How Ridley Scott’s Exodus Strays From the Bible
Christian Bale as Moses in Exodus: Gods and Kings 20th Century Fox
The biblical story was poetic, the history is murky at best
聖經故事史詩化, 歷史細節盡可能模糊
The Biblical story of Exodus hits the big screen on Friday with the release of Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. The story is one of the most timeless in Western history, like the Odyssey or Shakespeare, only imbued with deeper spiritual significance, as Jews, Christians, and Muslims all claim the hero as their own. This newest adaptation is classic Scott-style, very Gladiator, set in an ancient Egypt where Ramses is Pharaoh and Moses is Christian Bale.
雷德利史考特執導的, 取自聖經的出埃及記, 躍上大銀幕. 出埃及記是西方歷史最經典的歷史故事, 就像奧迪賽, 或莎士比亞, 帶有很強很深的精神象徵意味, 像猶太, 基督, 或穆斯林, 都聲稱基督是他們獨有的. 新拍成的電影, 可說是史考特式的經典出埃及記, 場景在埃及, 羅幕斯是法老, 摩西則是克里斯汀貝爾
Like any retelling of a classic, Scott’s blockbuster invites questions about the Exodus’ story’s origin and meaning. Most of the basic plot elements of the Biblical story are included in the film’s adaptation—Moses is a Hebrew boy raised in Pharaoh’s house, he leaves Egypt and encounters the divine in a burning bush; he returns to Egypt to free God’s people from slavery under Pharaoh; there are a bunch of horrible plagues; and the Red Sea parts so the Hebrew people can escape Pharaoh’s armies.
就像任何經典重拍一樣, 史考特的鉅作讓人思考出埃及記這故事的出處與意涵. 所有聖經的元素都出現在這部電影中. 摩西是西伯來人, 在法老家長大, 他離開埃及, 在燃燒的叢林遇到神. 他回到埃及, 要解放神的子女, 脫離法老的奴隸, 過程中, 有可怕的瘟疫. 也有紅海自動分開, 讓西伯來人能順利逃脫法老的大軍追殺
From a strictly historical perspective, the Biblical Exodus story is murky at best. While there is some evidence that a people named Israel were emerging in Egypt in the late 13th and early 12th centuries BCE, little information exists about Israel’s presence there during the time. The general picture is clearer—Egyptians were in power in the region most of the time, various people groups migrated to Egypt during times of famine because the Nile made Egypt’s agricultural system more stable, and slavery was a part of the economic system of the ancient world. Most likely multiple people groups would have been enslaved, not just Semitic peoples, as slaves were often debt slaves or prisoners of war.
從嚴謹的歷史觀點來看, 聖經的出埃及記其細節盡可能的模糊. 但有證據顯示1西元前2世紀, 13世紀, 在埃及確實有以色列這樣的民族在這塊土地出現過. 但進一步更清楚的資料就很少了. 大體的畫面是清楚的. 埃及人在當時是握有權力的. 很多不多民族的人在饑荒時移民到埃及來, 因為尼羅河讓埃及的農業體系很穩固, 而奴隸是古代經濟制度的一部份. 很有可能很多不同民族在古時都曾被奴隸過, 不只西伯來人. 通常奴隸是欠債還不出來的人或戰俘充當
The origins of the written account of the Exodus story in the Bible are equally hard to pin down. “We don’t know when it was written, by whom, and it appears to come from multiple traditions in Israel which were probably both oral and written traditions and probably developed over centuries,” explains Ellen Davis, professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School.
很難去考究聖經出埃及記這段的細節. "我們不知道何時寫成的? 誰寫的? 看來這段是來自以色列不同傳統, 以口述或書寫傳承下來好幾世紀". 杜克大學神學院的聖經與實務理論的教授Ellen davis這樣解說
But drilling the Biblical story for proof of its narrative elements—that the Red Sea split, the Nile turned to blood, that flies attacked and frogs covered the land—misses the poetic power of the story itself. The Bible as a whole is not designed as a history textbook. It is a collection of different types of writings. Some are historical records, others are laws, poems, prose, and prophecy—written over hundreds of years and in various cultures and languages. The core of the Exodus narrative is actually a song, recounted in Exodus chapter 15, and it is one of the oldest fragments of all Biblical texts, likely dating to the earliest period of Biblical literature. Songs, as Davis explains, are the kind of thing people pass on orally and remember. “Exodus 15 may well be one of the kernels out of which the book of Exodus as we have it grew over centuries in the process of oral and written traditions gradually getting consolidated,” she says.
