Jews, Christians, Peter-Paul-and-Mary

In “The Rational Bible: Genesis,” Dennis Prager points out that there are two men in the Torah who have quite extensive writings about them, unlike any other: Moses and Joseph.

The story of Joseph is so incredible that it almost has to be true. It’s tempting to say “You couldn’t make that up.” I stopped reading Prager’s book after the preliminaries of Joseph and re-watched the The Bible Collection: Joseph miniseries.

You can find it for purchase or rental on VUDU (which is what I did) or Amazon Prime. It would appear that Amazon Prime has the entire series (there are about 8 different people or episodes of the Bible featured) for rent or purchase. I had watched several of these when they came out back in 1995. They were featured on TNT and were co-produced by Turner Pictures. If memory serves, Joseph and Abraham were the pick of the lot.

And the Joseph miniseries is one of the best stories of the Old Testament or Torah put to film. I would rate only Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 The Ten Commandments or 1959’s Ben-Hur ahead of it. If you haven’t seen it, it really is extraordinarily well done for a $10 million budget.

Ben Kingsley plays a high Egyptian official, Potiphar. Martin Landau is superb as Jacob. I’ve never been a big Martin Landau fan. But he brings a light and fire to his acting I’d never seen before. This is even more remarkable if he, like a lot of Hollywood Jews, is not a practicing Jew. But I don’t know one way or another about that.

Paul Mercurio is excellent as the older Joseph. And his brothers are played beyond excellence by a talented cast of actors, although it’s only three of four of them that get any real screen time.

Prager notes that Joseph certainly didn’t endear himself to his older brothers, both by being a tattle-tale and by being so abrupt about his dreams — especially the one that said that they will all bow down to him.

This is another case where I think Prager fails a little in his interpretation. Yes, it seems Joseph was somewhat of an unbridled yute but not one whose exuberance was never meant to be mean-spirited. The story seams to elicit a key aspect of human nature: People often hate the good or beautiful.

The brothers (as portrayed in this miniseries) are a sour and argumentative bunch. One gets the distinct feeling that there are good reasons that their father finds Joseph to be their favorite, and quite beyond the fact that Rachel (Joseph’s mother) was Jacob’s favorite.

We see later the truth of this, as Joseph (perhaps more than a bit humbled after being sold into slavery by his brothers — which tells you all you need to now about the character of the brothers) seems to be able to transform the people around him in Egypt for the better — all but the slut, the wife of Potophar, played very nicely by Lesley Ann Warren.

Also excellent is Warren Clarke who is Joseph’s first slave master who deals out some rough treatment of Joseph. And whether the Pharaoh at the time was sort of a metrosexual snowflake-ish yute, I don’t know. But Stefano Dionisi is interesting as the Pharaoh. He plays him with a bit of air-headedness that is a delight.

The series is presented in two-parts. And it can be a little disconcerting at first because the first episode makes it appear as if you’ve skipped past the first episode. But the flashback will come and it all works out well the way they did it. Be sure to see this production if at all possible.