Quotes from Richard Elliott Friedman

One of the logical consequences of monotheism is guilt.

Investigators found that in most cases one of the two versions of a doublet story would refer to the deity by the divine name, Yahweh (formerly mispronounced Jehovah), and the other version of the story would refer to the deity simply as "God.

The chief pagan god in the region that was to become Israel was El. El was male, patriarchal, a ruler.

no word in the Hebrew language of that period for "religion." Religion was not a separate, identifiable category of beliefs and activities. It was an inseparable, pervasive part of life.

Every biblical story reflects something that mattered to its author. Whenever we figure out what it was and why it mattered, we move a step closer to knowing who wrote a part of the Bible.

Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918)

missîm. The term missîm in Hebrew refers to a sort of tax, not of money but of physical labor. Citizens owed a month of required work to the government each year.

extraordinary as it may seem, it has been suggested that in the original version of this story Isaac was actually sacrificed, and that the intervening four verses were added subsequently, when the notion of human sacrifice was rejected

when I have presented this subject in university classes, I have tried to be as sensitive to the feelings of my fundamentalist and orthodox students as possible. The goal was not to shake them up or produce faith crises.

understand better the world in which it was born and how inextricably connected it was to that world; to appreciate the wonder of how it came together; to appreciate that literary study and historical study of the Bible are not enemies, or even alternatives to one another. Rather, they enrich one another. Whether one is a Christian or a Jew or from another religion or no religion, whether one is religious or not, the more one knows of the Bible the more one stands in awe of it.

of the story would refer to the deity simply as "God." That is, the doublets lined up into two groups of parallel versions of stories. Each group was almost always consistent about the name of the deity that it used.