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The Exodus Decoded: A Biblical Theory in Video Game Graphics
More articles on this topic: MediaIt’s no accident that “amazing” is the reflexive superlative of the Internet age. Amazement — great wonder tempered by perplexity and even disorientation — is a deep feature of the Web; its users seek it, cultivate it and register it on message boards.
This aesthetic of amazement drives the Web’s many Pynchonesque narratives, the ones with the coincidences and conspiracies that bloggers love. In these stories there can never be too many documents, photographs, audio files or digital video. And had they but world enough and time, the Aeron Sherlocks would decipher all of it. At the same time, history, politics and popular novels now seek to amaze as much as to inform, instruct, convince or entertain. Conspiracy theories of 9/11 and the contested 2000 election, as well as international best sellers like “The Da Vinci Code,” have made cryptologists of us all.
Simcha Jacobovici, whose mesmerizing film “The Exodus Decoded” will be televised tomorrow on the History Channel, is a fitting hero of this age. A groovy Emmy-nominated filmmaker in a bob and a hip yarmulke, Mr. Jacobovici presents theories of ancient religious history that in a less stentorian voice might sound like baloney. You might even feel sorry for him, as if he were one of those guys whose tender intellect has been sandbagged by notions about Atlantis or Area 51. But because he’s sometimes right, and because he’s charismatic and never daunted, you don’t feel pity at even the most mad hypotheses. You feel rapt.
“The Exodus Decoded” — a masterwork of soaring computer graphics, if nothing else — pursues the idea that the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, as it transpires in the Bible, actually happened. Mr. Jacobovici maintains that the Exodus took place during the reign of Ahmose I, around 1500 B.C., which is a century or so earlier than most scholars estimate.
The Greek island of Santorini, he says, erupted at the same time, which had strange, seemingly supernatural effects on the Nile delta, where a related limnic eruption took place. These effects — the reddening of the sea, the darkening of the sky, the thriving of frogs and lice — were, he contends, what is meant by the notorious plagues of the Old Testament. They were real. And so were the parting of the Red Sea, Mount Sinai and the Ark of the Covenant.
This mind-bending argument is made with dutiful reference to hieroglyphs, interviews, scholarship and archaeology. But don’t expect to follow it. The voice-over — Mr. Jacobovici’s — strives for the ring of lucidity, and he certainly sounds positive, but sentence by sentence he busies himself so adamantly, connecting one dot to the next, that you often forget where you are in the master plan. (This, to me, is one hallmark of a conspiracy theory.) He also does not entertain competing arguments. He has his story, and it explains the ways of God to man, and he’s sticking to it.
If “The Exodus Decoded” is a little bullying, it’s nonetheless haunting and powerful polemical television, and a program that uses talking heads in an especially innovative way. Instead of filling the whole screen with academics yapping in bookish tableaus, Mr. Jacobovici works the wise men who appear here into the film’s haunting graphic scheme: a constructivist hangarlike place defined by scaffolding, like gleaming Tinker Toys, and flying artifacts.
The faces of interviewees float around, something like the JumboTron images from “Blade Runner” or the ghosts released at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The effect is that of a cacophony of sages competing for your soul in a dream.
At the same time, the cathedral-like place that serves as the main stage for the documentary, which also follows Mr. Jacobovici on his far-flung travels, looks as if it’s being hit by a sandstorm of stones — some of them arrowheads or promising discoveries, some of them merely rocks. If this sounds insane, think Borges: it’s beautiful. In a matter of years, it may look like computer graphics laid on too thick, but for now it’s enchanting.
And there’s something about those flying stones. Petrodolatry — the worship of stones — sometimes seems to be the ranking religion in the Middle East. In this film Mr. Jacobovici, whether he gets to the truth or not, succeeds amazingly at what any good historian of antiquity must do: he brings the stones to life.
THE EXODUS DECODED
The History Channel, tomorrow night at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.
James Cameron, executive producer; Simcha Jacobovici, producer, writer, host and narrator; Felix Golubev, co-producer; Susan Werbe, executive producer for the History Channel. Produced by Associated Producers Ltd., in association with the History Channel in the United States.
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