I admit it. I’m one of the whatever million people that keep The Ten Commandments coming back every Easter (Passover) by watching it. It was on Saturday evening this year. The rest of my family scattered to the four winds leaving me to watch it in peace.
Many thoughts run through my mind as I watch this movie, the foremost of which is watching it year after year with my two sisters to the point where we could recite all the dialog if we wanted to (incidentally, both of them watched it in their own homes, too.) I remember going to The Bottom Line comedy club with my then boyfriend (now my husband) for a Billy Crystal performance in which he pointed out the miscasting of Vincent Price, Yul Brynner and–most dramatically–Edward G. Robinson as Dathan the overseer (Where’s your Messiah now, see?). Folks, you’ve got to have a little age on you to appreciate the jokes here.
Most of all, I started thinking about the implausibility of the Moses story itself.
A couple of years ago my mother went to Egypt with a group being led by the famous, or perhaps infamous is a better descriptor, black Egyptologist Dr. Ben (more formally known as Dr. Yosef ben-Jochannan). According to Dr. Ben, the Moses story never happened, at least not the way it is claimed in the bible. If the Pharoah sneezed there was someone there to record the event in stone. Nothing in the records indicates anyone named Moses lived in the time of this particular set of Seti and son Ramses. And in case you want to argue that Moses’ name was ordered stricken from all public records, there was no record of any Hebrew slaves existent or set free around this time either. A little while back even theologians having nothing to do with ancient Egypt agreed the Exodus story was false. So what does that mean for Moses?
Hopefully nothing. The story of Moses, whether true, false or misrepresented is one of the most powerful themes in the canon of world myth–that of the man willing to give up the world he knows for a noble quest. It is the essence of that hero’s journey we writers talk about. We see it time and time again from ancient Greek epics to Arthur to Frodo Baggins to Luke Skywalker to Buffy to Neo to who knows?
Ironically we found ourselves watching part of Joseph Campbell’s interview with Bill Moyers on the meaning of myths that has been out on DVD for a while (if you have not seen this series, you owe it to yourself as a writer to view it). The first segment dealt with that hero’s journey, that call to transcend the every day of our lives to accomplish the heroic.
I’ve been working on this post for a couple of days now and I’m still not sure what all I wanted to say, except that I think that’s what we are all looking for when we read genre fiction–that heroic act extended and fulfilled.
And for our own lives? According to Campbell, each of us should search for our own bliss, our own moments of transcendence. He’ll get no arguments from me.
