Character Study: The Bible for Real

Jon Fortt and David Tieche
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  • Christianity

Just like real life, the Bible is full of wild characters. Join pastor David Tieche and journalist Jon Fortt, friends since college, as they explore scripture. The two bring deep devotion and just the right amount of irreverence to the stories of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Lot and more.

  1. 6h ago

    Jacob: The Night He Wrestled an Angel and Became Israel

    Jon Fortt and David Tieche come back to Jacob himself — the heel-grabber, caught between the uncle he just escaped and the brother he cheated — for the night he wrestles an angel and walks away with a new name. The circle is nearly complete. Jacob has spent half his life running: he grabbed Esau's heel in the womb, stole the blessing meant for his brother, fled for his life, and met his match in his uncle Laban. Now, in Genesis 31, God says go home: "Return to the land of your fathers, and I will be with you." First he has to get past Laban, who chases him seven days in a fury; it's an Exodus-style pursuit, Pharaoh after his workforce. God intervenes, coming to Laban in a dream: "Be careful not to say anything to Jacob, good or bad," a Hebrew idiom, the hosts explain, that means stand down entirely. They part at a heap of stones with the Mizpah line, "May the Lord watch between me and thee while we are absent one from another." It's a fond church blessing now, but here, Jon says, two men backing away with their hands near their holsters. What God is really doing, they argue, is deconstructing Jacob's whole mode of operation — trickery, craftiness, figuring it out himself: you don't get home the same way you left. Tellingly, the one trick left is Rachel's, not Jacob's. She pockets Laban's household gods and, when he searches, sits on them pleading her period, outfoxing her father. It foreshadows Joseph planting a cup in his brothers' bags, and marks the shift: This time Jacob isn't the deceiver. Then Esau. Genesis 32 opens with angels of God meeting Jacob. "God's army," he says, naming the place Mahanaim — yet he has no peace. He splits his family into two camps so one can escape, sends waves of gifts, works every angle. It's craft, not deceit this time; he's trying to show he's changed. And then he prays, humbled, reminding God of his promises. When he's alone at last at the Jabbok, he experiences a dark night of the soul, stripped of wives, sons, and possessions, and he wrestles a man until daybreak. "I won't let you go unless you bless me." It's a parallel to the blessing he once stole, but clean this time. The man wrenches his hip and renames him. No longer Jacob, "he who supplants," but Israel, "he who strives with God." An adult renaming, like Abram to Abraham or Saul to Paul: rare, and a big deal. Wounded but blessed, Israel names the place Peniel — "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved" — and limps into the dawn. As with Hagar on the run, this is the God who sees, meets us mid-flight, wounds, heals, and won't let go. Along the way: "at last the circle is complete" and Jacob's "Vader"; household gods as a magic eight-ball; laundering a stolen blessing like cartel money; Hips Don't Lie; Elisha's invisible army; and the Final Countdown cued up for Esau. Genesis 31-32. Next time, the final episode of Season 2: Esau. Part of Character Study with Jon Fortt and David Tieche — a walk through the people of Scripture: their flaws, their faith, and what they reveal.

