I’ve listened to Matt Whitman’s Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast since it began in October 2019. The premise of the show is straightforward: Discuss the Bible every weekday for about 10 minutes. However, this show is rather special in its approach and is worth your time to check out.
The beauty of this show is that it takes the format of something like Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History but breaks it up into daily, digestible pieces that naturally build on each other. I like the pedagogy of this, and Matt does an exceptional job using this particular medium and episode format to provide entertaining through-lines in the narrative. However, like Hardcore History, the depth of content is the true reason to check this show out.
Matt’s academic background prior to attending seminary was as a history professor. He has a strong understanding of how history weaves a narrative, how to interpret documents and alternative sources of information, and additionally has a straightforward way of explaining literary elements. Yet, he doesn’t come to this project as a pure expert. He does his research for each episode, and intentionally moves slowly through certain verses to make sure he groks everything that is going on and communicates it clearly.
Plus, his time as a pastor (and a dad) shows. He rather quickly found a useful format of shaggy dog story followed by a “likewise…”
The show began by diving into the book of Matthew. I don’t think Matt knew exactly what he was getting into, nor how long “finishing” the book would take. It ended up taking just a bit over 3 years and exactly 800 episodes, deliberately making our way through that book, looking back into the Old Testament and extra-biblical resources as needed. The result is fantastic, but may be too much of a commitment for a new listener.
Anticipating this to some extent, he started out 2023 by spending 1 episode on each book of the Bible. That took only about 3 months, and is a great way to get into Matt’s style. Of course those episodes are dense by nature, but he does a great job pointing out how they connect to each other in a way I’d never learned.
His most recent series is on the book of Esther. This is a book I knew absolutely nothing about (and given three similarly-named women, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you which was actually a book of the Bible.) This is where Matt began fully flexing his history and literary muscles. He spent the first couple months just diving into the background information of the Jewish people that leads us to the status of Persia in the book as we get started. It was an excellent walkthrough that I thoroughly enjoyed, but is not required for diving into Esther itself.
I admire how thoughtful Matt is while handling the project. He cares immensely about doing this right, but also about staying true to the premise of it being digestible, daily, and around 10 minutes. Given how low of a barrier to entry it presents, I recommend jumping into whichever of the three series above most interests you—he titles the episodes and numbers them in a way that makes it all easy to navigate—and see what you think.