ABSTRACT
W. Robertson Smith (1889) and Frazer (1890) initiated the anthropological study of biblical lore, but this line of research was subsequently neglected until Schapera (1955), Douglas (1966), Leach (1969), Pitt-Rivers (1977) and Lewis (1987) examined several biblical texts. Durkheim, although he was the son and grandson of rabbis, preferred an oblique approach to religion, by way of the ‘elementary form’ of Australian aboriginal customs, even if (as I shall argue) his account was deeply imbued with Jewish religious assumptions. Lévi-Strauss, also the grandson of a rabbi, believed that his methods for the analysis of myth could not be applied to edited, written texts. Yet it was his structuralist approach that became most influential as Biblical anthropology was revived. Leach drew on Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist perspective in the analysis of biblical stories and ancient Jewish religious practices, and Douglas has published ingenious structural analyses of the books of Numbers and Leviticus.1 Cooper (1987) and Zohar (1987), both with the advantage of being familiar with Biblical and Talmudic sources in the original Hebrew and Aramaic, have published structural analyses of beliefs and rituals described in these ancient texts. Goldberg and EilbergSchwartz have, in introductory chapters to their work, given comprehensive surveys of the field. The former has explored the notion of ‘culture as text’, and the symbolic significance of ritual, while the latter has concentrated on the dismantling of the ‘opposition between savage and civilized traditions’.2
