A couple of years ago, I welcomed a camera crew into my office for some interviews about Old Testament stories. The crew went away and I never heard from them again, until I e-mailed the production company last week to find out what ever became of the footage. A representative of that company promptly e-mailed me back and kindly sent out a screener of the DVD that is scheduled to release in October.

I am not happy with the end result.

When I agreed to do the interview, I did not know that the thankfully direct-to-video program would feature “re-enactments” of biblical scenes (and horrible re-enactments at that; only Moses has a proper beard). I did not know that the film would use completely irrelevant footage to distract viewers during longish voiceovers by host Roger Moore (yes, that Roger Moore). And I certainly did not realize that the production would end up trying to promote views that I do not personally endorse. I did suppose that a diversity of opinions might be represented, and represented as such. Silly me.

Here are some of my specific complaints about the program. Yes, I know that you haven’t seen it yet. My hope is that maybe you won’t. But perhaps if I embarrass myself pre-emptively by means of this post, at least my learned colleagues will cut me some slack. Also, as far as I know, I’m not bound by any non-disclosure agreement, so please consider this an “advance review” of the film. (Click on “continue reading” for the whole, long post.)

Adam, Eve, and Eden. The first eight minutes or so of the program offer up young-earth creationism, with a heaping helping of commentary from folk associated with the Institute for Creation Research. Longtime readers of Higgaion know that I have no sympathy whatsoever with young-earth creationism (I’d sympathize with a young-earth creationist who got bit by a pit bull or something, but you know what I mean); I consider it exegetically irresponsible and it is (regardless of my consideration one way or the other) not scientific in the least. The producers conveniently left out the parts of my interview where I expressed the view that the biblical Adam and Eve are “everyman” and “everywoman” and that the impossible geography of Eden is a clue to readers not to try to interpret Genesis 2–3 literally. Instead, the film gives air time to ICR folk who completely misuse the real scientific concept of a Y-chromosome most recent common ancestor (Y-mcra) and a mitochondrial DNA most recent common ancestor (mt-mcra), sometimes called “Y-chromosome Adam” and “mtDNA Eve”; the talking heads try to conflate Y-mcra and mt-mcra with a literal Adam and Eve from Genesis 2–3, even though Y-mcra and mt-mcra, according to current evidence, lived almost 90,000 years apart from one another. (To my better-informed friends: yes, I know that this brief explanation is awfully simplistic.) A caption in the film claims that “Using geographical clues given in Genesis, scholars almost all agree that the Garden of Eden is in Iraq.” Wrong. There are some biblical scholars who want to locate the original location of Eden in what is now Iraq, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates; of course, none of these scholars would say that the Garden is (now) anywhere to be found. And most biblical scholars are not even interested in the question. If you take the geographical description in Genesis 2 as your clue, you will be hopelessly frustrated, for the clues simply don’t work. No such place exists. If you are willing to stretch some of the geographical references in Genesis 2, and allow certain place names to mean things in Genesis 2 that they don’t mean anywhere else in the Bible, you can assign a geographical context to Eden, not in southeastern Mesopotamia but in the mountains of Asia Minor. I’m pretty sure I talked about this with the interviewers. If I did, they didn’t use any of that material. It wouldn’t fit the agenda.

Noah and the flood. With what I’ve written above about Eden, you can predict what you’ll see in the few minutes devoted to Noah and the flood. A literal interpretation—but not so literal that it precludes a re-enactment of Noah’s neighbors begging for help, which Noah refuses to give. And, predictably, the ICR guys are back with young-earth flood geology, while an on-screen caption repeats the discredited claim of some to have satellite photos of Noah’s Ark on a mountain in Turkey (it’s a rock formation, folks; didn’t you get the memo?). I don’t appear anywhere in this part of the program. I don’t remember whether I talked with the interviewers about the flood story, but if so, I’m sure I didn’t support—and even contradicted—the ICR’s young-earth flood geology. The ICR folk once again misrepresent mainstream geology to make it sound like they have good evidence for their own views. Specifically, John Morris comes on-screen to claim that “evolutionists” attribute the entire formation of the Grand Canyon to erosion caused by the “little bitty [Colorado] river,” as Morris characterizes it. Roger Moore’s voiceover tells viewers that “at present rates, the river would take millions upon millions of years to carve out the Grand Canyon,” and then Morris re-emerges with the standard YEC flood geology lines on the Grand Canyon. But Morris also tries to co-opt mainstream science:

Morris: By the way, even my evolutionary colleagues nowadays have recognized that the Colorado River would never carve a canyon like this. The mechanics of erosion are all wrong. It just wouldn’t carve a canyon like this. And they have come to the conclusion also that a huge volume of water racing through here not very long ago carved this canyon out rapidly. That is consistent with and supportive of the biblical doctrine of the great flood of Noah’s day.

