Women of the Bible

History Channels: The Women of the Bible collection has not aged well. It’s obviously an older program and not much looks to have been to improve it’s appearance since it’s original broadcast. Sometimes the picture is even a bit jumpy; see Joseph visiting a pregnant Mary on the lakeside. 

 

Aside from a poor aesthetic the collection is pretty interesting. It starts off with Mary of Nazareth. Lots of information in this segment that was familiar and even a bit new to me(this perspective coming from Sunday school experience and later Youth Group study). I didn’t know that, like Jesus, Mary was a miraculous birth guided through divine channels (much like later in the series we find a divine touch in the birth of strongman Sampson). I quite liked this segment and found it pretty informative. 

 

The second segment was a bit controversial from several angles. This segment talks about Queen Esther and her romance and trials during her betrothal to a king (Xerxes). What made the segment controversial was that a lot of the professionals being interviewed brought up the fact that this story holds no factual evidence. If you have a bit of skeptic in you you’ll start to feel that familiar twitch that will ask, “If the Bible is the truth, how can there be a story in it which is false?” Other then that  I found it pretty hilarious how the next segment “Scarlet Women of the Bible” takes a feminist stance on the Bible in which a lot of the figureheads talk about how women in the history of the bible are given a bad rap. Going back to the Esther story, the fact that so many people are debunking it holds some irony. 

 

The collections contains more stories such as one about Mary Magdalene, Sampson and Delilah- which is very interesting from the perspective that Sampson was clearly just a dumb brute, to Solomon and Sheba. 

 

By the end of the program you start to see several pictures that were used earlier as a base description for King David which is against later used as Sampson and so on. Not real deal breakers as the collection is pretty smart, it just could have used a bit of a touch up. Well worth checking out if the topics peak your interests.