不過鑽研聖經故事, 從它敘述的元素去看的話, 像紅海分開, 尼羅河染成血色, 蒼蠅攻擊, 青蛙布滿整個大地等等...少掉故事本身的詩意. 聖經這本書不是設計來當歷史教材的. 它是不同型態的書寫集結而成. 有些是歷史紀錄, 其他可能在講法律, 詩歌, 或預言, 寫了幾百年以上, 涵刮不同文化與語言. 出埃及記的核心確實是首歌, 記錄在出埃及記第十五章. 是聖經中最古老的段落. 可能要追朔到最早期聖經文學. 至於歌, 就像杜克大學的Davis教授指出, 是人們借以傳頌記憶傳承下去. 出埃及記第十五章可能是最精華篇, 是沿習幾百年透過口說或書寫過程不斷集結而成的.
The truth of the Exodus story is poetic—it is the quintessential story of oppression and liberation. The Pharaoh of Exodus, Davis points out, is not named. “It is, you might say, the generic Pharaoh,” she says. “There is a deliberate lack of specification. Pharaoh is the sort of quintessential oppressive ruler in the Bible, and that is how he is remembered in later literature, so he stands for the oppressor of the moment in a sense.”
出埃及記是詩歌式, 是有關壓迫, 解放最精采的故事. 出埃及記的法老, Davis指出, 沒有特定指那一位. "你可以說, 是廣義的法老" "沒有太多細節. 在聖經中, 法老廣泛代表壓迫者的角色. "
That is one reason the narrative has resonated powerfully generation after generation—there is not just one Exodus story. “Let my people go” is a timeless refrain for redemption. It is at the core of the African-American religious traditions in the United States. In some parts of the world, the Exodus story still is very concrete. Davis works in South Sudan with the Episcopal Church a few weeks before the new state was declared in July 2011. Women is the region often carry babies in baskets on their heads, and many of the people she works with, she says, have seen baby baskets torn from women’s heads and boy babies thrown in the Nile—the river runs through South Sudan. “They don’t want those boy babies to grow up and be soldiers,” Davis explains. “It is not a story that disappears.”
這是敘事如此強烈可一代傳給一代的原因, 並不是只有一個出埃及記. "讓我的人民走吧"是超越時間的. 它也存在非裔美國人的宗教傳統中. 在世界其他地方, 出埃及記仍然很具象化. Davis在南蘇丹工作, 跟一個Episcopal教會工作幾個禮拜. 在這區的女性通常要把小孩裝在籃中放在頭上, 很多她一起共事的女性, 看到小孩從籃中破口掉下來, 男孩丟到尼羅河, 這河會流經南蘇丹. "他們不想小男生長大當兵" Davis解釋說"這個故事在人類的心中永不消失"
One of the most striking aspects of Scott’s Exodus is that God is portrayed as young boy. Eleven-year-old Isaac Andrews plays the God character, and the choice is both brilliant and scary. It plays on Scriptural images about becoming like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven and—with the Christmas time release—it makes it impossible to forget that God being born as a child is the New Testament’s own liberation story. But the film’s God-child is also more King Joffrey than let-the-little-children-come-unto-me. He actively inflicts plagues of frogs, gnats and boils upon the Egyptian people, and ultimately kills the first-born of all Egyptian families. It is impossible to escape the irony—a child becomes the killer of children.
That raises questions of what kind of God the God of Exodus really is. The film purposefully papers over whether Moses is imagining the child-God, if he is having a vision, or if he is mentally unwell. The Biblical narrative of Exodus portrays God as a king and a man of war—the main drama, Davis explains, is a battle over sovereignty between Pharaoh and Israel’s God.
“You have to remember that Israel was most of the time in its history in a situation of being oppressed, and if you are an oppressed people, it is good news to know that God is going to render judgment, because you are not worried about God’s judgment nearly so much as you are worried about what is going to happen to you from the oppressor,” Davis says. “People have always understood that ultimately God renders judgment and brings down the powerful and raises up the lowly, and you have that in the New Testament just as much as you have it in the Old, that has always been viewed as good news.”
And spiritual questions like these are the ones that never go away, which means Scott’s version of the Exodus story won’t be the last, no matter what happens at the box office.
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