But Morris is completely misrepresenting mainstream scientific thinking about the formation of the Grand Canyon. It’s true that the National Parks Service characterizes the Grand Canyon as “very young,” but that’s “[g]eologically speaking”; the NPS suggests that the canyon itself formed “very recently” on a geological time scale, namely, “only within the last five or six million years.” By misappropriating language like “recently” when used on a geologic time scale, Morris seeks to reduce the actual time scale by a factor of 1,000! Morris also completely ignores factors like geological uplift, volcanic activity, and the near-certainty that the Colorado River was rather larger a couple of million years ago due to increased precipitation and runoff in the wake of Pleistocene ice ages. (To my better-informed friends: yes, I know that my language here is very imprecise.) He’s either intentionally being deceitful or he doesn’t know any better, and if it’s the latter, it means he’s getting all of his information about mainstream approaches to the formation of the Grand Canyon at second or third hand (at best). Also, I don’t know why Morris insists on connection “evolutionists” to the formation of the Grand Canyon, which is the purview of geology, not biology. Oh, I guess I really do: evolutionary theory is seen by creationists of most if not all stripes as the root of all evil.

Lot, Sodom, and Gomorrah. I first appear on-screen during the program’s treatment of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. All I do on-screen is summarize a part of the story, and hopefully I used phrases like “in the story” enough to indicate that I was speaking of a literary work and not making historical claims. Just at the tail end of that footage, a caption appears on-screen claiming that “A recent discovery at the ancient site of Ebla demonstrates the historical existance [sic] of the cities of the plain.” This “recent” discovery was made in the 1960s and 1970s, and the “information” provided in the film was outdated by 1980. Early in the process of translating, interpreting, and publishing the Ebla texts, one of the scholars working on the archive claimed that one tablet, which recorded some business transactions between Ebla and other cities, named the five cities of the plain (in Ebla’s syllabic cuneiform, as si-da-mu, è-ma-ra, ad-ma, si-ba-i-um, and be-la, allegedly corresponding to Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Bela). This claim still pops up on many “apologetics”-oriented web sites. The truth, however—known since the late 1970s and discussed in several publications that date to 1980 and 1981—is that

corrections in reading the names have eliminated the third and fourth in the sequence that was claimed to parallel Genesis 14, and that, moreover, they do not occur on the same tablet as the supposed Sodom and Gomorrah in any case. It should be stressed that there is no published evidence to support an identification of Ebla cuneiform si-da-mu with Hebrew sĕdōm and è-ma-ra with Hebrew ‘āmōrâ. One would need a number of occurrences of words from Ebla written with the cuneiform sign si and a number of cognates in other Semitic languages to see whether si corresponds to Canaanite samek. The case of è-ma-ra is even more difficult. One would need to show that the Ebla writing convention utilizes the sign è to reflect etymological ‘ayin or ǵayin. Until the proposed readings are better substantiated it would seem prudent to withhold drawing further similarities with no relevance whatever for either the existence or location of Sodom and Gomorrah. (Robert Biggs, “The Ebla Tablets: An Interim Perspective,” Biblical Archaeologist 43.2 [Spring 1980]: 82)

