This post contains Claude.ai’s summary of the transcript of the YouTube “conversation” Biblical Idols with Dan McClellan at the Bible & Archaeology channel. The conversation is hosted by Dr. Jordan Jones and includes Dr. Bob Cargill. The transcript is in the Jordan Jones directory in Dropbox.
[But first, my idea when listening to the conversation was that there is a message in the Golden Calf story when Arron made the calf, Moses was very angry, but Arron was not punished and later rewarded for his other works. Perhaps Moses was upset that the people did not have faith in the deity without a symbolic figure, but understood why Arron did it, as such symbols were common.]
Here’s a summary of the conversation between Dr. Jordan Jones (host), Dr. Bob Cargill, and Dr. Dan McClellan on the topic of biblical idols:
Overview
The episode of the Bible and Archaeology podcast brings together Dan McClellan — scholar, podcaster (Data Over Dogma), and author — to discuss what the Hebrew Bible actually means by “idols,” how that meaning shifted over time, and what continuities exist between ancient divine images and modern religious practice.
Defining the “Idol” — McClellan’s Core Framework
McClellan opens by pushing back against the popular reduction of idols to mere “objects of worship.” For him, the more accurate — and less polemically loaded — term is divine image: an object whose central function is to manifest the presence of the deity, enabling a range of activities including divination, healing, and consultation, not just liturgical worship. The Hebrew Bible’s dismissive portrayal of idols as “just things to be worshipped” is itself, he argues, a polemical caricature designed to delegitimize rival practices.
His preferred framework is renegotiation: rather than a clean break from idolatry, Israelite religion underwent an ongoing negotiation about which material media were acceptable vehicles for divine presence and which were not. The shift was from physical divine images toward textual ones — most visibly, the Torah.
Continuity into Later Religion
McClellan draws provocative parallels between ancient divine images and later religious practices:
- Christian icons, relics, and crucifixes function identically to ancient divine images, making the deity immanently present.
- The Bible itself — especially in Protestant traditions — has taken on the role of a divine image. The insistence on inerrancy and inspiration is, McClellan argues, essentially everything-but-saying the book is God.
- Mezuzot and Tefillin parallel the function of ancient standing stones and sacred enclosures: they bring the divine name physically near, demarcate sacred space, and provide apotropaic protection.
- The Ketef Hinnom silver scrolls (the oldest known biblical text) were amulets bearing the divine name — their function, McClellan argues, parallels the “activation” rituals used in Mesopotamia and Egypt to bring divine presence into an idol.
Jesus as Divine Image
In what he acknowledges as his most socially controversial claim, McClellan argues that Jesus functions as a divine image in early Christianity. Drawing on the cognitive science of religion and Thorkeld Jacobsen’s work on the paradox of the idol (“is and is not the deity”), McClellan sees the same conceptual structure at work in early Christology: Jesus both is and is not God. This framework, he notes, received serious professional uptake but predictable hostility on social media.
The Golden Calf (Exodus 32)
McClellan reads the Golden Calf narrative as a polemical story — written to delegitimize what was likely considered normative Israelite religion. The bull/calf imagery was widespread and closely associated with Adonai as a storm and patriarchal deity in Northwest Semitic tradition. He suggests the calf may have functioned as a pedestal animal (the deity stands atop it) or as the divine image itself.
The key interpretive move: the Ark of the Covenant, introduced shortly after in the narrative, does everything a divine image does — it goes to war, speaks for the deity, defeats rival divine images (notably the episode with Dagon). The Exodus narrative, McClellan proposes, is distinguishing appropriate from inappropriate divine images, not rejecting divine images altogether.
He also floats a theory — still in development — that the tablets of the law placed inside the Ark are functioning as miniature standing stones (stelae), the standard divine image of the region, housed within what may be a shrine model (like the Taanach cult stand he displays). The law written on tablets, placed inside an ark, may be doing exactly what Mesopotamian and Egyptian shrine models did.
Jordan Jones adds a related observation: the people’s cry that Moses has gone missing before demanding the calf suggests Moses himself may have been functioning as a mediator of divine presence — a role then transferred to the calf. McClellan agrees, noting Moses’s “horns of light” (Exodus 34) and God’s declaration in Exodus 7 that Moses would be “a god to Pharaoh,” as well as the Angel of the Lord’s similar paradox of being and not being the deity.
The Nehushtan (Numbers 21)
The bronze serpent that Moses makes to heal snakebite victims — later placed in the Temple, where it remained until Hezekiah’s reforms — gets a pass in the text, McClellan argues, because God commanded it. This is a recurring pattern: priesthood, divination, and healing objects that would otherwise be classified as idolatry are legitimized when attributed to divine command. The story in Numbers was likely constructed to rationalize a preexisting cultic object (a bronze serpent associated with healing, common in ancient West Asian religion) rather than preserving historical memory.
Hezekiah, Josiah, and the Reforms
McClellan is skeptical about how much of the Deuteronomistic reform narrative reflects genuine history versus literary construction. He notes:
- The Arad temple’s cultic objects (standing stone, incense altars) were carefully laid down and buried, not smashed — suggesting concealment from Sennacherib rather than deliberate Hezekianic reform.
- Hezekiah may have received retroactive credit for a de facto centralization of worship caused by Sennacherib’s military destruction of peripheral cultic sites.
- Josiah’s “discovery” of Deuteronomy is, in McClellan’s view, another convenient rationalization — finding a text that legitimizes the reforms already underway or already completed.
- Cargill’s theory that the Ark may have been deliberately destroyed by Hezekiah — and the fact later edited out — fits McClellan’s broader framework: once the Temple exists, the Ark becomes theologically redundant and potentially problematic.
The Deuteronomistic Lens and Intra-Biblical Polemic
McClellan cautions that virtually everything about early Israelite religion reaches us through a Deuteronomistic editorial lens, making it nearly impossible to reconstruct pre-Deuteronomistic attitudes without that filter. He notes the existence of competing priestly factions (the Komer vs. Levitical/Aaronic priesthood) and the probability of priestesses associated with Asherah worship. Epigraphic evidence — the Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom inscriptions referencing “Adonai and his Asherah,” and the Lachish ewer with a tree flanked by ibexes resembling early menorah iconography — supports the view that Asherah veneration was widespread and that the menorah itself may be a domesticated survival of Asherah symbolism.
Paul and New Testament Idol Polemics
McClellan notes that Paul’s own treatment of idols is situationally inconsistent: in one breath, “an idol is nothing in the world” (1 Cor. 8:4); in another, there are real demons being indexed by idols. He highlights Paul’s selective quotation of Deuteronomy 32:17 — citing only the line that calls the gods shedim (demons), but omitting the next line that calls them elohim (gods they did not know). This editorial selectivity, for McClellan, illustrates his central thesis: the negotiation is always driven by present needs, not by the text itself.
Closing Thesis: No One Reads the Bible Downstream
McClellan’s overarching argument — previewing his forthcoming trade book The Bible Says So — is that no one’s beliefs actually follow from the biblical text. It is always a feedback loop, with contemporary needs and goals driving which texts get foregrounded, which get rationalized away, and how the tradition gets renegotiated. This process, he emphasizes, is not something external readers do to the Bible — it is something the biblical authors themselves were already doing within the text. The assumption of univocality (that the Bible speaks with one voice) is, he concludes, an unexamined presupposition that the text itself consistently subverts.
