Posted on 04/10/2006 7:18:20 AM PDT by Watershed
Director Robert Dornhelm is painfully aware that there may be a large audience out there eagerly waiting to hate his new version of "The Ten Commandments," premiering Monday and Tuesday, April 10-11, on ABC.
After all, the story of Moses leading the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt has been told before, and unforgettably, by Hollywood showman Cecil B. DeMille in his ultralavish 1956 production starring Charlton Heston as Moses. Adapted from a variety of religious novels, that earlier version introduced a number of extraneous characters and story lines to the biblical account, yet a fair number of fans today regard DeMille's epic with near-reverence.
(In fact, ABC is hedging its own bets, airing DeMille's version on Saturday, April 15, just days after this new "Commandments.")
Small wonder, then, that Dornhelm initially declined when executive producer Robert Halmi Sr. came to him with the project.
"My first reaction was, 'Why? Why should I be the sacrificial victim who gets slaughtered?' " Dornhelm recalls. "To do a television version of this huge epic (seemed foolhardy). Then I saw (DeMille's version) again and thought it really wouldn't be that hard to top, not to sound immodest. Then, when Mr. Halmi told me he wanted to make it as real as possible, that made it even more interesting."
Halmi's own interest in revisiting the story of the Exodus arose from his conviction that great stories need to be retold for new generations every 35 years or so. "And I wanted to do it as reality," Halmi says. "My characters are real. The location is real. There is as much reality costumewise, researchwise [as we could manage]. I had three different religious advisers, a Muslim, a Christian and a rabbi, going through every word of the script. I wanted to be more true to the story and its characters."
That meant, in turn, examining the principal character of Moses as a human being, not the powerful icon Heston portrayed in DeMille's account. It was Ron Hutchinson's script that helped persuade actor Dougray Scott to sign on as Moses.
"You tell people you're playing Moses in 'The Ten Commandments' and they just go, 'You're what?'" Scott says, laughing. "But I thought the writing was just terrific. I knew Ron Hutchinson from his days as a playwright in London. He was terrific then, and he has become a really good Hollywood scriptwriter. He did a great job with that story, I think, examining it from a point of view that I don't think the audience ever has seen before. Certainly it's very violent, because it really tries to capture that period of history.
"Instead of the iconic figure that Charlton Heston portrayed, you get to see and even kind of smell what Moses must have gone through."
The new version charts mostly familiar territory, especially in its first half, tracing Moses' narrow escape from death as an infant to his encounter with the burning bush and subsequently, his confrontations with the Pharaoh, Ramses (Paul Rhys), leading to the emancipation of the Hebrew slaves and their long, frustrating quest in search of the Promised Land.
Whereas Heston's Moses was a towering, thunder-voiced pillar of authority, Scott's Moses is plagued by self-doubt. He is virtually horrified to learn that God has selected him for such a formidable task, since he is painfully aware of his inner flaws.
"The character starts off at quite an intense pitch and then becomes even more intense," Scott says, "so that was the challenge for me, to see how far we could take this character on his emotional journey, this arc that he goes through and his relationships with everyone: with himself, his family, his tribe and, of course, God. Moses has to deal with his fear, his paranoia, his loneliness, his pain, his anger, his temper and his lack of compromise. He's unrelenting, and a very multilayered human being, albeit an extreme one."
Give Scott full marks for his commitment to the role, since the inner torment of his Moses comes across unrelentingly. The big question, of course, is whether viewers will want to spend three or four hours with such a tortured soul.
If some viewers ultimately find this remake too much of a downer, Dornhelm is OK with that, as long as they come to his "Commandments" with an open mind. It's the zealots who insist DeMille's version is somehow untouchable that make him see red.
"I find that notion offensive, myself," he says. "I was really impressed with [DeMille's version] when I saw it as a young boy, because it was such a wonderful cinematic extravaganza. But it was what it was. The only thing missing was Esther Williams performing one of her water ballets in the Nile. It was a show, first and foremost. And it still works very well for some people who love that spectacle. But to me, if I am talking about important issues like faith, spectacle is the last issue that I would like to deal with.
"Just because there has been this huge, colossal canvas painted with one man's vision doesn't mean we can't retell it. We've been retelling every silly police drama a million times, and nobody questions why. I've been asked this question: Why would you redo such an important masterpiece? And the answer is always, if it's a good story, and there is something we can learn from it, there are always new ways to interpret it and to gain new perspectives on it."
I think that is what I see the new version doesn't have the dramatic effect the one I grew up with has.
And Moses seems to be getting mean as he ages.
