Joshua Bowen’s Rebuttal of "Kidnapping Was Punishable by Death" Examined

Dr. Joshua Bowen is an Assyriologist and scholar of the Ancient Near East. He holds a Ph.D. in Assyriology from Johns Hopkins University, along with master’s degrees in Old Testament and Semitic languages. He is the co-founder of the educational platform Digital Hammurabi, where he focuses on bringing academic Near Eastern scholarship and critical biblical analysis to the general public. He is the author of several books, including Did the Old Testament Endorse Slavery? and The Atheist Handbook to the Old Testament.  Dr. Bowen literally wrote the primary playbook that modern critics and skeptics rely upon in the biblical slavery debate.

The Verse in Question

"Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death."

— Exodus 21:16

Christian apologists, myself included, frequently cite this capital statute to argue that the Torah categorically outlawed the predatory human pipeline behind ancient chattel slavery.

Bowen’s Rebuttal

Bowen challenges this apologetic defense on two fronts:

1. The Legal Category of "Man-Stealing": Bowen compares Exodus 21:16 to §14 of the Code of Hammurabi ("If a man steals the minor son of another man, he shall be put to death"). He argues that ancient Near Eastern kidnapping laws existed solely to protect free citizens within the polity from illegal abduction by fellow citizens, not to abolish slavery.

2. Jurisdiction and Foreign Slaves: Bowen asserts that Exodus 21:16 is strictly a domestic statute governing crimes within the covenant community. It does not apply to state-sanctioned war captives (Deuteronomy 20) or purchasing foreign chattel (Leviticus 25:44–46). Treating Exodus 21:16 as a blanket ban on slave procurement, Bowen claims, creates a direct contradiction with Leviticus 25:44.

1. Universal Language vs. Elite Class Protection

Bowen’s parallel between Exodus 21:16 and Hammurabi §14 collapses under direct philological examination:

• The Code of Hammurabi (§14): Explicitly restricts capital protection to an awīlum (the patrician free noble class) stealing the minor child of another awīlum (mār awīlim). It leaves commoners (muškēnum) and enslaved persons (wardum) entirely outside this protection; stealing an enslaved person in Babylon was merely an offense against commercial property compensated via fines (CH §15–16).

• Exodus 21:16: The Hebrew text uses אִישׁ (’îš) in its most unqualified, generic sense: "Whoever steals an ’îš [any person]..." Biblical Hebrew had precise terms if it intended to restrict this protection to free covenant insiders, such as ’āḥ ("brother/kinsman") or ‘am ("countryman"). Deliberately choosing the universal noun ’îš establishes an absolute baseline: human beings, by virtue of their existence, cannot be stolen and commodified.

2. The Internal Biblical Evidence: The Qualification in Deuteronomy 24:7

The strongest internal refutation of Bowen’s thesis is Deuteronomy 24:7, where the author explicitly adds the restriction that Exodus 21:16 deliberately omits:

"If a man is found stealing an ’îš from among his brothers the sons of Israel... then that thief shall die."

If the Covenant Code’s earlier formulation in Exodus 21:16 already carried an inherent, implied limitation to free Israelite citizens, Deuteronomy’s explicit addition (mê’eḥāw mibbənê yiśrā’ēl) would be legally redundant. Legal codification moves from broad moral-legal baselines (Exodus 21:16) to specific civil case applications (Deuteronomy 24:7). Bowen errors when he reads Deuteronomy’s localized civil application back into Exodus 21:16 to force an artificial parallel with Babylonian class law.

3. Dismantling the Supply Chain

Bowen argues that applying Exodus 21:16 universally contradicts Leviticus 25:44 ("you may buy slaves from the nations around you"). This represents a category error regarding ancient commerce:

• In antiquity, the primary feeder pipelines for slave markets were war captivity, piracy, and kidnapping (brigandage). An international merchant peddling human chattel across the Levant acquired merchandise overwhelmingly through violent, unauthorized abduction.

• Exodus 21:16 does not merely execute the original kidnapper; it mandates the death penalty for anyone who sells the victim, or in whose hand the victim is found (wə-nimṣā’ bə-yādô). Under biblical law, purchasing a kidnapped person makes the buyer criminally complicit in trafficking stolen human life.

• If Leviticus 25:44 permits purchasing foreigners residing in the land, that permission operates under the non-negotiable moral constraint of Exodus 21:16: one could contract for labor with an individual seeking economic relief or client-patron protection, but trafficking the victims of abduction raids remained a capital offense.

Conclusion

Dr. Joshua Bowen’s critique of the traditional apologetic appeal to Exodus 21:16 ultimately falters because it relies on a flawed comparative premise: reading Israel’s covenant charter through the anachronistic lens of Mesopotamian imperial class law.

By forcing Exodus 21:16 into the mold of the Code of Hammurabi §14, Bowen commits the classic error of parallelomania. He artificially restricts the universal Hebrew term ’îš ("any human being") to mean only free covenant insiders - an interpretive move flatly undermined by Deuteronomy 24:7, where the author explicitly inserts the localized tribal qualification ("from among his brothers the sons of Israel") that Exodus 21:16 deliberately omits.

Furthermore, using Hammurabi as a statutory straightjacket ignores the fundamental findings of modern Assyriology. As scholars like Jean Bottéro, Martha T. Roth, Victor Avigdor Hurowitz, and Dr. Amanda H. Podany have demonstrated, the Code of Hammurabi was an idealized monument of royal propaganda and scribal science, not a binding penal code cited in daily legal verdicts.

Rather than copying Babylon’s property-indexed valuation of human life, biblical law introduced deliberate, revolutionary breaks:

1. It placed the unlawful seizure and sale of any person under the penalty of capital homicide.

2. It criminalized the commercial trafficking chain by executing anyone found in possession of an abducted human.

3. It rejected standard Near Eastern extradition treaties by granting unilateral asylum to foreign runaway slaves (Deuteronomy 23:15–16).

