I recently saw the new movie “Exodus: God and Kings” which stars Christian Bale as Moses.
In short, I don’t recommend it. Let
me begin by giving verbal praise where I can.
Christian Bale is fantastic as Moses.
While it did take a while for me to see his face and not see Bruce
Wayne, he finally did dissolve into his role for me. Second, the film does boast very good special
effects. Further, I’m pleased whenever
Hollywood releases a Biblical story.
All that said, once again, I didn’t care for the movie. I say this because the filmmakers threw in
way too many elements that departed from the Biblical account. This is not to suggest that the film didn’t
even try to follow the Bible. There was
the same story that we know. Moses is
called to a mission: set the Hebrew people free from their slavery, and he
succeeds. We do see such things as the
crossing of the Red Sea, the plagues, and the Israelites spreading the blood over the doorpost to avoid the death of their firstborn child. But there were way too many liberties that were thrown in that really
didn’t need to be.
For example, the plague of all the rivers turning to
blood begins by having God send a huge pack of alligators to attack and kill a
group of Egyptians on a boat. The
Egyptians’ shed blood spreads and it is apparently their blood that is
multiplied and overtakes all the clean water.
This isn’t the way it happened according to the Bible.
For another example, the filmmakers decided to have God
be a boy! In this movie, when Moses
first meets God, he doesn’t meet Him from a burning bush, but in an odd
dream-like state. In the film, Moses
gets caught in a mudslide. His entire
body except his face is buried in mud.
He calls for help, and a boy is there.
The boy talks to Moses about how the Hebrew people have been in
bondage. At the end of the scene, Moses
asks the boy who he is, and the boy responds, “I am.” This is an obvious tip-off that this boy is
supposedly God.
Ironically, in the next scene, Moses wakes up. He is wounded from the mudslide, but he is
lucid; his wife tells him whatever he thinks he saw wasn’t true because, as she put it, “God
is not a boy.” Amen to that! Yet we see this same boy all throughout the
film and we are supposed to go with the idea that this boy is actually God. Could God appear as a boy if He wanted to do
so? Of course He could; He’s God and He
can do whatever He wants. That’s not the
issue here, the issue is the Bible doesn’t say that God appeared to Moses in
the form of a boy, nor does it say that He ever appeared to anyone in the form
of boy. Once again, it was another
liberty that was taken.
Thirdly, God as a boy notwithstanding, I wasn’t
particularly impressed with the way they presented God in this film. I got the sense that they wanted to portray
God as more evil than the main villain of the film, Pharaoh. This was
shown in particular in the death of the firstborn plague. The death scene of Pharaoh’s firstborn son
evoked a massive amount of empathy and sadness for Pharaoh’s loss. In fact, at one point, Pharaoh shows Moses the body of his dead
child, and asks him, “How can you worship a god that would do this?” When the audience feels sympathy toward
Pharaoh, and suspicion and mistrust of the God of the Bible, something is very
wrong.
In reality, Pharaoh was a brutal, heartless, evil
dictator. Furthermore, God was
displaying to the Israelites how He is more powerful than the gods that the
Egyptians worshiped. Got questions.org
has a fantastic article on this; the author writes, “The Egyptians, like many
pagan cultures, worshiped a wide variety of nature-gods, and attributed to
their powers the natural phenomena they saw in the world around them. There was a god of the sun, of the river, of
childbirth, of crops, etc.” The article
goes on to state that every plague God sent confronted and overpowered a specific god they
worshiped. Check it out; I’ve included
the link below. God was saying, “These
gods are not worthy of worship; they are weak and impotent. Worship Me; I am the One true God.”
Kevin
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