The French critic Tzvetan Todorov has noted that a “science does not speak of its object, but speaks itself with the help of its object.”
I expect this is no less true of God-centered than of man-centered studies. One wishes to know about nature but studies physics or chemistry; one wishes to study the nature of divinity and learns theology or comparative religion. In large measure, structuralism, which, is not quite a science but an array of methods, is very much in the process of “speaking itself,” and it is in its own elaboration that most of its energies are invested. The extent and the way in which this is so will, I hope, become clear in the exposition which follows.
A definition is in order. “Structuralism” is the application of principles derived from certain movements within linguistics to other areas of discourse. These other areas may be transphrastic- that is, units of speech greater than the sentence, such as narrative-or they may be the social discourse of ritual, kinship rules, law.’ Struc- turalism is seen by its literary practitioners as part of the more global enterprise of semiology or semiotics, conceived by the classic exponent of structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure,‘as the general science of signifying systems, of which linguistics would be a part.2
By way of introduction to structuralist practice on the Bible, it would be well to briefly summarize the major elements of structur- alist analysis. The first key principle is the arbitrary nature of the sign. There is no necessary relation of similarity between its two parts-in-relation, the signifier and the signified. The bond between the two elements is none other than the social convention according to which, for speakers of English, the sounds /tri/ conjure up the
1. For an account of “structuralism” in such diverse disciplines as mathematics, physics, and biology, as well as linguistics and psychology, see Jean Piaget, Shuctur- alism (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
2. See Saussure, Coarse in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 16. The series Approaches to Semiology, published by Mouton, has some thirty- odd volumes dealing with narrative, costume, psychiatry, and information theory.
Reprinted from Interpretation 28 (1974): 146-64.
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3. Saussure, Course in Gene& Linguistics, p. 13.
4. One indication of the widespread applicability of these terms can be seen in Frazer’s twofold classification of magic as “contagious” and “sympathetic.”
third essay in Freud’s Tdan and Taboo. Cf. the
2 8 2 CONTEMPORARYAPPROACHES THE STRUCTURALISTS AND THE BIBLE 283 an advertisement bearing a photograph of a well-dressed person
driving one or another car may carry a second-order meaning such as “Driving a cadillac is the prosperous thing to do.”
The “double articulation” of language has been most clearly stated by the linguist Andre Martinet. 5 Human speech is composed of two distinct levels of articulation, first into sigm$cant units (“monemes,”
or words) and these significant units into purely di@rential units (phonemes, or sounds). Phonemes have no meaning in themselves;
their purpose is only to be different from one another. Meaning arises from their combination into words. But there is a related question concerning articulation which must be dealt with in any structural analysis: How is the syntagm to be divided up for the purposes of analysis, and how, indeed, is the syntagm to be sepa- rated from the larger and ultimately infinite text of all speech? There are, in effect, two parallel undifferentiated entities, one of concepts of ideas (the signified), the other of sounds (signifiers). By relating one group of sounds to an idea, a certain area is delimited which gains its value precisely from its contrast to every other such “ar- ticulation.” Barthes explains this concept by an example: there ex- ists in nature the spectrum of light, which is a continuum-there is nothing in nature to define the point where yellow merges into green. Language, through the connection of signifiers with concepts, accomplishes this articulation into discontinuous units6
It was by way of the Russian formalist studies into the interre- lations between language and poetic process that the possible ex- tension of means of linguistic analysis to other kinds of discourse was first suggested. Filipp Federovic Fortunatov, one of the founders of the Moscow linguistic school, seems to be the first to have artic- ulated the view that language is not “a means for the expression of ready-made ideas” necessarily, but primarily “an implement for thinking. “’ “In a certain respect, the phenomena of language them- selves appertain to the phenomena of thought.”
With the migration to the West of Russian formalists following the Russian revolution, social scientists began to appreciate the range of formalist and structuralist approaches. In particular the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in his Essai sur le don,’ first suggested that the rules governing the structure and exchange of
5. See Martinet, “Structure and Change, n in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970).
6. See Roland Barthes, Element OfSemiology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 5657, 64-65.
7. Federov, cited by Roman Jakobson in vol. 2 of Selected Whitings (The Hague:
Mouton, 1971), pp. v, vi, 527-38.
