Ya, it's not actually a lisp. I can't find the source but José has stated part of the idea was to give you lisp-like metaprogramming with a non-lisp syntax (sorry, José, if I have mis-quoted).

Even the regular syntax is sort of lispish, though, if you remove the syntactic sugar. It's all macros and datastructres.

    defmodule Foo do
      def bar do
        "baz"
      end
    end

is really:

    defmodule Foo, do: (def bar, do: "baz")

...which is lispish if you squint the right way.