Ruth and the Structure of Covenant History

Abstract

Job and David Jobling on the David and Jonathan narratives, there has been a steadily increasing application of the structuralist method to both poetical and non-poetical texts.1 Roland Barthes himself has written interestingly of Jacob's fight with the angel in Gen. xxxii.2 Having been shown the fascinating realm of deep structure-the code which underlies the narrative, we are not likely to remain entirely satisfied with mere source-criticism and form-criticism. And yet the structuralists seem to have difficulty with a factor which is of great importance to many students of the Biblical text, viz., the historical dimension. The question is not whether the Bible is history but whether its literary structure is not inescapably loaded with the sense of history. As Erich Auerbach long ago pointed out, the figures of Abraham and Isaac are fraught with background; their actions are determined by the memory of the past and the promise of what is to come.3 This aspect does not seem to find expression in the structuralist type of analysis. Hugh C. White, who shows an unstinted admiration for Barthes and the French structuralist, nevertheless asks whether their method

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