8. One English translation is The Gtft, trans. I. Cunnison (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954).
messages within society might be applied to other key items of ex- change, such as women and goods. It was presumably from his acquaintance first with the work of Mauss, and then with the Rus- sian linguist Roman Jakobson, that Claude Levi-Strauss came to apply structuralist methods to the analysis of kinship system and later so fruitfully to myth.
Virtually all the structuralist analysis of the Bible harks back to Levi-Strauss’s classic essay “The Structural Study of M~th.“~ An account of this essay should give a particularly clear view of the application of the principles of structuralist analysis introduced above.
Levi-Strauss notes “the astounding similarity between myths col- lected in widely differing regions,” despite the fact that the restric- tions of everyday reality are relaxed in myth. This bears comparison with languages, which use much the same restricted body of pho- nemes yet differ vastly among themselves. Just as meaning arises in language from the combination of arbitrary phonemes, so it seems likely that meaning in myth ought to arise not from the intrinsic meaning of the actions, but from their combination.
But special procedures are called for, since myth is not merely language: it is something different which begins with language. The first approximation as to this difference may be seen in the special relations between langue and parole in myth. Langue belongs to re- versible time (i.e., its nature is synchronic), whileparole is necessarily bound to nonreversible time. Myth belongs to both aspects at once:
it unites synchrony and diachrony in that it is told in past time and yet is felt to have a real effect on the present.
Now myth is composed of actions, with a determined similarity to one another: “myth is the part of language where the formula traduttore, tradittore reaches its lowest truth value.” The minimal units of articulation in myth, analogous to phonemes in speech, will be simple actions and relations. The minimum significant units, anal- ogous to words, will be “bundles of such relations:” The “bundles”
amount to paradigms, of which the individual relations are related to one another by a principle of similarity.
It was inevitable that Levi-Strauss’s methods of analyzing myth should be applied to the Old Testament. The first such work was carried out by the English anthropologist Edmund Leach, whose essay in two versions, “Levi-Strauss in the Garden of Eden,“” and
“Genesis as Myth,“‘l is an attempt to provide a structuralist anal- 9. L&i-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology (Gar- den City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967).
10. Leach, “Levi-Strauss in the Garden of Eden,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Science, 2d ser., 23 (1961): 386-96.
11. Leach, “Genesis as Myth,” in Genesis as Myth and Other Essays (London: Jon- athan Cape, 1969).
284 CONTEMPORARYAPPROACHES
ysis of the early chapters of Genesis. Leach goes so far as to relate this analysis, quite validly, to communications theory, singling out the elements of redundancy and binary @position. Redundancy arises from the fact that “all important stories recur in several versions.”
Binarism, which is “intrinsic to the process of human thought,” is the discrimination of opposing categories which are mutually exclu- sive. The most important such oppositions in human experience are life/death, male/female, and perhaps for myth, human/divine. The value of redundancy is the correction of errors introduced through
“noise,” that is, those elements of a message which are accidental to meaning. Meaningful relations are distinguished from noise by their presence in a pattern observable through all the variants of the narrative.
The major problem for myths of origin is a “childish intellectual puzzle”: there are those women of our kind with whom one must not have sexual relations (due to the incest taboo) and those of the other kind who are allowed. “If our first parents were persons of two kinds, what was that other kind? But if they were both of our kind, then their relations must have been incestuous and we are all born in sin.” This to Leach is the central contradiction to be resolved in the Garden of Eden story and of similar myths in other cultures.
Leach provides an elaborate diagram intended to summarize the binary distinctions and mediations of the Creation myth, which following the principle of redundancy, appears in three permuta- tions (the two Creation stories and the Cain-Abel sequence). Gen- esis 1 divides into two three-day periods, the first characterized by the creation of the static or “dead” world, the second by the creation of the moving, sexual, “live” world. Just as the static triad of grass, cereals, and fruit-trees is created on the third day, the triad of do- mestic and wild animals and creeping things appear on the sixth,
“but only the grass is allocated to the animals. Everything else, including the meat of the animals, is for Man’s use.” Finally, man and woman are created simultaneously and commanded to be fruit- ful and multiply, “but the problems of Life versus Death, and Incest versus Procreation are not faced at all.”
