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.

The Bible is one, Old and New, in my particular tradition.

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

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 find it exciting to get any historical material from the ground. As you know, I love to put ancient Israel and its literature into their ancient contexts. And to rebuild - that is, to me, a very exciting historical task.

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