Encountering the Other

Christian and Multifaith Perspectives

Laura Duhan-Kaplan, Harry O. Maier, Laura Duhan-Kaplan, Harry O. Maier

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781532633294
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Ecumenism & Interfaith

How do religious traditions create strangers and neighbors? How do they construct otherness? Or, instead, work to overcome it? In this exciting collection of interdisciplinary essays, scholars and activists from various traditions explore these questions. Through legal and media studies, they reveal how we see religious others. They show that Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Sikh texts frame others in open-ended ways. Conflict resolution experts and Hindu teachers, they explain, draw on a shared positive psychology. Jewish mystics and Christian contemplatives use powerful tools of compassionate perception. Finally, the authors explain how Christian theology can help teach respectful views of difference. They are not afraid to discuss how religious groups have alienated one another. But, together, they choose to draw positive lessons about future cooperation.

8

“Is This Your God . . . Killer of Children?”

Israel’s “Childish” Deity and the Other(s) in
Exodus: Gods and Kings

James Magee Jr.

Ramses, carrying the corpse of his infant son in his arms, his grief-stricken face still marred by boils, confronts Moses with a series of questions the morning after all the children in the city have apparently died: “Is this your god? A killer of children? What kind of fanatics worship such a god?” In what initially appears to be a compassionate grasp of the Egyptian’s arm, the deity’s reluctant general offers no words of solidarity or comfort, reporting instead that “no Hebrew child [has] died.” It would seem Moses’ god exterminates only other people’s children. Flustered by the discriminatory violence from on high and tormented by his loss, the pharaoh expels his foreign slaves from the land. The Israelites’ four hundred long years of servitude in Egypt have finally come to an end.

This pivotal and pathos-filled scene from the 2014 film Exodus: Gods and Kings (hereafter Exodus), based on the biblical story of Israel’s enslavement and deliverance in the book of Exodus,142 casts the oppressors in a sympathetic light.143 The pharaoh and his people are ostensibly the victims of a homicidal deity who targets defenseless children. This same god has already battered the Egyptians with a series of natural disasters, initiating the catastrophes with a smirk and showing no concern throughout for the plight of the Egyptian Other. The filmmakers’ innovation in embodying the divine drew mixed reviews from critics. One referred to the choice of actor as “bold and . . . genuinely radical,”144 another as “a rather clever idea.”145 Other critics were less enthralled, one claiming the film’s “image of The Almighty [to be] so absurd as to render nearly every scene in which he appears almost satirical.”146 Similar derisory comments were posted to IMDb with many reviewers of faith referring to the film’s representation of Israel’s deity as blasphemous, humiliating or insulting. At the center of these polarized interpretations was the character of Malak,147 played by eleven-year-old British actor Isaac Andrews. The boy appears to Moses as the divine “I Am” (Exod 3:14) and spars ruthlessly from behind the scenes as a “militant deity”148 with the self-proclaimed god Pharaoh.

Situated within a rapidly expanding corpus of critical studies on depictions of children in film,149 this essay will focus on the controversial character of Malak in Exodus. I will first ground my exploration in recent theorizing on childhood and film spectatorship, pausing to position my own viewing of the film. I will then look at how Malak is portrayed in his first encounter with Moses and introduce the question of the Other that emerges from their dialogue. The core of the essay will trace the interplay between these two aspects in several key scenes. I will argue that the depiction of Israel’s deity as a boy seems to involve an othering of children that is used to negatively characterize religion. I will conclude by drawing the study into conversation with current dialogues on both religiously-motivated violence and the ethics of seeing the Other in film, highlighting the importance of responsible filmic analysis in contemporary culture.

Deconstructing the Boy Malak and Negotiating EXODUS’ Childhoods

The idea for a boy to represent Israel’s deity was given to Exodus’ screenwriters by director ...