The Garden of Eden story then takes up the very problems left at the end of the first account. The creation of Eve is analogous to that of the creeping things in that both are anomalous, the creeping things to the other animals and Eve to the man/animal opposition.
The serpent, a creeping thing, is mediator between man and woman.
When the first pair eat the forbidden fruit, death and the capacity for procreation enter the world together.
The Cain and Abel story repeats the earlier oppositions: Abel, the herdsman, represents the living world; and Cain, the gardener, represents the static. Cain’s fratricide is a reprise of Adam’s incest,
THE STRUCTURALISTS AND THE BIBLE 2 8 5 which Leach believes to be demonstrated by the similarity between God’s questioning and cursing of Cain and the questioning and cursing of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (it has “the same form and sequence”). Since the latter part of 3:26 is repeated exactly (accord- ing to Leach) in 4:7, “Cain’s sin was not only fratricide but also incestuous homosexuality.” Just as Adam must eliminate a sister in order to acquire a wife, so Cain must eliminate a brother.
Leach’s work demands scrutiny both in terms of what it says and what it fails to say. I do not wish to call into question his application of structuralist principles, with the priority of synchronic analysis, but to point up some problems.
The whole question of text is a complicated one. Granted that for Leach’s purpose a single text is taken as authoritative (in this in- stance the “English Authorized Version,” i.e., the King James Bible of 1611), Leach still fails to do it justice. His claim that meat is given to man in 1:29, for example, is a misreading. The A V s a y s ,
“Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” The phrase “for meat” translates leoklah, which can only mean “for food” in contem- porary English. But even the AV, in its own idiom, clearly means that both men and animals are to be restricted to a vegetarian diet.
This is no small error, since questions of diet are central in a number of Genesis myths (if not in the myths of many nations) and naturally call for comparison with the meat diet first expressly permitted in the Noah sequence.
Leach introduces further problematic interpretations of the plain (or corrupt) meaning of the words in the text. God’s questioning of Adam and Cain are very dubiously compared. The second of these is very difficult to decipher. Oesterley and Robinson point out that
“readers of Genesis in Hebrew will know that this is somewhat in the nature of a paraphrase of an ungrammatical and untranslateable passage.“12
Whatever the original meaning of 4:7, an interpretation of homo- sexual incest between the brothers based upon it seems weak indeed.
It is of course possible to reverse the order of the argument and argue for such a meaning based on a structural pattern present throughout Genesis. Such an argument has merit, but Leach does not make it.
This point does however raise the whole question of text and translation in structuralist work. These seem to be separate though related issues. An examination of Hebrew myth cannot rest upon 12. W. 0. E. Oesterley and T. H. Robinson, Hebrew Religion: Its Origin and De- vetopment (London: S.P.C.K., 1937), p. 116.
2 8 6 CONTEMPORARYAPPROACHES
any particular translation. Sole reliance on the AV or the Revised Version can lead to valid discussion only of the point of view of King James’ translation commission or the scholarship of Oxbridge dons
of the last century. The critic, whoever he is and whatever his stance, needs a clean text.
And here a further difficulty arises, for we may well be at a loss to locate the Hebrew myth at all. In the welter of primary documents and conjectured subdocuments, whatever was in fact primary and mythic may well be obscured. By itself the documentary hypothesis need not invalidate a structuralist approach, which seeks repetitions, parallelisms, inversions -all possible variants of a myth-in order to establish the correlations and oppositions through which the structure may be read. But awareness of the two factors of multiple documents and sacredness of text leads to suspicion of the authen- ticity of any given text or reading.
This is because the myths before us are both sacred and text. T h e various mythological materials collected in the field by anthropol- ogists (notably, of course, by Levi-Strauss in his four volumes of Mythologiques) l3 must be properly distinguished from literary ma- terial. In effect, each report from a native informant is the myth.
