Explainer

Creed

Old Testament

Politics

Weirdness

30 December 2024

6 min read

Lady Mary's guide to Old Testament gangsters

How the weirdest characters in the Bible's ancient story apply to today's politics.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

Jacob and Esau.

Matthias Stom, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Have you looked at the Old Testament lately? In terms of how much better it can make you feel, I mean – particularly in the face of modern politics? No, me neither. Or at least not until a few days ago. Having not been a Christian for most of my life, I’d fought shy of the Bible rather, and the oldest bit in particular. Too remote, too ferocious, too weird, it seemed to me. Full of unpronounceable names and lists of strange rules. How could those be applicable? And then I made the mistake of going to evensong with my friend Alice, an agnostic animal lover, and we got a reading from the book of Judges about that heroic strongman Samson tying foxes together, setting fire to their tails and letting them loose in the Philistines’ crops. Which sent us both running out of the service and finished off Alice’s church career, terminally I think!

But as always in life, exploring new territory can be made enjoyable or otherwise by who you go exploring with. And a couple of weeks ago in a second-hand bookshop, I found a thin volume entitled Unread Best-seller: Reflections on the Old Testament by someone called Mary Stocks, which looked interesting. So I bought it and started reading it that day. I finished it that day. Then I read it again the next day, and I might read it again this week actually.

Mary Stocks, it turns out, was extremely posh (she became a baroness eventually, and a life peer in the House of Lords); extremely scholarly (she did a whole series of talks for the BBC in the 1950s, when not many women did such things), and extremely funny. She also adored the Old Testament. Not only is it full of glorious language she said, but it also offered great emotional resonance and satisfaction – particularly since she was writing during the Second World War, and finding many parallels between her own time and the fierce and far-off past. ‘Deborah was, I think, the Winston Churchill of her people’, she said of one outspoken prophetess, who inspired dispirited Israel (‘a remnant against the mighty’) to new efforts – and ultimate victory – over the King of Canaan. The battle of Megiddo that they won was the very same Megiddo fought over by General Allenby in the First World War, alongside some of Lady Mary’s own family. Echoes upon echoes. Elsewhere she described seeing a young serviceman, clearly not a regular church goer, listening to the Song of Deborah during ‘one of the blackest weeks of the war’ and saying ‘quite loudly, because he couldn’t help it, “Splendid”.’ ‘People are not often provoked to behave like that in Church’, she continued. ‘But there are lines in the Bible which, coming suddenly right at one, might prompt that sort of outburst.’

With all that as precedence, it doesn’t half shed a different light on the awful new sorts we’re coping with at the moment.

From my point of view though, the most thought-provoking insight I gained from Lady Mary was centred around how dreadful a lot of the Old Testament heroes were. Jacob, for example. Jacob – the founding father of the tribes of Israel! He swindled his brother Esau out of his birthright, by pretending to be him in front of their poor old father Isaac, who was blind. ‘Esau was an hairy man’, we are told. So smooth Jacob magically became an hairy man too, by strapping sheepskin to his arms, which Isaac fell for and pronounced his blessing upon him, the cheating git. And Samson, cruel to foxes as we saw above, was also vain, selfish and violent to boot. Not to mention David. Shiny King David, glorious poet, heroic defeater of the giant Goliath and ancestor of Christ himself, was first a voyeur (spying on beautiful Bathsheba while she was washing) then a date rapist (seducing same Bathsheba) then a murderer (seeing off Bathsheba’s husband Uriah by ordering his comrades to abandon him in battle). Even Noah, who I’d assumed to be a good sort (seeing as he’d rescued all of creation from the Great Flood in his ark) was given to drunkenness, and behaved very badly to his grandson who’d seen him flopped on his bed without his clothes.

In fact from the time that Adam and Eve disastrously ate the forbidden apple onwards, the whole book contains a litany of cowardice, lying, stealing, cheating, bullying, fighting, stupidity, killing and I don’t know what else. But this is where it’s got weird for me. Suddenly, I can see Lady Mary’s ‘emotional resonance’ – because our world today also contains exactly that: a litany of cowardice, lying, stealing, cheating, bullying, fighting, stupidity, killing and I don’t know what else.

