#2562 - Dan McClellan

It’s strange meeting somebody whose voice has rattled around in your headphones for years. I try to give people grace: I’ve probably been in their head far more than they’ve been in mine, and that’s odd for everybody.

It is odd. Joel McHale followed me, said he liked my work, and invited me to dinner as an arrogant foodie. He answered with his full name, and I said, Joe, this is much weirder on my end. I barely remember everything I’ve said online.

I’ll suggest a guest and get reminded we spoke three years ago. But you’ve made around four thousand videos on dense texts and structures. Eventually the hard drive gets overloaded.

It’s blessing and curse. I can revisit something because new people have not seen it, though I may need to check the manuscript or redo a translation. I care what people were trying to accomplish, not treating ancient words as inert information.

I brought a replica from Kuntillet Ajrud, around 800 BCE: an inscription invoking Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah, with figures probably drawing on Egyptian deity imagery. I love it because Israel’s god could be understood with a consort—nothing like the version many people expect.

What gets me is the event, oral tradition, or story beneath it. I don’t think every ancient account is invented, but I cannot read it flatly literal. Moses and Sargon feel suspiciously alike.

Both have the baby in a container on a river, and the surviving Sargon version comes from when Exodus traditions may have been taking shape. Authors use what audiences recognize. Texts have aims—power, reassurance, ritual—and genre tells you how to approach them before you ask whether they report history.

The Gospels came after Jesus died, for communities making sense of their lives. A saying about families splitting apart could reassure someone rejected by relatives: this suffering does not mean you failed. Ancient religious writing often shapes conduct or makes pain intelligible.

Literalism is the problem: people call every line God’s direct word, even when it commands horrifying things. Paul gets squirrely—he sometimes says it’s his view, comes after Jesus, and people attach it all to Jesus anyway.

“Word of God” is not a fixed modern collection of scriptures; it can mean a message or Jesus. Paul distinguishes his advice from a command of the Lord. Some letters attributed to him, including the Pastorals, came long after his death. Earlier Pauline material expects Jesus imminently; later material accommodates marriage, children, and delay.

Somebody arrives certain in a world of uncertainty, and it’s compelling. Stay celibate, Jesus is coming any minute—then you’re dying thinking, damn, I missed all that sex. Secret knowledge and confidence are how cults, politics, and nonsense get traction.

Genesis was assembled long after its events, using traditions around Israel, Assyria, and Babylon. Babel may reflect a famous unfinished Babylonian tower. The question is not one original source, but what older material was adapted and why it served Judeans then.

Translation is not word swapping. An interlinear and a little Greek can make you dangerous. Hebrew must be reconstructed, and Aramaic and Ugaritic illuminate shared traditions. Ugaritic divine conflict helps explain Leviathan, the twisting sea serpent.

Those dragons are not dinosaur reports. Water meant danger and chaos; a god defeating the monster imposes order. Religion can help societies cooperate through accountability, but somebody always claims the power to interpret what the deity wants.

We are primed to detect agency: the ancestor who heard rustling and assumed teeth may have lasted longer. That can build trust and identity, but it can also shrink empathy. Once the other side seems alien or corrupt, cruelty feels justified. We need empathy beyond our own people.

That lands on politics. Left and right can treat each other as enemies to eliminate, even celebrate deaths. And we act like earlier humans were dumber when we have bones, a few artifacts, and tons of prejudice about the past.

Shanidar One, a profoundly disabled Neanderthal who lived to an advanced age, suggests sustained care. We cannot prove every detail, but caring for someone unable to fully care for themselves may be a defining human feature. Archaeology gives fragments; ordinary life rarely survives.

Adam and Eve barely reappears in the Hebrew Bible. Other Jewish traditions, especially First Enoch, blamed rebellious heavenly beings for destructive knowledge. These were competing explanations. The garden tale explains painful childbirth, hard farming, feared snakes, and human self-consciousness.

Hell also gets harmonized beyond any single biblical teaching: destruction, temporary punishment, and enduring torment all appear. It may first have answered whether brutal rulers would face justice, then became a universal threat useful for regulating behavior.

Our intuitions lead before reasoning catches up. The Cornsweet illusion makes identical gray areas look different through light and shadow. Reflection can correct intuition—a nighttime bang is the furnace—but it can also defend an intuition that was wrong.

I’m religious, but keep my faith private. The prophetic critique, and Jesus, target people performing devotion while exploiting others. Mercy, justice, and righteousness matter more than clicks, power, or status.

That’s why calling ourselves a Christian nation while leaving poor communities to rot is so strange. Build education, safety, and opportunity. Freedom includes freedom from state-sponsored religious indoctrination. Make the case through how you live, not by forcing it on kids.

People in minority faiths should not enter public school feeling merely tolerated. Let evidence set the terms in history, scripture, and politics instead of forcing it to serve the dogma we arrived with.

Man, I love what you do. You make enormous material approachable without pretending it’s simple. There’s always more to discover and more old assumptions to challenge.

That’s Data Over Dogma. The deeper we go into the evidence, the less the ancient world resembles the tidy picture we inherited. I’m writing about how the biblical god changes across the literature. To understand the past—or ourselves—we have to let the data complicate us.