When stripped of the artificial Babylonian framework, the plain meaning of Exodus 21:16 stands firm: an absolute, capital prohibition against the predatory abduction and trafficking of human life, severing the foundational pipeline upon which ancient chattel slavery depended.

Deconstructing Dan McClellan's "Data Over Dogma" Slogan

The Umpire’s Invisible Rulebook: Why "Data Over Dogma" Isn’t What It Seems

1. The Opening Analogy: The Impartial Umpire 

Imagine showing up to a baseball game on a sunny Saturday afternoon. The visiting dugout is tense, the home crowd is roaring, and out steps the home plate umpire. Before yelling “Play ball!”, he grabs the stadium microphone, turns to both dugouts, and announces:

“Folks, I want you to know I’m not playing for anyone’s team today. I don’t wear a jersey. I don’t carry biases. I’m just here to look at pure data - to call objective balls and strikes as they cross the plate. Mind you, baseball bats are technically just random wooden cylinders with no inherent hitting power; you players simply construct the illusion of a home run in your own heads. Also, if a pitch lands anywhere close to the edge of the plate, my personal rule is that I will always give the call to whichever player is less advantaged.”

Now, if you were sitting in the dugout or the stands, you wouldn’t be thinking, “Finally, a neutral arbiter.” You’d be thinking, “Wait a second - you haven’t eliminated the rulebook; you’ve just replaced standard baseball rules with a set of rules you made up yourself.”

Yet, if you spend any time on social media or in popular biblical scholarship today, you will encounter almost this exact scenario. Dr. Dan McClellan has built a massive platform around a tidy, compelling slogan: "Data Over Dogma."

He presents himself as the ultimate neutral umpire - just a cognitive scientist and textual critic letting ancient manuscripts "speak on their own terms" while calling out the Christian's dogmatic theological biases.

It sounds objective. It sounds scientific. But when you unpack the epistemological engine driving it - as laid out across essays like Dan McClellan and the Epistemology of Biblical Criticism, Data Over Dogma? Evaluating Dan McClellan’s Biblical Criticism, and Dan McClellan’s Unacknowledged Presuppositions—you discover a simple truth: "Data Over Dogma" isn’t actually data over dogma. It is one set of philosophical dogmas masquerading as raw, unvarnished unbiased data.

2. The Mirror Triad: Confessional Dogma vs. Critical Dogma 

Dr. McClellan’s core thesis is straightforward: traditional Christian readers approach Scripture with three unproven dogmatic presuppositions:

1. Divine Inspiration (God guided the authors),

2. Inerrancy (the texts contain no factual error), and

3. Univocality (the entire canon speaks in one harmonious voice).

He points out that you cannot prove these three pillars simply by pulling an ancient papyrus out of the desert sand.

And on that narrow point, he is right. Ancient ink on parchment does not come stamped with a divine certificate of origin. Inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality are confessional theological presuppositions.

Where his slogan breaks down, where the trick is, is the hidden implication that while religious believers bring assumptions to the text, the historical-critical scholar brings none.

Philosophers from Hans-Georg Gadamer to Alvin Plantinga long ago dismantled the myth of the "presuppositionless observer." Historical criticism doesn’t escape the hermeneutical circle; it merely stands on the opposite side. For every confessional dogma McClellan targets, his own method imports an inverse methodological dogma:

• In place of Divine Inspiration, he installs Methodological Atheism and Naturalism - the non-negotiable rule that God cannot act, speak, or intervene in history.

• In place of Inerrancy, he installs Troeltschian Historicism and Intrinsic Fallibility - the axiom that all ancient witnesses are bound by a closed causal continuum of cause and effect, automatically ruling out miracles, predictive prophecy, or transcendent revelation.

• In place of Univocality, he installs an Atomizing Hermeneutic of Suspicion and Conflict Ontology - a framework that assumes ancient texts are fundamentally fractured sociopolitical weapons produced by rival factions, ensuring that differing perspectives are interpreted as hostile contradictions rather than complementary counterpoints.

When a critic reads a miraculous narrative like the resurrection and concludes, “This is pious myth,” that is not an empirical discovery drawn from the grammar of the Greek text. It is the direct output of a starting philosophy that decided beforehand dead men cannot rise.

3. The Collapse of Logic and Harmonies 

This bias becomes acutely visible in how McClellan handles supposed biblical contradictions.

In classical logic, the Law of Non-Contradiction requires that two statements directly negate each other in the same sense, at the same time, and in the exact same relation. When a critic declares that two biblical accounts cannot be reconciled, they are asserting a massive universal negative: there is no possible world in which both accounts can simultaneously be true.

In logic and legal testimony, presenting a plausible harmonization is an undercutter. It doesn't claim to prove definitively what happened; it simply demonstrates that the two accounts are not mutually exclusive.

Yet McClellan regularly dismisses harmonization and the law of non-contradiction as an illegitimate "apologetic trick." He treats divergence as direct negation, committing the elementary fallacy of confusing narrative omission with factual denial. Standard legal cross-examination expects independent witnesses to select, omit, and emphasize different details. Ruling out non-contradictory synthesis by fiat isn't rigorous textual criticism - it is an arbitrary evidentiary double standard.

4. The Grand Contradiction: Postmodern Squiggles vs. Positivist Facts

The deepest fault line in McClellan’s framework is his own internal performative contradiction between two conflicting philosophies: Postmodern Reader-Response Theory and 19th-Century Positivist Realism.

On the one hand, drawing from cognitive linguistics, McClellan insists that words have no inherent meaning. In his book The Bible Says So, he explicitly argues that texts are merely collections of inert "squiggles." There is no objective meaning residing in ink or pixels; meaning is created entirely within the mind of the reader as they negotiate with the text. He uses this postmodern skepticism as a weapon to dismantle traditional interpretations, dismissing them as arbitrary social constructs projected onto silent parchment.

