Quotes About Interpretation

I look out at the world through your transparent face...

is the writer a prophet or priest - does he show the truth or serve the truth?...

there is a myth called objective reality - we think an impersonal world exists apart from us - it doesn't - it needs us to be ...

language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...

if you're an actor, and you've thought your way into the part, then you're character portrayal will have authority...

Whatever happened, happened in exactly one way, and the investigator's job was to sift through often-conflicting bits and pieces to construct the one true story.

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

History is above all else an argument. It is an argument between different historians; and, perhaps, an argument between the past and the present, an argument between what actually happened, and what is going to happen next. Arguments are important; they create the possibility of changing things.

all history in some ways wishes to say something about its own present time.

History has a beginning in sources, but also in the gaps within and between sources.

The text of 14:3–5 has played an important role in the larger chronological discussions. For example, Rashi argued that Pharaoh was prompted to pursue the Israelites because of their failure to return after three days (cf. 5:3). If this is the case, Rashi continued, "on the fifth and sixth day they pursued them . . . and, thus, this was the seventh day of Passover.

thus Jacob's name, which means "the deceiver

Though we cannot expect to be able to think like they thought, or read their minds, or penetrate very deeply into so much that is opaque to us in their culture, we can begin to see that there are other ways of thinking besides our own and begin to identify some of the ways in which we have been presumptuously ethnocentric.

Art that is based on scenes from the Bible is not better than art that is based on scenes from, say, Shakespeare or Homer simply because it is based on the Bible.

This reading of the biblical text has not been imposed on it by the demands of science, but science has prompted a more careful examination of precisely what the text is claiming.

avoid attempting to identify the parties involved. Instead of linking the bridegroom to God or Jesus, it is preferable to portray the arrival of the bridegroom as the arrival of the kingdom of God, for which some will be prepared and others not.

Language itself is a cultural convention, and since the Bible and other ancient documents use language to communicate, they are bound to a culture.

we cannot translate their cosmology to our cosmology, nor should we. If we accept Genesis 1 as ancient cosmology, then we need to interpret it as ancient cosmology rather than translate it into modern cosmology. If we try to turn it into modern cosmology, we are making the text say something that it never said.

The Bible must retain its autonomy and speak for itself. But that is also true when we hold traditional interpretations up to the Bible. The biblical text must retain its autonomy from tradition. We must always be willing to return to the text and consider it with fresh eyes.

Matthew 27 makes numerous references to Psalm 22; however, that does not mean that the psalmist was speaking of Jesus. By the end of Psalm 22 it is clear that the one suffering had been delivered. Still, some of the details of the psalm were clearly appropriated by Matthew and applied to Jesus. It would not do justice to the psalmist's context, however, to suggest to students that he was describing the crucifixion of Jesus.

If God were intent on making his revelation correspond to science, we have to ask which science. We

We gain nothing by bringing God's revelation into accordance with today's science. In contrast, it makes perfect sense that God communicated his revelation to his immediate audience in terms they understood.