documents not unlike any other such religious documents. Since history had always been my second love, and since I too believe that the first task of exegesis is the historical one (to be as good historians as possible when dealing with anything that comes to us from an earlier time and culture), I had no trouble at all playing the game by the rules. To be sure, my bias was basically conservative toward all historical data—innocent until proven guilty—and my own experience of God also biased me historically