" Biblical records give us astonishingly vivid portraits of the principal actors in the national drama, portraits which rival and even surpass those we find in the finest Greek historians more than half a millennium later. These characters are placed firmly in a consistent ethical setting. But there is not merely good and evil in these historical moralities; there is every shade of conduct, and above all pathos, intense sadness, human love in all its complexity–emotions never before set down in words by man. There is too a veneration for abstract institutions, a sense of national choices and constitutional issues. "

― Paul Johnson , A History of the Jews