Old Testament Prophet

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 434, 17 October 1947, Page 10

Old Testament Prophet

EN OF GOD, the new Sunday night feature from 2YA, lives up to the high endeavour of its title. It has tremendous, vitality plus a subtlety partly derived from its inspired attention to detail. The programme, each an hour long, are to be broadcast only ‘once a month, a regrettable interval to those who were as impressed as I was by the "Elijah." Now a prophet is, to reduce him to his lowest multiple, good dramatic material. He is one of those who shape history, and lives, highlighted, in the middle of the whirlpool of events. Those around him are smaller in stature, excellent foils to the splendour of his personality. Yet the prophet is human, subject to moods of discouragement and failure, human enough to run away but God-inspired enough to come back. The Elijah of the first programme needed no build-up from radio scriptwriters, since his speech could almost all be taken from the Authorised Version. In the case of the minor characters the necessary expansion of dialogue and incident has been soberly and beautifully done. Ahab is the perfect prototype of the fence-sitter waiting for the cat to jump, but there is also a glimpse of the harassed husband. Jezebel remains as unscrupulous as ever, but we are permitted to toy with the idea that her defiant championship of Baal may be partly the expression of a homesick princess’s loyalty to the country of her birth. The filling-in of the balder Biblical narrative had perhaps resulted in a toning-down of the stark biack-and-white effect of the original, but is admirably in keeping with both the spirit and:form of the convention adopted of putting these stories of the Old Testament prophets into the mouth of the New ‘Testament Zacharias.