Newsbites: King Saul gets another son! Moses comedy gets a trailer!

Sam Otto is playing Saul's son Eshbaal in Amazon's House of David, while The Promised Land reimagines the story of Moses as a workplace mockumentary like The Office.

House of David gets its Eshbaal

Sam Otto as John Osweiller in Snowpiercer.

King Saul’s family is growing. Deadline reports that British actor Sam Otto has been cast as Saul’s son Eshbaal in Amazon Prime’s House of David series.

The Bible doesn’t mention Eshbaal at all during his father’s reign, but it does say he ruled Israel for two years after his father died, and that he spent those years engaged in a civil war with David, who was ruling the tribe of Judah from a town called Hebron. Eshbaal, also known as Ish-Bosheth,¹ was eventually assassinated by two of his own men, and it was only after that that David became king of all Israel (II Samuel 2-4).

This is how Deadline says Eshbaal will be depicted in House of David:

He is a good-looking pretty boy who uses his looks and status to much aplomb, taking nothing seriously that he cannot drink or flirt with. However, if he is confronted or struck by a real threat, he instantly folds & expects his mother to clean up the mess, proving to be a coward beneath it all. 

All the stuff about drinking, flirting, and expecting his mother to clean up his mess is pure dramatic invention, but the bit about the “coward” who “instantly folds” in the face of “real threats” does have a basis in the biblical text. Eshbaal was put on the throne by his father’s cousin/general Abner, and the Bible says Eshbaal was “afraid” of Abner (II Samuel 3:11) and ultimately “lost courage”—and possibly the will to rule—when Abner was killed by David’s nephew/general Joab (II Samuel 4:1).

As reported earlier, Saul is being played in this series by Ali Suliman (Paradise Now, The Swimmers) and Abner is being played by Oded Fehr (The Mummy, Star Trek: Discovery), while David is being played by Michael Iskander, who is new to the screen. I haven’t seen any official announcements re: who might be playing Joab, but the show’s IMDb page says Israeli actor Aury Alby (Shoshana, The Chef) has that role.

Eshbaal is the second son of Saul’s to be announced as a character in this series. Ethan Kai will be playing Saul’s firstborn son Jonathan, who was famously close to David. The biblical Saul had at least five other sons besides these two, but very little is said about them in the text, and it would be very easy to just cut them from the script.²

Saul also had at least two daughters, both of whom are already part of this series: Yali Topol Margalith is playing his older daughter Mirab, and Indy Lewis is playing his younger daughter Mychal, who ended up becoming David’s first wife.

It is not clear yet how much of the Saul-and-David story this series will cover, at least in its first season. The 2016 series Of Kings and Prophets, which was canceled after nine episodes, ended with Saul’s death and Eshbaal’s accession to the throne (in that series, he basically became a puppet of the Philistines), but House of David could stretch things out over multiple seasons if it wanted to. As ever, we shall see.

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The Promised Land releases a trailer, a couple of featurettes

The Promised Land, a proposed comedy series that reimagines the story of Moses and the Israelites walking through the desert as a mockumentary in the vein of The Office or Parks and Recreation, is about to premiere its first (and so far only) episode—so the producers have released a few new videos to promote that episode.

Here’s the trailer, which bills the show as “a workplace comedy series of biblical proportions”:

Here’s a featurette in which actor Wasim No’mani—best known, perhaps, as the Pharisee Yanni on The Chosen—describes his take on Moses:

And here is series creator Mitch Hudson on his approach to the story:

As I’ve noted before, Hudson is an assistant director on The Chosen, so it’s not surprising to see that a few of The Promised Land’s lead actors have worked on that series too. In addition to No’mani, The Promised Land features Shereen Khan (The Chosen’s Herodias) as Moses’ sister Miriam, as well as Majed Sayess (who recently played a character named Jabez in The Chosen) as Moses’ brother Aaron.

The Promised Land also stars Tucker Smallwood as Moses’ father-in-law Jethro. I noted in my earlier post that Smallwood had a small part in 2007’s Evan Almighty, but one connection I didn’t make at the time is that the star of Evan Almighty was Steve Carell—who, of course, is probably best known for starring in The Office. (Click here to read my interviews with Carell and his co-stars from the Evan Almighty junket.)

Curiously, the trailer for The Promised Land has one other thing in common with The Chosen: circumcision humour. In The Promised Land, a suspicious Hebrew looks at the crotch of a man that he suspects might not be circumcised (the man in question is an Egyptian who is trying to blend in with the Israelites), while in an episode of The Chosen that was livestreamed last Sunday, a Roman soldier makes a rather bad pun about foreskins. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that this is apparently becoming a thing in “faith-based” media now, but oh well, there it is.

The Promised Land’s pilot episode will premiere on Monday, July 1, at 5pm PST / 8pm EST. (Happy Canada Day!) There is no link for the livestream yet, but I assume the episode will be streamed via the show’s YouTube channel.

1. Ish-Bosheth is his name in II Samuel 2-4, Esh-Baal is his name in the genealogies recorded in I Chronicles 8:33 and 9:39.

Interestingly, while most scholars agree that Chronicles was written after Samuel, there is some speculation that Esh-Baal might have been this person’s original name. The argument goes that the author of Samuel changed Esh-Baal’s name to avoid association with the Canaanite god Baal, as that god’s name was becoming more and more taboo.

2. The other five sons were Ishvi, Malki-Shua, Abinadab, Armoni, and Mephibosheth (I Samuel 14:49, 31:2; II Samuel 21:8; I Chronicles 8:33, 9:39, 10:2). Nothing is said about these sons except that four of them died violently: Malki-Shua and Abinadab were killed in battle, and Armoni and Mephibosheth were executed for their father’s sins by the Gibeonites.