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.

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.

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.

There are surely many legitimate approaches to Biblical literature, and I think that it depends very much on one's experience and temperament which way one deals primarily with Biblical material.

There is nothing like taking someone's breath away.

All defensiveness and emotional tumult is a fear response because of your need for acceptance and ruthless control of the territory of your safe fantasy world.

What doesn't bend, breaks.

Mans true taproots are nourished in the sequence of generations, and he loses his taproots in disrupted developmental time, not in abandoned localities.

A mantra is a thought. Use a mantra to help you still your mind initially and then move into silent meditation.

to keep believing in life, until you're sure of death, it's the way a detective should be." - Kogoro Mouri, Detective Conan

I keep mementos from everything I've done.

We're approaching things quite differently this time, but it will still sound like Marilyn Manson.

My God, what do we want? What does any human being want?

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.