  2. Sep 13

    Laban: The Trickster Who Finally Met His Match

    Jon Fortt and David Tieche stay in the Jacob cycle with Laban — Jacob's uncle and father-in-law, the con man of Haran, and the rare Genesis villain who beats the hero at his own game. The first villain in Genesis isn't a dragon or a Goliath but the snake — not strong, just the craftiest animal in the garden, its weapon the lie. Laban is that craftiness loose inside Abraham's own family, and he isn't Jacob's opposite but his mirror: the trickster who stole a birthright has met the king of tricks — "Loki in the flesh" — and has to taste his own medicine. We met Laban back in Genesis 24, when his family kept angling to keep Abraham's servant around — a little Hotel California, Jon says. Now Jacob arrives with no exit strategy, meets Rachel at the well, and Laban names his price: seven years of labor, an indentured deal building another man's wealth for free. With no dowry — his birthright locked up, Esau still wanting him dead — sweat equity is all Jacob has to trade. Then the wedding-night swap: Jacob wakes married to Leah, not Rachel, owing seven more years. It isn't misdirection, Dave notes — it's a straight-up lie, the serpent's oldest tool, and exactly what Jacob and Rebekah did to blind old Isaac. The hosts sit in how icky it is to trade daughters like pawns — Scripture describes this brokenness, it doesn't prescribe it. From Eden on, the man-and-woman bond is meant to be co-equal, and it's just what the enemy keeps targeting with deception. The household becomes a fertility contest — handmaids, mandrakes — echoing Hagar. But Genesis 29:31 reframes it: "the Lord saw that Leah was hated," and he opened her womb. Jacob favored Rachel; God favored Leah. The same hand shows in Jacob's fortune: he bargains for the speckled animals, and Laban rigs it, walking every speckled beast three days off — taking out the face cards before the deal — while Jacob answers with peeled, streaked branches. But a dream in Genesis 31 sets it straight: God caused the increase. Not the mandrakes, not the branches — God. That's the throughline: trick versus test. Laban only takes, serving no one but himself; God tests to form character and reveal truth in the open. God never takes, Dave says; he only gives. After fourteen years Jacob leaves, and the sisters agree: our father sold us and used up the price. Rachel pockets Laban's household idols and, when he searches, sits on them pleading her period — the trickster outfoxed by his own daughter. They seal a truce at a heap of stones with the Mizpah line, "May the Lord watch between me and thee while we are absent one from another" — a church blessing now, but here the end of a bitter chess match. The deceivers are deceived, and God is quietly at work. Genesis 24 and 29-31. Next time: Jacob wrestles.

  3. Sep 6

    Leah: Unloved, Unchosen, and the God Who Saw Her

    Jon Fortt and David Tieche continue Season 2 with Leah — Jacob's first wife, the older sister nobody chose, whose story runs from a wedding-night deception to a blessing spoken over brides for generations. They start where the text starts, with one loaded, untranslatable description: Leah had "weak eyes," while her sister Rachel "had a lovely figure and was beautiful." Nobody is sure what the idiom means — droopy and bleary, weepy and melancholy, or simply doe-eyed. Jon and Dave walk through the rabbinical traditions that tried to soften it, and note the text gives them no support. What the Bible pointedly does not say is that Leah was any less righteous than Rachel. Cain and Abel, Shem and Ham, Jacob and Esau: those siblings are sorted by character. These two are sorted by looks — and if anything, the story tilts in Leah's favor. Then Laban slips her into the wedding after the feast and the drinking, and Jacob wakes up married to the wrong sister, owing seven more years for the one he wanted. Sit in Leah's position a second, Dave says: unwanted, outshone, handed over because she was the oldest. Then comes the line that reframes everything — "When the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he enabled her to conceive." The names she gives her sons read like a diary of her ache: Reuben ("see, a son"), Simeon ("the Lord heard that I am not loved"), Levi ("now my husband will be attached to me"), Judah ("this time I will praise the Lord"). The hosts trace how closely this rhymes with Hagar in Genesis 16 — the same overlooked woman, the same repeated phrasing, the same God who goes to her and whom she names "the God who sees me." They also slow down on "hated," which some translations use instead of "not loved": a Hebrew idiom for a distant second, the way Jesus talks about hating your parents or serving two masters. Not a blood feud — more, as Jon puts it, the way a kid hates Brussels sprouts. From there the household gets tangled: Bilhah and Zilpah handed to Jacob in a full-blown kid-off, and the strange business of Reuben's mandrakes, an aphrodisiac root Rachel buys from her sister with a night with Jacob. But watch what Leah does. She has every reason to refuse, and she hands them over. The sisters can still talk. When Jacob calls them out to the field to leave Laban, they answer in one voice. That, the hosts argue, is the character study: bitterness never takes root. Leah's confidence rests somewhere other than being chosen — God sees me, even when nobody else does. And the payoff is staggering. The unloved sister becomes the mother of Levi, the priesthood, and Judah, the line of kings that runs to David and to Jesus. By Ruth 4, the elders bless a bride to be "like Rachel and like Leah, who together built the house of Israel." As Dave puts it: there is nothing anyone can take from you that God wants you to have. Along the way: Billie Eilish, Tyra Banks and a run at "Paddan Aram's Next Top Model," Aphrodite as the lady of the mandrake, beauty standards several thousand years before Cosmo, and why Jacob may be Scripture's leading candidate for burnout. Genesis 29-31, with a closing stop in Ruth 4. Next time: Laban. Part of Character Study with Jon Fortt and David Tieche — a walk through the people of Scripture: their flaws, their faith, and what they reveal.