But notice what happens next. The moment he shifts to defending his own historical-critical reconstructions, his skepticism vanishes!

Suddenly, he pivots straight into hard, 19th-century positivism. The inert squiggles miraculously transform into objective, unambiguous "data." He claims to stand over the text as an impartial umpire, recovering the definitive authorial intent and letting the data "operate on its own terms."

He cannot have it both ways. If ancient texts are truly ink-stained mirrors reflecting whatever meaning a modern reader constructs, then McClellan’s own historical conclusions are just as much a subjective "negotiation" as the orthodox traditions he seeks to deconstruct. Claiming that ancient squiggles have no intrinsic meaning while simultaneously insisting that his reading represents pristine, unmediated "data" is not neutral science. It is a philosophical having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too moment.

5. The Moral Dogma: Confessing the Tie-Breaker 

If any doubt remains that this framework is driven by dogma, McClellan resolved it himself. In his own videos, he candidly admitted this rule:

“When all other things are equal... I will always give the benefit of the doubt to the less powerful group.”

Take a step back and examine that statement.

A commitment to favor the "less powerful group" is a modern, socio-political ethical prior. It does not originate from ancient Hebrew syntax or archaeology. Furthermore, in historical abduction, evidence is never neatly, mathematically equal. Deciding that the data is in equilibrium is itself an interpretive choice.

By installing power dynamics as his explicit interpretive tie-breaker, he formalizes a modern ethical outcome as the supreme adjudicating court whenever a text is contested. The moment your default is governed by modern solidarity rather than the text's own communicative context, dogma is no longer beneath data - it is sitting firmly in the driver’s seat.

Conclusion

Dan McClellan is right about one thing: we must be honest about our presuppositions. Confessional readers must acknowledge that inspiration, inerrancy, and the unity of Scripture are faith commitments. By the same token, Dan McClellan must acknowledge that Methodological Atheism and Naturalism, Troeltschian Historicism and Intrinsic Fallibility,  Atomizing Hermeneutic of Suspicion and Conflict Ontology are his faith commitments, his dogmas. 

The error lies in pretending that the secular, historical-critical guild operates without a faith commitment of its own.

"Data Over Dogma" is a brilliant rhetorical brand. It sells industrial-grade, naturalistic historicism under the appealing label of common-sense neutrality. But beneath the surface, it isn't "data over dogma." It is 1) naturalistic dogma over a theistic dogma; 2) Troeltschian historicism over historical openness, 3) an atomizing hermeneutic of suspicion over a charitable hermeneutic of coherence, and 4) an ideological tie-breaker (the less powerful) over ancient historical context.

When you evaluate Scripture, don't be misled by the claim of a jersey-less umpire. Look past the marketing slogan, inspect the invisible rulebook, and demand that the critics be as transparent about their starting axioms as the believers they seek to critique.

Note: The biblical text contains the raw theological material, assertions, and theological framework from which inspiration, trust, and redemptive unity are derived. Confessional readers are not inventing these themes out of thin air; they are synthesizing the explicit claims the text makes about God's character and speech.

The text does not, however, contain empirical, secular proof of these claims. The physical manuscripts themselves are ancient human linguistic artifacts. Recognizing them as divine speech requires a theological prior (a faith commitment in divine self-disclosure).

Both sides operate from a starting axiom: 

The confessionalist approaches the text assuming God can and does reveal Himself through human writers (double agency and divine accommodation). 

While the historical-critical scholar operates from methodological naturalism and historicism, assuming from the outset that texts must be interpreted solely within a closed causal continuum of human cultural evolution.

A Deeper Dive

The clash between confessional hermeneutics and secular historical criticism is not an argument over raw textual grammar or archaeological artifacts. It is an irreconcilable conflict between two foundational metaphysical starting points. Both approaches observe the exact same physical manuscripts, but their interpretive engines process that data through opposing models of causality, agency, and history.

1. Metaphysical Architecture & Causality: Open vs. Closed Continuum

• The Historical-Critical Model (Methodological Naturalism & Historicism):

  • The Closed Continuum: Rooted in the historiographical principles of Ernst Troeltsch (specifically the principles of correlation, analogy, and criticism), historical criticism operates on the axiom that history is an unbroken, closed causal web. Every event must be explained exclusively by preceding, immanent historical, sociopolitical, or psychological causes.

  • Methodological Atheism: By bracketing divine action out of the equation—even under the banner of "methodological" rather than "philosophical" naturalism—the historian operates etsi Deus non daretur ("as if God did not exist").

  • Epistemological Consequence: Transcendent events (the parting of the sea, the resurrection, predictive prophecy) cannot be evaluated as real historical occurrences. Because modern human experience does not observe corpses rising or seas parting on command (Troeltsch’s principle of analogy), accounts of such events are automatically categorized as ideological mythmaking, retrojected polemic, or pious legendary accretion.

The Confessional Model (Double Agency & Divine Transcendence):

• The Open Universe: The confessionalist operates from an open metaphysical framework wherein the transcendent Creator upholds the cosmos while remaining free to act within space and time.

• The Triune/Theistic Causal Web: Natural laws and historical contingencies are not an autonomous, closed ceiling; they are regularities maintained by divine providence.

• Epistemological Consequence: Miracles and predictive prophecy are not a priori impossible. If an omnipotent God exists, divine self-disclosure within historical events and textual production is coherent. The supernatural elements of the narrative are treated as historical data points to be weighed rather than immediate evidence of fictional fabrication.

2. Dual Agency vs. Exclusive Human Authorship

• The Historical-Critical Model (Purely Human Artifact):

  • Exclusive Horizontal Agency: A text is exhaustively explained by its immediate historical, linguistic, and political environment. The biblical authors were Bronze and Iron Age humans reflecting the tribal anxieties, political rivalries, and cosmological misconceptions of their day.

