Generally speaking, Ridley Scott’s “Exodus: Gods and Kings” is more biblically respectful than Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah,” which saw Russell Crowe performing a well-paid infomercial for Al Gore’s environmentalism.
Yet “Exodus” has been swarmed by critics accusing it of unchecked “white privilege.” No such charges, as far as I know, were made against “Noah” for the absence of actors of color, perhaps because its environmentalist creed made it racism-proof.
“In ‘Exodus’ did nobody ever once tell the cast and crew that having Africans as slaves to white pharaohs was a bad idea?” asked a Twitter user, with the hashtag #BoycottExodusMovie.
A change.org petition demanding a boycott states: “The Bible says both Egyptians and Ethiopians are descendants of Ham. Remember, Egypt wasn’t invaded by Rome until 300 BC. Egypt is in Africa not Europe.”
Ironically, a different criticism of “Exodus” — that it uses a child named “Malak” (played by 11-year-old Brit Isaac Andrews) to personify God emanating from the burning bush — has been made by religious conservatives who panned the film. “The portrayal of God as a willful, angry and petulant child in ‘Exodus’ will be a deal-breaker for most people of faith around the world,” said Chris Stone, founder of the North Carolina-based consumer advocacy group Faith Driven Consumer. One reviewer joked that this is “Children of the Corn” casting, and another likened it to “Lord of the Flies.”
Although young Malak is not played by an actor of color, the name — meaning “angel of Yahweh” in Hebrew — actually figures in Genesis 16:7–16:14 in a genealogical-tinged context. In this passage, the angel speaks as God in the first person, to Abraham’s Egyptian wife, Hagar, comforting her and her son, Ishmael — progenitor of Arabs and, later, Muslims — after mother and son have been pressured into fleeing in the desert from Abraham’s camp. Abraham’s first wife, Sarah, is never given the honor of such a first-person divine interview.
Ancient Egyptians ranged over the color spectrum — more so as centuries and millennia unfolded. As has often been remarked, the late Anwar Sadat would have been forced to sit in the back of the bus in Jim Crow Mississippi.
It is true that, with the exception of a few servants and criminals, none of the actors in “Exodus” are people of color any more than Christian Bale is a Jew (though many don bronzed body tones). This is a complicated matter historically. The depiction of Nubians and Ethiopians in Egyptian pictograms goes back to the Middle Kingdom, well before the putative Exodus. Shishak (circa 943-922 B.C.E) is central to Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Shishak, according to the books of Kings and Chronicles, was indeed a temple robber, but his provenance was Libya, not Ethiopia, which suggests a future attempt to contact Muammar Gadhafi’s ghost about the whereabouts of the Ark of the Covenant.
Some 300 years after Shishak, a pharaoh of Nubian or Ethiopian origin named
Taharqa, ruled Egypt during the 25th dynasty. His name is associated with the contest for world supremacy between Egypt and the Assyrian Empire that controlled Babylon and Persia. The monarchs of the two Jewish kingdoms at the time sided with Egypt. The prophets of that time did not much like Egyptians (whose penises were also pruned), mocking the Jewish alliance with them as a heathen “coalition of the circumcised.” The Assyrians defeated Egypt and destroyed the northern Jewish kingdom of Israel (scattering the 10 lost tribes).
In biblical times, Jews and darker-skinned Africans (called Cushites) were, at different times, fellow sufferers in servitude in Egypt, and citizens and soldiers of both Egyptian and Israelite states that were sometimes antagonistic, sometimes allied — a bit like the contemporary Mideast. But historically, the first pharaohs of Nubian or Ethiopian ancestry came a couple of centuries after Moses’ time. In this sense, Scott’s choices are defensible.
So much for biblical history and Hollywood. The truth is that though we may think of Africans and ancient Israelites as continents and cultures apart, the Israelites became conscious of peoplehood in Egypt, and Moses led a “mixed multitude” out of that land. Both Africans and Jews were inscribed in the biblical world map, and their histories have intersected, in old world and new, ever since.
Harold Brackman is a historian and consultant to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
