Fast and the Fastidious: Memphis Drift

Battles B.C. Season 1, Episode 5
Moses: Death Chase (2009)
Directed by David Padrusch
Written by David Padrusch

The title of this episode alone is enough to make cause the combination of hysterical laughter and crap-hurling anger.
Moses: Death Chase? Is that what we’re calling Exodus now?

And so Moses did get all up in Pharaoh’s business and said “Why you gotta hassle us, man?” -- Death Chase 1:29
As sort of a bizarre prequel to the David and Joshua episodes, the Death Chase, is built around the notion that in addition to being a prophet and a civil leader, Moses was a brilliant general. Also, the Israelites time spend wandering in the desert was sort of a 40 year long special forces training camp.

Moses....Cazzey Cereghino
Seti, a pharaoh....Nevin Millan
Ramses, another pharaoh....Vincent Lewis
Midianite Woman, a civilian prisoner who is killed after battle....Amanda Gamel
Egyptian Taskmaster, a really horrible boss....Tim Weske
Phinnius, an Israelite commander....Dustin Szany

Richard A. Gabriel (Distinguished Professor, Royal Military College of Canada)
David George (Director, Institute of Mediterranean Archaeology)
Steven Weingartner (Chariots Like a Whirlwind)
Mark Schwartz (Department of Anthropology, Grand Valley State University)

This episode sets its tone when it shows Moses killing the Egyptian Taskmaster. This is no Charlton Heston hero Moses, instead Moses lets out a bloody roar (with all kinds of drool and blood dripping out of his gaping maw) when he kills the Egyptian that is either ridiculous, blasphemous or just plain ugly. Apparently Moses was something along the line of an orc or some other sort of hairy ogre. Seriously?

Then there’s the problem of the source material. One of the problems of the Old Testament is that they are very clearly pieced together from multiple sources and at the heart of the source material is a division between descendants of Moses and Aaron and that much of the material that paints Moses in a less than flattering light is clearly meant to lower the status of the house of Moses with respect to the house of Aaron. The later redactors who combined the sources either didn’t care about this division anymore or made a compromise by including multiple points of view when they pieced it together. This knowledge is important, because it throws a whole bucket of salt on the kinds of conjecture that this episode is based on. The scholars here start out with the presumption that their Old Testament source (for the sake of argument) forms a coherent single narrative. They can do this, for the most part, because the show is very short, their audiences are presumed to be mouth breathing adolescents and child-men, and nuance makes for brain-aching television.

Instead, we have to sit through ogre-Moses slamming rocks into people’s heads and then roaring like a wild beast.

At any rate, I bring up the issue of the problematic sources, because they come into play more than once here, notably in the case of the Midianite purge and in the death of Moses. The Midianite purge is notable because it has to do with clamping down on intermarriage between Israelites and Midianites and considering the fact that Moses himself has a Midianite wife. Now, this episode treats all of the events described here as fact, whereas it is equally possible that the story of the Midianite purge is a later addition meant to A) denigrate the House of Moses because of their miscegenation and B) Justify later strict rules against intermarriage.
Again, these multiple layers of complication are not as cool as just showing Moses and his people slitting the throats of innocent women and letting the cartoon blood spatter.

As for the death of Moses, Richard Gabriel makes a bold conjecture that he was possibly (though he admits there can be no evidence for this) that Moses was killed by his own people before they entered the holy land. Cue the animation sequence of an Israelite running Moses through with a spear on Mt. Nebo. Yeah, they actually show that, cartoon blood spatter and all. I’m not sure how many religions (including mine) that offends, but it is an interesting proposition, though I think a little off the mark given the issue of the source materials I noted above.

I have to give the scholars kudos here for consistently ignoring the mistranslation issue of Red Sea versus Sea of Reeds. Thank you for ignoring the centuries of ridiculous assertions caused by Elizabethan/Jacobean misspelling.
The extended discussion of the pillar of fire and ancient signalling techniques is good and I might even buy some of the assertions that such tactics show Moses to be a great commander.

If the idea is that you want to spark an interesting discussion then I suppose Moses: Death Chase can certainly do that. But unless you are prepared to do some outside reading and conjecturing of your own then I would strongly object to the idea that this episode represents a good account of the subject matter. Moses deserves better than that.

And Death Chase? Is that what it’s all come to? Death Chase? I say it over and over again and get a little more filled with rage when I think about the kind of yellow journalism historiography that it implies.