  • Psychological & Cultural Determinism: Texts are treated as ideological weapons deployed by competing factions (e.g., the Aaronite priesthood vs. the Levitical priesthood; the pro-Davidic court vs. northern dissidents). Meaning is entirely confined to what an ancient author consciously aimed to communicate to their localized audience to gain or maintain social leverage.

• The Confessional Model (Concurrent Double Agency / Concursus):

• Primary and Secondary Causation: Drawing on the classical concept of concursus, the confessionalist holds that God works in and through human authors without bypassing their faculties. The human author is a genuine, active secondary agent (retaining their vocabulary, cultural idiom, style, and historical perspective), while God acts as the sovereign primary author guiding the communicative intent.

• Organic Inspiration: Rather than viewing inspiration as mechanical dictation, double agency affirms that God providentially prepared the author’s psychology, historical setting, and linguistic environment so that what they wrote represented precisely what God intended to communicate.

3. Divine Accommodation vs. Cultural Evolution

• The Historical-Critical Model (Evolutionary Trajectory & Anachronism):

  • Natural Cultural Evolution: The development of Israelite religion is understood through standard anthropological models: animism/polytheism developing into henotheism/monolatry, which only gradually coalesces into strict ethical monotheism during or after the Babylonian exile.

  • Static Evaluation: Primitive, harsh, or morally problematic laws (e.g., patriarchal structures, warfare practices, debt-slavery regulations) are evaluated as direct reflections of ancient Near Eastern barbarism. The text reflects nothing more than an early stage on the unguided evolutionary continuum of human ethics.

• The Confessional Model (Pedagogical Divine Accommodation):

• Historic Condescension (Synkatabasis): As articulated by Church Fathers like John Chrysostom and later clarified by John Calvin, God "lisps" to humanity, meeting ancient human beings within their concrete historical horizons. Rather than imposing an abstract, utopian ethic that a subsistence-level agrarian society could not sustain or comprehend, divine legislation met fallen culture where it was.

• Creational Ideal vs. Statutory Concession: Exemplified in Jesus’ hermeneutic in Matthew 19 regarding divorce laws, the confessionalist recognizes a distinction between the pristine creational baseline (ab initio) and pragmatic civil legislation conceded "due to hardness of heart." Accommodation explains why ancient Israelite statutes regulate and hedge fallen customs (like war captives or servitude) rather than eradicating them overnight—acting as a restraining, redemptive trajectory pointing back toward the Imago Dei.

4. Univocality & Coherence vs. Disjunctive Fragmentism

• The Historical-Critical Model (Conflict Ontology & The Balkanized Canon):

  • Fragmentary Suspicion: Because texts are the products of disparate cultural moments, diversity is assumed to denote contradiction. Source critics (J, E, D, P) and redaction critics approach variations not as complementary perspectives, but as competing political propaganda.

  • Rejection of Redemptive Unity: Any attempt to read the canon as a unified, coherent whole is dismissed as an anachronistic, confessional imposition that silences the unique, conflicting voices of individual authors.

• The Confessional Model (Canonical Coherence & Organic Progress):

• The Divine Mind as Canonical Anchor: Because God is the ultimate primary author across centuries, the diverse human witnesses participate in an organic, progressive revelation.

• Harmonization as Legitimate Abduction: Divergence is not treated as automatic contradiction. Just as independent witnesses in legal cross-examination emphasize different aspects of an event without negating one another, textual differences are examined for thematic complementarity, contextual distinction, or legitimate historical harmonization under the Law of Non-Contradiction.

5. Hermeneutical Teleology: Ancient Context vs. Modern Ideological Tie-Breakers

• The Secular-Ideological Approach (Modern Moral Adjudication):

  • When textual ambiguities arise, secular criticism often leans on modern socio-political priors—such as prioritizing the voice of the marginalized or the "less powerful"—as an adjudicating tie-breaker. While socially well-intentioned, this imports an anachronistic 21st-century liberation ethic into Iron Age literature. It replaces genuine historical-grammatical reconstruction with modern moral advocacy, deciding what the text must mean based on contemporary power dynamics.

• The Confessional-Historical Approach (Authorial Intent & Ancient Horizon):

  • Confessional hermeneutics seeks the author’s intended meaning within its authentic ancient Near Eastern cognitive environment. Rather than applying modern ideological tie-breakers to resolve historical tensions, it anchors interpretation in the text’s original covenantal setting, pedagogical accommodation, and canonical trajectory—evaluating ancient statutes by how God actually met and restrained a specific Bronze or Iron Age culture, rather than by how well they conform to modern political sensibilities.

