The Grammar of God Quotes

“What Jewish law wants is an ongoing conversation between man and G-d, and between man and man--but most of all, between man and himself. It's not a command, exactly, but a conversation: an inner song, full of melody and refrain, sometimes heard only by what Rabbi Soloveitchik so movingly called the lonely man of faith”
― Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

“Slowly, I understood that the way I read is intertwined with the way my family reads. Investigating the often tumultuous lives of the commentators, reading biographies and looking for patterns, I noticed that the idea of family influencing reading is actually a centuries-old phenomenon.”
― Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

“In Hebrew, mayim is the word for water and elohim is the name of God used in the first two verses. Mayim and elohim rhyme; water and God are therefore paired in Hebrew. It is part of the poignancy of the psalm, this rhyme of the visible and the invisible, the knowable and the unknowable.”
― Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

“I love the way everyone has their own scheme, their own way of reading reality, even God.”
― Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

“Translation means that a translator has picked one word above all the others: one winner, with all the finalists gone from the page forever. Translation always calls upon the translator to make a judgement call, and what the reader hears, then, is a judgement”
― Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

“Translating punctuation from the Hebrew Bible is a problem, since ancient Hebrew has no periods, commas, semicolons, colons, exclamation marks, question marks, or quotation marks. The King James Bible, on the other hand, has a lot of punctuation. It affects tense, sound, and sense, but it also makes everything read slower. Way slower. With a period at the end of the sentence, God is definitely done with creation, instead of breathlessly rushing on and possibly still continuing. Staring at that period, I realize that my reading is stalling for an obvious reason: the King James Version is taking me longer to read because it is longer.”
― Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

“Layout is not simply a matter of punctuation and versification; it also helps frame the understanding of a complicated idea like belief in God, or a law like the prohibition against murder.”
― Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

“I was foolish not to ask more questions when I could.”
― Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

“Translation, like scholarship, has long been a life-threatening enterprise.”
― Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

“The Hebrew text that I grew up with is beautifully unruly, often ambiguous, multiple in meaning, and hard to pin down; many of the English translations are, above all, certain.”
― Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

“Then, about 130 years ago, despite the usual pattern of ancient languages evaporating along with their speakers, Hebrew began to revive as a spoken language. It is the only example in all of history of an unspoken language becoming a mother tongue again.”
― Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible