It's all show biz

[Pah]

About that Capitol monument

By The Helena Independant Record - 09/23/04

Sometimes it is necessary to pick a fight. Sometimes it is not. When it comes to the monument bearing the Ten Commandments that has been sitting in obscurity for years on the Capitol lawn, it is not.

The half-century-old granite monument, installed by the Fraternal Order of Eagles at about the same time Congress was adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, is one of 14 plaques, statues and other monuments scattered around the Capitol grounds that are being examined by the Capitol Complex Advisory Council. The panel's recommendations to the 2005 Legislature will include retaining all the markers.

Complete article here

Little do they know that the monument, as presented by the Eagles and Cecil B. DeMilles, is a knock-off from the version used in the movie The Ten Commandments. And that, my friends, had completely made up characters in the tablets above the the list of the real commandments headed by an American Eagle (see picture below, the tablets on either side of the "eye')

It's All Showbiz While we were watching the part where God was burning the commandments onto the stone tablets with eye-popping 1956-special-effects animation firebolts, something caught my attention. The laws were etched with characters of a strange language I had seen somewhere before. Then I remembered: they are the same characters that appear at the top of the granite markers we have been complaining about over the years.

In "The Ten Commandments: Notes on the Film," Jeffrey Dane clears up the mystery:

"Significantly, [DeMille] even made special arrangements to have stone tablets cut from the red granite of a peak known in that area today as Jebel Musa (in Arabic, 'Mountain of Moses'): Mt. Sinai itself. The tablets, which DeMille kept in his office for a time after the film's completion, are about 21" long, 11" wide and 1" in thickness. This was corroborated in a letter to the author by Henry Noerdlinger, chief of DeMille's research staff. Bearing little similarity to what we recognize today as Hebrew but having a strong resemblance to the ancient and angular Phoenician alphabet (roughly contemporary with the Canaanite era and written only with consonants and no vowels), the symbols on the tablets were written for the film by Dr. Ralph Marcus of the Institute for Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago." Source for this quote is THE TEN COMMANDMENTS: NOTES ON THE FILM

It's a movie prop or a movie poster. Where is the religious or historical significane of that!!!

-pah-