Summary of Comparative Axioms

Feature	Confessional Hermeneutic	Historical-Critical Hermeneutic	Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) Evaluation
Foundational Metaphysic	Theism; transcendent reality acting in immanent history.	Methodological Naturalism; closed continuum of physical cause and effect.	Confessional (Superior Scope): Methodological naturalism commits an a priori question-begging fallacy by defining reality as a closed continuum before examining the evidence. An open metaphysic possesses greater explanatory scope by evaluating both natural mechanisms and historical testimonies of transcendence without arbitrary philosophical censorship.
Authorship Model	Double Agency (Concursus): God as primary author; human as authentic secondary author	Monistic Human Agency: Ancient scribes writing solely from social, political, and tribal self-interest.	Confessional (Superior Explanatory Power): Monistic agency must resort to complex, ad hoc sociopolitical conspiracies to explain the profound theological coherence, self-critical nature, and sustained prophetic critique across 1,500 years of disparate authors. Concursus accounts for both the genuine human cultural fingerprints and the overarching macro-theological trajectory
Cultural Adaptation	Divine Accommodation: God pedagogically condescending to meet a fallen culture to redeem and restrain it.	Cultural Evolution: Primitive Near Eastern myth and jurisprudence slowly evolving via unguided socio-cultural shifts.	Confessional (Greater Explanatory Depth): Cultural evolution struggles to explain why Israelite statutory law uniquely subverted core ancient Near Eastern norms (e.g., universal Imago Dei, statutory protection for runaway slaves, moral restraint of conquering soldiers) centuries ahead of unguided cultural consensus. Divine accommodation best explains both the ancient context and the radical ethical trajectory embedded within it.
Canonical Scope	Canonical Coherence: Diverse human witnesses unified by one divine redemptive trajectory.	Disjunctive Atomism: A fractured anthology of competing, contradictory sectarian texts.	Confessional (Greater Parsimony): Atomism requires multiplying hypothetical source fragments (J, E, D, P, endlessly divided redactions) to enforce conflict wherever nuance exists. Under standard legal cross-examination, coherence that accommodates diverse thematic perspectives is a simpler, more robust explanation than postulating endlessly splintered, hostile editorial conspiracies.
Treatment of Miracles	Plausible historical data points grounded in an omnipotent Creator	A priori categorized as myth, retrojection, or pious embellishment.	Confessional (Avoidance of Petitio Principii): Categorizing miracles as automatic fiction relies on Troeltschian analogy—arguing that because uniform modern experience excludes resurrections, they could never happen historically. That is an axiom, not an empirical deduction. IBE requires evaluating the historical footprint and explanatory power of the claim itself rather than dismissing it by methodological fiat.
Starting Posture	A charitable hermeneutic of trust and theological integration	A skeptical hermeneutic of suspicion and factional conflict.	Confessional (Hermeneutical Equity): Classical and historical documents are routinely granted prima facie credibility under standard historiographical rules of witness cross-examination unless direct contradiction or disproof is established. A hermeneutic of suspicion inverts this burden of proof, demanding impossible standards of proof exclusively for biblical literature.
Interpretive Tie-Breaker	Ancient Context & Trajectory: Resolves ambiguity through authorial intent, ancient Near Eastern cognitive horizon, and canonical redemptive trajectory	Ideological Tie-Breaker: Resolves ambiguity by defaulting to modern socio-political priors (siding with the "less powerful").	Confessional (Superior Historical Plausibility): Defaulting to modern socio-political advocacy (e.g., favoring the "less powerful") commits an explicit anachronistic error by importing 21st-century ideological outcomes to adjudicate Iron Age data. Rooting ambiguous texts in the author's authentic ancient cognitive horizon and progressive canonical trajectory respects genuine historical-grammatical context rather than modern moral retrofitting.

The Bottom Line: Evaluating the Rulebooks

When both frameworks are laid side-by-side, the secular critique cannot sustain its claim to epistemic neutrality. Every metric used to dismiss confessional readings—whether demanding closed natural causation, enforcing conflict between witnesses, or importing modern political tie-breakers—rests on philosophical choices made before the manuscripts are ever touched.

True critical thinking doesn’t mean pretending the umpire has no rulebook. It means demanding that every scholar, whether confessional or secular, lays their invisible rulebook open on the table for everyone to inspect. When you evaluate the competing frameworks through the lens of best explanation, the confessional model doesn’t merely hold its ground—it offers greater explanatory scope, historical plausibility, and integrity to the ancient world on its own terms.

Dan McClellan's "Unanswerable Contradictions" - Part 1.5 Who Killed Goliath?

Well, we've made it to the fifth and final installment, which means one last quick  check before we dive into the text. If you haven't checked out Dan McClellan and the Epistemology of Biblical Criticism yet, it’s a must read just to see the hidden philosophical playbook running in the background of his channel. He loves his catchphrase "Data over Dogma," but for the fifth and final time: nobody works in an assumption-free bubble - especially not Dan. We all bring baggage to an ancient text, and we all view the raw data through our own lenses.

You might also want to jump back to Dan McClellan's "Unanswerable Contradictions" - Part 1- Intro. He brushes aside the law of non-contradiction - one of the absolute basic cornerstones of logic. It’s still wild to watch, but it’s the exact reason we’ve had to reset the ground rules every step of the way.

With that final reminder out of the way, let’s wrap this series up and tackle his fifth alleged "unanswerable contradiction."

Who Killed Goliath? - 1 Samuel 17 vs. 2 Samuel 21:19 and 1 Chronicles 20:5

In Part 5 of his "Unanswerable Contradictions" series, Dan McClellan frames the question of who killed Goliath as an open-and-shut case of legendary accretion and scribal damage control. Under his reconstruction, historical criticism reveals raw, unvarnished data: an obscure warrior named Elhanan originally killed Goliath (2 Sam 21:19), David’s court scribes later co-opted the heroic legend to glorify their monarch (1 Sam 17), and the post-exilic Chronicler engaged in tendentious damage control by inventing a fictitious brother named "Lahmi" (1 Chron 20:5).

McClellan articulates the standard historical-critical challenge across two primary hubs:

• The Narrative and Historical Clash: 1 Samuel 17 provides an expansive, iconic narrative detailing David’s triumph over Goliath the Gittite in the Valley of Elah. Conversely, an obscure military appendix in 2 Samuel 21:19 flatly attributes the slaying of Goliath to a completely different warrior: "Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim the Bethlehemite struck down Goliath the Gittite, whose spear shaft was like a weaver’s beam."

• The Chronicler’s Alleged Harmonization: Confronted with an overt contradiction between Samuel's traditions, 1 Chronicles 20:5 alters the text to read that Elhanan killed "Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite." Under McClellan’s framework, the Chronicler engaged in an apologetic fabrication to preserve David’s legendary stature, inventing an unhistorical Philistine brother out of whole cloth.

