Random or Acausal

One of the episodes of the Bible that has been deprived largely of theatrical or film depiction (at least in mainstream Western culture) is the Ezra-Nehemiah cycle.  Certainly Ezra-Nehemiah suffers from no overall lack of iconic events or imagery.  The arrival of the titular character from the bustle of exotic Persia, the precarious situation of the resident Jews, the scheming of surrounding elements, the frantic erection of the city walls, the pitiful cries of the Jewish crowd for mercy and instruction from their God--each of these is suitable for evocative depiction (and each of these, in artful maneuverings, is incorporated into art and preaching intended for the faithful.)

Much more difficult would it be to film an evocative depiction of the Ezra-Nehemiah cycle as a whole.  How does one portray the actual human drama of a people sundering its marriage ties--ties scandalously prevalent, if the text is to be believed--without arousing an (unbiblical) sympathy for the affected families?  Leaving aside the darker implications of the fixation on sundering male-Jew to female-non-Jew marriages--effectively permitting to Jewish warriors the same power-rape privilege (and disinheritance of mixed offspring) over conquered or captured peoples as was common in those days--there is also the cinematic challenge of showing the events with real actors.

The Ezra-Nehemiah scenes of warrior-citizens building walls with their weapons at the ready (and hostile elements crouching in the surrounding shadows) would make for great film footage.  Can the same be said of pious Jewish men casting their powerless wives and effectively orphaned children to the mercies of ancient, strife-torn precincts?  In regards such as these--humanly-unrecognizable scenarios of sanitized purported actualization of religious ideas--is the veracity of biblical accounts most in question, not in, say, archeologists scratching around to find evidences by which to "prove" the Bible.

It is small wonder, then, that the Book of Ruth--defying notions of racial or ethnic exclusion and making, thereby, Ruth's descendant David a questionable candidate for the kingship--is taken often to be a rebuttal of Ezra's and Nehemiah's parochialism.  Certainly a sense of humanity resides in Ruth that cannot be extracted so easily from the Ezra-Nehemiah crowds, beseeching mercy for their crime of miscegenation and begging for instruction on how to perpetrate the crime of abandoning their families.

What would be missing most acutely from a film depiction of that abandonment would be mixed couples agonized by the course of events--for surely simple humanity as a general phenomenon would include such scenarios.  Instead we are presented with the notion of the entirety of the resident Jewish population swept up in the pious hysteria--and the effectual unanimity thus depicted is required for the narrative to have its force.  This requirement of unanimity (or one might say of general hysteria) renders suspect the biblical text itself, and most revealingly it flies in the face of the preachers' contention that the Bible and the Bible alone shows humanity as we really are.

Of course general, stylized descriptions abound in literature.  Surely echoes of all of the people shouting in unison in Ezra's day can be found in the Gospels' descriptions of all of Jerusalem doing this or that.  The important distinction, however, lies in the lack of necessity applicable to any Gospel notion that "all of Jerusalem" did thus-and-such--no one has ever really believed (what with gates and prisons to guard, and businesses and slave-tasks to pursue) that "all of Jerusalem" would be taken literally at any juncture.  More importantly, such unanimity is not required, either by the theology being promulgated or by the ripe sources in the narratives for depiction in various media.

The Gospel narratives (excluding any sophomoric framing stories) rely on depictions of real humanity.  Things arise in the story of humanity that defy attribution to assignable cause, and the fact that the Gospels will embrace such variegation is a testimony to their genuineness.  The story of Judas inspired by greed is wedged palpably into the gospel story (to say nothing of the Acts' "account" of the presumably greedy Judas coveting a handful of coins so as to indulge himself in a nifty set-up for suicide.)  On the other hand, inspiration by the devil and consignment to remorseful suicide do not describe what people do "because" of some narratable impetus, but rather are things that people do because they are people.  This is the language and logic of the substance of the Gospels.

For the purposes of anything we might understand, are lives are shot through with things that are effectively random or acausal.  For us, this ought not to be surprising, since each of us has the internalized experience of things within us arising we-know-not-where.  What not to be also surprising is the fact that the logic of the Gospels is not merely that we are observers of our surroundings, but also that we are observers of those "selves" to which we habitually lay claim, yet which we do not truly possess.