  4. Aug 23

    Rachel: Beauty, Barrenness, and the God Who Remembered Her

    Jon Fortt and David Tieche continue Season 2 with Rachel — Jacob's beloved wife, the beautiful younger sister whose story runs from a well in Haran to a grave outside Bethlehem. They start with the detail the Bible refuses to skip: Rachel was "lovely in form and beautiful." Like Sarah and Rebekah before her, her beauty is placed front and center — while her older sister Leah is remembered for "weak eyes." Jon and Dave sit with the discomfort of that: what does it mean that Scripture keeps naming these women beautiful, and what does it cost Rachel when beauty becomes the thing everyone competes over? Dave brings it into the present — a daughter's insecurity about her own hair, a TikTok culture where beauty alone can build a following. Jon keeps insisting it's a "character study, not a figure study" — but the point stands: beauty is tied to identity from the ancient world to now, and the Bible is honest about it. Rachel is set up as the pretty one, yet the story never makes pretty equal good; Leah, not Rachel, becomes the mother of most of Israel and the line of the Messiah. From there the conversation follows the rivalry that defines Rachel's life. Tricked into marrying Leah first, Jacob works fourteen years for the two sisters. Leah has son after son; Rachel stays barren and desperate — "Give me children, or I'll die." The hosts dig into the strange bargain over Reuben's mandrakes (Genesis 30), Rachel's superstitious shortcuts, and the servant-surrogate playbook she borrows straight from her grandmother-in-law Sarah. The recurring question: is Rachel trusting God, or trying to force his hand? The turn comes in Genesis 30:22 — "God remembered Rachel" — and Joseph is born. Jon and Dave trace how that phrase echoes God remembering Noah and answering Isaac's prayer for Rebekah, and why it matters that Rachel gets no personal promise from God the way the other matriarchs did, yet is still heard. Then the idols. Leaving Laban's house, Rachel steals her father's household gods and hides them — sitting on them and turning away his search with a shrewd excuse. Was it superstition, a mother's fear about protection, or a parting shot at a selfish father who "spent their inheritance"? The hosts leave the question open, and connect this "contraband in a bag" to a test her son Joseph would later spring on his brothers. Finally, legacy. Rachel dies in childbirth near Bethlehem and becomes the matriarch who "weeps for her children" — a line Jeremiah uses at the exile and Matthew echoes at the slaughter of the innocents. Her story is tragic and elevated at once: sorrow, frustration, and blessing all co-mingled. Along the way: Led Zeppelin and "Stairway to Heaven," Crazy Rich Asians, Raquel Welch, Rachel Green, and why two sisters in an impossible situation still manage not to destroy each other — a quiet contrast to Jacob and Esau. Genesis 29–31. Next time: Leah. Part of Character Study with Jon Fortt and David Tieche — a walk through the people of Scripture: their flaws, their faith, and what they reveal.

  5. Aug 16

    Why Would God Bless a Con Man? Jacob's Journey

    His name basically means "trickster." He cons his brother out of a birthright, deceives his blind father for a blessing, and runs for his life. So why does God meet Jacob on the road and hand him the same covenant He gave Abraham? Jon Fortt and David Tieche open the Jacob cycle with two very different reactions to the man — David can't stand him; Jon quietly relates — and work through Genesis 27 and 28 to figure out what a deceiver is doing in the lineage of God. In this conversation: • Why Jacob lives like a street urchin when he actually has a Father • The "deception inception" of Genesis 27 — a lie inside a lie inside a family • How favoritism quietly destroys a family, from Isaac and Rebekah back to Cain and Abel • Esau's bitter cry, and why there could only be one blessing • How God rewrites a broken, man-made code — "you are all firstborn sons" • Jacob's Ladder: the stairway, the angels, and the staggering promise at the top • The altar, the vow, and the first sign the trickster is starting to change It's a portrait of a flawed, grasping man who is always reaching — and a God who comes down to a desert to meet him anyway. Next time: Jacob meets his match in Laban — the trickier trickster — and two very different daughters, Leah and Rachel.

