Mary, an anonymous young woman, was betrothed to a carpenter named Joseph. Despite their living together, Mary remained celibate during her betrothal, but one day she discovered she was pregnant. She was carrying Jesus, the son of God.

In the first century CE, according to the representation of the evangelist of Matthew, not far from the Sea of Galilee, a young Jew named Jesus climbed a mountain and preached to his followers. He spoke about the proper and improper ways of his followers, reinterpreted some of the Mosaic laws, and offered a new way to reach the Kingdom of Heaven.

In this book, we examined Ephrem’s matrimonial system in comparison to three different cultural and legal milieus – Jewish, Roman, and Christian. In Ephrem’s days, Christianity was a young religion that arose from Jewish groups, yet it evolved under Roman rule and accepted not only Jews into its communities but also other citizens of the Roman Empire, from Latin-, Greek-, and Syriac-speaking communities. As such, Syriac Christianity was likely to be influenced by Roman law and Greek legal traditions and practices as well as local Semitic and Jewish legal traditions. In fact, apart from the specific issues on which Christianity had a unique stand, such as divorce and asceticism, the early church did not play a significant role in the marriage of its community members. Matrimony only gradually shifted from civil law, which was then Roman law, to religious law, under the authority of the church and its clergy.

This introduction situates this book within scholarly debates over the ancient Roman economy and the economy of Palestine in particular. By articulating a methodological framework that draws on historical sociology and New Institutional Economics, it sets the foundation for a study of socioeconomic change that focuses on formal and informal institutions that produce and sustain inequalities of economic, political, and ideological power.

The second chapter investigates changes in land tenure and the organization of labor in the Early Roman period. It shows that land tenancy was not an imperial imposition, but had instead existed in some form in the Levant since at least the Iron Age. In the Early Roman period, however, elites attained greater protections for private property and were thus able to accumulate and convey large estates consisting of a number of geographically discontinuous plots. Tenants and laborers were no more exploited working for their elite patrons on private estates than they had been working on royal estates in earlier eras, but they did enter into new socioeconomic relations with elites. Tenants and wage laborers could occupy a range of socioeconomic positions and managed to secure a modicum of bargaining power in making contracts with landowners. As in earlier eras, drought and crop failure sometimes impeded the success of agricultural laborers. As a result, these laborers often became indebted to their landowners or other elite patrons.

This book has argued that Judaean elites gradually increased their political, economic, and ideological power as agents of institutional change in Early Roman Palestine. These Judaean elites were boundedly rational – they were self-interested social actors, but often their actions were economically inefficient because they were influenced by dispositions that we would designate as cultural or religious. The surging power of Judaean elites, notably, did not generally correspond to the increased impoverishment of non-elites relative to earlier periods and other provinces.