God's Stories #6: Moses
God's Stories #6: Moses
Notes on miracles, sacrificial rituals, the psychology of ex-slaves, tension between the female in-laws, and more in this Arabic adaptation of the biblical story.
Some quick notes on Moses, the sixth film in ‘God’s Stories’, the nine-movie series of Arabic films based on the Old Testament:
The film has a framing device, in which Moses tells his life story to his adult sons Gershom and Eliezer shortly before he goes up Mount Nebo to die. I can’t recall offhand if I have ever seen Moses’ sons as adults in a movie before, but either way, this framing device ties into a recurring theme in ‘God’s Stories’, which is the passing of faith and family traditions from one generation to the next. Think of how a big chunk of The Sin consisted of Adam and Eve telling their story to Cain and Abel, or how Isaac offered advice to both his son and his grandson in Joseph. Moses talking to his adult sons fits with that.
Pharaoh’s daughter recognizes that Moses is Hebrew because the baby is circumcised. This fits with how other films produced by Robert Savo—such as The Promise, about Abraham, or The Savior, about Jesus—have highlighted the role that circumcision played in those stories.
Accordingly, the Moses of this story grows up knowing he is Hebrew, like the Moses played by Ben Kingsley in The Bible Collection’s Moses (dir. Roger Young, 1995). Moses also tells his sons he was quite conscious of being “a man hung between two peoples” who was “struggling with two identities”.
The Egyptian taskmaster threatens to kill Moses before Moses kills him, which may or may not mitigate Moses’ guilt. (Can he claim he did it in self-defense?) Moses’ sons ask him if he still feels shame for committing the murder, and one of his sons speculates that killing the taskmaster might have been for the greater good, because it put Moses on his current path and helped lead to the salvation of the Hebrews—but Moses says there is no good in killing.
Characters often express curiosity about things that other people have seen and places that other people have been. Moses’ sons say they want to see Egypt for themselves, but Moses says he’s never going back. Moses takes Aaron to see the bush that was “burning” when God spoke to him—it’s not burning now—and both men take their sandals off because they are standing on holy ground, but Aaron walks up to the bush and touches it, and gets pricked by a thorn. Pharaoh says he wants to send someone to Goshen to see why the Hebrew babies survived the plague of the firstborn. And, after Moses and his wife have lived with the Israelites in the desert for a few years, she suggests that they go back to Midian and let God deal with the Israelites, but Moses says he’s staying; he admits that he dreams of milking cattle back in Midian, but he doubts he will ever do that again, adding, “I prefer to die in the wilderness with God than in the Promised Land without him.”
Naturally, given the filmmakers’ interest in circumcision, the movie does refer to that strange incident in which Moses’ wife Zipporah performed an emergency circumcision on one of their sons to save Moses’ life (Exodus 4:24-26). Curiously, though, we don’t actually see this incident at all; instead, we hear Moses describe it to Aaron in a conversation some time after the fact.
The Pharaoh of the Exodus is identified as the younger son of Ramses II, i.e. Merneptah, who reigned 1213-1203 BC. In this, the film aligns itself with TV productions like Moses the Lawgiver and The Bible Collection’s Moses, rather than theatrical films like The Ten Commandments, The Prince of Egypt, and Exodus: Gods & Kings, all of which have tended to make Ramses himself the Pharaoh of the Exodus.
Interestingly, it is Aaron, rather than Moses, who performs the various miracles before the Hebrew elders, such as turning the staff into a snake and turning his hand leprous (Exodus 4:29-31). That might seem counterintuitive, as it was Moses who was given those miracles at the burning bush, but the wording of the relevant passage in Exodus is ambiguous and does allow for the possibility that Aaron performed these signs for the elders. Plus, Aaron does perform a number of miracles before the Pharaoh, from turning his staff into a snake (Exodus 7:8-13) to causing the plagues of blood (Exodus 7:19), frogs (Exodus 8:5-6), and gnats (Exodus 8:16-17). Incidentally, in the film, Aaron seems impressed, maybe even amused, by some of the miracles he gets to perform.
Like certain other films, this film portrays the contest between Moses and Pharaoh as a contest between the Hebrew God and the Egyptian gods. Pharaoh laughs at first and assumes that his gods will win just because there are more of them. Pharaoh also talks about how he, as the “son” of one of the gods, governs the order that the gods bring to everything—which strongly echoes statements that another Pharaoh made to Abraham in The Promise. Interestingly, even Moses laughs when Pharaoh’s magicians replicate some of the plagues—and the Pharaoh, for his part, gets impatient with his magicians and says, “Why can you only repeat what they do? Why can’t you nullify it?”
It’s a very simple effect, but the scene where Pharaoh visits Moses in Goshen during the plague of darkness is quite striking. When the camera points at Moses, we see sunlight. When it points back at Pharaoh, we see sunlight on his face (because he’s in Goshen) but darkness over all the land behind him.
