I try to look at the texts and say: Is there a way that I can find history in the texts and separate it from what may be the mythological elements, and I don't find any rules for that.

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.

Why fight to the death when we can love eachother to death?

Death is what happens when you die.

People are so different in wartime. No one gets to be ordinary. Not really.

Being broke is a very efficient educational agency.

Sometimes we have to be hard on ourselves. We've got to get on our case, if we are being sloppy, lazy, and indulgent.

Footballers are kept in such a bubble that horse racing is a release.

All desire the gifts of God, but they do not desire God.

Even in the days when they did Othello, you didn't necessarily have to be black to play Othello. You wore the makeup.

Yeah sure, I'd love to have all my movies on DVD.

It's very common for the victims to understand a system better than the people who are holding the stick.