#"Prince of Egypt" movie - Crossing the Red Sea

[sunshinesteves]

some prince of egypt things:

the cast is incredible. especially ralph fiennes as ramses, jeff goldblum as aaron, and of course, steve martin and martin short as hotep and huy

not only did dreamworks acknowledge at the beginning of the movie that they took some artistic liberties, but the things they changed made sense. they added more to the story - especially with making ramses moses’s brother instead of his father.

music!!!! every single song is such a goddamn bop

ofra haza (an israeli singer) played yocheved. the hebrew she sings in deliver us translates to “my good and tender son, do not be frightened and do not be scared”

when yocheved sings her lullaby to moses, she sheds two tears - one from the inner corner of each eye - and her hair blows in front of her mouth. later, when miriam sings the lullaby (also to moses) the exact same thing happens. kills me every time

music motifs!!! off the top of my head - yocheved’s lullaby plays during some significant moments when moses is still in egypt (no i don’t remember which specific moments just take my word for it), all i ever wanted plays while moses is shepherding right before the burning bush scene, deliver us plays when moses tells tzipporah about his people wanting their freedom, and the plague song is basically an all i ever wanted reprise

ok so cool thing about colors - moses is always red, ramses is blue. the accents on mose’s egypt-wear are red, so are the plumes on his horses, and the huge-ass robe thing he got from jethro. when he’s younger, ramses’s clothes are accented with blue, his horses’s plumes are blue, and so is his armor in the red sea scene. in the plague song, when half of each of their faces join to make one face, moses’s face is lit up red, ramses’s is blue. at night the palace is lit blue. the one blue thing moses owns is ramses’s ring - which he ends up giving back.

what they did with tzipporah! in the actual torah they don’t meet until moses saves her and her sisters (i’m pretty sure the whole “moses falling in” thing doesn’t happen in the torah either...stellar scene. truly) the way she’s handled in the movie just adds a lot of history and background to her and moses rather than it being out of the blue. obviously it doesn’t get off to a...great start...but i just think it’s cool that moses helping her escape leads to him finding out who he really is, which leads to him running away, which leads to them falling in love, etc. good job prince of egypt writers!!

not that it matters but making moses stupidly hot and not like 80 (which he canonically is) was. galaxy brain. thank you for making me horny for the leader of my people dreamworks

i don’t know jackshit about animation but that red sea water looked fucking real. WHAT– 

also! the fact that the bottom of the red sea isn’t just straight up flat sand cause that is literally just. not how a sea floor works? it’s like it’s own mini mountain range! and it takes them a while to cross!! FANTASTIC

when moses turns the nile to blood and there’s a little circle of water around him!! true to the source material!! (in the torah it says that it was still water for the israelites)

THE FUCKING DREAM SEQUENCE OH MY G O D

it’s so cleverly done, especially when the moses!fam is running from the egyptians and they run on the ceiling or on the pillar in front of all the drawings. the MUSIC. the COLORS. and according to my art history mother, all those trees were literally everywhere in Egyptian art. THEY👏🏼DID👏🏼THEIR👏🏼RESEARCH👏🏼 

how they tried to show just. how many people there were. like there were around 600,000 israelites!! and that’s just the men over 20!! and you could tell that it was a TON of people (especially when you see them leaving and on mount sinai)

BURNING BUSH SCENE

fun fact! the voices of god are a man’s voice and a woman’s voice layered on top of each other!! 

fun fact part two! the male god voice is the same guy who voices moses! oh the metaphors

the “who made the blind, the deaf, etc.” line is a direct quote from exodus

ANGEL OF DEATH!!!!!

obviously that’s like. a very difficult scene to do (maybe even more difficult than the bush scene??) without pissing off a lot of people and they did. a good fucking job.

moses’s hair is just. really important. you know what? zuko vibes. moses is zuko, zuko is moses, they are the same.

the kids singing in hebrew as they leave egypt are singing the song of the sea! in the torah, it’s sung as they cross the red sea. also it’s sung by a children’s choir how CUTE

it’s little but in the actual torah moses doesn’t spend much time with kids because he’s busy leading a bunch of whiny bitches (i’m jewish i’m allowed to make the joke lol) through the desert for forty years, so just that little moment where those two kids jump on his staff..he really was a leader of the people, yknow?

how when old!pharoah (no i don’t remember his name) stands in the throne room in profile and it perfectly lines up with his bigass statue of himself right outside. and then ramses does the same exact thing except his statue is like. much bigger. i think he’s overcompensating for something lol

the movie ending on the ten commandments is obviously v good but i’m just laughing because we’re just gonna. gloss over the tablet smashing lol. it’s ok i’ll let it slide

AND IT ENDS ON YOCHEVED SINGING DELIVER US AGAIN!!!! Y E S

and at the very end, three quotes about moses - one from the torah, one from the new testament, one from the quran!! 

there are lots more lol i could go on about this movie for a very long time

[astridstorm]

Sermon for Martin Luther King Weekend

Good morning on this Martin Luther King Junior weekend. In the church, Dr. King’s feast day is actually April 4, because we date our observation of saints’ days according to the date of death, not birth. But in our country (of course) and for most, the remembrance of him occurs this weekend. 

