Data Over Dogma

In three days, the earth opens up and swallows a household whole, fire consumes 250 men, and a plague takes 14,700 more — and then the very next chapter expects us to be impressed by a dead stick growing flowers.

This week we're going chapter and verse with Numbers 16, where a rebellion that names four ringleaders forgets one of them entirely by verse two, can't keep straight which of the rest are actually standing there, and somehow leaves the sons of Korah alive to write a whole run of Psalms.

Then we're taking issue with Christian nationalist Joel Webbin, who says the church's job is to look a childless 65-year-old woman in the eye and tell her "you starve, glory be to God" — which runs headlong into the Good Samaritan, the prophetic critique, and the entire point of the thing he claims to believe.

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Get your mind out of the gutter — this week it's Aaron's rod, the staff that sprouted buds, blossoms, and ripe almonds overnight to settle once and for all who was in charge. But the text is oddly insistent that it sat in FRONT of the ark rather than inside it, which raises a fascinating possibility: was this flowering stick in the holy of holies an Asherah pole that the priestly writers needed to explain away — and did Moses forfeit the promised land not for striking a rock, but for striking it with this pole?

Then it's chapter and verse in 2 Maccabees 6, where a ninety-year-old scribe named Eliezer is offered a very easy out (bring your own meat, we'll all say it was pork) and chooses the rack instead. This, followed by a dying speech that is remarkably well-punctuated for a man having his bones broken.

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In 1929, a farmer in French-occupied Syria hit a rock with his plow and accidentally uncovered the lost city of Ugarit — and with it, a library of Bronze Age tablets that has been quietly reshaping how scholars read the Hebrew Bible ever since.

This week, we're diving into the Baal Cycle: an elderly patriarchal high god named El, a youthful storm-riding warrior who fights the chaotic sea (and then, memorably, drinks him), a goddess who winnows Death himself like grain, and a whole pantheon that ought to look awfully familiar.

Then, in History's Mysteries, we tackle a word Dan B has used his entire life without ever quite knowing what it means: Zion. Where did it come from, why does it seem to start out as a dry rocky stronghold, and how did it stretch into a portable, symbolic, cosmic idea that runs from Jerusalem all the way to Jackson County, Missouri?

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You've seen the claim: 66 books, 40 authors, 1,500 years, three continents, three languages — and not one contradiction.

This week we take that apologetic apart piece by piece, from the canon that was never fixed, to the authorship traditions nobody can source, to the "three continents" you could fit inside a circle smaller than the Mediterranean.

Then it's Twisted Scripture, where Mark Driscoll insists you can't be a Bible-believing Christian and a socialist, so we look at what the eighth-century prophets, Deuteronomy, Jesus, and the book of Acts actually say about wealth, debt, and who's on the hook for taking care of the poor.

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

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Watch every episode on YouTube:

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There isn't a single surviving original manuscript for any book of the Bible, so how do scholars decide what the earliest recoverable text actually said?

This week, it's a primer on textual criticism: why King James onlyists despise it (despite the KJV being a product of it), what Erasmus did when he ran out of Greek manuscripts for the last chapter of Revelation, and how one scribe's wandering eye can quietly delete an entire paragraph from Samuel.

Then it's chapter and verse on Zephaniah — three short chapters of unrelenting doom that promise to sweep humans, animals, birds, and fish off the face of the earth, before pivoting rather abruptly to "sing aloud, O daughter Zion."

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

https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma

Get your Data Over Dogma merch at our online store:

https://data-over-dogma-shop.fourthwall.com/

Watch every episode on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@dataoverdogma

Follow us:

Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/dataoverdogmapod

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

https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/bible-says-so-9781250347466/
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