A Passionate Moses

A spiffy new remake of The Ten Commandments will air on ABC-TV April 10 and 11. This year, Easter and Passover fall during the same week, and both religious feasts are rooted in the story of the Israel’s Exodus from Egypt. This timing makes this made-for-TV movie timely watching for both Christians and Jews.

Dougray Scott (Ever After) plays a thoroughly conflicted Moses. He is confused by his double identity: Egyptian prince and son of Hebrew slaves. He is torn between God’s call to lead his people through the desert and his responsibility as husband and father. He is torn between the demands of leadership and the simple pastoral life he learned from his father-in-law Jethro.

Scott’s emotional range is enormous: shouting, swooning, blubbering, ripping his robes. When he hears God speak in his inner voice, he holds his head like a figure from an aspirin commercial or presses his palm to his brow like Johnny Carson’s Great Carnac.

But hey, this is supposed to be dramatic stuff.

The best performance is turned in by Omar Sharif (Dr. Zhivago) as Moses’ father-in-law Jethro. He is confidently cheeky, free with unsolicited advice, and underneath his crusty exterior, you can tell he is kind, kind, kind.

Naveen Andrews (Bride and Prejudice) portrays Menerith, Moses’ Egyptian stepbrother. His performance is rock solid. And his affection for Moses is palpable, and his frustration with Pharaoh Ramses’ policies simmers just below the surface.

As Ramses, Paul Rhys (Vincent and Theo) gets to recapitulate Yul Brynner’s famous shaved head role. He gets to wear very cool Egyptian eye-makeup. But he unfortunately brings to the role a mincing vanity that seems like a campy import from La Cage aux Folles.

Missing the irony

Any producer runs a risk when trying to turn up the drama quotient of an already dramatic story. The biblical drama of the Exodus is gripping enough without some of the dramatic enhancements added in this production.

According to Exodus, the “Pharaoh who knew not Joseph” saw the demographic threat of the exploding Israelite population. “The more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites” (Exodus 1:12). He foresaw a slave revolt and formulated the first zero population growth policy. He tried to persuade the Hebrew midwives to kill all the boy babies who were born under their care. When they refused, he told his own people to throw all the male Israelite babies into the Nile.

But the parents of the boy who would be Moses hid him for three months, then devised their own version of throwing him into the Nile—floating him on the water in a papyrus basket plastered with bitumen and pitch. (Get the irony?)

That wasn’t dramatic enough for the producers of The Ten Commandments. So they gave Pharaoh a nightmare and invented a seer who froths at the mouth (gross!) while interpreting the dream. The seer predicts that a male child born to the Israelites will rise up and lead a revolt, so Pharaoh commands his soldiers to go kill all the baby boys among the Hebrews. And so the film substitutes a fortuneteller in a twitching fit for the real Pharaoh’s demographic dread, and it substitutes menacing swords for drowning. Thus it misses out on both the king’s political shrewdness and Jochabed’s ironic method of saving her child.

Time after time, the film omits telling detail from the dramatic biblical original in order to invent new (and sometimes interesting) conflicts. Fortunately, even though the film misses the irony of Jochabed’s saving Moses by putting him in the Nile, it nicely points up the ironic justice in God’s killing the first born of all Egypt as a kind of eye-for-an-eye payback for Pharaoh’s murdering Israel’s male infants.

Murder. Slaughter. Carnage. There’s no shortage of bloody violence in this film. But that is true to Scripture. When Moses comes down from the mountain carrying the law on two tables of stone, he finds the people have persuaded his brother to let them have an idol to worship. They are, says the NRSV, “running wild.”

To teach them an indelible lesson, Moses has the Levites kill about 3000 people. He instructs the Levites: “Each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor” (32:27). It is one of the most painful passages in Exodus. And the slaughter is one of the most difficult scenes in the movie. Yet it underscores the cost of disobedience.

Severe religion

The film is faithful to the supernatural character of the story. And that makes for good special effects. God speaks to Moses from a burning bush. The Israelite refugees are preceded by a pillar of cloud (or is that just a really big dust devil?). The Red Sea is parted so that there is a churning wall of water on either side of the Israelites’ path. The ten commandments appear on the stone tablets as if etched by fire. And so forth.

The film is also faithful to key theological points. It preserves a strong emphasis on the priority of God’s action—his call to Moses, his will that brings devastating plagues, his power over Pharaoh’s army. Moses’ stepbrother from the house of Pharaoh’s daughter at one point asks, “Have you found the God you were looking for?” And Moses replies, “He found me. … We argue sometimes, but he always wins.”

The filmmakers have tried to update the language of covenant by using the word “bargain.” Moses tells the people, “God has made a bargain with us. Do you accept God’s bargain?” he asks. The word “bargain” is misleading, because it suggests two equal parties have formed an agreement. But that weakness is more than compensated for when Moses metes out the punishments for “breaking God’s bargain.” It’s clear that God is in charge.

The film presents the serious character of obedience to God’s law. People who commit adultery must die. People who commit perjury must die. Not only are the wicked punished, but God promises to punish their children and grandchildren as well. This is severe religion. It’s not very PC. And though it is discomfiting, it is faithful to the book of Exodus.

War is another very un-PC aspect of this story. When two men are killed by Amalekites, Moses decides to attack an entire Amalekite city. He arms the Israelite men with weapons recovered from dead Egyptians and gets them trained. But a young man named Joshua sits it out. Joshua tells Moses that since God had delivered them miraculously from Egypt and again at the Red Sea, it would show a lack of faith in God to take up arms now. Moses will have none of it, argues vehemently with Joshua, then attacks him physically. Joshua is provoked to fight back, and he is won over to the Lord of Armies. Thus he becomes the man who in the future “fit the battle of Jericho.” Joshua’s conversion to militancy sets the tone for Israel’s brutal conquest of Canaan.

The film has much to commend it. Enjoy the colorful characters, the dancing, and the music. Enjoy the Moroccan scenery and the special effects. Enjoy the acting and the Egyptians’ cool eye makeup. But be sure to reread the book of Exodus, just so you know what you’re missing.

Note to families: This film depicts a number of things as described in the biblical account, including adultery, theft, murder and other sins prohibited by The Ten Commandments. They are, however, pretty tastefully handled. In the adultery, for example, we do not see any more than passionate kissing and embracing.