The film’s budget limitations are, perhaps, at their most obvious when the Israelites are parked by the edge of the Red Sea and they turn and see Pharaoh’s army coming—and all we see at first is a line of flags just barely visible above a nearby ridge. Eventually the Egyptians come around the corner and we see maybe two chariots and a small number of foot soldiers. That being said, the film’s newly “upgraded” visual effects are pretty good; the parting of the sea looks fine, and the pillar of cloud in the distance looks fairly imposing.
A recurring theme in the film is whether slaves can ever become free. Moses is skeptical at first. The Hebrews who bristle at Moses’ leadership are represented by a fictitious character named Azoor—it is he who says the Israelites will die if God speaks to them directly (Exodus 20:18-19), it is he who compels Aaron to make the golden calf (Exodus 32), and it is he who leads the rebellion against Moses after the spies come back from Canaan (Numbers 14)—and Moses tells Azoor at one point that the “slave” in him “always sees the dark side of authority”. Moses’ sister Miriam, for her part, tells Zipporah defensively, “We are slaves, and slaves are constantly murmuring and protesting.”
This film includes the part of the biblical story where God, in response to the Israelites’ various rebellions, says he will destroy them entirely and turn Moses into a great nation instead. Years later, Moses tells his sons he went up the mountain to atone for the people.
The film pays attention to some of the bloodier aspects of sacrificial rituals: In one scene soon after the Exodus, Moses sprinkles blood on the faces of the Israelites (Exodus 24:8), and later, we see Aaron sacrifice an animal and place its blood and entrails in various bowls on various altars (e.g. Leviticus 16).
Moses is nervous after the spies have been sent into Canaan. Zipporah has to remind him to eat—“Fine, a cake of manna,” he replies, which is a nicely casual way to talk about a miraculous food source, but I guess one gets used to it after a couple years—and he wonders if Canaan might be so beautiful, like the Garden of Eden, that the spies won’t want to leave it. (Shades of how the one bird didn’t return to Noah’s ark because it found dry land, perhaps?)
There is tension between the women in Moses’ life, as his wife Zipporah tries to support his leadership and his sister Miriam tends to undermine it. The tension between the two women is, perhaps, most evident when Aaron makes the golden calf—an action that Zipporah opposes and Miriam supports. This tension may be a nod to the passage which tells us that Miriam (and Aaron) spoke against Moses because of his wife (Numbers 12:1),1 but the Miriam of this film is grumbling about Moses’ actions long before he is married, e.g. she complains that he has put their family in danger after he kills the Egyptian taskmaster, and that’s one of the reasons he has to flee the country.
Moses tells his sons that a man doesn’t need boldness or courage to believe God, he simply needs a heart prepared to listen. Similarly, he says Azoor cannot hear God’s voice. The ability to hear God’s voice is a recurring theme throughout ‘God’s Stories’.
The special effect when Moses dies on Mount Nebo is quite something—it’s like his body disintegrates! It felt vaguely reminiscent of Luke Skywalker’s death in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The Bible says God “buried” Moses, and it says that, “to this day, no one knows where his grave is” (Deuteronomy 34:6), so okay, his body vanishes … but like this?
One thing you can’t help noticing—after seeing so many conventional movies where Moses is played by the likes of Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster, Dougray Scott, and Christian Bale—is how the actor playing Moses doesn’t have the face or physique of a typical leading man. He’s almost more of a character actor. And that’s fine! It adds to the authenticity.
Also authentic: the way flies occasionally walk over people’s faces. (Remember the one that Belloq supposedly swallowed in Raiders of the Lost Ark?) Not so authentic: some of the beards look a bit more fake than they should. I believe you can see some of the flies and beards in the trailer below.
And that about covers it, I think.
Next up: a look at the last of the judges and the first of the prophets: Samuel.
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I’ve written a lot about Moses movies in the past. I rounded up some of those articles in a blog post at FilmChat back in 2013, but here are some of the highlights:
I surveyed the Moses-movie genre for Bible Review magazine in February 1999 and for ChristianityToday.com in December 2014.
I reviewed the special edition of The Ten Commandments (1956) in March 2004 and interviewed DVD contributor Katherine Orrison in March 2006.
I reviewed The Bible Collection: Moses (1995) in December 1996 and interviewed director Roger Young about that and other films in December 2014.
I reviewed The Prince of Egypt (1998) in December 1998, wrote 20 fun facts about the film for its 20th anniversary in December 2018, and blurbed the film for the Arts & Faith Top 25 Movie Musicals list in May 2022.
I reviewed the animated version of The Ten Commandments (2007) in October 2007 and interviewed producer Cindy Bond in February 2008.
I have also written reviews of the TV version of The Ten Commandments (2006), the Moses episode of The Bible (2013), the big-budget movie Exodus: Gods & Kings (2014), and the indie animated film Seder-Masochism (2018).
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The ‘God’s Stories’ films can be purchased online at the GII Store. Note: It is possible that some of these titles might not be the upgraded versions of those films.
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Bits of Moses appear in this super-trailer for the ‘God’s Stories’ series:
Moses also has its own trailer:
Numbers 12:1 says Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of his “Cushite” or Ethiopian wife. Zipporah was a Midianite, as per Exodus 2:16-21, so it’s possible Moses had more than one wife. But some films and traditions infer that it was the same wife.