First, Tables are the logical structure in a relational system , not the physical structure. At the physical level, the system if free to store the data any way it likes- using sequential files, indexing, hashing, pointer chains, compression.
Second, The Information Principle: The entire information content of the database is represented in one and only one way. Namely as explicit values in column positions in rows in tables.
Third, The integrity aspect. Consider the departments and employees database of figure 1. In practice, that database might be required to satisfy any number of integrity constrains- for example, employee salaries might have to be in the range 25 K to 95 K , department budgets might have to be in the range 1 M to 15 M and so on.