ABSTRACT
Structuralism outside of the history of society and the framework of changing culture explains a system as it exists for a single moment. New critics in literature, Carl Schorske points out, replace literary historicism with "a-temporal, internalistic, formal analysis". Traditional political philosophy gives way to "the a-historical and politically neutralizing reign of the behaviorists". The chapter describes three positions: examples of a historicistic reading of two Jewish tales of ancient times, a structuralist reading on these same stories, and a post-structuralist reversion to questions of a fundamentally historical character. It explores an exercise in exemplification, a problem in the analysis of ancient Judaism in its principal expression, that is, the Judaism of the Mishnah, Talmud, and midrashic compilations of the first six centuries of the Common Era. Stories drawn out of ancient Judaism will serve as our laboratory case, so Judaism will provide a paradigm of interpretation, a resource from which to reason.