  6. Aug 9

    Is it Ever OK to be Tricky? Rebekah's Initiative and Deception

    Season 2 of Character Study opens with Jon Fortt and Dave Tieche launching the Jacob saga by starting with his mother, Rebekah – the decisive counterweight to a passive Isaac. In Genesis 24, Abraham sends an unnamed servant to his homeland to find Isaac a wife (no Canaanite intermarriage). At a well the servant prays an oddly specific prayer ("prop bets," Jon jokes): let the woman who waters my camels be the one. Rebekah appears and not only gives him a drink but waters all ten camels – roughly 240 pounds of water hauled by hand. The hosts read this as covenant hospitality and, more, character: energetic, decisive, a problem-solver who goes far beyond what's asked. When her family stalls the servant, she cuts through with "I'll go," leaving home and land for an unknown future – an intentional echo of Abraham's own leap of faith. So far: A+. Genesis 25 complicates it. When she's barren, Isaac prays and God answers fast (unlike Abraham and Sarah's decades). Twins "jostle" violently in her womb (a foreboding Hebrew word) and Rebekah inquires of the Lord, marking a praying couple who seek God more actively than the prior generation. God's oracle: two nations, and "the older will serve the younger," reversing ancient birth order. Jon presses the question that anchors the episode: is this passive prophecy, or a blueprint Rebekah is meant to enact? Esau grows into a hairy hunter Isaac adores (for his venison); Jacob stays among the tents, beloved by Rebekah. The hosts sit with the destructiveness of favoritism – Paul and James – and note affinity forms through shared activity: Esau's hunt, Jacob's kitchen. Jon threads a "toxic masculinity" line from Esau to Samson: God challenges the fleshly assumption that strength looks like the hairy hunter rather than nurture, contemplation, and spiritual sensitivity. Then "the trickeration" (Genesis 27): the aging, blind Isaac prepares to bless Esau; Rebekah overhears and dresses Jacob in goatskins ("a Halloween costume of his brother") to steal the blessing by deceiving touch and taste. Jon links it to the camel-watering: same initiative and creativity, "only it's goats, and a costume." Dave's diagnosis is sharp: Rebekah believes God's word but doesn't trust Him. It's control instead of faith, the serpent's old lie that God is holding out. The fallout is ugly: Esau vows fratricide, and Rebekah, ears everywhere, spirits Jacob off to Laban, double-scheming by telling Isaac she can't bear Jacob marrying a Hittite woman. The richest wrestling comes last. Where's the rebuke? Nobody dies, Jacob goes where he must, and Scripture withholds condemnation. The hosts land on the line between clever and duplicitous ("wise as serpents, harmless as doves"), the Joseph refrain "what you meant for evil, God meant for good," and a takeaway that's not judgment but sober self-reflection: God keeps His covenant through deeply flawed people, and families can reverse dysfunction by walking with God instead of seizing control. Next: Jacob on his own, heading, fittingly, to an even craftier trickster.

