http://www.christianpost.com/news/was-the-historical-samson-black-91661/
Was the Historical Samson Black?
EXCERPT:
As millions tuned in to the second part of the miniseries "The Bible" on The History Channel on Sunday night, some were intrigued by the casting choice for one of the characters.
Samson, the Ancient Near East judge known for superhuman strength and long hair, was portrayed by a black actor, leading many online to ponder aloud what Samson must have looked like. On the discussion board for Internet Movie Database entry for "The Bible," someone posted the question and got five pages worth of responses for and against the idea.
On Yahoo Answers, at least three people posted questions pertaining to Samson's race in response to the episode, with a combined amount of over 20 responses.
The Christian Post asked its Facebook fans what they thought of Samson and received over 400 comments, many addressing the question as to whether or not Samson really looked that way.
Dr. Andrew Vaughn, executive director of the American School for Oriental Research located at Boston University and an expert in the Hebrew Bible, told The Christian Post that while Samson was probably not black it is a minor issue. "Historically, the Bible describes Samson's parents as Israelites from the tribe of Dan, so it is unlikely that the historical Samson would have been so dark skinned. However, for the purposes of the mini-series, I did not find the skin color to be important," said Vaughn.
Presumably brown skinned of some hue or other, like everyone else in that part of the ancient world at that time. As such, all the white guys running around portraying various Bible characters aren't any better. Nor is that fact that they're all speaking English, some with American accents, some British, and some Scottish (like Noah).
It's basically a sequence of Bible stories, with non-homogeneous stand-in actors playing the parts. No matter how you slice it, you have to get past the language/race issues of the actors, since the goal was apparently to convey the stories in an interesting way, rather than to display an attempt at complete historical accuracy. In the latter case, we'd be watching short little brown people jabbering in unintelligible ancient languages, in which case - who would watch that?
While I find it orders of magnitude easier to learn new computer languages than the inside out, upside down, cryptic language used in the bible I was hoping this series would be enlightening. I can barely keep all my 20 plus aunts and uncles straight but all the “begotting” leaves me at a loss to name the players without a program.
However, as I believe I detected one error, I am now suspicious of the shows accuracy.
In the show Delilah was shown to be cutting Samson’s hair but I was always told: Delilah called in a co-conspirator to shave off the seven braids of his hair.
Now that may be nit picking but when we are asked to believe the unbelievable it does not help to have errors.
bttt
It wasn't even close to being accurate and anything associated with Joel Ostean, I should have known, would be close to blaspheme. Ninja angels? Give me a break.
I stopped watching during episode 1 when the men of Sodom and Gomorrha were portrayed as thugs only out to hurt people instead of homosexual rapists.
Meh...but hey, it's a mini-series so technically anything goes! But it's unfortunate that millions of people are going to watch this and BELIEVE it's the THE bible.