The Garden of Eden presents the same story: If you want to make yourself gods, you'll find you're akin to the animals.
If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That's the Tower of Babel.
It fascinates me to analyze these things and, yes, to see layers in the texts and the building up of Biblical literature. I think this provides insights that one simply does not get by the direct approach.
My own interest is far more in the Hebrew Bible. My religion is more personally related to the Hebrew Bible than it is to the New Testament.
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.
[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.
Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way.
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.
That is to say, the inspiration, the interpretive richness of the text is what Elie [Wiesel] does publicly, and his interest in history is his private reserve; he knows that he is not an expert in dissecting the text the way Frank [Moore Cross] does.
I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?
We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.
I have referred to [Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac] on occasion, but I doubt that you will find his name in any of my indices. In my view, he is important in the history of interpretation; and that is a subject I have not approached directly.
I would not speak of Judaism as a Talmudic or Rabbinic religion. It's a Biblical religion.
The Hebrew Bible defines Judaism. It's certainly true that the Talmudic interpretations become authoritative and normative, but they are interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. So that is always there.
[The story of Adam and Eve] it's poetry. One must interpret it as poetry. The first 11 chapters of Genesis [the Primeval History] are absolutely remarkable.
You have miracles [in the Hebrew Bible], yes, but they're not the work, normally, of demons.
When you come to the New Testament you can't even swing a cat without hitting three demons and two spirits. And magic becomes something that is everywhere. In the Hebrew Bible this sort of thing doesn't go on.
In fact, we're both [with Elie Wiesel] engaged with the text. We search for different things, we find different things. There is a side of what he does that I'd like to do, a bit more privately. I'm not sure he is as interested in history, as I am.
I find myself a little uncomfortable in the New Testament environment. And this is also true of what I would call late Judaism, the Judaism of the Second Temple and later.
The history of interpretation [of the Bible] is fascinating; but that is something else.
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.
I have a concordance to the Talmud at home, which I have to use.
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.
If I had to choose between the two ways of approaching the deity, I should prefer the existential relational way, to the abstract philosophical way. I think it is truer, or in any case, less misleading, to say that God is an old Jew with a white beard whom I love, than to say that God is the ground of being and meaning, or to say that God is a name denoting the ultimate mystery. I prefer the bold primitive colors of the Biblical way of describing God.
I grew up in a household in which the Bible played very little role.
