Dr Dan McClellan on the Hebrew Bible

Listen to this episode from History for Atheists on Spotify. 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.