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Nathan MacDonald, We Think what We Eat: Neo-Structuralist Analysis of Israelite Food Rules and Other Cultural and Textual Practices. By Seth D. Kunin. Pp. 264. (JSOT Supplement Series, 412.) London: T & T Clark International, 2004. isbn 0 567 08177 X. £70, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 57, Issue 1, April 2006, Pages 170–172, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flj072
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In this volume Kunin provides a structural analysis of various texts in the Hebrew Bible, a task begun in his earlier work, The Logic of Incest: A Structural Analysis of Hebrew Mythology (1995). As the ‘neo-structuralist’ of the subtitle suggests, this is more than an application of a particular methodology to the biblical text: it is an attempt to develop and improve structuralism. In particular, Kunin tackles the statist assumptions for which structuralism has been much criticized and develops an account of diachronic transformation. Since the complex historical diversity of the Old Testament is one of the most important problems that scholarship continues to contend with, this refinement will do much to commend Kunin's account of structuralism to the Old Testament guild. The first chapter, in which Kunin introduces his theoretical position, is a model of clarity. It includes an important discussion of the levels of structure with which structuralism is concerned. It also provides an argument that myth, ritual, and custom should be analysed independently so as to determine a common structural substructure. Analyses that use one cultural form to provide the structural understanding of another cultural form are methodologically confused, because structure is encoded in all cultural forms, rather than being explicitly expressed in one form more than another.
