The Bible: The King James Version, Readings From The Old Testament With Music From The Holy Land. Read by Sir Laurence Olivier [Audio Cassette]

Sir Laurence Olivier (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1977

12 Audio Cassettes in a box.

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: The Testament Company (1977)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000GYNIBI
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,181,102 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 stars The Chipmunk's Bible; or, Saving the Vampires Two by Two?, August 9, 2010

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Christopher A. Fulkerson "Composer" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bible: The King James Version, Readings From The Old Testament With Music From The Holy Land. Read by Sir Laurence Olivier (Audio Cassette)

I was reminded of this reading of EXCERPTS of the Bible when I was doing some follow-up research after studying the Frank Langella DRACULA, in which Sir Laurence plays Van Helsing. I bought this and don't regret it, it's very well done, but for reasons I will spell out here I will not be elevating this version of the Bible above any others I have. I have read the Bible three times, in Hebrew (OT), Greek (NT), and English (twice, King James and New American) as well as some Septuagint, German, Latin, French, and other versions; and, though I am in no way any kind of fundamentalist, I take a great interest in the way it is used in story-telling... especially when I detect "spin" happening. Yes, there is something here that disturbs me when I find it, and feel in good faith compelled to remark on.

There is here a typical wicked literary maneuver here such as Hollywood likes to make. It may be that the participants simply fell into the usual pitfall that other editors of "condensed Bibles" have fallen into, but this one is a theologically potentially serious problem, IMO. Once that is said, I can say this is certainly the fine rendition we would expect from the great Sir Laurence.

There is a simple way, done here, to make the Good Book into a not-so-good book, and that is to allow for the story of the destruction of Earth by the Lord, but carefully leave out the part about saving the species by sevens as well as by twos. This is done so often in Hollywood, and even from the pulpit, that most people don't realize what they're being told when the story of the Flood is related with only the part of the saving by twos. The proper version of the story is told so seldom that most folks nowadays think Noah's mission is only to save the species two by two.

Hey everybody, the CLEAN are saved seven by seven, it's ONLY THE UNCLEAN that are saved two by two. Don't take my word for it, read Genesis 7,2: "Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female." (KJ)

So what we have here is Hollywood's usual effort to depict only the parts of the Bible that carefully preserve only the unclean, and not the clean, from among Earth's creatures.

Bad Hollywood, bad! Here you may imagine me slapping the sunglasses off of Hollywood. Once that sort of maneuver is effected, a reading of the Bible has potentially the opposite nature to what is expected. Once the Flood happens, you could say "It's all here, except the clean parts." I have been forced to take anomalies of this sort more seriously than I might like to, ever since someone smashed a window of my old Jetta, took a few spare parking coins, ransacked the piles of books I had in the back seat, and stole from them... only two: my two Bibles, including a beautiful pocket three-volume boxed Israeli edition that I had read, often while parked in my cab at the cab stand that no longer exists on Montgomery Street at the Centerfolds Club. You can tell them apart: the pristine unread lowbrow English translation is bound in brown, and the elegant thumbworn Hebrew edition - worn down by MY thumbs, people - in black. When, several weeks later, some kind of popular music band calling itself "Stolen Bibles" appeared at Jack's on Fillmore Street, I decided I would keep track of such matters, that there was something going on here. I did not go to the show. But I want royalties, you thieves! I was not the one who got an extra fiver out of the deal!!!

Ahem, getting back to the business at hand, this is an excellent rendition of EXCERPTS the Bible. There is one other problem: the musical examples bias the listener against contemporary music. The composer is very skillful, and writes in a variety of styles familiar from contemporary composers. But there is a bias against dissonance, and it is given as a bias against Modernism. To give one example, the versions of early Schoenberg, though with a slightly thinner texture, that are used for the "positive" passages make it seems as though the versions of Bartok, used in "negative" passages, such as that of Queen Jezebel, prejudice the listener against Modernism as a thing of beauty. This as a Modernist composer I deeply resent. The discourtesy is not as great as that done to Bartok by Stanley Kubirk in the movie THE SHINING, in which the second movement of Bartok's MUSIC is chopped up and reassembled to give the worst impression in the service of horror. None of Bartok's many "Night Music" slow movements are meant to be scary - any more than a night under the stars with unseen crickets or frogs is frightening. Artistic opportunism that harms the intentions of a creative artist is, frankly, not fair.

Trust me, "The Lord" that moves across the waters of this reading of the Bible is nothing but a chipmunk. These fragments of the bible are well done, and the intellectual profile of the music is too much in the service of Hollywood populist musical propaganda; it would be better if the composers selected for parody were not aligned according to an existing anti-Modernist bais.

(For myself, I prefer the Isreali research archaeologist, Zechariah Sitchin for real understanding of the ancient intentions of the devout and respectable people who collated the Bible. I don't give a damn that you might call Sitchin's ideas "pseudo-science;" he puts forward way too many respectable research problems, and solves enough of them well enough, that I trust him far more than any priest, minister, or rabbi of my acquaintance. Basically, I believe that ALL translations of the Bible yet made are insane, and only Sitchin's commentary is worthwhile. If you want to think the Bible is literal, and that the world was created in seven actual days, you have also to believe that green herbs are meat, and you have admit that, after all, the Lord lied to Adam that he would die if he ate from that certain Tree, and that when the Serpent told Eve she would not die, it was he, not the Lord, who spoke the truth).