I think you already know where I'm going. The Ten Commandments. It looms large in movie history. And like anything else about Jews by Gentiles, it has mistakes.
The most obvious one is the first Passover. What is Aaron handing out at the first Seder ever? Pita! Pita is not unleavened, it is leavened flatbread such as many cultures have.
The second one is painting the blood on the outside of the door frames. Mekhilta d'Rabbi Yishmael 12:7:1-4 assumes that the blood is supposed to go on the inside, thus it's a warning not to go out of the house. Halakhah is that whereever you eat the Seder, there you stay until you go to shul the next morning. Gd doesn't need to see it, He knows which house belongs to Israelites and won't send the Destroyer to it.
The third one is a little more hairy. Joshua did not need to paint the lintels for Lilia. Everywhere that firstborns have the law applied to them, they are males not females. Exodus does not specify that the Egyptian male firstborns died, but it is added in brackets on Sefaria. Nevertheless as an Israelite, Lilia was not at risk. Dathan on the other hand, as the leader of his part of the Reuvenites, might have been at risk. But his role in the movie was invented by deMille.
And now to the fourth mistake. I realized this when I saw some still shot of Moses (well, Charlton Heston) holding the tablets of the law. The writing is in the Gezer script, which dates to the 800s BCE.
Now, if you read this blog, you know that one of my mantras is "culture makes no leaps". We know the Gezer script had to be older. How much older?
Well, if it developed out of Ugaritic cuneiform, Ugarit was destroyed by the Sea Peoples just after 1200 BCE. Most people think the Exodus was in the 1200s BCE but I've already tackled that. My claim allows the Israelites to have contact with Ugarit for 300 years before its destruction, plenty of time to start using Ugaritic cuneiform, and then 300 years to morph it into the Gezer script. This is similar to the destruction of Ebla and of Naram-Sin setting the west adrift and letting Ugaritic and Hebrew develop out of the western dialect of Akkadian. Which also happened by 1200 BCE.
Aha, you're saying, what about the Tell Amarna cuneiform tablets? Well, look at them here, at the Met. They come from the 1300s BCE when Akhetaten was the capital of Akhenaten for about 30 years. This is plain old straight-up cuneiform, not something that is halfway to being the Gezer script. This is what the Canaanites used in diplomatic and trade exchanges with Egypt. If the Israelites didn't arrive in the Holy Land until the 1200s, they still had 300 years to develop the Gezer script from what they learned from the Canaanites. And that would have happened during a period of isolation.
Which, as I said, did happen. But not until a century after Akhenaten, at a time when Merneptah knew of Israelites living in the Holy Land and sent raiders to get grain. The Israelites were isolated on their hilltops developing the Gezer script a century after most people think the Exodus happened, and they refused to communicate with the Canaanites in the lowlands. So Charlton Heston could not have written the tablets in the Gezer script.
The question is always, could X have known about this subject, and the answer is yes. The Amarna tablets were published 40 years before deMille made the Charlton Heston movie. The Gezer script was published about the same time. That was shortly before deMille made his silent film of Ten Commandments. If he had time to look up the Gezer script, deMille had time to look up the Amarna tablets. He might have done, and rejected it because he wanted something Israelite, not Canaanite.
But he still got it wrong.
If stuff like this matters to you, let me know cos I can also do Ben Hur the book, but I'll have to do it from the start and you know, it's pretty long.
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