What a waste of my time!!!

Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Fantastic!

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

This is one of those series that get hit from both sides. It radicalizes and polarizes both sides on the political spectrum, and the religious spectrum and draws hatred from the fanatics on both sides.If you read the reviews:The far right uber-religious are crying about how Biblically inaccurate this is...and that means that they missed the "mini-series" part of production. Really, how are you going to make it accurate to the Bible and watchable for the general public? I used to work in history and that was a HUGE pet peeve of mine. "Saving Private Ryan would have been good but this, this, and this were inaccurate and..." WHO CARES????!!!!!!!Do you honestly want an entire two-hour episode of David sitting down writing Psalms? That's really not going to be entertaining. The same goes with long winded rehearsals of who begot whom, which are also guaranteed to put the public to sleep.If you want a literal interpretation of the book...buy and read the book. Otherwise you will have a faithful depiction at best, but never a truly accurate one.You can't even translate Harry Potter 100% accurately into a film and those novels are a lot less, well, Biblical. So, chill, take a seat, and be entertained.The series might be made to educate, but it's education for entertainment as implied by the word "dramatization." And moving across the alley you have far left fanatics yelling that both the book and this series should be banned. Yelling that they are harmful, that they are dangerous.......and I guess they are forgetting that people said the exact same things about "Howl" when it was published, and if you live in America and have that view, you should be seriously ashamed of yourself.There is something inherently wrong about censoring thought and speech. Chill, this is an AMERICAN production and over here, if you want to worship the stick you found in the parking lot last Tuesday...and then make a movie about it, that's your Constitutionally protected right as stated in the 1st Amendment.If you have an issue with that, move someplace that censors thought, religion, and speech. The rest of us are perfectly happy that we won't get thrown in jail for not sharing the same views as whomever is in power at the moment.So...if you think about it, if you really think about it, the Bible did a FANTASTIC job in dramatizing the Bible if it's getting it from both sides. The far left is not happy with it and the far right is not happy with it...and that generally means I'm going to be pretty happy with it.And I was, as someone that spent most of his adult life working around history...well...is there a word that best explains salivating in nerd fueled bliss?It was awesome. Like The Da Vinci Code (book not movie) the little chapters were just long enough to draw you in and short enough not to get dull. But, the historian in me absolutely loved how well it showed the the stories and people were inter-connected...and that is really an aspect of the Bible that you do NOT get when you go to church.So you have a bunch of short interconnected stories that sort of turns the Bible into a "Pulp Fiction" styled miniseries and just sits really well for entertainment purposes.For real entertainment purposes, spending more time on Judges, where you get the bulk of the nation building and the only real stories that you liked when your parents forced you at gunpoint to go to CCD as a child, would have been preferable. Yeah Moses and Noah are OK, but really you want to hear more about Samson and the high adventure stories...the ones that you liked as a little kid because it read kind of like Robert E. Howard...But I guess focusing only on those stories wouldn't make The Bible as epic in scope as the miniseries became.And, I feel because of that need to be more epic you had what so many other people complained about...SAMURAI NINJA WARRIOR VR TROOPER ANGELSAnd unlike the political and religious zealot complaints...the Samurai Angels were really a valid complaint. That just hurt to see. I WOULD have given it 10 stars because it was super entertaining...but Ninja Warrior Angels. You can't suspend your disbelief enough not to do a spit-take when you see them.They were so bad.But fortunately they were also short lived.So...don't turn it off when you see them. It's a good dramatization to sit back and watch, and the strongest part is honestly the length of the little chapters. It makes it perfect for viewing.

The bible is hard to read. I hate it. Plus, it's impossible for us who do not know much about the period to interpret correctly the texts in the bible. This is why this series is so interesting. Give us the stories and put them in context. The series is however, not all that accurate and does not provide the answers I'd wish. There is another TV broadcast about Jesus made by archaeologists explaining very well some the significant aspects of the story. There is a definitive version still to make. The parts before Jesus are fun but the jews don't look good at all in them. The people chosen by god that have all the rights? The germans sure showed them wrong. And now we know the englishes are the ones chosen by god! Haha!

I think some reviewers judged the show too much. So what if Jesus in the movie was pretty and their was more violence in the bible then the show? The actual release on Blu-ray and DVD had some scenes edited it seems to make them more biblically related. I am trying to remember, I think in Jericho that the scenes seem more believable after watching the DVD version because you can see that they actual kill the women and men or actually try to kill everything. I did not see any children killed but it seems to match up somewhat more with biblical context on the DVD or Blu-ray. Did anyone notice the differences in scenes played out on the DVD or Blu-ray collection? I think that some editing of the scenes was great because the true unedited and unrated version would have been more like a 300-movie and drive some people away. In Addition, Their are plenty of movies to cover the parts of the old testament not already covered by the bible. For instance, one night with the king and many others.People like to say that the old testament was mostly genocide. You have to see the bigger picture though: Israel was meant to replace the people or cultures that had already started throwing children into the fire or offering them as sacrifices to idols, raping people in the streets, and other nasty stuff(clearly in the old testament more then once). So, taking an eagles eye view it was a choice between Israel who was keeping gods commandments and acting civilized and the other countries that were clearly barbaric in their practices and would not listen to change or even meet halfway in change or reason with them.