McClellan frames this divergence under his trademark banner of "Data over Dogma" as an objective historical fact: the texts are mutually exclusive, demonstrating that canonical univocality is untenable and that biblical scribes actively altered traditions to sanitize embarrassing theological or historical discrepancies.

However, evaluated through the epistemology of biblical criticism, this verdict is not raw, presuppositionless data. It represents the inevitable output of historical criticism’s own foundational axioms: Troeltschian historicism, atomizing text-critical skepticism, and an uncritical weaponization of text-critical maxims (lectio difficilior potior).

1. Scribal Corruption and the Transmission of Samuel

McClellan’s treatment of 2 Samuel 21:19 relies on an unexamined methodological default: treating the Masoretic text (MT) of Samuel as an unassailable baseline while placing the testimony of Chronicles under an immediate, asymmetric suspicion of tendentious tampering.

However, when examined across Hebrew manuscript evidence and comparative textual criticism, this critical consensus exposes profound epistemological vulnerabilities.

The Epistemic Asymmetry of Defaulting to 2 Samuel

Treating 2 Samuel 21:19 as a pristine, uncorrupted historical witness while treating 1 Chronicles 20:5 as a theological fabrication is a methodological choice rooted in historical skepticism, not an objective evidentiary demand. While the Books of Samuel are foundational historical narratives, Old Testament textual critics have long documented that the textual transmission of the Books of Samuel—and the concluding appendices of 2 Samuel 21–24 in particular—is among the most visibly disrupted and demonstrably damaged in the entire Hebrew canon (Frank Moore Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran, 1995; Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Fortress Press, 2011).

The corruption in 2 Samuel 21:19 is evident directly on the surface of the Hebrew text:

• The Gross Dittography of "Oregim" (’ōrĕgîm*):* In 2 Samuel 21:19, Elhanan's father is recorded as "Jaare-oregim" (ya‘rê ’ōrĕgîm). The element ’ōrĕgîm is not a Semitic personal name; it is the plural noun for "weavers." It appears verbatim at the exact conclusion of the very same verse to describe the giant’s weapon (kimsôr ’ōrĕgîm, "like a weaver’s beam"). As S.R. Driver pointed out in Notes on the Hebrew Text and the Topography of the Books of Samuel (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1913), the presence of ’ōrĕgîm inside the patronymic is an undisputed case of accidental scribal duplication (dittography), in which an ancient copyist's eye leaped forward to the end of the line.

• Chronicles Preserves the Intact Vorlage: In 1 Chronicles 20:5, the patronymic appears without the accidental duplication: Elhanan is simply the son of "Jair" (yā‘îr). A verse that demonstrably preserves visual transcription blunders inside its own immediate clause cannot serve as an infallible chronological or historical benchmark against Chronicles.

2. The Textual and Philological Mechanics: How Samuel Lost the Text

McClellan insists that the Chronicler synthetically confected "Lahmi, the brother of" (’et-laḥmî ’ăḥî) out of "the Bethlehemite" (bêt hallaḥmî). Yet detailed comparative philology demonstrates that the exact reverse occurred: 2 Samuel 21:19 represents a classic mechanical scribal conflation and haplography.

As Old Testament linguist Kaspars Ozoliņš demonstrates in "Killing Goliath? Elhanan the Bethlehemite and the Text of 2 Sam 21:19" (Vetus Testamentum 72, no. 4–5 [2022]), a systematic reconstruction of the ancient script accounts for every single letter across both passages:

1. The Parallel Clauses:

   • 1 Chron 20:5: wayyak ’elḥānān ben-yā‘îr ’et-laḥmî ’ăḥî golyāt haggittî ("and Elhanan son of Jair struck down Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite").

   • 2 Sam 21:19: wayyak ’elḥānān ben-ya‘rê ’ōrĕgîm bêt hallaḥmî ’ēt golyāt haggittî ("and Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim the Bethlehemite struck down Goliath the Gittite").

2. Visual Graphic Confusion: In early West-Semitic and square scripts, the sequence ’ăḥî (אחי, "brother of") and the direct object marker ’ēt (את) are virtually indistinguishable if a ligature or parchment defect is present (P. Kyle McCarter Jr., II Samuel, Anchor Bible 9, Doubleday, 1984).

3. Accidental Telescoping and Haplography: The ancient scribe copying Samuel looked from ben-yā‘îr to bêt hallaḥmî (naturally conditioned by Elhanan’s regional identity as a Bethlehemite, cf. 2 Sam 23:24), misread ’ăḥî ("brother of") as the direct object marker ’ēt, and inadvertently displaced the personal name laḥmî into the gentilic bêt-hallaḥmî.

McClellan’s assertion that the syntax of nākhāh (נכה, "to strike") strictly requires the direct object particle ’et overlooks standard Biblical Hebrew syntax. As documented in Bruce K. Waltke and M. O'Connor’s An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Eisenbrauns, 1990) and Gesenius's Hebrew Grammar (§117b–c), definite direct objects frequently occur without the accusative marker in archaic narrative and unvocalized Vorlagen. The Chronicler did not engineer a theological deception; 2 Samuel suffered an ordinary, well-understood textual telescoping.

3. Philological Viability: The Authenticity of "Lahmi"

McClellan seeks to invalidate 1 Chronicles 20:5 by arguing that "Lahmi" (laḥmî) is Northwest Semitic ("my bread") and therefore historically and culturally impossible for an Aegean-descended Philistine warrior. This objection depends upon anachronistic assumptions regarding early Iron Age Levantine onomastics:

• Pervasive Semitization of the Philistines: By the 10th century BC, the Philistine urban pentapolis had undergone thorough linguistic assimilation with the surrounding Northwest Semitic cultures. As archaeological discoveries - such as the 7th-century BC Tel Miqne/Ekron Inscription documented by Seymour Gitin, Trude Dothan, and Joseph Naveh ("A Royal Dedicatory Inscription from Ekron," Israel Exploration Journal 47 [1997])—routinely prove, Philistine dynasties and military figures routinely bore Semitic names (e.g., Padi, Baal) alongside residual Aegean forms.