Also his Mom just asked "Will your God allow you to see me again"
I relize they worshipped many Gods but didn't they know free will?
Well, Williams might be nuts, a jerk, a "clymer," and politically, I disagree with just about everything he stands for... But I respect him for what he did for Christopher Reeve and his wife. And you might want to check out Williams in some of his "non-nuts" roles, like "Awakenings," where he shows that he actually learned something in the acting classes at Juliard (he and Reeves were friends while students there). He was not "outclassed" by DeNiro, which is saying something.
Hugo Weaving played Agent Smith in The Matrix movies, as well as Elrond in Lord of the Rings.
Terrance Stamp is one of those actors you've seen over and over again, but can't quite place him. He played "Sir Larry" in "Wall Street," he was in "The Phantom Menace" as the Chancelor, One of the 3 badguys from Superman's home planet, Young Guns, and the bad guy (the bad, rich alien) in "Alien Nation."
Mark
It would be extremely difficult for the honest skeptic to dispute the overwhelming archeological support for the historical accuracy of both the Old and New Testaments. Numerous items discussed in the Bible such as nations, important people, customary practices, etc. have been repeatedly verified by archeological evidence (and never once refuted). Bible critics often have been embarrassed by discoveries that collaborated Bible accounts they had previously deemed to be myth, such as the existence of the Hittites, King David, and Pontius Pilate, just to name a few.
Did you know that there exists on display in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo, a stela from Pharaoh Merenptah (13th son of Rameses II), distinctive in that it includes a reference to the "tribe" of Israel. The mummy of Pharaoh Merenptah (also on display) is distinctive in that the analysis of the salts found in the canopic lungs of the mummy imply that he apparently drowned in salt water.
The objects are listed in the Official Catalogue of the Egyptian Museum as item 212 in room 13 (ground floor).
That they've found chariot wheels at the bottom of the Red Sea.
When compared against secular accounts of history, the Bible always demonstrates amazing superiority. The noted biblical scholar R.D. Wilson, who was fluent in 45 ancient languages and dialects, meticulously analyzed 29 kings from 10 different nations, each of which had corroborating archeological artifacts. Each king was mentioned in the Bible as well as documented by secular historians, thus offering a means of comparison. Wilson showed that the names as recorded in the Bible matched the artifacts perfectly, down to the last jot and tittle! The Bible was also completely accurate in its chronological order of the kings. On the other hand, Wilson showed that the secular accounts were often inaccurate and unreliable. Famous historians such as the Librarian of Alexandria, Ptolemy, and Herodotus failed to document the names correctly, almost always misspelling their names. In many cases the names were barely recognizable when compared to its respective artifact or monument, and sometimes required other evidence to extrapolate the reference.1Did you know that Sir William Ramsey, probably greatest archaeologist of the 19th century (if not the 20th), a professed atheist, went to Asia Minor to debunk the books of Luke and Acts of the Apostles. To his chagrin, dig after dig the evidence without fail supported Luke's accounts. Governors mentioned by Luke that many historians never believe existed were confirmed by the evidence excavated by Ramsay's archeological team. Without a single error, Luke was accurate in naming 32 countries, 54 cities, and 9 islands. Ramsay became so overwhelmed with the evidence he eventually converted to Christianity. Ramsay finally had this to say:
I began with a mind unfavorable to it...but more recently I found myself brought into contact with the Book of Acts as an authority for the topography, antiquities, and society of Asia Minor. It was gradually borne upon me that in various details the narrative showed marvelous truth.2Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy...this author should be placed along with the very greatest historians.3
That last bit about W.M. Ramsay isn't particularly germane to the issue with respct to the account of Exodus. However, it is relevent in the sense that the integrity and veracity of accounts rendered in the Scriptures have not only been proven accurate time and time again, but breathtakingly so. Only a fool would proclaim lack of evidence as being evidence of lack. As if.
1. Wilson, R.D. Ph.D., D.D., A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament - 1st Edition, (Philadelphia, The Sunday School Times Co., 1926)
2. Ramsay, William M., St. Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen - 10th Ed., (London, Hodder and Stoughton, MCMVII), pg 8
3. Ramsay, William M., The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), pg 222
I hate to burst your bubble, but Heston's version WAS a remake.
Albeit DeMille made the other one, but...
I've already been informed of that.
I wasn't around in 1923 for the original.
