What is public for you, Elie [Wiesel], is private for Frank [Moore Cross], and the reverse.

Elie [Wiesel], when you ask, "Why do I want to know," I'm trying to grab the holy. And I'm getting thrown back.

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 think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

It has been said that in order to pursue the history of Biblical interpretation, you must include the whole philosophy of the West, which informs it at every stage.

Certainly professionally, yes [I was interested more in history]. And literary criticism, the structure of poetry. But it is primarily as a historian that I work, although text criticism and literary criticism are very much a part of my interests.

The history of interpretation [of the Bible] is fascinating; but that is something else.