Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

5-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

Humanities

Degree Program

Humanities, PhD

Committee Chair

Hall, Ann

Committee Member

Omer-Sherman, Ranen

Committee Member

Ferre, John

Committee Member

Roof, Judith

Author's Keywords

Moses; film; religion; culture; popular; adaptation; Judaism; Christianity

Abstract

This dissertation examines the various film adaptions that the American Hollywood has released about the Biblical character Moses. The scope of this examination is limited to theatrical releases from Hollywood in English, which spans roughly 100 years of history. Each of the five films examined in this dissertation represents a different period in American culture, and all are from a different film genre. Starting with The Ten Commandments (1923) which represents the silent-film era of Hollywood, to the 2014 blockbuster Exodus: Gods and Kings, the film industry has continued to produced films which examine the life and deeds of Moses that mostly focus on the book of Exodus. Other films include The Ten Commandments (1956) from the epic-panoramic era of Hollywood, along with Wholly Moses! (1980), which is a comedy, and the 1998 animated film The Prince of Egypt. Despite each film using the same source material from sacred texts, the Moses character found in each are dramatically different from each other. Genre, along with the cultural influences of the time, resulted in creating five distinct Moses character types such as authoritative, iii iv political, comedic, reluctant, and action-hero. Each chapter examines the films individually and discusses how genre, scripture, and culture came together to create each of the distinct Moses characters found in a century of Hollywood film adaptations.

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