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 private relationship to the Biblical text.

I became intimately acquainted with the Bible only as a theological student.

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 kind of pastoral activity that he pursued.

I have a concordance to the Talmud at home, which I have to use.

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.

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.

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