Prequel

When I hear the term 'prequel', I think about the 'Star Wars' series of movies.

That was the first series of movies that I can recall which employed the technique

of producing another movie to explain in greater detail events which happened before the original movie's time.

 

I had to go back and find out more about that.

 

If you go here:

 you can see an interesting article

about the history of the making of the Star Wars series.

 

(You have to scroll down a bit to the article.  The relevant paragraph begins with "1973..." and discusses George Lucas and "American Graffiti"  Although the information about "Star Wars" doesn't begin until a paragraph or so later, this is still good background information.)

 

It turns out that there were four trilogies of movies.  George Lucas wrote the entire story, but it was far too long for one movie, so he first made the part which he thought to be the most exciting to film.  Later, of course, when the phenomenal success of the movies guaranteed the interest and funding to produce the others, a prequel and later other trilogies were produced.  At times, Lucas also waited until the development of special effects and cgi in filmmaking could catch up with his vision of how the movies should look.

 

Another article gave a list of plot elements which Lucas employed in the Star Wars series over and over again, to great success.  It was an amazingly long list, and very interesting...that is, if you are interested in that type of thing.  Since I love film-making and might write a historical fiction thriller someday, I was very interested and will have to take the time to study that list later.

 

All this to introduce an explanation about why I called this post 'Prequel':

 

As we proceeded through Exodus, I realized that soon I would come to the place where people would begin to wonder why so much detail was given to the construction of the Tabernacle.  What was the big deal?  Why did it matter?  Of course, the real big deal was that they were coming before a holy God, who set before them a way that they could approach Him.

 

However, to fully understand that, you would need to understand what had separated mankind from God in the first place.

 

Yet even before that, we'd need to think about the original relationship which existed between God and mankind.

 

I had been writing about the Scriptures which began around Genesis 4 or so, regarding the line of Abraham.  That continued until Exodus 26, when I realized that people would need to understand the pre-Abraham content of the Bible in order to have any interest in finding out more about the construction of the Tabernacle.  Things get a bit technical for a while, so I figured that the best way to understand the need for such detailed descriptions of Tabernacle furnishings (and the many details about the law which will come up in the chapters following Exodus 26) is to have an understanding about why God would have included this material in the Bible in the first place.  So that is why we are going back for a bit to the beginning of the book of Genesis.  That is why I call what is coming up a prequel...for it tells what happened before.  I'm also, as you no doubt have realized by now, having a bit of fun at the same time.