A New Gloss on Pharaoh

By BEZALEL STERN

THE LONE AND LEVEL SANDS
By A. David Lewis, Marvin Perry Mann, and Jennifer Rodgers
160 pages. Archaia Studio Press. $17.95.

When I was 14, I started to write a play about Moses. A musical. I got through three acts before I decided to quit. When I did put the unfinished work down, it wasn’t for lack of ideas (I actually had already come up with a number of songs, and I certainly knew where the story was going), but because I realized that everybody already knew the story of the Exodus, the ten plagues, and all the rest, and that nobody would want to read, or watch, an adaptation.

How wrong I was. In 1998, the DreamWorks take on the greatest (Jewish) story ever told, The Prince of Egypt, grossed over $100,000,000 in America and over $200,000,000 worldwide. The Ten Commandments, the classic Exodus film starring Charlton Heston, is, adjusting for inflation, the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time. The cinematic retellings of the Exodus from Egypt did so well, I believe, not simply because of their execution (superb in both cases), but because of our collective fascination with what has become perhaps the ultimate story of collective redemption, of the movement of an entire people, as the haggadah proclaims, from slavery to freedom.

While The Ten Commandments—and my unfinished play—took a more or less traditional approach to the telling of the story, The Prince of Egypt, in what I believe to be a stroke of genius, gave Moses a deliciously provocative backstory that is only hinted at in the biblical text itself. The animated film assumes that Moses and Pharaoh not only grew up as brothers (a claim to which the Biblical text gives a distinct possibility), but that they were friends, almost soul mates. This makes the plagues and the Egyptian leader’s subsequent downfall at the hands of his adopted brother all the more tragic, and the story all the more gripping.

The Lone and Level Sands, a new graphic novel written by A. David Lewis, illustrated by Marvin Mann, and colored by Jennifer Rodgers, is another retelling of the Exodus story, and it both exploits and diverges from the themes of the animated film. At first, one comes into the story believing that it will just be a cheap retread: a comic book modeled on a film modeled on an ancient text. But The Lone and Level Sands soon surprises us. The Exodus narrative is given a new, surprisingly modern perspective, which nonetheless feels somehow in parity with the biblical text itself.

The book manages to do this through a potentially precarious but ultimately successful narrative twist: the story is told solely through the eyes of Pharaoh. But this alone does not account for the ingenuity—and, ultimately, the unique modernity of the book. What does is this Pharaoh's attitude toward action. The Egyptian ruler realizes that the God of the Israelites is out to avenge His people, and he submits willingly, if with despair, becoming, in a sense, a Sartre 32 centuries before the rise of existentialism. When asked, after the Israelites had left Egypt, why he wants them back, when they had caused so much trouble, so much pain, Pharaoh responds, “We do not. But we have no other choice. No other path. It is what we are supposed to do.”

This is an interesting, if somewhat illogical, explanation for the stubbornness of the Pharaoh of the biblical text. Question is: Why does Pharaoh not give in to the demands of Moses, even when being smitten with plague after plague? Why doesn’t he just let the Israelites go? In the Bible Pharaoh’s reasoning is cryptic at best. All the reader knows is that God has hardened the Egyptian leader’s heart. In The Lone and Level Sands, the Israelite God actually commands the Egyptian monarch to resist the pressure of His own plagues; at first Pharaoh resists but eventually he accedes.

The result is a portrait of a vengeful, somewhat sadistic God, reminiscent of the blood-loving deities of the Iliad. By the end of the book, somewhat ironically, it is Pharaoh who takes up the position more often in literature reserved for the Jew: “Why do this?” Pharaoh screams at God, “What sick pleasure comes from our suffering?”

The Prince of Egypt, The Ten Commandments, and, indeed, the biblical text itself, all leave Pharaoh after the splitting of the Red Sea. And this makes sense. After all, the story of the Israelites is not solely the story of Egypt. The Ten Commandments is arguably a movie about, first and foremost, the receiving of said Commandments, and the biblical narrative is arguably meant to lead to the same apogee. The Lone and Level Sands, though, is a story of Pharaoh rather than of Moses, of the Egyptians rather than the Israelites, and, in the book’s finest moments, we follow the fallen leader home.

An early Midrash, cited by Rashi and picked up by The Lone and Level Sands, says that after the Red Sea parted, all of the Egyptians who had come to fight were killed when the waters re-engulfed them, with the exception of Pharaoh, whom God let live in order to witness the ultimate destruction of his empire. The last frame of the book shows a lone man—Pharaoh—stubbornly pulling a horse through the desert. The man and the horse are both silhouetted far in the background of the frame. The bulk of the picture is taken up by crisp, yellowed sand, carrying the echoes of fading footprints. In this case, at least, a picture says a thousand words.