• The Gath-Judean Borderland: Goliath and his lineage operated out of Gath, situated immediately adjacent to the Shephelah and the Judean hill country (Aren M. Maeir, "The Tell es-Safi/Gath Archaeological Project," Near Eastern Archaeology 80, no. 4 [2017]). A family of borderland champions bearing Semitic names or West-Semitic military epithets is precisely what comparative archaeological data expects. Dismissing "Lahmi" as a post-exilic fiction is an arbitrary presupposition rather than a philological conclusion.

4. The Misapplication of Lectio Difficilior Potior

Historical-critical polemics frequently treat the text-critical maxim lectio difficilior potior ("the more difficult reading is to be preferred") as an inflexible empirical law. Because 2 Samuel 21:19 clashes directly with 1 Samuel 17, critical theorists automatically pronounce it "the more difficult reading," and therefore the original historical memory.

However, classic textual critics have repeatedly cautioned against using this rule to canonize transparent copyist errors. As Bruce M. Metzger emphasizes in The Text of the New Testament (4th ed., Oxford University Press, 2005) and Emanuel Tov reiterates in Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Fortress Press, 2011):

"The rule lectio difficilior praeferenda cannot be applied to readings that originated in scribal errors... scribal blunders often produce readings that are exceedingly difficult, but nonsense cannot be original."

To elevate an obvious transcriptional accident into historical dogma simply because it produces a canonical contradiction is a fundamental distortion of textual criticism.

5. Double Agency vs. The "Legend Accretion" Model

Critical methodology operates under Peter Berger’s socioreligious premise of methodological atheism (The Sacred Canopy, 1967), evaluating biblical narratives strictly as competing political fictions. Under this lens, David’s court is assumed to have expropriated an obscure warrior’s deed to manufacture royal propaganda.

In contrast, classical theological hermeneutics and narrative analysis demonstrate that these texts serve unified, non-competitive literary functions within ancient historiographical collections:

Narrative Dimension	1 Samuel 17 (The Valley of Elah)	2 Samuel 21:15–22 / 1 Chron 20:4–8 (The Wars at Gob)
Literary Genre & Setting	Central royal epic: the youthful rise of Yahweh's anointed king in national crisis.	Archival military appendix: cataloging the heroic feats of David’s veteran elite guard.
Thematic Purpose	Demonstrating that Yahweh delivers through faith, not conventional armor or size.	Demonstrating how David's loyal mighty men extinguished the remaining giant lineage of Philistia when David was aged.
Heroic Combatants	David vs. Goliath of Gath.	Abishai, Sibbecai, Elhanan, and Jonathan vs. the four kin of the giant in Gath.

The Literary Structure of 2 Samuel 21

McClellan’s hypothesis of "legend theft" entirely ignores the internal literary structure of 2 Samuel 21 itself:

1. The Setting: In 2 Samuel 21:15–17, an aging David grows faint in battle, and his warriors swear an oath: "You shall no longer go out with us to battle, lest you quench the lamp of Israel."

2. The Succession of Giant-Killers: The narrative sequence immediately documents David's elite warriors eliminating the four remaining giant kin of Gath who carried weapons of identical, family-inherited scale (V. Philips Long, 1 and 2 Samuel, Tyndale OT Commentaries, IVP Academic, 2020).

3. The Summary Climax: The chapter concludes in 2 Samuel 21:22: "These four were born to the giant in Gath, and they fell by the hand of David and by the hand of his servants."

If the author of Samuel had intended 2 Samuel 21:19 to record the killing of David's primary antagonist by an unknown soldier, he would have placed a blatant, irreconcilable contradiction inside his own unitary work. The catalog does not record the theft of David’s historic duel; it records David's veteran soldiers finishing off Goliath's remaining family.

Conclusion

Dan McClellan’s claim of an "unanswerable contradiction" regarding who killed Goliath ultimately rests on unexamined methodological presuppositions rather than neutral textual data.

By 1) treating a demonstrably damaged passage in 2 Samuel as an infallible historical anchor, 2) misapplying lectio difficilior to protect a mechanical scribal error, and 3) dismissing legitimate ancient Near Eastern onomastics, historical-critical orthodoxy constructs the very impasse it claims to discover.

When evaluated with philological precision, scribal mechanics, and literary coherence, 1 Chronicles 20:5 preserves the original historical reading: David struck down Goliath in the Valley of Elah; Elhanan struck down Lahmi, the brother of Goliath, at Gob. McClellan's verdict does not expose a fatal flaw in the biblical text; it exposes the interpretive limitations of a methodological framework engineered to guarantee fracture.

The Fatal Flaw of Red-Letter Christianity

Why Pitting Jesus Against Scripture Fractures the Faith

"Red Letterism" has carved out a comfortable home in contemporary Christian discourse. At first glance, the premise seems pious, almost beyond reproach: If Christianity is about following Jesus, shouldn't His direct, earthly words carry the highest authority? Shouldn't the red letters in our Bibles outrank the black ones?

Formalized in the mid-2000s by progressive evangelical figures like Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne under the banner of "Red-Letter Christianity," this movement sets Jesus’ earthly sayings - especially the Sermon on the Mount - as the primary or exclusive filter for doctrine, ethics, politics, and social engagement. In practice, however, this hermeneutic routinely pits Jesus against the Apostle Paul, downplays the Old Testament, and reduces Christian faith to a selective moral program.

What presents itself as supreme devotion to Christ is, upon closer theological examination, an unstable system that fractures the Trinity, demolishes the authority of Scripture, and misunderstands the very gospel Jesus came to achieve.