Another case in point is the biblical record of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their subsequent 40-year wandering in the Sinai wilderness. According to census figures in the book of Numbers, the Israelite population would have been between 2.5 to 3 million people, all of whom died in the wilderness for their disobedience, yet extensive archaeological work by Israeli archaeologist Eliezer Oren over a period of 10 years "failed to provide a single shred of evidence that the biblical account of the Exodus from Egypt ever happened" (Barry Brown, "Israeli Archaeologist Reports No Evidence to Back Exodus Story," News Toronto Bureau, Feb. 27, 1988). Oren reported that although he found papyrus notes that reported the sighting of two runaway slaves, no records were found that mentioned a horde of millions: "They were spotted and the biblical account of 2.5 million people with 600,000 of military age weren't?" Oren asked in a speech at the Royal Ontario Museum. That is certainly a legitimate question. Up to 3 million Israelites camped in a wilderness for 40 years, but no traces of their camps, burials, and millions of animal sacrifices could be found in ten years of excavations. This may be an argument from silence, but it is a silence that screams.
I note that your references are almost a hundred years old. Sadly out of date.
So a pharoahs lungs have salt water "as if he had drowned" Could it be salt water was usesd in the embalming process? Even if he had drowned there is no way to know the circumstances. Same with chariot wheels in the Red Sea (see my previous post on the error in translation) the hebrews were supposed to have fled through the REED sea.
The Israel stela mentions that the people were wiped out. It says nothing about any "exodus"
No, no, my favorite scene is where Nefreteri says, "Moses, Moses, you mad impetuous fool!" or something like that.
That having been said, after I saw the Ten Commandments as a young teenager (I'm, er, not young and not a teenager anymore) I was so awed thinking about God, who He is and His power, I actually fell on my face in prayer that night. So it musta been pretty okay! :-D
The other species of 'secundum quid' you're guilty of is argumentum ad novitatem. Which succinctly put: something newer is better than something older.
Nevertheless, and that notwithstanding, who am I to argue with Julius Wellhausen, Volkmar Fritz (director of the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem), Robert Coote (San Francisco Theological Seminary), Niels Peter Lemche (University of Copenhagen), Israel Finklestein (Tel Aviv University), William Dever of the University of Arizona? William Foxwell Albright (professor of Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins University) and G. Ernest Wright are a bunch of loons.
Much better to listen to a voice of reason, such as Rabbi David Wolpe, senior rabbi of Sinai Temple in the "fashionable" Westwood district. In a series of sermons during Passover he told his congregations as much. The sermons evoked a firestorm of criticism from area Jews, dominating the covers of local Jewish weeklies for several weeks and spilling over onto the front page of the Los Angeles Times. In response, "Should we amend it to read, 'I am the Lord your G-d who may or may not have taken you out of the land of Egypt'?" asked six Orthodox rabbis (Orthodox Rabbinical Council of California) who took out a half-page ad in the Los Angeles Times in response to Wolpe's sermons.
It is hard to understand the impulse that would drive one to deliver such a message with apparent pride. While I believe that God expects us to study His world and even the Torah scientifically, I also think that He requires us to maintain some humility in the face of more than 3,300 years of faith. The notion that archaeology's failure to turn up signs of the Exodus is conclusive proof that it never happened is the ultimate in human hubris. - Rabbi Ronald Price (executive VP of the Union for Traditional Judaism)Consider this: its utterly unrealistic to believe a Semitic-speaking foreigner like Joseph, and later Moses, could have risen to the highest levels of Egyptian government. And yet, an Egyptian tomb was discovered in the late 1980's in Sakkara, Egypt. It contains the coffin of a Semite named "Aper-el" along with the coffins of his wife and children. His titles included "vizier," "mayor of the city," "judge," "father of god," "child of the nursery."
Even though Sakkara has been excavated and explored for more than a century, if such a high-ranking official as Vizier Aper-el was completely unknown to modern scholarship until the late 1980s, despite the fact that he lived in one of the better documented periods of Egyptian history (fourteenth century), arguably buried in the most excavated site in Egypt, Biblical minimalists have every right to demand direct archaeological evidence for Joseph (if he was indeed an bona fide historical figure).
The foregoing is even more stark when taken in context of extra-biblical sources such as The Wisdom of Merikare and the Prophecy of Neferti (ancient Egyptian documents), that reported influxes of thousands of Semites into the Nile Delta between 2200 and 2000 B.C. Similar patterns of settlement recurred over the next thousand years, creating a "significant Asiatic population" in the Delta region.
