Quotes about Interpretation

It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

He learned, like every good novelist, that human behaviour can neither be explained nor predicted, only rendered.

Hebrews: No one knows who wrote Hebrews, but it probably first went to Christians in danger of slipping back into their old, rule-bound religion. It interprets the Old Testament, explaining many Jewish practices as symbols that prepared the way for Christ.

Jesus is literally the exegesis of God.

Many liberals believe in God; many conservatives do. What matters is not whether people believe in God but what text, if any, they believe to be divine. Those who believe that He has spoken through a given text will generally think differently from those who believe that no text is divine. Such people will usually get their values from other texts, or more likely from their conscience and heart.

The Hebrew original does not say, 'Do not kill.' It says, 'Do not murder.' Both Hebrew and English have two words for taking a life — one is 'kill' (harag, in Hebrew) and the other is 'murder' (ratzach in Hebrew).

The next time you hear someone cite, 'Do not kill' when quoting the sixth commandment, gently but firmly explain that it actually says, 'Do not murder".

The waters below are mayim (the Hebrew word for "water"), and waters above are sham-mayim—which some, but by no means all, scholars believe means "water there" (sham is Hebrew for "there").

Therefore, there is no issue here of a holy text depicting people being ordered by their God to kill infidels or innocents.

This verse uses the Hebrew word milacha to refer to work instead of the more common word avoda. Milacha is not truly translatable; it is best understood as creative work—work that produces something.

People need to realize that even the greatest jazz musicians, when they listen to jazz, they're not like, analyzing it and deconstructing it - they're enjoying it. It's like listening to any other style of music. It's saying something to you, and you kind of just absorb it.