Along comes YouTube to offer us, for free, DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” for a preview to Passover.
Great flick, from 1956, starring Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Pharaoh, and since that time it has become tradition to show this film on network TV as a Passover treat to the delight of movie buffs, but to the horror of Bible mavens, who can easily accentuate everything that is so wrong with this picture ecclesiastically.
We won’t go into all that here, except to say…read the Book. The Book has been a bestseller since time immemorial. The writing is sublime.
The story, of course…as Judah Halevi put it…tells the single greatest event in the history of the world, and that would be, the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.
Credit DeMille for the try, but he used the wrong sources…mostly goyish…which gives us less Bible but more Hollywood.
What it comes to is a standoff between two angry men, a motif for every Western.
A change in wardrobe and instead of Moses versus Pharaoh you could be watching Gunfight at the OK Corral, or the Hatfields and the McCoys.
But in terms of playing the hero, credit Heston for his portrayal we can all admire. Or so you would think.
Toxic masculinity?
A friend, a scholar, tells me that kids today, among the ones he teaches, find Scriptures too masculine…signs of the times, that is, our times and our new sensibilities.
A judgmental generation is upon us, alas.
Now this, therefore…what is a man, just after we have discovered what a woman is.
We all remember supreme court nominee Katanji Brown Jackson who was stumped by the question and was unable, or unwilling, to define her own gender.
But that was during the godless Biden years, when you could pick your own gender from a menu. Finally, Trump settled the matter…two genders. Man. Woman.
What is a woman? Historically, a woman toils in the home…raises the kids… while her man toils in the field. Him Tarzan. She Jane.
But yes, the Hebrew Bible does celebrate masculinity and chivalry…without saying so directly…but saying so through action.
Turn to Exodus 2.11 to find Moses confronting a Hebrew being beaten by an Egyptian. He steps in and kills the Egyptian at the risk of his own life, and indeed the matter is known, and so he must flee, and finds himself in Midian, where the seven daughters of Jethro are being harassed by some thugs at the well, and again Moses must do the heroic thing to the delight of the women.
One incident to the next, the Hebrew Bible is showing us what A Man Is. He is the hero, never afraid of being called toxic…if such a thought is even considered in Scriptures.
David is the very picture of a hero, after 3,000 years. Since David slew Goliath, never in the annals of champions has there been anything like David…except for Moses.
The Torah itself tells us that no man will ever come along to surpass Moses. Who but Moses to “proclaim liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.”
For Michelangelo, both Moses and David were the epitome of manliness…and remain so down through the ages.
His sculptures of both Biblical figures embody strength everlasting…toxic masculinity be damned.
For Hollywood, manliness is never enough. Looks count. So if Moses actually looked like Charlton Heston, well all right, and we’ll take David as Gregory Peck.
So long as we remember which is Biblical fact, and which is Hollywood fiction.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His novel, “Compulsive,” motivated John W. Cassell to declare “Jack Engelhard is a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here
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