For several periods in its history, Egypt's empire expanded into surrounding regions, including Canaan. During these times, young men and boys from those provinces were brought to Egypt to be trained in the pharaoh's ways and later sent back home as regional rulers who were loyal to the pharaoh. Studies on foreign children reared in the pharaoh's nurseries during the eighteenth dynasty show that some of these children became court officials, and that a few eventually attained high government posts. Clearly, without clear cut evidence of Jacob and Moses, the Biblical stories are nothing more than lies (else the evidence would be right there for all to examine).
The story is just simply too fantastic: ten plagues, a million-plus runaway slaves traversing a desert, the miracles - clearly all this belongs in the realm of fable and legend. How in the world could the children of Israel escape from Egypt and the pharaoh's army be destroyed without getting recorded in Egyptian annals?
An Egyptian document called Leiden Papyrus 348 contains orders to "distribute grain rations to the soldiers and to the 'Apiru who transport stones to the great pylon of Rames[s]es." Nobody in their right mind would correlate that to Ex 1:11 (that is quite simply too preposterous and a lofty flight of fancy). 'Apiru is believed by some scholars to refer to the Hebrews, the 'Ibri. That there's intense debate concerning to whom the reference of the Apiru makes merely strengthens the Biblical minimalist position. In the contemporary world there's overwhelming evidence beyond any debate, doubt, or dispute regarding the Law of Evolution. There's no research needing to be done, there's no missing pieces to the puzzle, its a foregone fact. Contrast that with the Fable of Exodus, having no evidence and a great deal of debate. In fact these clowns are holding their breath for some future discovery of an inscription that could link Apiru to the Hebrews. Yeah, as if, that document would prove to be the first direct extrabiblical reference to the children of Israel in slavery in Egypt. Not.
It really stretches incredulity that 600,000 men plus women and children could have survived as a people in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years. Forget Hebrew University professor Abraham Malamat, who points out that the Bible often refers to 600 and its multiples, as well as 1,000 and its multiples, typologically in order to convey the idea of a large military unit. The issue of Exodus 12:37 is not an interpretive one. It means nothing that the Hebrew word eleph can be translated 'thousand,' but it is also rendered in the Bible as 'clans' and 'military units.' It is thought that 20,000 were in the entire Egyptian army at the height of Egypt's empire. Scripture claims at the battle of Ai in Joshua 7, there was a severe military setback when 36 troops were killed. No way can that be right, given an army of 600,000, that wouldn't be a big setback (unless they mislplaced the decimal point by several orders of magnitude).
The Merneptah Stele is a seven-foot high, black granite stone contains a victory hymn of Pharaoh Merneptah, which proclaims, "The Canaan is plundered with every hardship. / Ashkelon is taken, Gezer is captured, / [and] Yano'am reduced to nothing. / Israel is laid waste, his seed is no more." Anybody who reads anything into the fact that a pharaoh considered Israel's defeat worth inscribing on stone, and that a people called Israel lived in Canaan by that time, is delusional. Pictorial carvings on a temple wall in Luxor, Egypt, which Egyptologist Frank Yurco believes depict the destruction of Ashkelon, Gezer, Yano'am, and the Israelites mentioned in the Merneptah Stele are also a non-issue (merely the flighty imagination of some guy at that time).
The biblical record, when you give it a fair test, fits its world and the world fits it. When scholars say such things as 'We have no evidence,' that merely means we do not know. Negative evidence is no evidence. It only takes one fool with a spade to dig up a new inscription and, whoosh!, that 'no evidence' disappears. I'm just amazed over the 40 years I've been in this business how we keep blundering into things you didn't expect that tie in with the Scriptures. If something doesn't seem to fit, the answer is to wait and see, not out of cowardice, not out of escapism, but just to see what happens when you have fuller evidence." - Kenneth Kitchen (Personal and Brunner Professor Emeritus of Egyptology and Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Oriental Studies, University of Liverpool, England)Sounds to me like somebody's whistling in the wind, don't ya think?
Does the collective memory of the Jewish people (and the embrace of that memory by two other major Western religions) not figure convincingly in the calculus of truth? [The ruth of the Exodus] was not questioned then - are speculations three thousand years later more convincing? - Orthodox Rabbinical Council of CaliforniaDo you see the fallacy of argumentum ad antiquitatem here? I hope so. Because now, you can accuse me of "the red herring" fallacy. However, that is now inconsequential, in that during debate, whomever opens the door suffers the monster that walks through it. What I expect none the less from you would be an ad hoc assertion to shore up your assertion (combined with an attempt to shift the meaning of words used in your original assertion). You may even attempt to change your syllogism entirely, but one constant is that your presupposition and conclusion will remain the same. I'll be absolutely astonished if that's not the case.
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