Exodus: Gods and Kings (a brief summary and review)

     In Ridley Scott’s retelling of the beginning of Exodus, we find Moses to be an adopted member of the royal family of ancient Egypt. He and his adopted brother Ramses, the son of the current Pharaoh, Seti I, are made aware of a prophecy concerning them that one will save the other and then become a leader. Moses and Ramses then lead an attack on the Hittites, during which Moses saves Ramses’s life. The meets with Seti I and is forced to reveal his saving of Ramses, but downplays the event, revealing a doubt and distrust of religion and prophecy.

     Seti I seeks to humble Ramses by making him visit the man overseeing the Hebrew slaves in Pithom, but Moses offers to take the duty instead. While in Pithom, Moses meets with the overseer and then the elders of the Hebrews. While in Pithom Moses also discovers that the overseer is corrupt. He also meets with some of the Hebrew elders secretly and learns that he is actually of Hebrew descent, and not Egyptian. Moses does not believe them and returns to report his findings to Seti I, who is deathly ill, and soon dies. Unbeknownst to Moses, to Hebrews overheard the conversation in which one of the Hebrew elders, Nun, reveals Moses’s true ethnicity. They tell the overseer, who manages to bring the news to Ramses, the new Pharaoh, just in time to use the information to escape punishment for his corruption by casting doubt on Moses’s ethnicity. Ramses confronts Moses and eventually threatens to cut off the arm of a maidservant, who is rumored to Moses’s sister, and also a Hebrew. Moses intervenes and confesses that it is true, even though not believing it at the time, purely out of concern to protect the maidservant, who indeed is his sister. Ramses has Moses banished, despite his mother’s insistence that he have Moses killed.

     Moses is given a horse and a few supplies and left to fend for himself. He journeys through wilderness for a time before arriving in Midian, where he meets some shepherd girls at a well and scares off some shepherds who had been rude to the girls. He ends up staying with the father of one of the shepherd girls. The father’s name is Jethro and the daughter’s name is Zipporah. Moses marries Zipporah and stays in Midian for nine years as a shepherd, fathering a son during that time.

     During this nine year stretch Ramses has become a very callous, self-indulgent Pharaoh, abusively using Hebrew slaves to build many things throughout Egypt, monuments, a new palace, and the like. Even Egyptians seem to be afraid of Ramses capricious moods. But for the Hebrew slaves, it is far worse, as they are used so mercilessly that they are dying of ill-use.

     At this time in Midian Moses goes onto the mountain that Zipporah and his son believe to be God’s mountain, chasing some sheep from his flock in the middle of a storm. Moses, not believing in God, has no issue with going up the mountain. Moses is hit in the head and sustains further injuries during a rockslide and “awakes” stuck deep in some mud, and sees a bush burning nearby. A boy called malak appears who serves as a representation of God (talking not just with the authority of God, but also with the person of God, as if Malak is indeed God). Malak tells Moses that he (Malak) needs a general to fight for him so that he can free his people, the Hebrews. Moses passes out and wakes up under the care of his wife.

     After he heals, Moses leaves his family in Midian and goes back to Egypt. There he witness Egyptians throwing dead Hebrew slaves into fires. He confronts Ramses and threatens him, telling him to let the Hebrews go free. Moses gets in touch with the Hebrew elders and teaches some of the Hebrew people about war and begins fighting a war of attrition against Egypt. Ramses begins executing Hebrew families by hanging them, demanding that the Hebrews turn Moses over to him. Moses speaks with Malak and the boy who is supposed to be God tells him that he is going to take a stronger hand in the fight to free the Hebrew slaves, saying that Moses’s war of attrition is taking too long.

     The traditional ten plagues are presented in a flowing format, with the first being alligators killing some Egyptian fishermen in the Nile and then going into an absolute frenzy, flooding the Nile with so much blood that the water is unusable. Other plagues strike Egypt, affecting both Hebrews and Egyptians alike. Each of the plagues is woven one into another, until, as Ramses continues to refuse to free the Hebrews, Malak tells Moses of the final plague, the killing of the firstborn. Moses is horrified and turns himself in to Ramses, meeting with him in his palace. He warns Ramses to let the Hebrews go by sunrise, or risk the life of his own son. Ramses refuses. Moses tells the Hebrews to cover their doorframes with the blood of lambs (though when he was told of this “trick” I cannot remember). And that night all the firstborn children of Egypt die suddenly. The next morning Ramses confronts Moses and the Hebrews and tells them to leave Egypt.

