Data Over Dogma

This week, we're wandering into a valley full of dry bones!

Ezekiel 37 is the Bible at its most horror-movie: bones rattle together, sprout sinew and skin, and stand up as "an exceeding great army," before the chapter loses steam with a much less metal bit about two sticks.

What was Ezekiel actually promising the exiles in Babylon, and how did those sticks turn into the Book of Mormon?

Then we're taking issue with the piercings of Jesus. Zechariah 12:10, Psalm 22:16, and Isaiah 53 all get cited as prophecies of the crucifixion, but did the gospel writers read them that way? And does "they pierced my hands and my feet" even work in Hebrew? (Spoiler: no, it doesn't.)

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This week, we're finally reading a chapter verse by verse, and Exodus 24 does not make it easy: in just 18 verses, Moses climbs a mountain, wanders off to write everything down and splash the people with blood, climbs again, and somehow keeps finding more mountain.

Along the way, seventy-four people look straight at the God of Israel (feet, sapphire pavement, and all) nine chapters before God insists no one can see him and live, and the seams between the chapter's multiple sources start showing.

Then, we lay out the timeline behind all those terms Dan M keeps throwing around, like "Late Bronze," "Iron Age," and "post-exilic," starting with the Bronze Age collapse and the moment a people called Israel first shows up in the record.

Explore every episode, searchable transcripts, and our book recommendations on the Data Over Dogma website:

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Pope Leo XIV called the death penalty "inadmissible," and the internet promptly told him to go read his Bible—the one that prescribes execution for everything from kidnapping to picking up sticks on the Sabbath. But the Pope is making the same image-of-God argument from Genesis 1:27 that abolitionists used to argue their way past the Bible's acceptance of slavery, and the Gospel of Matthew can't seem to decide whether Jesus overturned "eye for an eye" or still invoked the death penalty.

Then, in Thicker Than Water, we finally tackle animal sacrifice: why Israel's temple offerings look so much like the meals people left for their dead, and Jacob Milgrom's theory that sacrificial blood was a ritual detergent for the sanctuary, not the sinner.

Thanks for supporting Data Over Dogma!

Explore every episode, searchable transcripts, and our book recommendations on the Data Over Dogma website:

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Support Data Over Dogma and get every episode early and ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content — become a patron:

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In the beginning was the Word, but what if the Word was Wisdom all along?

This week we welcome Dustin Smith, New Testament scholar at Spartanburg Methodist College and host of the Biblical Unitarian Podcast, to talk about his book Wisdom Christology in the Gospel of John, which traces how John's portrait of Jesus draws on Lady Wisdom from Proverbs, Sirach, and the wider Jewish wisdom tradition.

Was Jesus a consciously preexistent Son, or the embodiment of a personified attribute of God? And why are the women of John's gospel the ones who actually get it, while the twelve remain the "duh disciples"?

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It's the most spookiest time of the year, so we're debuting a brand-new segment: Hexegesis!

Did King James really slip "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" into Exodus because he hated witches, or does the trouble go all the way back to the Hebrew—and why does a Bible that bans divination keep showing its heroes doing it (as long as they're authorized, aiming at the right God, and conveniently male)?

Then we're Taking Issue with one of Jesus' roughest moments, when he compares a Syrophoenician woman to a dog, and ask why she has to beg for crumbs while a Samaritan woman at a well gets offered living water.

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The Daily Mail says the resting place of Noah's Ark has been "100% confirmed" on a hillside in Turkey, so we're lacing up our hiking boots to check the radar scans, the fundraising pitch, and what happened the last time someone drilled into this very same formation (spoiler: bedrock).

Then, what exactly is a messiah? Long before the word meant one savior at the end of the world, it just meant someone who'd had oil poured on their head, which is how kings, priests, and even a Persian emperor ended up with the title, and why Dr. Dan thinks the whole job description had to be rewritten after Jesus was executed.

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Open an English Bible and you'll mostly see "God" and "Lord," but underneath is a whole divine vocabulary: El, Eloah, Elohim, the tetragrammaton, and a few choice insults, including gillulim, which likely comes from a word for dung (shit gods, basically). First, we sort out which plural belongs to which singular (spoiler: Elohim isn't the plural of El), why Deuteronomy uses Elohim more than any other book, and how the Shema's "your God" quietly assumes other gods are out there.

Then we take issue with the old line that the Old Testament God is wrathful and the New Testament God is all love—where it came from (hello, Marcion), why its roots are antisemitic, and why it falls apart once you notice where eternal torment actually shows up.

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This week, Paul finally gets his day in court — several of them, actually, and he spends nearly all of them in custody.

We're going chapter and verse through Acts 23 to 26, where Paul lobs the word "resurrection" into a room full of Pharisees and Sadducees like a rhetorical grenade, forty-plus men swear off food and drink until they can kill him, and one well-timed nephew sets off a midnight cavalry escort to Caesarea.

Then it's artifacts and fiction, where Dan tells Dan about the Tel Dan Stele — a ninth-century BCE Aramaic brag-in-stone that gives us our earliest extrabiblical mention of the "House of David," and also names a killer for two kings that neither Kings nor Chronicles agrees with.

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This week we're taking issue with a Vice President!

JD Vance recently sat down with a very young podcaster to discuss his lifelong fascination with end-times prophecy, his suspicion that the Antichrist may already be walking among us, and his willingness to shrug if doing "God's work" happens to bring on the eschaton — so, after being fairly fair to him, we're looking at what his newly adopted church actually teaches about hastening the end, what Matthew 24 was really promising and to whom, and why every flood and drought now arrives with a prophecy hot take attached.

Then, at a listener's request, it's the gifts of the Spirit: what Paul was actually arguing back in 1 Corinthians 12, why the list works nothing like leveling up in D&D, and whether celibacy (or its opposite) counts as a charisma.

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This week, we're taking issue with Mark Driscoll, who recently explained that a wife is a garden, a husband is the gardener, and — out loud, on purpose — that the finished result is "beautiful property."

We dig into where that idea actually comes from: 1 Corinthians 11, the bride-price laws of Deuteronomy 22, ezer kenegdo, and an ancient world where a woman's social identity (and her virginity) belonged to whichever man held the deed.

Then: is the Bible the world's oldest game of telephone? If you mean translation, no — but when it comes to the transmission of the manuscripts, from the verses that quietly vanished from your New Testament to a version of Jeremiah a full sixth shorter, the comedians may be onto something.

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Get Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book, The Bible Says So:

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