BIBLE STORIES : PARTING THE RED SEA IS EASY; MAKING A REALISTIC FILM ABOUT IT ISN'T.

Byline: Peter Steinfels The New York Times

It is almost impossible to make a good biblical movie. Perhaps it is achievement enough not to make a bad one.

Over the last several years, Turner Network Television has produced the first few films in a biblical series, and they are not bad at all.

The series, which is making its way from Genesis through Job, got off to a respectful but ponderous start two years ago with ``Abraham.'' That was followed by the livelier ``Jacob'' and then ``Joseph,'' the winner of an Emmy for best miniseries in 1995.

Now comes ``Moses,'' the most ambitious effort in the sequence to date, with Part 1 airing at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. tonight and Part 2 the same times on Monday.

The four-hour ``Moses'' is the most ambitious because its story, unlike those of the other films, has been spectacularly done - many people would say ``done in'' - before.

Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 version of ``The Ten Commandments,'' with Charlton Heston in the lead role, is a four-hour landmark of Hollywood religiosity, periodically re-released with all the to-do of a papal visit.

Viewed today, ``The Ten Commandments'' is a pretty bad movie, of course. It does depict how Moses freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and conveyed God's law to them at Mount Sinai.

But the film was fatally wounded by its ludicrous romantic subplot involving Heston the hunk and Anne Baxter as the scheming, sultry Princess Nefretiri. Her plaintive ``Oh Moses, you adorable fool!'' is a line hard to forget.

It is also hard to watch ``The Ten Commandments'' now and not be distracted by the anti-Nazi, anti-Communist subtext. Here is humanity's struggle against dictatorships that consider humans the property of the state, viewers are instructed in the prologue.

Also distracting is one aspect of the otherwise impressive crowd scenes: with their swelling music and thousands of extras, they sometimes have the feel of wartime newsreels or of westerns when the covered-wagon trains bravely head out across the plains.

Nonetheless, the 1956 ``Ten Commandments'' was far from the formula of orgy and uplift that shaped many earlier Hollywood biblical dramas, including DeMille's first shot at ``The Ten Commandments'' in 1923. Not a few of the 1956 film's images, composed with a melodramatic rococo flair, stick in the mind. Even in light of the computer-assisted special effects of the present, DeMille knew how to part the Red Sea.

In 1975, Burt Lancaster starred in an Italian-British six-hour miniseries that was then edited into a passable feature-length ``Moses,'' largely shorn of DeMille's excesses. TNT's ``Moses'' is even more chaste. Like the other TNT Bible movies, it sticks relatively closely to the text.

Ben Kingsley plays Moses as an anti-Heston. This is Moses the wimp and klutz, Moses the self-doubter, Moses the stutterer, in his belief no less than in his speech.

When this Moses, fleeing for his life after killing an Egyptian, arrives at the well where the daughters of the priest of Midian are being tormented by shepherds, he frightens the men off not by threatening them but by concocting a cock-and-bull story more suitable to Woody Allen than Heston or Lancaster. The plagues eventually serve as much to confirm Kingsley's Moses in his calling as to challenge the Pharaoh.

The Pharaoh, once again, is the most convincing character. Like the devil, Frank Langella gets all the best lines. But that was also true of Yul Brynner in 1956 and Anthony Quayle in 1975.

And why not? The Pharaoh's motivation and emotions are clear: a natural attachment to his slaves and his authority, fury at the insolence of the Hebrew upstarts, grief at the death of his firstborn, a backwash of vengeance and a final devastation.

The only things hard to make convincing are, first, why he doesn't just toss Moses and Aaron into a handy dungeon and, second, why he is such a slow learner.

The Bible does not bother much with questions like that. And when it does, its answers are disconcerting: God, for instance, purposely made the Pharaoh a slow learner (``I will harden his heart'') to exhibit the full scope of divine power.

And that is one reason Bible films are such a thankless genre. They have to do what the Bible doesn't: inject psychology and a sensibility recognizable to an audience more comfortable with identity crises than with religious revelation.

``I'm not Egyptian or Hebrew; I'm nothing,'' Kingsley's young Moses pouts. ``Was it God?'' he later agonizes to his father-in-law after encountering the burning bush.

The Bible doesn't examine how Moses immediately became the spokesman for a supposedly huge and growing slave population. It just happened. But the Moses movies before this one found it better to hint that hopes in Moses' potential leadership had been smoldering since he killed the Egyptian.

And how can Moses and Aaron plausibly come barging into an imperial court? Why not the possibility, a little voice whispers to the scriptwriter, that Moses, raised as an adopted son by the previous Pharaoh's daughter, was the Pharaoh's childhood playmate? Or even his old rival? Start down this path and can the purring Princess Nefretiri be far away?

Movie makers, to be sure, are not the first to speculate about gaps in the sacred text or to try smoothing out its oddities and side-by-side variants and outright contradictions. (Moses' father-in-law is given three different names; the crossing of the Red Sea and the destruction of Pharaoh's army are described in parallel but subtly different accounts, etc.) Much of DeMille's nonbiblical embroidery of Moses' early life in the Pharaoh's court - that he led a triumphant expedition to conquer Ethiopia, for example - is based, as DeMille claimed, on sources like the first-century Jewish historian Josephus.

But movie makers, unlike Josephus and Philo and rabbinic commentators, must deal not only with what the text says but also with what modern audiences believe the text says - impressions now as likely to be based on past films as on children's Bible stories or regular reading of the Bible.

Also, contemporary movie makers must deal with what scholars say is the historical reality behind the texts. Anyone making a movie about Moses can safely ignore the minority of scholars who maintain that no such person existed, but what about expert views that enjoy a wide acceptance?

Did the departing Israelites count 600,000 men in their ranks, aside from women and children, as one reads in Exodus 12:37 and Numbers 1:45-46? DeMille did his best to create the illusion of a migration by the entire population of California, but most scholars find such figures incredible.

Instead, many of them believe that the account of an exodus from Egypt reflects events that happened to one or two relatively small groups of people. Later, these stories of liberation from slavery, a covenant with Yahweh and bestowal of the law became the paradigmatic tales that united the migrants with other tribes already present in the land of Canaan, inspired their cult and justified their conquest.

Still later, the texts were reworked to reflect the concerns of the temple priesthood in Jerusalem.

Are movie makers filming the life of Moses as it might have actually taken place in 1200 B.C., or the saga as it took shape 700 years later among Jews who survived the exile in Babylon?

If it were not enough to deal with what scholarship reveals about the Egypt of Ramses II, movie makers must also deal with what audiences think they know about that Egypt.

Straying too far from what audiences already imagine about the look and operation of a Pharaoh's court is as risky as straying from their expectations about crossing the Red Sea or bringing down two tablets from Sinai.

Not only do the makers of Bible films have to find some way of reconciling, or at least juggling, all of these different realities; they also have to do it in an atmosphere of religious diplomacy.

TNT boasts of getting ``input from some 20 religious leaders representing different theologies'' and developing ``a script that pleased everyone in record time.''

The entire series, explained its executive producer, Gerald Rafshoon, has relied on a group of ``religious experts'' in Rome, including the chief rabbi of Rome and representatives of the Vatican, and of Protestant scholars in Italy and Britain.

These people provide the scriptwriters with guidance on both theology and ancient history and ``keep us out of trouble,'' Rafshoon said. Fortunately, representatives of Aton, Ra and Osiris did not have to be consulted.

Finally there is the matter, or perhaps one should say the temptation, of the miraculous. Bible movies easily turn into special-effects sideshows: Step right up! See the burning bush and hear God's voice! Watch Moses' rod turn into a serpent! Gasp as the Nile turns to blood! Marvel at manna from heaven!

TNT's ``Moses'' skirts most of these dangers pretty effectively. Sometimes Kingsley's relentlessly uncharismatic rendition of Moses seems like an awkward attempt to be contemporary. It is easier to understand why the Israelites repeatedly lost confidence in this leader than why they followed him the rest of the time.

But this portrayal, besides distinguishing the new film from its predecessors, can find justification in the Bible's references to Moses' humility, his reluctance to lead and his difficulties in speaking.

And whether by plan or by chance, a flawed Moses reflects a tension within Judaism itself: Moses is the teacher and prophet exalted above all others, but he is also distinctly human, never to be confused, like so many ancient semidivine heroes, with the Lord whose servant and instrument he remained.

Likewise, it may have been TNT's budget that makes the Hebrew slave quarters look decidedly underpopulated. When Moses returns from Midian and announces that he has been sent to free the enslaved Israelites, he and Aaron seem to be addressing not thousands of slaves or even a council of leaders but a few dozen random people.

Though the film makes stabs at crowd scenes and the traditional idea that this is a vast nation going forth, it still suggests what may be the historical truth about the small numbers involved.

TNT is correct in wagering that with only a touch of piety, many viewers will find ``Moses'' rewarding. As for those lacking even that touch of piety, maybe they should wait for the next film in the series: ``Samson and Delilah.''

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos

Photo: (1) Burt Lancaster did a turn as the Hebrew proph et in 1975's ``Moses - The Lawgiver.''

(2) Ben Kingsley, center, plays a flawed Moses who slowly realizes his role as the Lord's servant and overcomes difficulties in leading and speaking in the four-hour ``Moses,'' premiering tonight on TNT.

(3) Yul Brynner, left, as Pharaoh, and Charlton Heston as Moses defined the roles in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 epic, ``The Ten Commandments.''

(4) In TNT's ``Moses,'' perennial movie bad guy Frank Langella has the role of Pharaoh.