Ten years later, when the New International Commentary on the Old Testament volume on Genesis 1–17 appeared, “better substantiation” was still lacking. As far as I know, “the world and I, we are still waiting,” but for the producers of this film, “any dream will do.” The filmmakers also swallow, without any evidence of critical examination, someone’s identification of certain ruins south of the Dead Sea as being those of Sodom and Gomorrah. The film is so vague that the claim can hardly be assesed; specific sites are not identified. One laugh-line comes when Moore, with all the gravitas he can muster, tells viewers that “archaeologists believe the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah discovered southeast of the Dead Sea sit on a fault line.” That’s silly; either the ruins (whether they be of Sodom, Gomorrah, or some other city) either sit above a fault line or they don’t—no believing required. You can guess where they’re going with this, though; a talking head and Moore’s voiceover suggest that earthquake activity spit up “sulfur-laden bitumen” and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. At the end of the Sodom-and-Gomorrah segment, my friend Bob Cargill also appears on screen, telling the interviewers that Sodom and Gomorrah are mentioned in other parts of the Bible, in “second temple period” Jewish literature, and specifically in the Genesis Apocryphon. Yes, this is all true, but so what? The producers of the film put this information to a use that I’m almost positive Bob wouldn’t endorse, namely, “arguing for” the historical accuracy of the biblical story by counting up references thereto.

Job. Why put a segment on Job after the segment on Lot? Since they have Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe (an old-earth creationst organization) on talking about the time frame for the life of an “historical Job” (over completely irrelevant footage of a large ruined structure, which I guess viewers are supposed to take as Job’s mansion), one can only guess that they’re trying to put the segments in a chronological, allegedly historical order. The famous passage in Baba Bathra 15a, “Job never was and never existed, but is only a parable,” was either unknown to or ignored by the filmmakers (or they disagree, based on critical analysis of the possibilities—but I tend to doubt this is the case). Here comes my second “talking head” moment, when I try to explain the “divine council” scene in Job 1. At least the script got right that “Satan” (“the satan” would have been preferable, but I’m all about grasping at little straws of hope by this point in the viewing) was “one of these figures,” that is, one of the “sons of God/the gods” or functionaries in the divine council—but this information is shared by Moore in narration over visuals of an actor in a black robe, black lipstick, and black nail polish dropping some kind of token into a bowl by which sits another actor garbed all in white. Anything in the narration that detracts from the standard Christian image of Satan as God’s arch-enemy—an image quite foreign to the book of Job—is undermined by the visuals. After a very quick consideration of the theodicy theme (not using that terminology), the film flops back to science, making claims that the book of Job records accurate scientific knowledge. Hugh Ross is on-screen claiming that the book of Job talks about “the beginning of … matter, energy, space, and time.” I must have missed that somewhere. Ross also claims that the book of Job describes the expansion of the universe—and again, I missed it. No specific passages are cited. When Ross then claims that God creating life and “ecological relationships” in “optimal form” or “optimal designs,” I’m really at a loss. In Ross’s hands, the divine question “Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, when the crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert?” (Job 38:39–41) apparently becomes “[God] creates carnivores to relate to herbivores so the carnivores are only able to kill off the weak, the dying, and the sick or the unwary—not so effective that they [incomprehensible] or so ineffective that they can’t kill any. The ecological relationships are idealized.” The apparently willful misrepresenation of biblical content by so-called conservatives drives me batty. A caption then claims that Job predicts other scientific discoveries in “Meteorology, Paleontology, Geography, Astronomy, Oceanography, Shape of Earth, Movement of Light, Physics, Biology, and Botany”—not that any of these “predictions” are identifed, or given chapter-and-verse references, or presented for critical analysis.

Abraham. I next appear on-screen briefly summarizing the theme of barrenness in the Abraham story. Then there is an unsatisfying “re-enactment” of the aqedah. In the next scene, Moore tells viewers that “skeptics doubted the existence of Abraham’s home town, Ur of the Chaldees”—and yes, if you’re wondering, Moore mispronounces the ch in Chaldees like the ch in chalk (it should be hard, more like the k in chalk)—until it was discovered in the early 20th century. There’s a curious mixture of true and false here; the biggest issue is the completely uncritical way in which the script makes Moore assume that the southeastern Mesopotamian city of Ur is the city intended by the biblical phrase “Ur of the Chaldeans.” The identification is plausible but not certain. Moore then tells viewers that “the name Abraham appears in Mesopotamian records”—implying that the simple appearance of a phonetically cognate name somehow verifies the biblical Abraham’s historical existence. It’s almost as if Thomas Thompson never wrote his 1974 book on the patriarchal narratives, which taught us all to read the evidence much, much more carefully (whatever one might think of Thompson’s conclusions and subsequent work). Well, it’s pretty certain that none of the producers of this film ever read it, at any rate.

