The history of interpretation [of the Bible] is fascinating; but that is something else.

We are thrown back on the text, for the most part. Archaeology can give us background. It doesn't either confirm or disprove the Bible, but it may illuminate it.

My own interest is far more in the Hebrew Bible. My religion is more personally related to the Hebrew Bible than it is to the New Testament.

The Garden of Eden presents the same story: If you want to make yourself gods, you'll find you're akin to the animals.

If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That's the Tower of Babel.

Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way.

I prefer to have all of this apparatus - historical, literary, critical - and then, beyond initial innocence and naiveté, to try to achieve a new innocence, a new naiveté.

I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.

There was certainly an old law code which stands behind the earliest form of Deuteronomy. Presumably that is what was lost.

With the Hebrew Bible, you're living in an austere world.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Nothing that is God's is obtainable by money.

We are not brought by faith into a realm of passivity, but rather, we are brought into the realm of diligent activity.

I remember the '60s, I remember the '80s, but somehow I went directly from the '60s to the '80s.

She remembered the godswood, drooping branches heavy with moisture, and the sound of her brother’s laughter as he chased her through piles of damp leaves.

Whoever has an army has power and that war decides everything.

If Jupiter should hurl a bolt whenever men sin, His armory would quickly be empty.

The absence of him is everywhere I look.

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.

A middle-aged cat will often play as unreservedly as a kitten, though he knows perfectly well it is only a game.