[p. 1] 

Norman J. Fedder

Dramatizing the Torah: Plays about Moses

Much has been written about Judaism’s “superstar”: many scholarly studies and novels have appeared but relatively little drama—especially when one considers the infinite number of plays about Jesus. Regarding the Old Testament, playwrights have been more interested in such figures as Adam, Noah, Joseph, David, Jonah, and Job; or, maybe, less intimidated. For none are as imposing as Moses, who dominates four of the five books associated with him—the foundation of Jewish and Christian faith—known by the Jews as The Torah. Among modern plays about Moses are Isaac Rosenberg’s Moses (1916), Lawrence Langner’s Moses (1924), Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron (1932), Christopher Fry’s The Firstborn (1948), Cecil B. deMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), Anthony Burgess’ Moses, The Lawgiver (1975), and Elizabeth Swados’ The Haggadah (1982). While each of these works will be considered, those of deMille, Burgess, and Fry will receive extensive treatment because they are the best known and follow the Torah most closely.

Moses by Isaac Rosenberg

Two scenes constitute Rosenberg’s short play. In Scene 1, Moses reveals his determination to prevail over Egypt; and in Scene 2, two Hebrews quarrel over Moses, a drugged overseer beats one of them senseless, and Moses enters and kills the Egyptian. Rosenberg departs from the traditional portrait of the divinely inspired and guided Moses to create a liberator empowered by his own will, “all a-bristle” with self-confidence and zeal to take action against everything that is enslaving to the human spirit:

I am sick of priests and forms
This rigid dry-boned refinement.
As ladies’ perfumes are
Obnoxious to stern natures,
This miasma of a rotting god
Is to me.

Who has made the forest a park?
Who has changed the wolf to a dog?
And put the horse in harness?
And man’s mind in a groove?

I heard the one spirit cry in them,
‘Break this metamorphosis,
Disenchant my lying body,
Only putrefaction is free, [p. 2] 
And I, Freedom, am not.
Moses! touch us thou!’ (141-42)

However, Moses is really more a dramatic poem than a theatre piece--consisting largely of long verse monologues, rich in original and startling word pictures, but too static in action and complex in syntax to be effective on the stage.

Moses by Lawrence Langner

This full-length play by Lawrence Langner goes decidedly further than its one-act namesake in remaking Moses. The great lawgiver is now the villain of the piece, weighing down humankind with his harsh commandments—particularly his antipathy to graven images. These symbolize for the playwright the world of the artist, championed by Moses’ sister, Miriam. Thus the making and worship of the golden calf is for Langner, not the nadir of civilization, but the acme! Yet, granting this deliberate inversion of the Torah, the play is so blatant in its blasphemy that the characters are flattened-out, denying them both credibility and interest.

Moses and Aaron by Arnold Schoenberg

Schoenberg, like Langner, places the conflict between two symbolical characters at the center of his work: in this case, a three-act opera (the last act of which has not been musicalized). The polarity of values is also similar. Aaron, rather than Miriam, is in conflict with Moses. The latter’s commitment to an ineffable God and a morality of pure spirit is pitted against Aaron’s awareness of the people’s need for a tangible Deity and a life of the senses. Aaron’s God commands allegiance through signs and wonders—rods changing into serpents, hands made leprous, water becoming blood, and sacred images. However, Schoenberg is clearly in Moses’ corner. Aaron goes too far. The golden image he makes to becalm the people bestializes them. But Aaron defends his action against Moses’ ire, to the point of claiming that the tablets of the law are “images also.” Moses responds to this by breaking them and imprisoning Aaron; who is, finally, freed by Moses, but falls down in death. This sharply contrasts with the original, where the two are reconciled, and Aaron dies highly respected and widely mourned. Moses and Aaron is a bold conception, carried through by an equally daring score. The character contrast inherent in the Torah is developed to mythic proportions with maximum effectiveness.

The Haggadah by Elizabeth Swados

Subtitled “A Passover Cantata,” composed by Swados with texts by Elie Wiesel and others, this play is essentially a musical dramatization of the Passover seder (ritual meal). It generally follows the order of the seder and has the same quality of combining stories, prayers, commentaries, and ceremonies “in memory of the departure from Egypt.” Swados interweaves excerpts from the Haggadah (text of the seder) and elsewhere with episodes from the life of Moses (not included in the Haggadah). These are narrated, sung, and danced by a chorus of twenty; and illustrated with props, scenery, masks, and projections. The only dialogue is spoken [p. 3]  through life-size puppets; the only characters are Moses, played by a boy who mimes the action as it is narrated, and Pharaoh, portrayed by a huge stylized head raised and lowered from the top of a stylized pyramid. The image The Haggadah evokes of Moses is playful and exuberant, acknowledging the pain of enslavement and bloodshed, but transmuting it into the joy of freedom and celebration.

