[xwkd]

Produced by a Mormon whose dissertation was supervised by an atheist Professor of the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion. This may be a data point in favor of the trustworthiness of the podcast, or it may be an argument against, depending on your own personal point of view.

[stvltvs]

As long as the approach is rigorous scholarship in good faith (is it?), it shouldn't matter too much.

[o11c]

I can't speak for the particular material referenced, but ... good faith is a lot to ask for in religious meta-literature. So often I see arguments based on the following:

* Start by assuming all the weird stuff didn't actually happen. We all know that fiction is stranger than truth.

* Next, assume it's impossible to foretell the future (in particular, "people who hate each other will start a war" can obviously only have been written after the fact), so clearly the author lied about the date they wrote it. Also, assume that nobody ever updated the grammar (due to linguistic drift) while copying it, and that the oldest surviving copy.

* Finally, assume that all previous translations were made by utter imbeciles and reject the wording they used, even if that means picking words that mean something completely unrelated to the original. You can always just assume that the words were a typo or something, and not a blatant reference to other books on the same topic.

The most basic sign of rigorous scholarship is saying "well, maybe" a lot, with just an occasional "but definitely not that".