Interview – Dr Dan McClellan on the Hebrew Bible
My guest today is Dr Dan McClellan. Dan is the presenter of the Data over Dogma podcast and a public educator who has won the Society of Biblical Literature’s 2023 Richards Award for Public Scholarship for his YouTube and TikTok videos on the academic study of the Bible. He is also the author of The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues (2025). Dan holds a Masters in Jewish Studies from Oxford and did his doctorate in Hebrew Bible Studies under Francesca Stavrakopoulou at Exeter University. Dan spends a lot of his time correcting erroneous and simplistic ideas about the Hebrew Bible, called the Old Testament by Christians, held by Christian fundamentalists and Biblical literalists. But I’ve found many of my fellow atheists have similarly poor understanding of these texts and their cultural contexts. So I invited Dan to discuss what current critical scholarship can tell us about this subject and asked him about some common claims about the Hebrew biblical texts made by atheists. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dan McClellan.
4 thoughts on “Interview – Dr Dan McClellan on the Hebrew Bible”
Interesting discussion! I especially liked the part starting at 50:30, where McClennan discusses the passage in Numbers ch. 5 that is sometimes cited as evidence that God supports abortion. He says:
“It would indicate that God doesn’t have much concern at all for a fetus . . . and that’s consistent with the representation of God throughout the Hebrew Bible, where God is COMMANDING the Israelites to slaughter babies.”
Not the commentary I would have expected from a Mormon. Good for him!
There is a parallel here with the story of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel, where even though their child, conceived in adultery, is born, it dies after 7 days. So it is pretty clear that the two texts are about breaking the Seventh Commandment. The adulterous woman becomes infertile, or maybe suffers a miscarriage, while Nathan curses David with the words “the sword shall never depart from your house”, prefiguring Absalom’s killing of Ammon who had raped Tamar, Absalom’s sister, and David himself later having to flee from Absalom.
You realise that Mcclellan does not believe that texts have any meaning.
You said:
References where daniel mcclellan has denied texts having inherent meaning.
Direct Statements by McClellan
Daniel O. McClellan’s own blog — “No, Words Do Not ‘Have Meaning’”
In this post McClellan argues that words do not possess intrinsic meaning in themselves, but that all meaning resides in the minds of those communicating and interpreting:
“Words…do not have meaning. All meaning associated with communication resides entirely and exclusively within the mind of the individual articulating… or the individual interpreting… There is no sense in which ‘meaning’ somehow resides within blobs of ink, pixels on a screen… or in sound waves.”
So why on earth he’s arguing against any interpretation or for any meaning of any text (whether the Bible ot not) is beyond me.
I could just assume that he’s being ironic and that he believes the Bible IS God’s Word every time he denies it, because the “sound waves” from an interview or Vlog post have no meaning and I get to construct what they mean.
Wouldn’t embracing this idea mean that we cannot construct anything from history (at the very least) since if I take it that Cleopatra was an alien and admitted it in the records we have, that believe would be valid?
How does anyone take someone seriously that says there is zero inherent meaning in what they say?
I hope it’s not beyond you. I think if you tried a bit harder, you could figure this out. Try harder.