Religion: Moses Unplugged - analysis of film `The Prince of Egypt' - Brief Article

National Review, Jan 25, 1999 by David Klinghoffer

Mr. Klinghoffer, an NR senior editor, is the author of The Lord Will Gather Me In: My Journey to Jewish Orthodoxy, published last month by Free Press. lives in New York.

Bill Clinton, Kenneth Starr, Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, Steven Spielberg, Robin Williams, Madonna, Oprah Winfrey, Moses.

Moses? Strange to report, in the winter of 1998 the ranks of America's most glittering public figures were briefly joined by a man who never told a joke, never handled a basketball, nor went on television, and who claimed he took dictation from God Almighty. Moses was a spiritual leader, and "spirituality" is held in high regard today. But what we mean by that word-cozy blather as a consumer good-would have filled him with rage. He raged a lot, especially in the fierce farewell speech on the Plains of Moab recorded in Deuteronomy. Were that discourse to be published today, it would be denounced as intolerant and uncaring.

Yet along comes The Prince of Egypt, an admiring cartoon about the first two-thirds of his life. Shortly before the movie opened last month on 3,000 movie screens worldwide, Moses appeared on the cover of Time and provided the subject matter of a disquisition in The New Yorker. In numerous feature articles elsewhere, biblical experts were interviewed about all aspects of his legacy, not least the question of whether he really existed. One new book was repeatedly quoted, Moses: A Life, a kind of celebrity biography by journalist Jonathan Kirsch. How do we account for the circumstance of Moses' being for a few weeks bigger than Larry King and Jerry Springer combined?

Actually the film deserved all this adulation. The Prince of Egypt gives you chills about every 15 minutes. It's gorgeous to look at, especially when illustrating the sinister loveliness of royal Egyptian architecture. The songs are lusty and memorable, the characters artfully portrayed and voiced: Val Kilmer as Moses, Michelle Pfeiffer as his wife Tzipporah, Ralph Fiennes as the pharaoh Ramses.

Certain thrilling moments haunt you after you leave the theater. There's the encounter with God at the burning bush, His whispering voice half-compassionate and half-menacing; and the escape through the Sea of Reeds, with the shadows of great fishes seen swimming in the towering walls of water on either side of the fleeing Israelites.

The parting of the sea marks the climax of the film, the Egyptian chariots sinking under the waves as the Israelites shout hymns of joy for their freshly won freedom. Executive producer Jeffrey Katzenberg decided to limit himself to a modest 90 minutes rather than an epic three hours, so he had to edit the Bible's account of Moses down to its most salient story line. In Katzenberg's mind, the essential Moses was not a lawgiver but a liberator, the ancient world's Dr. Martin Luther King. "God sent you to be our deliverer," says his sister Miriam (voiced by Sandra Bullock).

Of course the biblical Moses also did a little thing at Mt. Sinai which had some impact on the Bible's narrative-and the rest of human history. At Sinai Moses met God and received the commandments, ten famous ones and 603 in addition. The Prince of Egypt alludes to this as a postscript. The movie's final moment shows our hero descending the mountain with two unidentified pieces of stone in his hands.

It is hard to say whether a 90-minute movie with Sinai and the two tablets as its climax could be conceived, but one thing's certain: as a culture we would be spooked by any portrait of Moses the man in full, liberator and lawgiver. After all, spirituality for us isn't about getting bossed around by some dead guy. We will accept Moses Luther King Jr. or no Moses at all.

Hence the most notable feature of the media coverage attending Katzenberg's movie: its insistence that Moses was quite likely made up, "merely a character in a grand historical novel, the invention of storytellers," as Jonathan Kirsch puts it in his biography. "Historians regard his existence as questionable," David Denby agreed in The New Yorker. Time cited the belief of "some scholars [that] Moses was a creation of the ancient Hebrews' binding together their own national epic out of the tales of neighbors."

Reading these remarks and watching the film that occasioned them, you had the uneasy feeling of watching small children at play on a railroad track. Blithely, confidently, innocently, the moviemakers and commentators hadn't the slightest idea of what their views implied.

Kirsch assures us that the factuality of Moses is "less important . . . than the quest for the moral and spiritual values that we might extract from his biblical story." Denby comforts himself with the thought that whether or not Moses ever lived, "obviously he lives fully in what people have made of him." Like Santa Claus.

But that's a little too easy. If the Jewish ancestors of Denby and Kirsch never heard God speak to Moses on the mountain, then Judaism is reduced to a genealogy of delusion. As for Christians, if Israel's God offered no covenant at Sinai, which would suggest there is no God of Israel, then just what God could have fathered Jesus?