Have you had a chance to watch The Promised Land yet?
It’s “a comedy of biblical proportions” which began streaming at YouTube and Angel Studios in October, billed as a take on Moses’ desert wanderings, but in the style of NBC’s The Office, with half-hour storylines interrupted with documentary-style interviews with the characters.
I got a lot out of the series — with a few reservations.
Of course, I always have reservations about biblical dramas.
I’m not concerned with what the creators worried about. Mitch Hudson and the others probably have in mind their goofy Aaron, obsequious Joshua, and caustic Moses when they say, “We’re not mocking Scripture. We’re mocking ourselves as we try to live it out.”
They add: “The Promised Land is a long way of saying, ‘Yeah, I’d probably complain too, wouldn’t I?’"
I like that, but every year I show my Benedictine College students research that demonstrates the literal truth of the old adage “seeing is believing.” Give people true history to read, and then show them a film’s false history, and they tend to remember the film’s errors as truth.
So I worry about watching biblical narratives that will lock one version of events in my mind when the Bible doesn't spell out the details or gives a different version entirely.
In particular, I want to learn from the Bible, not the show, about women, law, and liturgy.
The show's take on women is fun and funny. Moses’ sister is the intelligent but self-important Miriam, played by Shereen Khan, who suffers from, and is improved by, Moses’s wife, the ditsy but wise Zipporah, played by Tryphena Wade. I like that they allow us to see the women’s perspective on all this — but Miriam’s 21st-century snarky attitude tends to suggest that the biblical view of women is hopelessly wrong.
The show’s take on the Law is also fun and funny — with jokes at the expense of injunctions against, for instance, boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk. But watching it so soon after hearing Christ at Mass declare that “not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law” made me uneasy.
Last, while I understood the reason the season’s character arcs all had to be resolved simultaneously at the First Season’s finale, the Dedication of the Tabernacle, seeing the primal liturgy worshiping God being reduced to an amateur artist’s search for validation was too much for me.
All the same, the show helped my Bible literacy also, including about the Eucharist.
I literally went online to fix an article while watching the show with my family. My article had suggested that Moses received the Ten Commandments before his first incident of striking the rock for water. The show corrected my timeline.
More significantly, the show helped me see the reality of the Real Presence. The Protestants who created it certainly didn’t intend this, but it was telling to see in the Finale how, the moment Aaron makes his sacrifice on the altar, God descends with fire and smoke and occupies the tabernacle. Seeing a priest in vestments “call down” God’s presence is a familiar sight to Catholics, and it was profound to see how it began.
I also like the creators’ stated goal “to show that these biblical characters were just like us.”
Yes, I understand that the figures in the Bible are sacred heroes in the inerrant text of an inspired writer, and that they did not share contemporary understandings (and big misunderstandings) about life. But if there’s anything you learn reading the Old Testament, it’s that these people there are as sin-prone and feeble-minded as us. And that’s important.
And as much as we want to think Charlton Heston when we think of Moses, as the Angel studios’ online materials point out, the real Moses stuttered, doubted, panicked, and nearly quit. He was weak like us and, with God, we can be strong like him.
All in all, I think the series is a good place to start sharing salvation history.
I personally find The Promised Land is as enjoyable, in its humble way, as The Prince of Egypt (1998), The Ten Commandments (1956), and Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). Its details are more accurate, too. That said, the greater production values of those big-budget films give the story a grand scale that better fits the impression one gets reading the Bible.
As far as Moses comedies go, the “Moe and the Big Exit” episode of Veggie Tales probably wins for enjoyability — but it’s one 52-minute episode, so The Promised Land gets points for both thoroughness and accuracy (there is, as it turns out, no cucumber leader in a cowboy hat in the biblical text).
Moses, starring Ben Kingsley, is probably the most accurate Exodus movie but is a hard sell for family movie night. The Promised Land is not a tough sell at all.
