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

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.

If I ever write a book on "How True Is the Bible?" I'll have to start out by saying that archaeology is not the way to find out; that it has very little to say.

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.

[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 characteristics, and so on. We cannot determine what is historical and what isn't. As literary critics, we would understand the importance of this for understanding life, destiny. But the historical question must be left with a question mark.

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.

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