Birth: July 13, 1921 Death: October 16, 2012
The text says Deuteronomy was lost, but you say it was written then..
I find myself a little uncomfortable in the New Testament environment. And this is also true of what I would call late Judaism, the Judaism of the Se….
I sense that what you two [Elie Wiesel and Frank Moore Cross] share is that you each have a public relationship to the Biblical text and a somewhat p….
My father's religious life was not Biblically centered. He was a saintly man, whom I could never emulate, so I went into scholarship rather than into….
The Bible is one, Old and New, in my particular tradition..
The history of interpretation [of the Bible] is fascinating; but that is something else..
I have referred to [Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac] on occasion, but I doubt that you will find his name in any of my indices. In my view, he is important in….
We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition..
That is to say, the inspiration, the interpretive richness of the text is what Elie [Wiesel] does publicly, and his interest in history is his privat….
It fascinates me to analyze these things and, yes, to see layers in the texts and the building up of Biblical literature. I think this provides insig….
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 Go….
[Sacrifice of Isaac] is a major theme of the so-called Elohist [one authorial strand in the Pentateuch]. It is marked by all of his linguistic charac….
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 communi….
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..
I became intimately acquainted with the Bible only as a theological student..
Frank [Moore Cross], publicly dissects the text but he has a private, passionate relationship to the text that he doesn't often speak of publicly..
My father was a Social Gospel, far-left liberal, and to some degree a mystic. But we did not have Bible readings; we had prayers..
I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?.
There are surely many legitimate approaches to Biblical literature, and I think that it depends very much on one's experience and temperament which w….
Happily, I come out of a Calvinist tradition in which the Hebrew Bible carries as much authority as the New Testament. No different weight is given t….
I prefer to have all of this apparatus - historical, literary, critical - and then, beyond initial innocence and naiveté, to try to achieve a new inn….