One thing that stood out to me overall between the film and Exodus is the conciseness of the first part of Moses’s story in Exodus versus how much detail is included in the film. The first two hours of the film are covered in just one chapter of Exodus. In chapter two of Exodus, Moses’s Hebrew mother had hid him for three months out of fear that he would be killed by the Egyptians for being a male newborn. Finally, when she felt that she could no longer hide him, she floated him down the river (Exodus 2:3). This scene is very similar to the movie in which Moses’s mother puts him in a basket as the sister watches where Moses goes from afar. Different from the movie, however, is how Moses’s sister speaks with the Pharaoh’s daughter and says that she can find a Hebrew woman to breastfeed the child and gets Moses’s birth mother to do the job (Exodus 2:9). In the film, Moses’s sister does not approach the Pharaoh’s daughter and instead watches from a distance as her brother is named Prince and is immediately adored by the daughter of Pharaoh and scorned by her maid. After Moses grew, he then became the Pharaoh’s daughter’s son instead of the instant that she found him like the movie portrayed. The chosen name for the baby, Moses, is explained in the same way in both variations of the story of Moses: “Because I drew him out of the water” (Exodus 2:10) and “Because I drew you from the water, you shall be called Moses!” (The Ten Commandments 17:20). While Moses’s time as a mere child is briefly described in Exodus and the film, the film greatly details part of Moses’s adult life in two hours while Exodus details the same time frame in just ten verses (Exodus 2: 11-20). A question that I have about the difference in detail between the two variations of Moses’s story is whether the writers of the film created these missing pieces, followed other accounts of Moses’s story, or if the Bible later fills in these missing details that the film seems to account for.
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