Joshua

Joshua keeps returning on the show because it concentrates several of the Bible’s hardest problems into one book: conquest, genocide, land claims, miracle warfare, and the use of divine mandate to justify totalizing violence. The hosts revisit it when readers want to know whether Jericho fell as described, whether the conquest happened historically, or how later interpreters keep trying to soften language that the text itself presents as annihilatory.

That makes Joshua central to Data Over Dogma’s recurring interest in ideology and reception history. On the show it often functions less as historical reporting than as a theological and political vision of possession, memory, and purification, one that later communities inherited, defended, and repurposed even when the book’s own contradictions make its propagandistic edges hard to miss.