Joseph. After a cheesy re-enactment of parts of the Joseph story, with voiceovers by Moore and a brief commentary by Tremper Longman (who casts the scene with Potiphar’s wife as being simply about sex), Ogden Goelet, Associate Research Scholar of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University (mistakenly assigned, in the film, to Columbia University, where Goelet earned his Ph.D. in 1982), appears on-screen telling the interviewers that non-Egyptians sometimes “Egyptianized” themselves and rose to prominence in the Egyptian government. I have no idea what Goelet thinks about the historicity of the Joseph narratives, and the film doesn’t actually go there, leaving a vaguer statement hanging in hopes that viewers will connect the dots themselves. Then the film goes immediately right on to Moses. Viewers are supposed to move from Goelet’s statement—that non-Egyptians could sometimes rise to high rank in the Egyptian bureaucracy—to the filmmakers’ desired conclusion that Joseph was a real person and the story is perfectly accurate as told in the Bible. The Joseph story may or may not be historical, and Joseph may or may not be a real person, but in either case, the sound bite is insufficient to establish the case. The filmmakers imply that the rise of Joseph in the Egyptian government is the only historical problem with the story, but that isn’t so.

Moses. Much of the first part of the Moses segment is simply bad dramatizations and voiceovers summarizing the biblical story, with a few embellishments (“Moses became learned in the esteemed knowledge of the Egyptians: mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and archicture,” according to host Roger Moore). Once the film has the Israelites out in the wilderness (the work of a few seconds of voiceover), one John Eastman, credited as a Professor of Law at Chapman University, claims that the Ten Commandments “tap into and coincide with what our human reason tells us as well.” How, exactly, “our human reason” would “tell us” that monotheism is preferable to polytheism and that one day per week should be “kept holy,” Eastman does not bother to spell out (though one might make an argument from the Greek philosophers on the first score). The filmmakers want to argue that the Ten Commandments correspond to a universal, inbred human ethical code—and they quote Jeremiah 31:33 (in a caption, floating over the Magna Carta and the Constitution of the United States), completely out of context, to support this notion. Eastman comes back on to try to connect the Declaration of Independence, with its “inalienable rights endowed by [our] Creator,” to the Ten Commandments, but even a second’s reflection will expose this for the mendacity it is. The “unalienable rights” envisioned in the Declaration are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” At most, the Ten Commandments could arguably be linked to the “right to life,” in the commandment “You must not kill,” but there certainly is no “right to liberty” in the Ten Commandments (and biblical law is well-known for endorsing slavery, even if trying to regulate its excesses at points), nor any “right to the pursuit of happiness” (especially if that happiness drives to you collect sticks on the Sabbath).

Samson. Bob Cargill and I are back in the film’s next segment, which focuses on Samson. (I don’t know why Joshua ended up on the cutting-room floor.) Each of us appears on-screen basically summarizing some narrative element or theme; my bit is on the nazirite vow as a sign of devotion to God, and then on what a “judge” is in the book of Judges. I get quite a bit of screen time here, summarizing the part of the story that features Delilah. As long as my comments are taken as such, I don’t come off looking too badly. The introit to the section suggested that viewers would learn whether Samson was a real person, and really did the things attributed to him, but in fact the film (and the talking heads, Bob and me) just summarize the story as it’s told.

David. I’m the first talking head in the David section, summarizing in a few seconds the part of the story where Samuel anoints David. Tremper Longman plays a similar, but more prominent role here. Somebody needs to tell Roger Moore that the Philistines never fought the “Jews.” The dramatizations here are absolutely horrible. Goliath is played by a large black man with a buzz cut, and the Israelite soldiers—less than a half-dozen people—wear the stupidest-looking robes and head scarves that I’ve ever seen in a biblical “reenactment.” The filmmakers invoke the Tel Dan stela to prove David’s historical existence, but they don’t actually show it on-screen. Instead, they show footage from the “Tomb of David” monument in Jerusalem, quite a long way from Dan, running the risk (or was this intentional?) that viewers might misinterpret the images they’re seeing on-screen as artifacts from ancient Israel. The script has Moore misrepresent the Tel Dan stela (they don’t use that term) as containing a “reference to David,” which isn’t quite right; the inscription refers to ביתדוד, bytdwd, which many but not all students of the inscription interpret as “House of David.” I happen to think that this reading is correct, and that it’s evidence in favor of a historical David existing as the founder of the Judean dynasty that was current at the time the stela was inscribed, but it’s an indirect reference to David at most, and the filmmakers give no space to dissent or alternate readings.

