5 classic movies that botched Bible verses
1. 'Pulp Fiction' (1994)
Considered one of the more inventive films in modern cinema, Quentin Tarantino’s "Pulp Fiction" was heavy on expletive-laced dialogue and snappy repartee — and a little short on biblical literacy.
In a 2020 interview, Tarantino acknowledged taking some creative liberties with the Ezekiel quote in order to align it more with the plot of "Pulp Fiction" and its themes of vengeance and redemption.
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Perhaps its most famous scene comes during the film’s climax where hitman Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) recites a soliloquy of sorts that he’s memorized to recite before he assassinates someone after telling his partner Vincent (John Travolta) that he believes God intervened and spared their lives in a shooting earlier in the film.
The quote is as follows: “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children and I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers and you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you!”
The verses, while undeniably Old Testament in tone, are but a shadow of the actual Scripture from which they were inspired in the book of Ezekiel: “I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful rebukes; and they will know that I am the Lord when I lay My vengeance on them.”
Far from the bravado of a hitman, Ezekiel was writing during the Babylonian captivity of Israel as he warned them of God’s coming judgment upon Jerusalem in 586 BC.