I’d say it’s especially poignant because of the year we’ve had in race relations. But then I’m saying that as a white person. My black colleagues often point out that they live tragedy every day; it flashes across our screens every now and then (as it did last summer with the death of George Floyd), but death and fear are front and center and an inescapable part of their lives all the time. Sometimes those of us who happen to be white notice it, oftentimes we don’t. Though I hope that’s changing.

Last Sunday night I taught our seventh grade confirmation class. We were online. Four girls, and me. We’re working our way through the Old Testament at the moment. This year, I’m teaching Scripture. Next year in 8th grade the kids learn the church’s history and faith with Father Sabune. We’ve been studying the life of Moses for three weeks, starting with his journey as a baby in a basket down the river where he was scooped up by the Pharaoh’s daughter and raised, this son of Hebrew slaves, as the Prince of Egypt. 

Continuing with his discovery of himself and his roots as a young man, which led to his flight into the desert to live as a shepherd. That was where he had the vision of God in the burning bush. 

Then the Exodus from Egypt where he led hundreds of Hebrew slaves out of bondage into freedom, to take them to the Promised Land. 

The crossing of the Red Sea where God parted the waters and closed them again upon the Egyptian army.

The trip up Mount Sinai in the wilderness to receive the Ten Commandments and the other laws that guided them as a people. 

The years in the wilderness, of hunger and thirst and second-guessing about this dream of a Promised Land.

And finally the fulfillment of the promise as Moses stood on a mountaintop overlooking the Promised Land. Forty years after they left Egypt. That mountaintop, that bluff, today is a tourist site; it’s in Jordan. You can stand there and see much of Israel from Jerusalem off in the distance to the north to the Dead Sea off in the distance to the south. It’s a magnificent view. 

Let me stop here to say, Teaching kids on Zoom is really hard. I had movie clips, timelines, all sorts of visuals, but whenever I looked up, I saw the blank stares of four pre-teen girls who, I’d begun to suspect, had their screens on something else.

We got to Moses on the mountain, overlooking the Promised Land. We read it from the Bible, and for those who don’t know, this is where Moses dies. Nearly his entire life given to the pursuit of bringing himself and his people to this land, and all he gets is a glimpse from afar...and dies. He never steps foot in the Promised Land. 

Blank stares from my seventh grade girls. But I wasn’t finished! The coup de gras was still to come. 

In the last five minutes of our class, I toggled over to Martin Luther King’s speech given in Memphis. This was his last speech before his death. I played for the girls the final few minutes of it. He was in Memphis for the Sanitation Workers strike. He almost didn’t go; his sense of foreboding, of danger was very strong at that time. But he also knew these men, these sanitation workers, had been stripped of what little dignity they had in the Jim Crow South. They were denied basic protections; some had been crushed in garbage trucks, with no one held to account. They were denied collective bargaining rights. They were underpaid and made to work long hours. They were called “boy,” as if they were servants to the whites, not equals, and men. Hence the famous “I am a man” placards. The shame of that needing to be said. 

King was afraid at this time for his life, but his sense of justice and outrage was so keen, he couldn’t refuse these men when they asked him to be there. I’d been telling the confirmation kids you have to learn this story of Moses. It is part of the foundation of Western Culture. Not to know it, is to fail to understand so much of what has happened in our world. And now I got to show them. 

I’m sure they would deny every bit of this next part, but I’m telling the truth. I played the video, and I could see the looks on their faces change. I knew they finally got it.

Here’s what King said. 

“I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane–there were six of us–the pilot said over the public address system: ‘We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong on the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we've had the plane protected and guarded all night." [The pilot said.]

And then [King continued] I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out, or what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers.

Well, I don't know what will happen now; we've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy tonight; I'm not worried about anything; I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. 

King’s last public words. 

When I logged off from our Zoom class that night, I wondered about these kids. What kind of world they’ll live in when they’re my age. I think I’m right in saying their parents weren’t even born when King was assassinated. 

It’s easy to say, it’s sure to get better with time. But will it? Has it? Enough? 

King had something to say about that, by the way. Time, he said, is morally neutral. We have to work to make sure things change for the better, to bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. We have so much work to do, and we need to do it for ourselves, our children, but above all for our black brothers and sisters and their children. One of my favorite quotes of Kings’ seems apt here: “I can never  be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”

King knew this: the Church is a framework, a force, for justice. It’s nothing if it’s not at least that. And so, on this Martin Luther King weekend, I wonder how we and our kids here in this country, here at St. James, will help in this struggle towards justice, for every human being. 

Remember this PROMISE we give at our baptism -- a promise is a serious thing: “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?”

Say it with me: “I will, with God’s help.” Amen.

[ourkd]

Israel’s Deliverance, Exodus 14:10-31

Israel’s Deliverance, Exodus 14:10-31

Moses answered the people, ‘Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the LORD will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.’” – Exodus 14:13-14

You may read Exodus 14:10-31 here: Bible Gateway.

Perhaps this is the first instance of the Israelites’ bitter grumbling as they accuse Moses of…