Herewith is part three of my secular/atheist reaction to The Bible series on the History Channel. Knowing of the reality series roots of Mark Burnett, the product he and his wife produced is threatening to become a theological version of The Biggest Loser: trimming line by line all manner of inconvenient Bible text (from Genesis to Judges) to leave the leaner, tidier finished product beaming at the end.
While the omissions of the Samson tale discussed in part two could be chalked off as based on unverifiable local events, other Bible tales bump into the bigger world in ways that have given scholars headaches, not least of which is the Exodus. Unlike the Philistines, the Egyptians had lots of written texts to put chronological perspective on the case, and that’s the problem. Historians have been hard pressed to find solid confirmation of the purported Hebrew presence in Egypt, let alone the inner circle of royalty (remember, Joseph supposedly percolated from slave to Pharaoh’s right hand man, and Moses was adopted as Pharaoh’s stepson).
Then there is the snag of chronology. Traditional biblical calculations (of the sort that pegged Creation to 4004 BC, another long story with detour through Bishop Ussher) had the Exodus occurring roundabout 1500 BC. But generations of scholars have pulled the event down into the New Kingdom (1200 BC) to be consistent with the “Pharaoh Ramses” context of the story.
Bible groupies aren’t the only bunch in a pickle here, though. It has been known for half a century that the Aegean volcanic island of Santorini blew its top in that period, a Mt. St. Helens-on-steroids blast that knocked the seafaring Minoans on their keester and likely (as filtered through Egyptian sources eventually to Plato) inspiring the “lost continent of Atlantis” story. But trying to figure out how this affected the Egyptians on the mainland (tidal waves, dust clouds?) has proven as tough as pegging the Exodus. And the two camps often intersect, as some cannot resist the temptation to link the plagues inflicted on Pharaoh’s Egypt to events caused by the volcanic burp. But 1650 to 1500 to 1200 BC is a pretty long taffy pull to sort out, and one can pick and chose among a bevy of candidates proposed for the Pharaoh of Exodus and/or the Santorini event.
So I’ll cut Downey and Burnett some slack here — what an unregenerate secularist such as I can’t fairly overlook, though, is the curious omission of a particularly revealing Bible passage (Exodus 9:12) apropos the sixth plague inflicted on Egypt (boils on man and beast): “And the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” Interestingly, the kitschy old DeMille version of The Ten Commandments that gets trotted out every Easter didn’t mention it either.
Think about it: up until then Pharaoh’s heart had been repeatedly hardened as the plagues escalated, but come number six and Pharaoh is all set to give in and let the people go until God intervenes to change his mind. What gives? Was the Lord suddenly put off, with four miracles still left in the “Little Jiffy Plague Kit” he picked up at the local “Miracles Are Us” outlet, and just hated to waste them? (Which meant, of course, killing firstborn at the end.) Are we bumping into what the philosopher Alfred Whitehead dubbed “misplaced concreteness” — a bit too much detail for a story’s own good?
Here it might be useful to compare the Exodus “my god’s magic is better than your gods’ magic” festival with an incident in the classic 1951 science fiction film “The Day the Earth Stood Still” — a story as brimming with messianic allegories (from the name the visiting alien Klaatu adopted, a Mr. Carpenter, to his resurrection by Gort the robot after being shot by a nervous military) as the Narnia Chronicles or Bryan Singer’s “Superman Returns”.
Urged by the Einstein-like Professor Barnard to perform some demonstration to get everyone’s attention regarding the seriousness of Klaatu’s mission (spoiler alert: the climax reveals Earth faces automatic annihilation by their robot police force should humans incautiously extend our belligerent tendencies into the solar system), Barnard also pleaded with Klaatu not to hurt anyone in the process. Klaatu (or rather the writers at 20th Century Fox) came up with a solution both riveting and ingenious: neutralize all the electricity on the planet for half an hour, though with notably moral exemptions (airplanes in flight and hospitals) where a suspension of power could have injured or killed somebody.
So, how does Exodus stack up against Fox studios for ingenuity and violence prevention? Reflecting an oddly legalist side to the story, why exactly does Moses need Pharaoh’s permission in the first place? Why didn’t the omnipotent creator of the universe simply command Moses to pack up the people and leave — with soldiers who intervene finding their swords plucked from their hands, or turned into bouquets of flowers, or pursuing charioteers seeing their rigs levitating off the ground until they decide not to follow the departing Hebrews? Now there would be some miracles — and not one poor hapless Egyptian soldier drowned in the end, or any firstborn children bumped off to occasion grieving parents.
Ever since I saw the old DeMille movie I’ve been struck by the oddity of this episode, and am frankly disappointed that the author of Exodus couldn’t be at least as clever as the screenwriters at 20th Century Fox?
Anyway, Moses duly leads the Hebrews out of bondage, with Downey/Burnett showing the Sea of Passage in all its miraculous glory (walls of suspended water) — though Charlton Heston intoning “Behold, his mighty hand!” in the DeMille version is still hard to top. In any case, all this sidesteps the piles of scholars who have tried to find some physical events underlying the story, including dragging in the Santorini eruption.
But it's what happened after the Exodus, as Moses and then Joshua lead the people hither and yon until they finally enter the (already occupied) Promised Land, that gets revealingly short shrift in The Bible. There’s Joshua commanding the sun to stand still at Jericho, of course (how ever could Downey/Burnett have passed that one up, unless they would rather not ponder the implications that the Bible authors thought the sun revolved around the earth, making sun stopping more of a conceptual snap for the almighty).
But that’s a cosmological bagatelle compared to the many morally troubling instances of “kill everything alive” acts of genocide that The Bible elects not to mention. So you could have knocked me over with a feather when, way down the plot line regarding King Saul, The Bible actually lets the Bible peek through unvarnished: the prophet Samuel (played quite well by the actor who was Indiana Jones’ archeologist nemesis in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”) furious that Saul has failed to kill all the men, women, children, and farm animals of the vanquished Amalekites as the Lord had commanded him to (1 Samuel 15:18-19).
Never mind how it is that Samuel is deemed to be a prophet in the first place. Why, because he says so? In the way of Mohammed, or Joseph Smith, in their own more recent contexts? Is there really a reliable prophet detection checklist?
No, what gave me the creeps was Samuel’s grim certainty (mayhap with a God hardened heart again?) and what that means for the whole idea of divinely mandated absolute morality. Evidently “though shalt not kill” is not an absolute after all, but a conditional: thou shalt not kill without God’s permission. But if God does command you to kill (even down to those tainted livestock?) it now becomes positively sinful to disobey. Yipes!
So Saul is cut off from divine blessing and the skids are greased to ease in his replacement, David, a Bible character so important in the eschatology department that he couldn’t possibly be left out (compared to the Job or Jonah stories that failed to make The Bible cut). For the House of David, and David’s natal city of Bethlehem, are to set to provide major plot points in my final offering, where we go “Out with the Old (Testament) and in with the New (Testament).”
