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This little TV movie was a masterpiece. It's one of Richard Harris' most brilliant roles as he seems to become Abraham. The movie takes us on a journey from Abraham's initial trek to an unknown land, to the birth of Ishmael and Isaac. Barbara Hershey couldn't have been better as Sarah. The portrayal of the Egyptian pharaoh, the voice of God that speaks to Abraham -- all the way to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra and the close call with Isaac -- all were done with taste and sensitivity. As some have pointed out, the special effects often looked like overlays, but it didn't adversely affect the power of the film.

The movie covers a lot of ground and while it is long the time goes by quickly because the acting was so beautifully realized. Harris' portrayal of Abraham truly is emotional and realistic. The cast and crew handled the topic with sensitivity and like so many other religious films, this one stays focused on the story and shuns proselytizing, goopy music or silly dialog. This film does not suffer from any of those common problems. I'd highly recommend this film. Well worth the experience.

This is part two of a documentary on the History Channel about the Bible Code -- a continuation of part one, The Bible Code: Predicting Armageddon, which apparently isn't listed the same way in IMDb, but can be found under "History's Mysteries."

The premise behind both films is that a hidden Code exists in the Torah, (the first five books of the old Testament) that tells of past, present and current events. That this code was thought to be in the Torah for centuries, and that only when the computer became available that professor Eliyahu Rips, a brilliant mathematician, discovered how to search the code. Then comes the various skeptics to debunk the Code, finding similar "codes" in everything from War and Peace to Moby Dick.

It is almost impossible to produce a documentary that will receive distribution without containing some sensational aspects -- end of the world, atomic holocaust, and so forth. This film suffers from that fact. There do seem to be Codes in the Bible, but the filmmakers didn't explore dual searches on the same topic in the Torah and a Hebrew edition of Moby Dick, for example -- side by side. That would have been revealing. Also, whether or not such searches are accurate are now being taken through various experiments to obtain their statistical significance. When this film was made, there wasn't nearly as much information available.

Professor Rips does not believe in using the Bible to predict the future. Although the original writer of the first mainstream book "The Bible Code," (author Michael Drosnin) hit the jackpot when he found the codes that Yitzhak Rabin will be assassinated, today much more stringent requirements are mandated to insure that the codes being found are significant. A new documentary needs to be forthcoming, and I believe it is already in production.