Old Testament God Bad, New Testament God Good?

Key takeaways

• Hebrew has multiple words for deity that get flattened into "God" and "Lord" in English translations. El is the generic/patriarchal high-god term, Elohim is grammatically plural but often used as a singular "concretized abstract plural" (Joel Burnett's phrase), and Eloah is a rare singular form that Elohim is technically built from; not from El.
• Elohim's grammatical number is sometimes genuinely ambiguous, as in 1 Samuel 28 when the medium at Endor sees "Elohim" rising from the ground using a plural participle, and Saul still asks "what does he look like"; leaving open whether she saw one God or several.
• Deuteronomy uses "Elohim" more than any other book (374 times), largely in the generic lowercase sense ("your God" vs. "their God"), which undercuts readings of the Shema as pure monotheism; Deuteronomy 32:8-9 explicitly has the Most High dividing nations among the "sons of God," with Israel getting Adonai as its specific portion.
• Biblical writers coined deliberate insults for rival gods instead of dignifying them with "God": Shikuts ("detestable thing," used for Chemosh and Milcom), Gilulim (likely derived from a word for feces), and Elilim ("worthless things," possibly a wordplay mocking the Mesopotamian god Enlil).
• The "Old Testament God bad, New Testament God good" framing traces back to Marcion and early Gnostic movements, which literally taught that the Hebrew Bible's creator God (equated with Yaltabaoth, the demiurge) was evil and distinct from a superior New Testament God; a framing that inherently casts Jewish people as worshippers of an evil deity.
• The data doesn't support the dichotomy: eternal conscious torment appears only in the New Testament, not the Hebrew Bible, while extensive passages about mercy, care for the poor, and protection of foreigners run throughout the Old Testament; and violent, vengeful God imagery (including a startling reading of Revelation's "sickbed" passage as depicting sexual violence) appears throughout the New Testament too.

Notable moments

• "They're calling them worthless. They know they exist. They're not saying there are no other gods."; on how "idol" language actually works in Hebrew.
• The riff on Gilulim as literal "shit gods," complete with a Dogma movie callback to the literal feces deity.
• "In the Dan McClellan translation... the gods, when the gods caused me to wander"; McClellan explaining how he'd render Genesis 20:13 versus traditional translations.
• The "Old Testament Santa" cartoon (angry Santa with an axe) sparking accusations of anti-Semitism among McClellan's colleagues, used as the episode's launching point.
• "To say that all Jewish people worship an evil God is anti-Semitic... it is a supersessionism that Christianity is better than Judaism."
• "The shift happens before you get the New Testament. It happens when you still have the Hebrew Bible"; locating the real turning point in post-exilic Judaism, not at the biblical seam.
• "If you like the things that Jesus said, then you like the parts of the Hebrew Bible that Jesus liked"; the closing point that most of the Sermon on the Mount directly echoes existing Jewish scripture and tradition.

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