http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/mar/11/amen-history-channels-bible/
NEW YORK, March 11, 2013 — Well, it could have been much worse, and in some ways it was better than expected.I missed the first part of the History Channel’s series on the Bible, that begins at, well, “The Beginning,” as in Genesis, but I caught up to it last night by the time Moses, not Yasser Arafat, reaches the Promised Land, yes, Israel.
Those of us who study the Hebrew Bible daily and religiously but are not necessarily religious, indulging in the forbidden cheeseburger after study and prayer or the ballgame we may watch after Sabbath services, were afraid that the series may take too many liberties in this, the age of political correctness.
ABC-TV, for example, once tried to re-do Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 “The Ten Commandments,” but forgot to mention that the people Moses was leading were Hebrews. They could have been anybody in that pasteurized version.
In this “Bible,” at least the script was clear enough.
But I must admit that even in this telling it was difficult to imagine anybody as Moses except Charlton Heston or Pharaoh as anyone except Yul Brynner.
Was this version accurate? I’ll let our doctors of divinity get into that, but as for me, not bad, and showing Samson as a black man was a good touch. Jews have become distilled and we do trace our lineage back to Abraham (some would say his grandson Jacob and the 12 Tribes, specifically Judah, hence Judaism), but we come from a mixture. We never were “the white man.”
The best part, for me as a casual observer, was that there was no hiding the fact that God promised the land of Israel to the Jewish people. Period. End of story. But as we know, this story is without end. Read he headlines and the Hebrew Bible itself foreshadows everything we read in the papers today.
But whoa! Where’s this been all these years? Even Israeli politicians are afraid to mention Israel’s indelible Biblical connection for fear of rocking the boat.
Frankly, I had expected “the other side of the story,” namely that the Arabs enjoy an equal claim to the Land, and if they do, it’s political, and not Biblical. The History Channel stuck to the Bible, the Hebrew Bible…told, of course, in King’s English, and there is even more to this to prove King Solomon’s maxim that there is nothing new under the sun: