In those days the world teemed, the people multiplied, the world bellowed like a wild bull, and the great god was aroused by the clamour. Enlil heard the clamour and he said to the gods in council, "The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel." So the gods in their hearts were moved to let loose the deluge; but my lord Ea warned me in a dream . . . "tear down your house and build a boat . . . take up into the boat the seed of all living creatures. . . ."

Even the gods were terrified at the flood, they fled to the highest heaven, . . . they crouched against the walls, cowering like curse. . . . The great gods of heaven and of hell wept, they covered their mouths. For six days and six nights the winds blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world. . . . When the seventh day dawned the storm from the south subsided, the sea grew calm, the flood was stilled; I looked at the face of the world and there was silence, all mankind was turned to clay. . . .

God said to Noah, "I have decided that the end has come for all living things, for the earth is full of lawlessness because of human beings. So I am now about to destroy them and the earth. Make yourself an ark. . . . From all living creatures, from all living things, you must take two of each kind aboard the ark. . . . [Noah] built an altar to Yahweh and . . . he presented burnt offerings on the altar. Yahweh smelt the pleasing smell and said to himself, "Never again will I curse the earth because of human beings, because their heart contrives of evil from their infancy. Never again will I strike down every living things as I have done. . . ." God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, "Breed, multiply and fill the earth."

To transfer the Bible to the screen, you cannot cheat. You have to believe. . .

What I hope for our production of The Ten Commandments is that those who see it shall come from the theatre not only entertained and filled with the sight of big spectacle, but filled with the spirit of truth; that it will bring to its audience a better understanding of the real meaning of this pattern of life that God has set down for us to follow; that it will make vivid to the human mind its close relationship to the mind of God. . . .

In our search for authenticity, we consulted some 1,900 books and periodicals, collected nearly 3,000 photographs, and use the facilities of thirty libraries and museums in North America, Europe, Africa, and Australia. So that the hundreds of millions who will see The Ten Commandments can make a pilgrimage over the very ground that Moses walked, we rolled our cameras from Goshen to the Red Sea, then across the wilderness of Zin, and up the steep, barren, majestic, awe-inspiring slopes of Mt. Sinai, to the holy ground where Moses stood to receive the law.

Is it too much to hope that our production of The Ten Commandments might help to do what centuries of bloodshed and argument have failed to do? To remind the millions of adherents of the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem faiths that they all spring from a common source, and that they have in Moses a binding tie, a universal prophet, and in the Decalogue a universal law of brotherhood?

Cecil B. DeMille