{"id":749,"date":"2014-12-16T10:04:20","date_gmt":"2014-12-16T18:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/?p=749"},"modified":"2014-12-16T10:04:20","modified_gmt":"2014-12-16T18:04:20","slug":"exodus-never-never-egyptland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/2014\/12\/16\/exodus-never-never-egyptland\/","title":{"rendered":"Exodus: Never-Never-Egyptland"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"904335_037\"<\/a>I knew it was going to be bad when the trailer showed a Great Pyramid under construction<\/em> in New Kingdom Egypt. This would be like, say, Ford putting the Model-T back into production for the 2016 lineup of new cars.\u00a0 Then I saw the movie, and things got worse\u2014much worse.\u00a0 Then I thought about it, and a light dawned. More of that later.<\/p>\n

Exodus: Gods and Kings<\/em> is this year\u2019s second Old Testament blockbuster; and like the first one, Noah<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> it will confuse those who are expecting a straight retelling of the Biblical account.\u00a0 This is because, like Noah<\/em>, it draws as much or more on extra-biblical rabbinic literature<\/a>, a veritable briar-patch of contradictory and organically grown legends, fables, and just-so stories about the culture-hero Moses, of which the narrative found in Exodus is only a teeny portion; and then it confuses things further by changing inconvenient details in the interests of moving the plot along.\u00a0 You gotta love Hollywood.<\/p>\n

Thus, you do not find many of the elements that enthralled some of us in Sunday School: you do not get to see Baby Moses in the bulrushes, the pillar of fire by night, or the duelling wizards with their snakes and staffs.\u00a0 Nor do you see Moses wrestling with God, or Moses\u2019 wife Zipporah performing an impromptu circumcision on their son, or the bloody slaughter following the incident of the golden calf.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, you do get to see Moses being a war hero, as per the rabbinic lit, though the scriptwriters changed the \"battle\"<\/a>enemy to the Hittites, instead of the POC Kushites in what is now the Sudan.\u00a0 For the Egyptian massacre of the infant boys, the scriptwriters eschewed the biblical explanation (overproduction of Hebrew babies) and instead borrowed a prophetic trope recounted in the \u00a0rabbinic lit, the prophecy that a Hebrew child would bring down mighty Egypt, leading to Pharaoh\u2019s order that all Hebrew boys should be drowned at birth. [Note: none of the sources, biblical or rabbinical, identify the pharaoh involved.]<\/p>\n

The movie\u2019s plot, however, pitting Moses against his foster-brother, the Pharaoh Ramesses II, appears to draw from neither the Bible nor the rabbinic lit, but from The Prince of Egypt<\/em><\/a>, which had both a better script and<\/em> the duelling wizards.\u00a0 In fact, the animated characters did a better job of acting\u2014most of the performances in Exodus<\/em> were emailed in.\u00a0 Apart from the cool CGI and pretty visuals, it was mostly fairly dull and ponderous.\u00a0 And long…very long.\u00a0 On a more positive note, though, God was presented as a snotty bullet-headed bruiser of a boy, with attitude issues that would cause a social worker to sit up and take notice.\u00a0 I quite liked this, given how juvenile God\u2019s behaviour is in the Old Testament.<\/p>\n

But what kept me scribbling frantically in the dark of the theatre, quietly grinding my teeth, was the Egyptology, or the lack of it.\u00a0 I\u2019m not talking about the fact that the Egyptians did not use foreign slaves to build their monuments, since that particular glaring inaccuracy is a necessary plot-point in the original mythology.\u00a0 No, I\u2019m talking about the details: pyramids, for example.\u00a0 Pyramids everywhere, scattered around the landscape as thickly as casinos in Vegas. Pyramids at Pi-Ramesses<\/a>, where none was ever built, and on both sides of the channel instead of the canonical west.\u00a0 Pyramids under construction, a thousand years too late for historical accuracy.\u00a0 Domesticated camels, at least seven centuries too early.\u00a0 Etc.\u00a0 By the end, I had a lot of awkward questions:<\/p>\n

\"exodus-gods-kings-cast\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Why, if Moses was raised as an Egyptian prince, was he dressed like an escapee from The Kingdom of Heaven<\/em><\/a>? \u00a0Why was Ramesses crowned with a flowerpot balanced precariously on a babushka, instead of a headdress<\/a>?\u00a0 And why did he go to war sporting a vulture cap<\/a>, which was worn only by queens? \u00a0How did cacti end up in the Sinai?\u00a0 Where did Queen Tuya get a Mayan feather headdress?\u00a0 How did the unconvincing plastic doll standing in for the Pharaoh\u2019s dead baby get mummified and coffined so fast?\u00a0 Mummification<\/a> took months.\u00a0 Why did the elderly Egyptian general have his hair arranged in a sidelock<\/a>, which was normally worn only by children?\u00a0 Why were the palaces all built like temples?\u00a0 Why did the clothing, wigs, hairstyles, tapestries, the sphinxes in the desert, look so wrong? \u00a0I gave up taking notes after a while. But why was the movie messing up in so many details, when it could so easily have got things right?<\/p>\n

Then it hit me.\u00a0 Maybe, just maybe, Ridley Scott wasn\u2019t messing up\u2014maybe he was getting it wrong on purpose<\/em>.\u00a0 This was clearly not Ancient Egypt as designed by Ancient Egyptians.\u00a0 This was an Art Deco Egypt, a mythical fantasy Egypt based on modern popular conceptions and misconceptions, a Never-Never-Egyptland.\u00a0 The stupid babushka crown was intended<\/em> to look ridiculous; stuffing the landscape with imaginary pyramids was a deliberate act of hyperbole. Maybe, just maybe, this was Scott\u2019s sly way of reminding us that the Moses narrative was also a fiction, full of anachronisms and absurdities and implausibilities, written centuries after imperial Egypt vanished into the boneyard of historical legend.<\/p>\n

If so, that would be all terribly cool and meta, but it would not save the movie from being dull, dull, dull.\u00a0 Gorgeous, yes, but otherwise Exodus: Gods and Kings<\/em> was about as gripping as watching the gilt dry on a faked Egyptian antiquity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew it was going to be bad when the trailer showed a Great Pyramid under construction in New Kingdom…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-featured","category-secularism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}