from the Dead Sea region and other parts of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Babatha's Orchard is an extraordinary accomplishment. The book has as its focus four legal documents that deal with the sale of an orchard, about as dry as situation as can be imagined, but Philip F. Esler recreates the social and personal circumstances with great imagination and scholarly insight. It is like seeing a tattered black and white photograph turned into a film of the highest quality: what is two dimensional and in poor condition is transformed into a multidimensional narration with many nuances. His book is an inspiring model for scholars, and educated laypeople will find this book an enchanting entryway into a lost world.