Ronen Bergman Quotes

Around A.D. 930, the sages in Tiberias assembled all 24 holy books and completed the writing of the codex, the first definitive Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible. From Tiberias, the codex was taken to Jerusalem.

I have also written a book about the Giving of the Torah, and a book on the Days of Awe, and a book on the books of Israel that have been written since the day the Torah was given to Israel.

First, it is not unimportant that the legislative texts of the Old Testament are placed in the mouth of Moses and within the narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai.

I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers - the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue - bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder.

My brothers were rabbis. My grandfather was a rabbi.

In Jewish tradition the Talmud is said to have been given on Sinai.

The New Testament is not new anymore' it's thousands of years old. It's time to start calling it the Less Old Testament.

The most revealing books are the Holy Koran and the Holy Bible. The Bhagavad Gita is a great book as well, and the works of Buddha. These are the major influences on the world.

If it was wrong to seek God in a stone, how was it right to seek Him in a book called the Gita, the Granth Sahib or the Koran?

For many people during many centuries, mankind's history before the coming of Christianity was the history of the Jews and what they recounted of the history of others. Both were written down in the books called the Old Testament, [the Torah] the sacred writings of the Jewish people ... They were the first to arrive at an abstract notion of God and to forbid his representation by images. No other people has produced a greater historical impact from such comparatively insignificant origins and resources.

More Bibles are bought and fewer read than any other book.

To talk of comparing the Bible with other "sacred books" so called, such as the Koran...or the book of Mormon, is positively absurd. You might as well compare the sun with a rushlight, or Skiddaw with a molehill, or St. Paul's with an Irish hovel, or the Portland vase with a garden pot, or the Kohinoor diamond with a bit of glass. God seems to have allowed the existence of these pretended revelations, in order to prove the immeasurable superiority of His own Word.

If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory of mankind, nothing of value would be lost.

We should throw the Epistle of James out of this school.

Though my father was poor and had nothing, the Torah, the poetry of prophets, was his daily bread.

The Old Testament is full of poetry, prophecies, chronicles, documentations, storytelling, fairytales.

The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.

The truth is that what the great religions preached, the Yiddish-speaking people of the ghettos practiced day in and day out. They were the people of The Book in the truest sense of the word. They knew of no greater joy than the study of man and human relations, which they called Torah, Talmud, Mussar, Cabala.

Scripture is the most up-to-date and relevant reading that ever comes my way.

Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible.

[The writers of the holy books] did not even know the earth revolves around the sun. Why are we listening?

In our household, the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology

It is reported in the supplement of the council of Nicæan that the fathers, being very perplexed to know which were the cryphal or apocryphal books of the Old and New Testaments, put them all pell-mell on an altar, and the books to be rejected fell to the ground. It is a pity that this eloquent procedure has not survived.

The scriptures are in print what Christ is in person.