But the point is that God doesn’t seem to mind this terribly: he engaged directly with all those awful old sorts – and despite their flaws, they became the heroes of the Old Testament and the agents of his will upon the earth. Moses might have murdered an Egyptian overseer and run away and hidden because of it, but he also was chosen by the Lord to lead the Israelites to the promised land. God’s actual game plan didn’t get corrupted, just because the pieces on the board were bent and chipped.

So with all that as precedence, it doesn’t half shed a different light on the awful new sorts we’re coping with at the moment. A menacingly orange person with a foul mouth and an unpleasant attitude towards women need not be a source of dismay – even as the new president of America. A friend once described Mr Trump as ‘God’s wrecking ball’, which made me roll my eyes. But perhaps that’s exactly what he is. If David could be ‘a man after God’s own heart’ as the book of Samuel calls him, sexual misdemeanours notwithstanding, there is no reason why Donald couldn’t be a force for good, when wielded by the Lord. Bad manners and a felony conviction are small beer compared to other things God has tolerated in his servants.

‘Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid,’ says Jesus in the New Testament, about a thousand years after David’s death. Having been keeping company with Mary Stocks and seeing the big picture of what the Old Testament has to tell us, I might now manage not to be so troubled – at least not by Mr Trump. And the Bible has some tremendous stories about what happens to the seriously wicked. King Saul killed himself when he realised the battle was lost. Well, you know, so did Hitler. And the appalling dictators of Romania in the 1980s – Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu – came to an end not unlike wicked Queen Jezebel’s, who was thrown from the windows of her palace and trampled by Jehu’s army. Bad King Nebuchadnezzar ‘was driven from the sons of men; and his heart was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild asses’, says the book of Daniel. Which makes me remember Saddam Hussein being dragged out of a muddy sort of burrow at the end of the Iraq War in 2003, looking completely dishevelled. And come to think of it, didn’t Osama bin Laden – architect of the Twin Towers attack – also spend a lot of time hiding in caves in the wilderness of Swat before he was eventually caught?

Mr Putin, Kim Jong Un and the other bad hats of the world might like to watch themselves: it is odds on that the Lord ‘shall also blow upon them, and they shall wither, and the whirlwind shall take them away as stubble’. It says so in the Old Testament.

‘Splendid!’ as Lady Mary would say.

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Article

Creed

Egypt

Film & TV

Freedom of Belief

7 February 2025

6 min read

The 21: wrestling truth from a story of horror

Remembering the Coptic Martyrs a decade on.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

An graphic image shows 21 men in orange suits kneeling in front of executioners in black.

MORE Productions.

In 2015, 21 men were kidnapped, tortured, and eventually killed by ISIS. Twenty of those men were Coptic (Egyptian) and one, Matthew, was Ghanian. They were all Christians. And that is why they were killed.

Over the past decade, the story of their martyrdom has been widely told. And yet, the only piece of visual storytelling that existed was the propaganda video, filmed and released by ISIS. A film that was intended to scare the world and dehumanize the men, a film that glorified violence and hatred.

We’ve known the story of the men’s execution, but we’ve only known it as told by their executioners.

That’s no longer the case. On 15 February 2025, ten years since their death, the story of the 21 is being re-told by a team of over seventy artists from 24 countries, directed by Tod Polson, and in collaboration with the global Coptic community. The short film, The 21, will premiere on the anniversary of the men’s death and be featured at film festivals throughout 2025.

We knew a story, now we’re hearing their story.

I was able to talk through the details, how and why this short-film was made, with one of its producers – Mandi Hart of MORE Productions. After watching the film a handful of times, and needing ten minutes to recover after every viewing, I had lots to ask Mandi. Firstly, I wanted to know all about the visual aesthetic.

This film is animated, which feels like both a defiance and a kindness. It’s a defiant choice because it ensures that this film stands in contrast to the film that was released ten years ago, where pure terror was the only story-telling objective. Nothing about this film is reminiscent of that one. And that’s a kindness to us, the audience. We’re not totally spared, however, as carefully selected moments of the original footage are woven into this short film, reminding us that these men – the ones who were killed and the ones who did the killing - were as real as you and I. But, on the whole, we’re spared the worst of the horror. As Mandi noted,

‘animation allows your imagination to fill in the gaps. It’s just as powerful a form of story-telling, if not more so’.

