Bonus post! The Passover story.
Charlton Heston delivers like an Omega Man in the story of Passover
While I’m watching the movie it all makes perfect sense.
Charlton Heston is great as Moses, his beard authentically bushy, and Yul Brynner makes a fabulous pharaoh, buff and bald all over. Probably. Obviously Moses had been found in a basket down by the river because pharaoh’s people are just not that hairy, but the two of them have a convincing sort of step-father/step-son frenemy vibe. The special effects are phenomenal! Moses’ staff turning into a snake? I don’t know how they did that without CGI, and later (the snake back in the form of a staff) Moses parts the Red Sea and his people pass to safety. Wow!
But I’ve gotten way ahead of the story, because, since I’ve done a few holiday posts now I feel like it’s a thing and I should keep doing it, this is going to be my post explaining Passover.
Let me say right from the start that I’m not Jewish and I don’t really know very much about Passover, but I know a little bit and I’ve watched the 10 Commandments a whole bunch of times - most of them in luxurious black and white on a 19” cathode ray tube TV. That’s plenty of background for my purposes, because I’m embracing the concept of establishing firm opinions from a position of feelings and ignorance. Also, I haven’t actually seen the 10 Commandments in a long time and I might be confusing some of the details with those other Charlton Heston classics Ben Hur, Planet of the Apes, Omega Man, but there are similar themes going on. Take some of this with a grain of salt.
So here’s the story of Passover, as I understand it, and I’m going to rush some points because I don’t want to waste a lot of your time. If you want the full story there’s a very nice write up in the Bible that you can reference. I gave it 4 stars on Yelp.
Moses was left in a basket by the Nile because Pharaoh had ordered all male Hebrew babies to be drowned. (Weirdly nearly this exact same thing happened to Cyrus the Great as well which makes you think it was more common in the Bronze Age) Yul Brynner looks great and all but he’s keeping the Hebrews in bondage and Moses, all grown up now in the Pharaoh’s court (because pharaoh’s daughter had found the baby Moses and raised him as her own) keeps telling his step dad to “let my people go,” and “tear down this wall,” but that part has a different connotation so they leave it out of the story nowadays. An aside here, I think most movies would be better if they were edited down, and a lot of movies would be great at about 30-45 minutes run time. Anyway, somehow Moses had figured out by that point that he was actually Jewish. Maybe he had questions when he had peeing contests with Pharaoh’s other sons. I’m a little fuzzy on those details.
Yul Brynner keeps telling Moses “no,” and God (or Yahweh) keeps sending plagues to convince Yul otherwise. This is one of the points where I think God could have taken a more direct approach with Yul and saved a lot of trouble for all the Egyptians who really had nothing to do with this situation. They must have been like “oy, what this time? Frogs? stinking bloody rivers? Lice, flies, boils…dear Jesus, boils?” Except they didn’t use that expression because Jesus was several hundred years in the future.
Somewhere in there was the bit with the staff turning into snakes and Pharaoh’s magician staff turn their own staffs into snakes and there’s a sort of cage match with Moses’ snake coming out fully fed for several months. And now we’re at the part about Passover, which is what I’m writing about if you haven’t forgotten. God has gotten really exasperated with Pharaoh’s intransigence so he tells Moses to have his people select special lambs, kill them and brush their blood on the door posts of his people’s homes. This seems like a weirdly specific and sort of gross sign to put on your door and I’m not sure I would have done it if it were me but all the good Jews do this anyway and in the night all the Jewish people had dinner and instead of dessert they ate bitter herbs. I’ve never been much on dessert anyway so I think I would pass (no pun intended) on that. In the movie version a spooky fog floats through the town and women in the distance keep screaming because the first born sons of Egypt all die. This is it! This is the exact center of Passover, but the story continues a bit.
Finally Yul Brynner has reached his limit and tells Moses and all his people to pack their things and get the hell out of Egypt and don’t let the Red Sea hit them in the ass (I can say ass here because that’s the beast of burden carrying Moses’ stuff) on the way out. That’s a joke, because I already told you way back at the beginning about the parting of the Red Sea. Set-up, joke…
So all the Jews start heading to the Promised Land (not Bruce Springsteen’s Promised Land, he’s well into the future too, even later than Jesus) and things are going about as well as can be expected. Moses climbs a mountain and talks to a burning bush (God) and brings some tablets with rules or “commandments” (because God is kind of bossy) down to his people. While the cat was away his people were getting in trouble and they were breaking a lot or maybe all the commandments Moses was coming to tell them about and Moses had to lay down the law, but they got that straightened out and would have been in Canaan very soon except that Moses had made a pact with God and he didn’t exactly follow the ritual God laid out perfectly. I mean, he got it pretty close, but God is a stickler on rituals and he’s heavy handed with punishment as the Egyptians knew so well, so God made them all wander around in the wilderness for 40 years until Moses was ready to die, but he got a quick peek at the property God basically exchanged for eternal devotion to him by every generation of Jews forever afterward. And honestly, I think Moses could have negotiated a better deal on that but it isn’t actually a part of the story of Passover so I’ll let that go.
So that’s it! That’s pretty much the Passover story unless you want to be a pedant over some of the details.
I hope this explanation has been helpful for those of you who were as mystified as I was by the Passover story. I hope you have a happy Passover, if that seems appropriate, and I hope you’ll come back to hear the story behind the next major holiday I decide to explain.