My Review of the “The Bible” on the History Channel

I don’t normally do TV or movie reviews but several people have asked me what I thought of the new mini-series so I thought I would respond here. We discussed it a little bit at the Guam Minister’s Prayer Meeting and the opinions ranged from, “it was pretty good,” to “too violent,” to “it was so inaccurate that I turned it off after 5 minutes.” My review is based on the first episode only, which covers creation up to right before the battle of Jericho. When you try to cover that much material you have to leave out a lot so I am ok with that. I also understand that conversations need to be added, but they should stay within the point and details provided of the biblical story. So based on what I have seen so far my review will be mixed.

First, the good side. I thought the best thing about the show was that they presented the story of the Bible as one unified story. I really liked that they started with Noah reading the Genesis 1 story of creation and then connecting it to the ark story as a re-creation of the world. The Abraham and Exodus stories are also connected back to the creation story. So the unified theme of God being involved in His creation was very good. It will be interesting to see how they develop the kingdom principle. Of course, a lot of money was put into this and so the camera work, scenery etc was great. There are no cotton beards in this biblical epic! It looked good. I also appreciate that they did not try to explain away miracles or attribute to people what God clearly does in the biblical story. In general, I think they got across the big idea of the whole story and the big idea of each story they presented. I thought they nailed it with Moses looking back at pharaoh after the Red Sea crossing and saying, “You are NOT God.”

The story I thought they really messed up was the burning bush. When God spoke from the bush it did look pretty spectacular, but I think they missed a big point of the story. The Bible portrays Moses as a very reluctant deliverer, but in the show he seems pretty gung-ho. I know you have to leave some things out of the story, but to do that scene without God revealing His character in His name and without the leprous hand or the staff turning into a snake was just wrong. The whole idea of God using a fearful, weak man in a mighty way was lost. They also left out the covenant scenes with Abram from Genesis 15, 17 which give the theological content to that story. I guess they thought the original call of Abram was enough.

The silliest scene in the 1st episode was the Sodom fight scene. First, the angels look like Jedi Ninjas. Second they did some kind of martial art sword fight with the people of Sodom in which they dispatched several people with artistic flourish. I have no idea where the screenwriters got that but they should have been satisfied with having the angels dazzle the Sodomites with blindness and get Lot and his daughters out of town. I also noticed that there was no mention of homosexuality in the scene.

The thing that annoyed me the most was the little details they got wrong. For example, Abraham has one name through his whole life, Isaac and Abram go to sacrifice Isaac alone (there are servants with them in the biblical story who provide extra drama), God provides a ram not a lamb for Isaac and the sacrifice happens close enough for Sarah to follow them. I tried to find out who the technical advisors were for the program but could not find them anywhere on the History Channel website.

So overall, at least after one episode, I would recommend that you watch it. I will watch the next episodes. I would also advise you to read the stories in the Bible for yourself and not take the TV show as necessarily being accurate. It is a good thing if people are talking about the message of the Bible. I suppose there is much worse on the TV.