There was a Bata (footwear shop) in Egypt in Moses’ Times

 

There was a Bata (footwear shop) in Egypt in Moses’ Times

On Mount Sinai, God orders that Moses remove his sandals because the land he is standing on is holy. Then, I checked. I find this practice is neither mandated nor universal among Jews when they enter a synagogue. God’s edict carries the weight no more than what a mother tells her child, perhaps even less!

Moses comes down Mount Sinai and tells his wife and Joshua (his sidekick) that he is returning to Egypt where death could await him. Moses is fatalistic about this. As a dutiful (?) wife, Zipporah (spelling per Wikipedia; the Old Testament in its many English versions must have a number of different spellings!) Moses treks back to Egypt, and there in the palace of the Pharaoh, Moses enters dramatically pronouncing that he comes from the “Kingdom the most high”, with a strapped pair of sandals on his feet.

Where did he get the pair of sandals from? From the neighbourhood Bata shop, of course!

The director must have pleaded with Charlton Heston to act barefoot, now that he had done it on the trek back down the mountain. Cecil B. DeMille was trying to save the cost of production. But, Heston would not hear of it−“Done it once, never again.”

DeMille went to Egypt located a Bata shop and bought a sandal of proper size. The above is a sub-narrative of the story behind The Ten Commandments.

There is more. Moses gets less religious the second time round, up the mountain. He wears the same old pair (DeMille could not afford another one), but does not recall God’s edict. Of course, he was emboldened after he saw the Pillar of Fire that stopped Pharaoh’s horses, and he was sandal-clad.

This post is what I consider film-appreciation. Take that, art cinema lovers.

Raghuram Ekambaram