Mandi’s right. This film will stop you in your tracks. More than anything, though, the visual aesthetic is an ode to the men who were lost and the community they belong to.

Director, Tod Polson, travelled to Egypt to meet with Coptic iconographers and learn about the intricate ways they communicate in symbolism, iconography and art. Mandi told me that even details as subtle as the width of a line used or the placement of the eyes on a human face have deep wells of meaning held within them. Polson also visited Minya, the Egyptian region that was home to many of the martyrs, and gathered inspiration from the church that was built there in their honour. The film’s aesthetic derives from all of this, it’s drawn in alignment with what Polson learnt. In other words, the story is told in the language of the martyrs. Through the work of the seventy plus artists, this story is weaved into the story – the Coptic story, the Christian story. It’s rooted and yet timeless, a decade old and yet ancient.

For the men standing on the beach, an assassin standing behind them, the veil between the seen and unseen was incredibly thin.

The film is a masterclass in learning the language of the ones to whom you’re paying tribute. The artists have honoured the martyrs on their own terms and according to their own story. It’s a special thing.

It’s also a challenging thing. It’s a harrowing event, after all. It feels as though, through this film, we’re brought closer to the torture the men endured, given details that the mainstream media left unreported. Details such as, the floor they were forced to sleep on was continuously pumped with water, the relentless taunting and manual labour, the beatings, the fact that they were actually put in orange boiler suits, taken to the beach, and filmed three times. It was on the third time that they didn’t return.

40 days, that’s how long the twenty-one were held for.

960 hours.

57,600 minutes.

3,456,000 seconds.

The longevity and intensity of the torture is nearly impossible to fathom. The fear they must have felt is mostly unimaginable. Mandi mentioned that she was probed by a continual set of questions as she studied this story, these men, and those days. The questions went along the lines of: what would she be willing to die for? Would she be brave enough to stand her ground? Would she be faithful to what she believes to be true? Would she choose a life without Jesus or a death because of him? It’s a hypothetical set of questions for Mandi, and for me too. But not for the 21 men.

Finally, I wanted to ask Mandi about the inclusion of supernatural facets of the story – the improvable, un-fact-check-able stuff. If I was to be brave, I guess I would say the truest stuff. The way the heavens seem to open, rage, and weep; the subtle appearances of Jesus’s scarred and bloody feet; the mention of a prayer-fuelled earthquake in the prison; the glimpses of a supernatural army guarding the 21 men as they walked to their death. It’s quite weep-worthy, really. The closer these men get to their execution, the brighter and more vivid the ‘unseen’ becomes.

Yet, it feels like quite a brave storytelling choice, to meld the provable with the improvable facts of the story.

‘Only to us’, Mandi reminded me. ‘we, the cultural West, struggle with the supernatural stuff. It’s an affront to the ‘rational’. But we’re the minority. The majority, who have less cultural power, they don’t struggle with this stuff at all... ’

This led us to speak about the seen and the unseen elements of reality, how – as Christians – we believe that all that we see is not all that there is. In fact, the things that cannot be seen are the realest things. And how, for the men standing on the beach, an assassin standing behind them, the veil between the seen and unseen was incredibly thin. It’s comfort that often makes the veil thicken out, Mandi reminded me, it’s the left hemisphere of our brains that tells us that all that we see is all that there is. When our safety and comfort are stripped away, what happens? For the twenty-one martyrs, it seems as though the veil became thread bare. As Mandi quite remarkably noted, ‘the human soul knows more than the mind is comfortable admitting’.

The 21 is a short film about death, the death of 21 innocent men. It’s important that we give these men our attention, look them in the eye and weep with those who weep. But I think, in a way, this short film also tells the story of life. Life after death, life that death doesn’t put an end to. Life that confounds death, even. And in that way, this film tells both a particular story and a universal one, both their story and the story – the Christian story.

Find out more about The 21

Watch the trailer