5 classic movies that botched Bible verses
4. 'The Book of Eli' (2010)
In this apocalyptic thriller, Denzel Washington plays a mysterious stranger wandering through what appears to be a post-nuclear war American landscape, one in which his character Eli possesses the lone existing copy of the Bible.
While such a plotline should theoretically yield multiple (and accurate) references to the Scriptures, that’s actually not quite the case.
Eli does spew a couple of Bible-adjacent quotes, like “Ask and you shall receive,” which can be traced to Matthew 7:7, and “I walk by faith, not by sight,” an allusion to 2 Corinthians 5:7.
But once again, the book of Genesis gets the casual treatment as Eli liberally paraphrases the book, saying, “Cursed be the ground for our sake. Both thorn and thistles it shall bring forth for us. For out of the ground we were taken, for the dust we are ... and to the dust we shall return."
His line is actually a rehash of Genesis 3:17-19, which reads: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you … until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
