The 10 Commnadments

James Brown

3-1-06

Creative Liberty, AKA Hollywood

Underneath every film, sitcom, commercial, or televised event that comes from Hollywood is a just cause just waiting to be discovered. Happy endings, lessons learned, and righted wrongs are the prizes for having waded through the unnecessary details of the story. Catching you by your eye and not your mind is the greatest scheme that Hollywood has come up with. You stimulate your mind by the visual aspect of what’s happening, and you lose perspective on the true meaning of what’s happening. There are stories that don’t attempt to captivate you with details, though. Ones that simply are there for you to read and get right to the lesson that you can learn from it. Even better, they are all grouped together in one book, the Bible. The Bible doesn’t read like a juicy romance novel or a suspense thriller, and for good reasons too. It wasn’t written to describe the people of its time, or to give scenes of what it may have been like to live back in that day. It was written to describe God and His interactions with His people throughout time. The color of a person’s hair, how tall they were, or even their physique are not significant details in these stories. Those details would have distracted from the true meaning of the stories they were derived from. A perfect example of Hollywood’s detial changing affecting a story by its misrepresentations is the movie The Ten Commandments versus the Biblical account in Exodus 1-14.

In the Biblical account, very few details were shared about various things. For instance, did Moses know that he was Hebrew while he was growing up? The Bible doesn’t make that clear. But the movie, however, took the liberty of showing that he didn’t know of his birth mother at all and thought his whole life that he was completely Egyptian. It took the Levite cloth to convince Moses that he was born a Hebrew. After that, Moses immediately joined the family of his blood and labored as a slave. In the Exodus account, it doesn’t say whether Moses knew he was Hebrew or not, but it does say that he went to observe his brethren’s toil. That is a typical example of how Hollywood fills in the gaps, but not only that, they change a few details too.

One detail that they changed is that of Moses leaving Egypt. The Bible only took a few sentences to describe this account, whereas the movie took several scenes to depict it. The main difference, though, is that of the conditions around Moses when he left. Moses was laboring as a slave and killed an Egyptian that was abusing another Hebrew in the movie. Conversely, Moses was still “Egyptian” in the Bible when he saw an Egyptian abusing one of his brethren and killed the Egyptian and buried him in the sand. In the Bible, though, Moses tried to break up a fight between two Hebrews soon thereafter, and they replied to by saying, “Do you intend to kill us like you did the Egyptian?” NKJV. This shows a very sharp contrast between the movie and the Biblical account. The Hebrews were waiting for a deliverer and when Moses stood up for them, they rejoiced. In the actual account of things it appeared that the Hebrews had very little respect for Moses and didn’t see him as a deliverer. For example, when Moses saved Joshua he looked up into Heaven and thanked God for sending the Hebrews a deliverer That one little detail changed the story so much, but some situations were completely fabricated is the movie.

What would a classic movie be without a little feuding over a girl? Throughout the movie there is a constant tension between Moses and Ramses over Nefertiri. Nefertiri and Moses are obviously in love (or lust)