DreamWorks' The Prince of Egypt (1998) opens with a song the studio fought hard to make the centerpiece of the film. Deliver Us, written by Stephen Schwartz, begins with a Hebrew slave chant — the actual Hebrew, not English — and rises into a six-minute lament that takes the audience from brick-pits to a basket on the Nile. Children sing in it. Mothers sing in it. The animation cuts between bricks, whips, water, and a baby placed where Pharaoh's daughter would later find him.
The song is the film's argument in miniature. It is also a translation of a single Old Testament sentence, the one the book of Exodus places between Moses' fleeing into Midian and his encounter at the bush. The sentence is small. It is also the engine of everything that follows:
"And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob."
A Verse of Three Verbs
The verse is built on a triple. Heard. Remembered. Looked (in verse 25, which extends the action). All three verbs have the same subject: God. None of them is yet a deliverance. The verse does not say God acts. It says God attends. The acting follows in chapter three. The attending is what makes acting possible.
This is what Deliver Us dramatizes. The song is a cry, not yet an answer. The film does not cut to Moses splitting the sea. It cuts to a baby in a basket. The acting will arrive. First the verse, and the song, settle into hearing.
What the Animation Adds
DreamWorks made an unusual choice for an animated children's film. It did not soften the slavery. The opening number shows men collapsing under bricks, soldiers cutting whips, mothers running through soldiers with babies. The hand-drawn style allows for a heaviness that live action could not get past censors. The slaves' cry — deliver us, hear our call — is filmed without irony.
That seriousness is what allows the verse to do its work. Children watching the film are being asked to enter the kind of grief most live-action Bible films sand off. Exodus 2:24 is being honored, not skipped. The animation is willing to film the groaning the verse describes.
The Brother the Verse Does Not Name
The film's other addition is the relationship between Moses and Ramses, raised as brothers. The Bible is silent on this; rabbinic tradition fills in some of it; the screenwriters extend the speculation. The film uses the brotherhood to make the cost of the deliverance visible. Deliver Us is the slaves' cry. The Plagues is the song that follows years later, with the brothers separated, neither of them able to step back.
The verse, beneath both, is still the same. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant. The brothers have made each other unbearable; the covenant is older than either of their reigns.
When You Believe
The film closes with another song, When You Believe, sung as the people cross the parted sea. It is a different mood from Deliver Us — gratitude, not grief. The verse beneath that final mood is not Exodus 2:24 anymore but the deliverance promised because of it. Yet without the hearing, there is no crossing. The song's word believe points back to the verse's word heard. Faith answers attention.
The Forty Seconds
Read Exodus 2:24 once, slowly. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. Forty seconds. In that time, the film's two songs are joined at the verse. The first cry. The first hearing. Everything else — basket, bush, brother, sea — follows from there.
The brick-pits are the spectacle. The hearing is the verse. Deliver us is what you sing because you suspect, before you can prove it, that someone is listening.