Elisheba, I really liked your review about how the producers 'whitewashed' parts of The Bible.However, in your comments about Lot, you could have added the extra little horror in that story, concerning incest where those two very young daughters - and in the TV series they do look extremely young (I must admit I had always assumed them to be in their late teens) - take turns having sex with their father.I am not sure how often this quaint story gets told in its entirety in Sunday Schools across the United States, especially if one is using the racy New Living Translation of The Bible, where nothing is held back - unlike the King James' version where people 'know' each other. That's what I grew up on and no one explained 'know' to me when I was young: it was quite an eye-opener when I chanced on the New Living Translation! One can certainly see how one gets one's morals from The Bible - God thought Lot was the only one worth saving in Sodom; he was a true moral role model for all of us! I wrote the above a few days ago and then I thought I'd add something more about Biblical horror stories. The story of Abraham and Isaac came to mind; that surely must be one of the most appalling stories in the whole Bible; and as I was thinking of the scene shown in the TV version, I realised that the programme wasn't following the story I know and love so well! The Bible refers to a ram with his horns caught in a thicket. I really have to wonder why the producers decided to substitute a lamb or kid with its hoof caught in the cleft of a tree.I've added a Spoiler Alert as I'm not sure if some viewers might be expecting The Bible 'warts and all'. And also some viewers, like me, might be expecting a ram in the hideous Abraham story.* * * * * * * * * *I also have to say that I found the way the producers of 'The Bible' combined the Creation story with the story of Noah very well done. Neat!However, I do have a few problems with both stories. I have always understood that Abraham was the 'founder' of the monotheistic religion of Judaism, having just the single God, Jahweh. As far as I know Abraham is supposed to have lived somewhere around 2000 B.C.E. And Noah of flood fame lived some 900 years earlier. My problem is this: if Noah lived so long before monotheism was established, how did Noah know that it was God, with a capital 'G' - the later God of the Jews - who ordered him to build an Ark; surely Noah would have worshipped a whole panoply of gods - he wouldn't have known there was only one God. I can just imagine this scenario: Noah coming into the family kitchen and announcing the great news of the coming flood, and Mrs Noah saying, "That's nice, dear. By the way, which god did you say it was? The god of the sea or the god of rain? That would be typical of either of them, wouldn't it! So angry they always are!"And then during the fearsome storm, where we get glimpses of a lonely llama in a stall, when Noah was describing Creation, he referred to God as though he knew there was only one god. How's this possible?I also noticed that the producers of 'The Bible' didn't go with the first chapter of Genesis where God, again with a capital 'G' some 2000 years before the establishment of monotheism, created both man and woman at the same time. The producers went with the much more likely story in Chapter 2 of creating Adam out of mud, rather than the completely unbelievable 'evolution' route. Of course creating man out of mud or clay has always proved a really tried and trusted method - so many cultures around the world have favoured this way of creating humans: the Egyptians with Khnum, known as The Potter; the Greeks with Prometheus; in the Babylonian creation epic 'Enuma Elish', the goddess Ninhursag was said to have created humans from clay; in Sumerian mythology, the birth goddess Nammu, of the watery depths, was said to have moulded clay into the shapes of humans; the Mayans, the Maoris of New Zealand, the Yoruba of West Africa and the Chinese all have similar myths, to name but a few. With so much stunningly convincing evidence, the mud/clay/dust method was definitely the way to go.Whoever came up with such an asinine idea as evolution? How could we humans possibly have evolved from an early ancestor common to both the great apes and hominids? Who do these scientists, paleontologists, evolutionary biologists, etc. think they are? Scientists are always so arrogant when they propose their ridiculous hypotheses, spend years and years of their lives in detailed research, sometimes doubting their findings, and finally they produce a theory, submitting their work in peer-reviewed publications to have it minutely examined by the greatest minds in the particular field. Such arrogance! When it is all so obvious that all that was needed was a group of bronze-age herdsmen in the Middle East sitting round their fire of a night and one of them announcing: "I was listening to that Egyptian fellow who arrived here yesterday. He told a wonderful story about their god Khnum, I think he said it was. This god, he said, made all men in his own likeness out of clay on a potter's wheel. I've already told my children this story, you know. And they really loved it..." So convincingly obvious! So thoroughly believable! Any humble believer just knows the truth when he hears it.