Excepting the 10 Commandments …an OT one, which was reasonably accurate /faithful to scriptures.
Not really, no.
If anything,
The Ten Commandments is a typical DeMille production: a combination of the Bible, extrabiblical material, pseudo-piety and a dash of debauchery - in other words, a common 50s Hollywood spectacle. If it’s fidelity to the biblical text you’re looking for,
Moses the Lawgiver (Burt Lancaster) or
Moses (Ben Kingsley) are two productions which stick closer to it than Mr. DeMille’s film does.
Case in point:
Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank. And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her young women walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.” Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. When the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “Because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”
One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews were struggling together. And he said to the man in the wrong, “Why do you strike your companion?” He answered, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid, and thought, “Surely the thing is known.” When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian. And he sat down by a well.
Note the disconnect in the narrative. At verses 1-9, Moses is still a baby; at verse 10, he is “older,” and at verse 11, Moses had already “grown up” and was already somehow aware that he was a Hebrew. Exodus does not tell you what happened between verse 10 and verse 11: how Moses may have grown up, what he did, and - most importantly - how did he come to know that he was an Israelite. Guess what
The Ten Commandments does. It devotes a good third of its 220 minute (nearly four hours) running time on Moses as a young man and the whole love triangle between him, Nefertiri, and Rameses. (Incidentally, the identification of the pharaohs of Exodus being
Seti I and
Rameses II is yet another interpretation - the two ‘pharaohs’ who figure in the text are not even named, leading to all sorts of speculation: identifying which pharaohs the narrative speaks of is crucial to the dating of the exodus. For the record, DeMille has a total of
three pharaohs in the film: the pharaoh who commands the slaughter of the Hebrew babies, the more kinder Seti, and Rameses.)
I’m going to limit myself to another element of DeMille’s film, namely his conflation of the worship of the golden calf with the rebellion of Dathan and Korah (Numbers 16). DeMille - unfortunately, in my opinion - removes the inherent difficulty in the text of Exodus, where Moses commands the Levites to
slaughter those who worshipped the idol (32:25-29 “Thus says the Lord God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side each of you, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill his brother and his companion and his neighbor.’”), by having God Himself directly punish the transgressors by earthquake and bolts of lightning (cf. Numbers 16:31-35). Fortunately, this is where most recent productions do not shy away
from showing more-or-less what the text actually says - even if it makes for uncomfortable viewing.
