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.

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.

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.

An enemy of today is a friend of tomorrow

Success is a mindset just as failure is, but they can never coexist in the same mind.

There's something about the ukulele that just makes you smile. It makes you let your guard down. It brings out the child in all of us.

I get a lot of sleep on the bus. I bring two dogs with me, who keep me grounded. I guess that's just in my soul. It's good to know that you're good at something.

Write the music your inside-you needs your outside-you to hear.

The knowledge of everything knowable is not yet wisdom

Seize the day. Well, I aspire to that anyway.

there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.

Good luck, little Wanderer, good luck. How I wish you didn't need it.

We all have two childhoods, the unhappy one and the happy one.