Moses

[liberty]

I don’t have a twitter account so I can’t be sure what this controversy is about. But I can guess based on other similar topic I have read. Here is my guess: Moses should have been played by a black man. Based on their logic, Africa is the home of black people so Africans are black, Egypt is in Africa so Egyptians are black people. Moses was thought to be a member of the royal family so he must have been black.

It could also be about the fact that none of main characters are played by middle easterner, but I don’t see the problem there. The actors that play these roles are Caucasians of European descent and so are most Egyptians except they are from a different branch Caucasians; they have the long noses and the Caucasian hair. If whites can be made to look like look like Egyptians I see nothing wrong with them playing the roles.

http://www.filmibeat.com/hollywood/news ... 65976.html

Exodus: Gods and Kings 'Boycott' Controversy On Twitter Posted by: Amrisha Updated: Friday, November 28, 2014, 15:44 [IST] googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1413541577263-0'); Share this on your social network: Facebook Twitter Google+ Comments Mail Hollywood's forthcoming Moses movie - Exodus: Gods and Kings is in trouble long before it is released. As soon as the trailer of the upcoming movie was dropped, the hashtag #boycottexodusmovie has been trending on Twitter.The director of Exodus: Gods and Kings Ridley Scott has been criticised over the decision to cast white actors to play Egyptians.WATCH THE TRAILER HEREThe movie starring Christian Bale as Moses, Aaron Paul as Joshua, Sigourney Weaver as Tuya and Joel Edgerton as Rhamses is getting ire of the twitteratis over being racist.Tweets like '#BoycottExodusMovie because it is a blunt disregard of historic facts!' and 'Blacks only cast as slaves, thieves...Not the Kings and Queens? I hope @ExodusMovie bombs at the box office..' have been seen on the feed under the hashtag.Meanwhile, director of Exodus: Gods and Kings, Ridley Scott has told Variety that casting was a business decision."I can't mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such," Scott said."I'm just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn't even come up," he added.However, in August, Scott had something else to say. "We cast major actors from different ethnicities to reflect the diversity of culture, from Iranians to Spaniards to Arabs," he told Yahoo.Earlier also the film had been in controversy after Christian Bale described his role as 'barbaric' and 'schizophrenic'.

Read more at: http://www.filmibeat.com/hollywood/news ... 65976.html

[MajGenl.Meade]

Moses was a pre-Israelite... something to do with the people of Abraham from the old Ur of Chaldees region and parts north and east etc. So... one of the Aryan peoples - like Jews and Arabs. At least, that's what I thought.

[liberty]

Moses was a pre-Israelite... something to do with the people of Abraham from the old Ur of Chaldees region and parts north and east etc. So... one of the Aryan peoples - like Jews and Arabs. At least, that's what I thought.

Well General Sir, with all due respect I believe the Jews and Arab are of the Semitic branch of Caucasians. The Aryans were relatively late arrivals in the area. The Bible gives the origin of the Hebrews as northeast of Canaan beyond the Euphrates River; it would be logical to extend it further north and east to the mountains and steppes of Central Asia the original home of all Caucasians. It is my personal hypothesis that the Semitic arrived in Southwest Asia during the last ice age when the area was still occupied by a Negriod people that would account for their somewhat darker skin. But the only real difference between the Semitics and the Europeans is that the ancestor of the Semitic people travel south and the ancestors of the Europeans traveled west. It is a little more complicated than that but let’s not open that can.

[MajGenl.Meade]

That sounds more like it. I was thinking "Aryan" when Caucasian would have been better.

[Sue U]

Not "Aryan," not "Caucasian." We are descendants of a West Semitic people, most likely Arameans.

[TPFKA@W]

I thought he was a Cajun? Oh wait, that was Amos-Moses.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Yes Sue but Aryan, Semitic and the alleged Hamitic were (still) debated as being Caucasian - which had nothing to do with whiteness per se. Or as Devo explained

Caucasoid, he was a Caucasoid
Related to you and me

Caucasoid, he was a Caucasoid
And it determined what he could see

Caucasoid, he was a Caucasoid
Monochrome to many

Caucasoid, he was a Caucasoid
And it determined what he could see

And he wore a hat
And he had a job
And he would not eat bacon
So that no one knew

He was a Caucasoid

[Sue U]

When Jacob and his household moved from Canaan to Egypt, they were merely 70 people; by the time of Moses and the Exodus, there were 600,000 Israelite men on foot, plus children, according to the Old Testament -- and assuming its numerical designations are actually meant literally in this context, which is not at all certain. In any event, since virtually all the descendants of Jacob's children -- including Moses -- were born in Egypt over the course of 430 years, they were undoubtedly the product of many generations of intermarriage with other local tribes/peoples of the Nile delta, whoever they were in (roughly) the second millennium BCE. And although morphologic features of "race" had probably arisen some 20,000 to 50,000 years earlier, the populations of the Fertile Crescent probably could not be separated out by anything people today think of as "race."

