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.

Furthermore, I think there was, in fact, a celebration of Passover in the era of the Judges in which the epic was recited in the context of the central sanctuary. That tradition was displaced by the Feast of Enthronement beginning in the Solomonic era.

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

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.

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.

With the Hebrew Bible, you're living in an austere world.

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 to one or the other.