But a biblical myth is so much less the thing itself by virtue of its paradoxical fixity and fluidity. Once a myth is written down, it must cease to be the product of the unconscious generative force (ques- tion, contradiction, paradox, whatever) and becomes instead the re- port of that force acting upon given materials at one moment- though it enters the (written) culture as the myth itself. The as- sumption behind a Levi-Straussian analysis must be that the au- dience of the myth is aware, if “unconsciously,” of the permutations and transformations of the myth because they have heard some and will yet hear others. The individual narrative element (parole) h a s the living redundancy which at whatever level of articulation is the speaking sense of the story. Once it becomes a fixed and written part of the culture, the myth (now transformed into sacred history) must inevitably sacrifice much of that structure which becomes ev- ident in the variations of repeated telling. In effect, the competency of the culture to state the myth (langue) and the performance (parole) become identified-and the generative power and meaning of the myth must together become moribund.
And fluidity of a sort arises from the sacred character of the text as well. Despite the Deuteronomic injunction (4:2), alterations have
13. The four volumes of Mythologigues are Le cru et le cuit (Paris: Plan, 1964; ET, The Raw and the Cooked [New York: Harper & Row, 19691); Du miel aux cendres (Paris:
Plan, 1966; ET, From Hong, to Ashes, trans. John and Doreen Weightmann [New York Harper & Row, 19731); L’origine des mameres de table (Paris: Plan, 1968); and L’homme nu (Paris: Plan, 1971).
THE STRUCTURALISTS AND THE BIBLE 287 occurred for a variety of reasons, such as the scribal errors of hap- lography, dittography, or a scribal practice of lectio di@cilior.
But more significant than the alteration of written material in the hands of scribes and revisers is the work of redaction, which may transform the material either through conscious or unconscious means. A myth, by virtue of its presence in a written text, may enter into dialectical relations of a sort with other material whose conti- guity to it in scroll or codex is strictly contingent. It may also, of course, have been affected by a dialectical process with other non- preserved texts from its own culture area. The work of the redactor may advance this process by his attempt to harmonize originally disparate works reflecting etiological tales, true history, and pristine myth. He may wish to propagandize for religious doctrine, he may suppress material which is apparently contradictory on the syntag- matic plane, or he may unite conflicting material by means of new additions or suppression of old, all in the interests of one or another aesthetic end. In any case his work could well, like that of a careless archeologist, obscure or destroy what it most wishes to preserve.
His intrusion of conscious material may serve to destroy the uncon- scious logic and coherence of which he is most likely unaware.
Considerations similar to these were raised in a fascinating col- loquy between Paul Ricoeur and others on the one hand and Livi- Strauss on the other which appeared in the November 1963 issue of the French journal Esprit. Here Ricoeur and Levi-Strauss show some agreement in doubting the applicability of a structuralist analysis to the Bible. For Ricoeur, following Von Rad, the significant content of the Hexateuch is the “declaration of the great deeds of the Lord.”
“The method of comprehension applicable to this network of events consists in restoring the intellectual working-out, the result of this his- torical faith set out in a confessional framework.” Consequently, in the Old Testament “we are faced with an historical interpretation of the historical. . . . The tradition corrects itself by additions, and it is these additions which themselves constitute a theological di- alectic.” Levi-Strauss, citing the early work of Leach, largely agrees
“because of scruples which join with those of M. Ricoeur. First be- cause the Old Testament, which certainly does make use of mythic materials, takes them up with a view to a different end from their original one. . . .The myths have then been subjected, as M. Ricoeur well says, to an intellectual operation.” Further, symbols, whose meaning is only “by position,” can only be understood “by reference to the ethnographic context” which “is almost entirely lacking.”
Leach discusses these matters briefly in an essay entitled “The Legitimacy of Solomon.” His disagreement with Levi-Strauss is based on the contradictory nature of Levi-Strauss’s doubts; he has no qualms, for one thing, about applying structuralist principles to