Flickering Tablets
In the darkened room, the projected image is immediately understood. Held aloft, the stone tablets are the embodiment of a compact entered into long ago between a people and its god-- a legal and moral code etched deep into rock and hearts.
The screen’s image is symbolic, surely, and it may seem ever constant, for haven’t the tables of the covenant always appeared this way? Don’t they reflect hundreds of years of religious art and perhaps even the original artifacts themselves? And yet, once we look around, we see that these objects have been imagined in so many ways that it is difficult to determine even one characteristic they all share. The tablets flickering before us reflect not necessarily an historic fact, but the lives of their designers.
And once we begin to really look at them, we find so many questions about something that once seemed an absolute:
What do we call these tablets? The Ten Commandments? Surely that says it all, except that is also what some call the text on the stones, or a movie made in 1956, or a move made in 1924 or movies released in 2006 and 2007. And are there really only ten? And are they all actually commandments? And how has the entertainment field presented them?
Let’s start looking for the answers. Though we may not find them all, what we may learn along the way might be more than enough…
The screen’s image is symbolic, surely, and it may seem ever constant, for haven’t the tables of the covenant always appeared this way? Don’t they reflect hundreds of years of religious art and perhaps even the original artifacts themselves? And yet, once we look around, we see that these objects have been imagined in so many ways that it is difficult to determine even one characteristic they all share. The tablets flickering before us reflect not necessarily an historic fact, but the lives of their designers.
And once we begin to really look at them, we find so many questions about something that once seemed an absolute:
What do we call these tablets? The Ten Commandments? Surely that says it all, except that is also what some call the text on the stones, or a movie made in 1956, or a move made in 1924 or movies released in 2006 and 2007. And are there really only ten? And are they all actually commandments? And how has the entertainment field presented them?
Let’s start looking for the answers. Though we may not find them all, what we may learn along the way might be more than enough…