Jesus. The teaser for the next segment asks viewers, “What did archaeologists dig up in the 1960s that proves the Bible’s accuracy?” The segment opens with a couple of talking heads telling viewers that “there really aren’t any” contradictions in the Bible and that there is no evidence contradicting any part of the biblical story. Amazing. These people either can’t or don’t actually read the Bible, but only talk about it, or they have become remarkably adept at the mental gymnastics required to pay incredibly selective attention to their sources, both biblical and non-biblical. Yes, I realize that’s probably a rude thing to say, but one can hardly read the gospels carefully without realizing that John’s chronology is explicitly different from that of the Synoptics, for example, and the Tel Dan stela (mentioned above) makes claims that clash with a story early in 2 Kings. Please understand—I’m not anti-Bible (far from it), but I am anti-lying, even on the Bible’s behalf. One of the talking heads in this section is my colleague Ira Jolivet (who says, on-screen, that if the stories about Jesus hadn’t been passed on, they would have been lost—an entirely unobjectionable premise). Darrel Bock is also on-screen, talking about the reliability of Jewish oral tradiition in the first century CE.

To try to prove the reliability of the traditions about Jesus, the filmmakers turn to—are you sitting down?—the Dead Sea Scrolls, which of course having nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus. Moore makes reference to the Great Isaiah Scroll, but the first on-screen image is 4Q175, or 4QTestimonia, which has nothing to do with the Isaiah scroll. The second scroll is shown upside-down and backwards on the screen, and too close-up (and blurry) for me to identify it. According to Moore’s script, comparison of the Isaiah scroll with the Masoretic Text (he doesn’t use that term) yields “stunning” results; one of the talking heads, a guy named Paul Maier and identified as a Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University at Kalamazoo, tells him that the two manuscripts are “99.9% identical” (meanwhile, a caption on-screen quotes Matthew 5:18, which has nothing to do with textual transmission). I cannot be even 99.9% certain that Maier was talking about the Isaiah manuscripts, though I hope the filmmakers weren’t that careless or mendacious. I am, however, 100% certain that the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Masoretic Text of Isaiah are considerably less than 99.9% identical. To use a crude measure, there are 1,291 verses in the MT of Isaiah; if only three verse are substantially different in the DSS, we have an “identicality” rate lower than 99.9%. You can find that many differences in chapter 7 alone. To use a trivial example, the Masoretic Text spells “Damascus” as דמשק; the Isaiah scroll has דרמשק, consistently. There are other small differences of spelling, use or non-use of definite articles and copulas, and—much more interesting than these—the MT’s tendency to show אדני in the text where the Qumran Isaiah scroll has יהוה. The figures given in the film are simply false. Maier claims that “This idea that the copyists have totally change scripture just doesn’t work,” and depending on how strongly you ramify his word totally, he may be right; but in the case of the Isaiah scroll, it’s quite clear that copyists did in fact change יהוה into אדני for reasons of theological propriety. The comparison of DSS Isaiah and MT Isaiah proves what Maier says it disproves.

Of course, the degree of exact correspondence between DSS Isaiah and MT Isaiah has nothing to do with the reliability of the transmission of the New Testament documents, since completely different communities were doing the transmission. Moreover, scribal accuracy in copying a text has no bearing on whether or not the story is true.

Well, the rest of the film is presumably about New Testament stuff, and I’m not going to torture myself any more. I feel reasonably certain that nothing I said on-screen was particularly embarrassing, and was in fact accurate taken for what it was supposed to be (in most cases, a summary of a literary narrative), but I’m a bit upset—no, incensed—at being threaded into a production that sets out to prove a whole bunch of stuff that I don’t agree with, much of which is demonstrably wrong. I suppose I have noone and nothing to blame but my own naïveté, in failing to ask the right questions before saying “Yes” to the camera crew. I’m not sure if I exercised better judgment the second time around—if not, I’ll blame it on Bob—but that remains to be seen.