1. The Typographical Accident Turned Bad Theology

The visual separation of Jesus’ words from the rest of the text is not an apostolic tradition; it was an editorial novelty born at the end of the 19th century. In 1899, Louis Klopsch, a German-American journalist and editor of The Christian Herald, conceived the idea of printing Jesus’ words in red ink after meditating on Luke 22:20 ("This cup is the new covenant in my blood"). Klopsch aimed to help readers identify Christ’s utterances in the King James Version, which lacked modern quotation marks. The first red-letter New Testament appeared in 1899, followed by a full Bible in 1901.

Klopsch intended to highlight the Savior’s speech, not demote the rest of the canon. Yet modern Red Letterism transformed a Victorian typographical convenience into a theological hierarchy. By treating the red letters as "first-class" revelation and the surrounding black letters as "second-class," proponents construct an artificial "canon within a canon."

2. A Collapse of Plenary, Verbal Inspiration

Historic Christian orthodoxy affirms the doctrine of plenary, verbal inspiration: every word of the biblical canon is God-breathed and equally inspired.

• The Apostle Paul writes in 2 Timothy 3:16 that “all Scripture is breathed out by God [theopneustos] and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” Paul does not carve out an exception for apostolic letters or the Hebrew Bible.

• The Apostle Peter affirms in 2 Peter 1:20–21 that “no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation... but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

To assert that Jesus’ spoken words possess higher ontological authority than the writings of Paul, Peter, John, or Moses requires abandoning biblical inspiration altogether. If Paul’s letters are merely human theological speculation that can be overruled by a selective reading of Matthew 5, then Scripture ceases to be the final, infallible rule of faith and practice (Sola Scriptura).

Attempting to use the Gospels as an exclusive, overriding lens through which to diminish the Epistles fractures the fundamental organic unity of the canon.

3. The Trinitarian Problem: Dividing Christ from His Spirit

Red Letterism assumes that Jesus’ authority is confined to what was vocalized from His physical vocal cords between Bethlehem and Calvary. But this directly contradicts what Jesus Himself taught about the Holy Spirit and His Apostles.

On the night before His crucifixion, Jesus explicitly warned His disciples that His earthly teaching was incomplete by design:

"I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you." (John 16:12–14)

Christ’s revelation did not terminate at the Ascension; it expanded through the Spirit-inspired apostolic witness. When the Apostle Paul writes to the churches, he does not speak on his own authority. In 1 Corinthians 14:37, Paul writes: “If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord.” Likewise, in 1 Thessalonians 2:13, he commends the believers because “when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God.”

To pit Jesus against Paul is functionally to divide the Trinity. It sets the Son of God during His earthly state of humiliation against the Holy Spirit whom Christ sent to speak for Him in His exaltation. The black letters of the Epistles carry the direct, dominical authority of the risen, ascended Christ speaking through His chosen emissaries.

4. The Pre-Cross vs. Post-Cross Fallacy

Perhaps the most catastrophic hermeneutical blunder of Red Letterism is its failure to account for redemptive history.

It is both natural and necessary for Jesus to speak differently before accomplishing salvation on the cross than how the Apostles articulate it after the resurrection. Jesus lived and ministered before the climactic moments of redemption had occurred. He could predict the cross and point to His blood as the new covenant, but the full theological import, application, and cosmic significance of that finished work could only be explained once it was accomplished.

The Gospels record the performance of redemption; the Epistles record the interpretation of that redemption. Isolating the earthly sayings of Jesus from the Epistles inevitably reduces Christianity from a gospel of substitutionary grace into an unbearable system of moralism. Jesus’ commands - such as cutting off an offending hand (Matthew 5:30) or being perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48) - are designed to expose human inability and drive sinners to the cross. Divorcing those red letters from Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith alone (Romans 3:21–26) leaves believers with impossible demands and no theological mechanism for righteousness.

5. Echoes of Marcionism and Kingdom Reductionism

By severing Jesus from the broader biblical narrative, Red Letterism routinely lapses into a modern variant of Marcionism - the ancient heresy that contrasted the "wrathful, legalistic" God of the Old Testament with the "loving, merciful" Jesus of the New.

Proponents often curate an idealized, therapeutic version of Jesus who cares only about systemic empathy, while ignoring the inconvenient red letters where Christ speaks explicitly about eternal damnation (Matthew 25:41–46), upholds the binding authority of the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 5:17–19), or affirms the historical reality of judgment narratives like Sodom and Gomorrah (Luke 17:29–30).

Furthermore, the attempt to contrast Jesus’ focus on the "Kingdom of God" with Paul’s focus on "justification" and the "cross" creates a false dichotomy.

• The Apostle John rarely employs Synoptic "kingdom" language, choosing instead terms like "eternal life" and "believing in Him" to describe the exact same reality.

• Biblical theologian George Eldon Ladd emphasized that "eternal life" is the future life and power of God's Kingdom breaking into the present age through faith in Christ.

• During His earthly ministry, Jesus intentionally veiled and redefined messianic expectations to prepare His followers for a crucified King. Once that death and resurrection occurred, the Apostles naturally shifted from the veiled terminology of the kingdom to openly proclaiming Christ Himself as Lord and King over all creation (Philippians 2:9–11).

The Whole Counsel of God

Jesus never authorized His followers to edit the canon down to His direct quotations. On the road to Emmaus, He did not point the disciples solely to His previous sermons; rather, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).

Every word of Scripture - from the genealogies of Genesis to the cosmic visions of Revelation, through the Law, the Prophets, the Gospels, and the Epistles - is the inspired, authoritative voice of the Triune God. Red Letterism may market itself as Christocentric, but by rejecting the apostolic foundation Christ established, it ends up with a diminished gospel and a domesticated Savior. We do not honor the King by silencing His authorized ambassadors.