[Zuriel]

I like the old movie “The Ten Commandments”, but the screenwriters liberties taken with the story are numerous.

For example, Moses killed the Egyptian taskmaster, buried the body, and thought no one knew it, until the next day when Hebrew slaves mentioned it to him. He promptly fled Egypt.

In the movie, he is captured shortly after the murder, and sentenced to die by a slow death in the desert.

However, in order to make a 3 hour movie, Moses life up to that event needed some filling in where the scriptures are silent. So making Moses a general in Pharaoh’s army, and an architectual engineer, was as good a guess as anything else the writers could dream up.

[Fiji Hill]

You might recall that at the start of the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, Cecil DeMille appeared on the screen and explained that he would be taking dramatic license to turn the Bible story into a good movie. He probably did that to stave off some of the flak he would get for making changes in the Biblical account.

I also like the 1923 version, which I saw in the theater at the La Brea Tar Pits, accompanied by a veteran theater organist who knew the score by heart. This movie tells the Biblical story and then tells a story showing how the Ten Commandments apply in our modern world.