[MajGenl.Meade]

OK. That 600,000 is suspect but less so than that 25 billion (or 20 million or whatever silly number it is) that certain fundamental Christians calculate as having left Egypt in the exodus. Do you suspect a lot of intermarriage then? It would seem to be a natural occurrence! Still, I don't think there's any reason to suppose that Moses was black - or the pharaohs for that matter as this contemporary pictograph shows:

[Sue U]

Intermarriage is reported as a matter of fact in the Biblical account. Moses himself married a woman identified as a Cushite (Nubian), presumably black, who may or may not have been the same wife identified as Tziporah the Kenite, who was probably black, or at least dark-skinned, given her Midianite ancestry. Moses himself may or may not have been dark-skinned, although the Biblical text suggests a pigmentary contrast between him and his wife.

It is a certainty that people up and down the Nile and on both sides of the Red Sea interacted and intermarried, so it is equally a certainty that there was significant mixing of dark-skinned and lighter-skinned peoples, and all shades in between. It is also a historical fact that Egyptian rule extended from Nubia to Assyria to Persia, bringing all the peoples of the region into socio-political contact, through both war and trade. At the time of the Exodus (if there was an Exodus), Israelite ancestry and culture was still primarily a subset of the Canaanites, whatever that might imply as to their skin color. As if it actually mattered.

[Gob]

Of course the probability is that Moses never existed, so it's all a moot point really.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Ah but that's where you're wrong, Gob. Wrong, I say!

The sons of Mootpoint: Amram, Izhar, Hebron, and Uzziel, the years of the life of Mootpoint being 133 years. Amram took as his wife Jochebed his father's sister, and she bore him Aaron and Moses

Exodus 6

[Gob]

Incest?

[MajGenl.Meade]

Yeah but before the rules...

[Gob]

Jewish and Christian tradition viewed Moses as the author of Exodus and the entire Pentateuch, but by the end of the 19th century the increasing awareness of the discrepancies, inconsistencies, repetitions and other features of the Pentateuch had led scholars to abandon this idea. According to current thinking, a first draft (the Yahwist) was probably written in the 6th century BCE during the Babylonian exile; this was supplemented and completed as a post-Exilic final edition (the Priestly source) at the very end of the 6th century or during the 5th century, and further adjustments and minor revisions continued down to the end of the 4th century

Bunch of bollocks then.

[wesw]

tpk@w ... wonder what happened to the lousiana sher-iff.....

[MajGenl.Meade]

(sigh) No, Gob. Bollocks was a different story... see there were these three bears - a daddy bear, a mummy bear and a little baby bear and... (cont. p94)

Oh and Sue? That was the point of the OP - who cares what colour/nationality actor plays Moses in a big production movie?

[Sue U]

Oh and Sue? That was the point of the OP - who cares what colour/nationality actor plays Moses in a big production movie?

I certainly don't care, just as I don't care what color baritone plays MacBeth in the opera or what color actress plays Mother Superior in The Sound of Music. My point was only that Israelites were not "Aryan" or "Caucasian"; I think the National Geographic genotype study shows that after migrating out of Africa, their ancestors found the Levant a perfectly delightful location to set up shop, permanently.

[liberty]

(sigh) No, Gob. Bollocks was a different story... see there were these three bears - a daddy bear, a mummy bear and a little baby bear and... (cont. p94)

Oh and Sue? That was the point of the OP - who cares what colour/nationality actor plays Moses in a big production movie?

Your right General it should not matter what race the actor is if he can play the role convincingly. Period or historical pieces match the historical facts. I wouldn’t care if a black actor played
Alexander the Great if he could convincingly play him as a white man. And it wouldn’t matter if a white actor play a black historical character if he could convince the audience he was black.

Sue, are you saying the Hebrew where a Negroid people? Look at the Arabs do they look that much different than Europeans. Don’t they have the same kind of nose and hair. Color is not a good indicator of race; after all, southern Europeans tend to be darker than northern Europeans, but they are still white.

[Joe Guy]

Would you care if Brad Pitt had played the part of Ray Charles instead of Jamie Foxx?