from the article Structuralism and Biblical Studies:
[quote]
By contrast, my next example from Robert Culley’s work exhibits a much more modest use of structuralist insight.
Culley has chosen to apply “structuralist” insights and methods in a broad sense to various OT narratives.9 However, he brings to the narrative not so much a universal scheme into which any narrative is presumed to fit but an eye open for any repeated structural patterns that the texts themselves may call to his attention. Hence both his methods and conclusions remind one of form criticism more than of Leach’s use of I~vi-Strauss.
One of the best examples from Culley’s work is his analysis of seven OT miracle stories: 2 Kgs 2:19–22; 2 Kgs 4:38–41; Exod 15:22–27; 2 Kgs 6:1–7; Exod 17:1–7; 1 Kgs 17:17–24; 2 Kgs 4:1–7.10 After discussing each story separately, Culley argues that all seven stories exhibit a common structure of three successive “motifemes”: (1) A party in a problem situation brings this to the attention of a party with power to provide miraculous help; (2) the helper party responds by taking action on the problem; (3) the miraculous result that removes the problem is indicated.
For example, in 2 Kgs 2:19–22 the story has the following three stages: (1) Jericho has a problem with bad water, and the men of Jericho appeal to Elisha for help; (2) Elisha takes action on the problem by using a material (salt) in a symbolic action (throwing the salt in the spring water) accompanied by a word of the Lord; (3) the result is that the water is made wholesome. Similar analysis applies to the other six miracle stories of the same class, but not to some other miracle stories Culley discusses (e.g., 2 Kgs 4:42–44; 1 Kgs 17:8–16).
How do we evaluate work like Culley’s? On the one hand, to most people Culley’s work must seem much more reasonable and sane than Leach’s. The structures that he finds are more obviously drawn from the Biblical material rather than imposed on it. On the other hand, Culley’s results tend to be much less exciting. How much do we gain by knowing that quite a few miracle stories take the form of a problem, a response by a man of God, and a miraculous result? Is there a special significance to this? Or is it simply the fact that there is scarcely a reasonable alternative way of telling about a miracle at all?
A further difference between Leach and Culley concerns the type of structure that the two men analyze. For Culley, the structures of interest are “syntagmatic” narrative structures that help to explain the linear, rhetorical organization of a story as it unfolds line upon line on the page. For Leach, the primary structures are “paradigmatic,” static structures in terms of which the speaker organizes the world. The speaker or myth-maker sees the world in terms of certain oppositions and mediations. The linear organization of the actual mythic narrative is only a secondary “surface” reflection of the underlying worldview.
All in all, Leach’s and Culley’s results may seem to many Biblical scholars not too impressive. It will be said, “If this is all there is to structuralism, what is the fuss about?” But structuralism is more complex and wide-ranging than these examples may indicate. I have had to choose two of the simpler examples in order to have any hope of adequately illumining them in an article of this size. And even so, my own presentations of the two examples verge on oversimplification.