Cecil B. deMille’s The Ten Commandments

So well known is this film, that when most people picture Moses they see the face and form of Charlton Heston! He is tall, handsome, muscular, intelligent, kindly, the greatest of all warriors, the finest of all statesmen, highly respected by men, dearly adored by women. He is the image of melodrama’s typical hero, engaged in a battle to the death with two equally typical villains—dark-complected and sinister-looking, hated by the men they oppress and despised by the women they exploit: the Egyptian Pharaoh, Rameses (Yul Brynner) and the Hebrew collaborator, Dathan (Edward G. Robinson). The Torah has been reduced to a simplistic saga of physical conflict, romantic intrigue, and extravagant spectacle.

A Torah, one would surmise, not “out of Zion” but Hollywood. Clearly, the non-biblical aspects of deMille’s screenplay, with an eye to popular appeal, must be of his own invention. “Not at all,” insists Henry S. Noerdlinger, in his Moses and Egypt: The Documentation to the Motion Picture The Ten Commandments:

Cecil B. deMille’s genius as a storyteller, his inherent talent as a dramatist in the direct and universal language of the cinema, are known and proven. For the picture The Ten Commandments, the facets of Moses’ life that are not recorded in the Bible could have been invented and written into scenes harmonious with the Old Testament story. But Mr. deMille, his associate producer and writers—Messrs. Wilcoxon, MacKenzie, Lasky, Gariss and Frank—did not have to invent them. They had been set down in writing some 1,600 to 2,400 years ago. The missing years of Moses’ life have survived in this very ancient literature. (13)

The ancient literature to which he refers includes Philo’s On the Life of Moses, Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, Eusebius’ Preparation for the Gospel, and the Midrash (Interpretation) of the Jews. Noerdlinger goes on to demonstrate that he and his fellow scholars were painstaking in their efforts to determine, as far as they could, the exact nature of the architecture, clothing, arts, crafts, adornments, food, and entertainment of the ancient Egyptians. This accuracy of detail is reflected in the scenery, props, and costumes of the film; and, therefore: “To bring these events and the man who lived them to the screen was approached with responsibility, with conscientiousness and with intelligence.” (13) But, mostly, with tastelessness. That such a meretricious and mindless movie could be made after so much effort at “authenticity” is disturbing—although it is less a matter of the enormity of the creative task and more a result of deMille’s “proven genius” as a cinematic pander.

[p. 4] So the point not be missed, we hear in stentorian tones at the start, that God has given man the power to “choose between good and evil” and to concoct the melodrama that follows of “one [good] man standing alone against an [evil] empire.” We hear of this man, at first, as the “deliverer.” He will be, it has been prophesied, a Hebrew child who will grow up and overthrow Pharaoh. As in the Torah, Pharaoh responds by decreeing the death of all new born Hebrew males; and to prevent this happening to her son, Moses’ mother Yochabel (Yocheved) puts him in a basket and floats him down the Nile, where he is watched over by his sister, Miriam; until Pharaoh’s sister (not daughter), Bithiah, retrieves and adopts the child against the warnings of her maidservant, Memnet, who realizes that the child is a Hebrew.

The Bible is “taciturn on Moses’ life,” Noerdlinger writes, “from this precise moment to his killing of the Egyptian as a grown man. This is the moment when we draw fully from the ancient sources to paint as complete a portrait of Moses as possible.” (19) A portrait which in every way inflates the original to the dimensions of hagiography, the making of Moses into a supersaint. We see him first as a great general, returning in triumph from his conquest of Ethiopia. He is adored by the kindly Pharaoh, Seti, who prefers Moses over his own son, Rameses, as the heir to the throne and the woman who goes with it. This beautiful (non-biblical) princess, Nephreteri, is equally infatuated with Moses. Nothing the man does is less than remarkable. When challenged by Rameses to direct the building of Seti’s city at Goshen, Moses does so, not only with optimum success, but with loving concern for the welfare of the Hebrew slaves who labor at building it. Against the will of the Egyptian overseers, he takes the part of the outspoken Joshua and saves a woman who is about to be crushed under a huge stone—a woman who, coincidentally, turns out to be Yochabel. He is instinctively hostile to Egyptian polytheism. With grain stored for their deities, he feeds the starving Israelites and preempts the giving of the law at Sinai by creating the Sabbath! In consequence, Seti proclaims that Moses will be the new Pharaoh.

