At McCormick Theological Seminary I had to take Hebrew, so I began to read prophetic poetry, and suddenly it became the life I wanted to spend.

I think that there is a certain schizophrenic aspect to my own relation to the Bible.

I've been on a faculty in a university, and I felt it was incumbent on me to deal with the Bible not as something I was attempting to convert people to, or to have them enter into my religious experience, but rather as an academic and scientific discipline.

Frank Moore Cross is also a leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, which he's been since they were discovered more than 50 years ago. He's just completing an edition of one of the most significant scrolls for Biblical studies, the Book of Samuel from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It would be hard to find a more influential book of Biblical studies than his Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic [1973].

We [with Frank Moore Cross] have the same fervor, the same passion when in front of us is a page, a unique page - every page is unique - of the Pentateuch.

[My father was ] Presbyterian [minister]. But I did not take the Bible seriously until I was forced to take Hebrew at McCormick Theological Seminary.