  7. Aug 2

    The Bible and The Odyssey: How Odysseus is Like Jacob

    Jon Fortt and David Tieche open Season 2 of Character Study, their Scripture-through-people podcast and companion to their dozen-plus YouVersion Bible plans. Season 1 covered the Abraham cycle; Season 2 turns to Jacob. The launch timing coincides with a cultural moment: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is nearing $1 billion at the box office, and its trickster hero Odysseus becomes the hook for exploring Jacob. Jon recounts a comic detour about nearly missing a 70mm IMAX screening while visiting San Francisco — scoring a front-row companion seat blocks from the Metreon so he'd at least know the film's true framing before taking his family to a standard IMAX showing. The heart of the conversation is the trickster archetype and the longing for home. Odysseus, Jacob (whose name means trickster, and who becomes "Israel" after wrestling God), Bugs Bunny, and Ferris Bueller share one pattern: a cunning wanderer using his wits to get home. Why does it resonate across millennia? Because these stories wrestle with deep, universal questions — home, moral responsibility, and encounters with forces greater than ourselves — that a "surface culture" of TikToks and cat videos paves over, even though "we're not surface people." The central contrast: the Greek gods are powerful but mercurial and remote, offering no intimacy. The God of the Bible invites wrestling. Abraham bargains over Sodom; Moses argues God out of destroying Israel; Jacob wrestles at Peniel and won't let go without a blessing. Jon argues the right kind of wrestling — rooted in faith, not rebellion — isn't merely permitted but required; it's a form of intimacy, unlike Cain's obstinacy or Miriam's challenge to authority. Even Jesus wrestles in Gethsemane ("not my will, but yours"). They probe desire and passivity: Jesus repeatedly asks "What do you want?" (blind Bartimaeus, the invalid of 38 years), calling people to risk naming their longing rather than passively accepting their conditions. David confesses this is his own struggle — comfortable with God as King and Creator, but resistant to God as friend and spouse — a passivity that pushes God far away, the opposite of the whole point of the Incarnation. On trickery in Scripture, they separate deception-for-gain (prohibited) from wit that forces intellectual engagement: Jesus' parables and riddles, "render unto Caesar," the woman caught in adultery, the Syrophoenician woman who out-argues him in faith. Righteous "tricking" appears in preserving life against tyrants — the Hebrew midwives, Moses' basket, the nuns in The Sound of Music. The takeaway: The Odyssey is an on-ramp to introduce audiences to Jacob's story and to the radically different, intimate, self-sacrificing God of the Bible — the promise of Season 2.

  8. Mar 24

    Judas and Peter: Betrayal, Denial and the Way Back

    The Character Study podcast episode on Judas, hosted by Jon Fortt and David Tieche, examines the infamous betrayer not as a monster beyond humanity but as  a cautionary mirror — someone whose trajectory any of us could follow in smaller ways. The episode opens by situating Judas among history's great betrayers — Benedict Arnold, Shakespeare's Iago — before drawing a critical distinction between betrayal and denial. Dave offers a war metaphor: denial is retreating from the line in cowardice; betrayal is turning your gun on your own soldiers. Both are failures, but betrayal is an active, hostile act against someone who trusted you. The hosts read from Matthew 26, the Last Supper scene where Jesus identifies  his betrayer, and note that Judas's fall wasn't sudden — Satan entering him represents the culmination of small compromises practiced over months or years. Jon connects this to Genesis 4, where God warns Cain that "sin crouches at the door" before the first murder. Both Cain and Judas faced a choice at the threshold and failed to rule over it. The episode's most provocative moment comes when Dave challenges the conventional reading of Judas's remorse. After the betrayal, Judas returns to the priests, confesses his sin, names Jesus as innocent, and throws back the silver — actions that look remarkably like repentance. Dave argues the priests failed catastrophically here: their one job in the Levitical system was to offer absolution for sin, yet they responded, "What is that to us? That's your responsibility." Crushed under unforgivable guilt with no path to cleansing, Judas hangs himself. Jon contrasts this with Peter's parallel failure. Peter denied Jesus three times, wept bitterly, but stayed among the disciples. In John 21, Jesus finds Peter fishing — physically present with the community but spiritually adrift. Jesus reinstates him with three affirmations to match the three denials, then says "Follow me" — not with your feet this time, but with your whole heart, even unto death. The hosts note that in church tradition, the rooster's crow became a symbol of human frailty and divine restoration — the sound that launched baptismal ceremonies in Florence's Baptistery, where converts identified with Peter's failure before emerging cleansed. The takeaway isn't that Peter was a hero and Judas a villain — both failed miserably. The difference is who they went to afterward. Judas went to corrupt priests; Peter stayed with the disciples and was found by Jesus. The episode argues this is the real lesson: not whether we'll fail, but whether we go to the right source for restoration when we do.

    Judas and Peter: Betrayal, Denial and the Way Back
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Just like real life, the Bible is full of wild characters. Join pastor David Tieche and journalist Jon Fortt, friends since college, as they explore scripture. The two bring deep devotion and just the right amount of irreverence to the stories of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Lot and more.

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