This is too much for Memnet. She must reveal that Moses is the son of a Hebrew slave. Why she tells Nephreteri, who promptly kills her for her trouble, is anybody’s guess; but why Nephreteri is dumb enough to tell Moses is beyond comprehension—given the fact that she ought to know well enough that our boy scout will now be honor-bound to leave her and seek out his origins. While the Torah doesn’t tell us that Moses was aware of his Hebrew parentage, the traditions assume it. However, Noerdlinger writes that deMille couldn’t have his Moses be such a “man of duplicity....A man of such high ethical and moral standards could not have been loyal both to Pharaoh and to the enslaved Israelites.” (21) This “high ethical” Moses is hardly fazed by the knowledge of his slave origin—far from it; it transforms him into an abolitionist: “I must find the meaning of what I am—why a Hebrew or any man must be a slave.”

So he strips himself of his Egyptian finery and labors with his fellow Israelites in the mud of the brickyard. But Nephreteri can’t keep her hands off her now filthy lover, still resplendent under the slime. Wrapping herself around him, she pleads: “You stubborn, splendid, adorablefool. Return to me…you can free the slaves when you’re Pharaoh.” Of course this sensible idea is scrapped for the sake of Moses’ honor and deMille’s picture. Moses nobly rejects her crass [p. 5] offer and proceeds from there, as in the Torah account, to kill an Egyptian whom he finds brutally whipping an Israelite. Wouldn’t you know that the victim would be none other than Joshua, Moses’ future right-hand man and successor, and that Joshua would now declare Moses to be the deliverer of prophesy. And who should be spying on them but the wicked Dathan, whom Rameses has hired to get the goods on said deliverer. Rameses had already promised Seti that if this person did indeed exist, he would bring him to Pharaoh in chains. And so Rameses does, revealing to Seti (what by this time you would imagine all of Egypt ought to know) that Moses is a Hebrew. Unhappily, Seti declares that Moses cannot be his heir; Rameses will now have that honor. And Moses tells Seti that he is not the deliverer, but if he could free the slaves he would, so opposed is he to “the evil that men should turn people into beasts of burden because they are of another creed or race.”

But Rameses has Moses banished to the desert, not executed, to prevent his being made into a martyr—and ending the picture at this point. This differs from the Torah version in which Moses was “frightened” when he realized that the murder was known; and he “fled” from Egypt to escape Pharaoh’s vengeance. But that would not be “in keeping with Moses’ noble character,” according to Noerdlinger (22). In the desert, he is “cleansed for God’s great purpose.” He arrives at last in the land of Midian, at the point of death from dehydration and starvation; but, of course, with sufficient strength to drive away a gang of shepherds who won’t let Jethro’s seven daughters water their flock. Much is made of his winning Sephora (Zipporah), one of these daughters, and of capping his triumphs by making it big in the wool trade!

Now he is ready for the final glory, to become Israel’s deliverer and be commanded by none other than God at nearby Mount Sinai. The ever-burning bush not only flames and crackles in living color, but is equipped with state-of-the-art stereo. The voice of God manages to sound even more affected than the holy groan of Heston as it booms out its demand that Moses return to Egypt and redeem his people; to which Moses replies as he does in the Torah: “Who am I? How can I lead them?” One is tempted to admonish him at this point: “Are you kidding? You’re Charlton Heston! Where were you when your director was inflating your Moses to near-immortal proportions?” But, of course, that kind of fake humility is expected of Hollywood heroes—along with a fake hair-do! The “burning light of God’s own presence” has not only turned Moses’ hair gray, but sprayed it up skyward. This heaven-sent hairiness will be more than a match for the bald new pharaoh, Rameses, because Seti has died with Moses’ name on his lips despite his vow to forget him.

Not long after, Moses and Aaron (a minor character in the film) confront Rameses and demand that he let the Israelites go. Rameses responds by making things even harder for the slaves; they will be denied the straw they need to make bricks, but their required daily quota will not be reduced. The people turn on Moses and are about to kill him; but he is saved by Nephreteri, whose attempt to win him back is repulsed by the new, holy Moses.

Then God responds to Rameses’ obstinacy by having Moses bring down the ten plagues on Egypt, three of which are graphically portrayed in the film: we see the waters polluted by blood, [p. 6] the land ravaged by hail, and the firstborn meeting their death (when Rameses persists in his refusal, spurred on by the vengeful Nephreteri). This last plague turns the tables on Rameses’ plan to murder Israel’s firstborn. But Nephreteri has taken this as an opportunity to get Sephora away from Moses and back to Midian, by warning her of her son’s imminent death. However, when Nephreteri tells this to Moses in an effort to reclaim him for herself, he tells her that it is her son who will die. And when he rejects her plea to reverse this, she denounces and defies God’s verdict.