“This day shall be for
you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord.”
Exodus 12:14
The Exodus story is one
of the Bible’s most vivid and dramatic narratives. The wickedness of Pharaoh, the steadfast
courage of Moses, the horrors of the plagues, the spectacle of the the Red
Sea’s high waves, frozen in place—they almost seem, to us to demand a
screenplay. There have been plenty of
Exodus movies, from Cecil DeMille’s great 1956 epic The Ten Commandments, to the animated Prince of Egypt, a favorite in our household. Earlier this week, I asked my sons if they
knew about the ten plagues, and was very impressed when they could reel off all
ten of them. “Did you cover that in
Sunday School?” I asked. “No dad,” came
the response—"it’s in the movie.”
I didn’t ask them if they
had been reading about the Exodus directly from the Bible. But if they had
tried, they would have found a story paced quite differently from any film I’ve
seen.[1] It’s not that the filmmakers need to invent
lots of episodes. All the powerful stuff
comes right off the pages. It’s that
they usually leave out much of what the Book of Exodus actually says.