     The Hebrews leave Egypt, but after a time of no more than a few days, Ramses, still grieving over the death of his son, decides to go after the Hebrews and kill them all. The Hebrews follow Moses through the desert, soon discovering that Ramses is chasing them. Moses leads the Hebrews through the mountains and end up on a sea shore, the waters too high to cross through. Moses is distraught and throws his sword into the sea before falling asleep on the shore. The next day the sea recedes and, as Ramses and his army closes in, the Hebrews cross the sea, the waters no more than waist high in some places, and relatively free of water in others. Moses stays behind to confront Ramses as the Egyptian army deserts him and turns back for the shore as walls of water come crashing back towards them. Ramses and Moses and the Egyptian army are caught beneath the water, Moses ending up on the Hebrew side while Ramses makes it out alive on the side he started out from, alive while all of his army is dead. Before he made it to the Hebrews on the shore, Moses hit his head against a rock underwater, a clear connection to his injury in Midian during his nine year exile.

     Moses leads the Hebrews from the sea to Midian, where he is united with his wife and son. They accompany him and the Hebrews to Mount Sinai, where we see Moses sitting in a cave, scratching the ten commandments on stone tablets while Malak watches. The movie ends with an aged Moses riding in a wagon with the ten commandments as the Hebrew people make their way through a desert. Moses looks out from the wagon and sees Malak walking amongst the people.

     In trying to describe how closely the movie follows the Biblical storyline, the best way to answer would perhaps be, “it does not.” Moses knew that he was a Hebrew and so did everyone else, unlike the movie, in which Moses’s ancestry was a secret, even from Moses. Moses fled Egypt because he killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew and when the Pharaoh found out he tried to have Moses killed, unlike the movie, in which it was Moses’s Hebrew ancestry that caused him to be banished. In the movie Moses is portrayed as an atheist, or at best an agnostic. There is not evidence for this. Also, I have heard that Ramses did not reign as Pharaoh until more than a hundred years after the time of the Exodus. But even if this claim is incorrect, the Biblical text has the Pharaoh that tries to kill Moses dying after Moses leaves for Midian. The new Pharaoh would not have been Moses’s step-brother, but at the very least would have been his step-nephew, a much younger man than Moses. Moses’s encounter with the burning bush and God did not include a knock on the head, as the movie portrayed, as if Moses’s interaction with God was a result of a brain injury. When Moses goes back to Egypt in the movie, he leaves his family, whereas in the Biblical text his family goes with him.

     The inconsistencies are far too numerous to list in entirety, so perhaps a more focused critique of the pattern of differences between the movie and the Bible would be more prudent. The story of Moses and the freeing of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt is not about man, but about God. This discrepancy is the greatest difference between the movie and the text. In calling Moses back to Egypt, God brings him as a messenger, one who comes in the name of Yahweh, not as a general, as done in the movie. Moses is portrayed in the movie as the liberator of the Hebrew people, their savior, their warrior general. But in the Biblical text it is God who wages war on Egypt.

     A key point of the Biblical narrative that was very much lost in the movie was the clear back and forth between the Pharaoh and Moses and Aaron amongst the delivering of the plagues. In the movie the plagues are the actions of a childish, wrathful, petulant god-child that are explained away as miraculous, but natural events in an effort to purely force Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go. But in the Biblical text the plagues are so much more than the actions of a god-child suddenly impatient with a war of attrition. The war in the text is between God and the Egyptian pantheon. The ten plagues are God displaying His complete and total dominance over the Egyptian gods. Eventually forcing Pharaoh to let the Hebrew people go after the killing of the Egyptian firstborn, a declaration of victory over the Egyptian Pantheon and a repayment for the killing Hebrew sons in the first chapter of Exodus. However, in the movie God is seen as barbaric and cruel in his killing of the Egyptian firstborn. The main character of this story in the text is God, unlike the movie. Without a great deal more space and time the fullness of the divergence of the film from the text cannot be fully covered, but the overall theme of the difference would concern the portrayal of God.

     Despite my firm belief that this film is a foundationally inaccurate, sloppily cut mess of a project, I do, in fact, recognize several major redemptive factors. The director, Ridley Scott, is admittedly not a Christian. Why then should I expect the film to be accurate? Scott’s clear lack of adherence to the text are due to the fact that he, as an unbeliever, has no rational motivation to follow the text, and is therefore simply re-imagining the story in his own way, not necessarily making any credible statements about how things happened. This movie is an atheistic, or at best agnostic, understanding of a Biblical narrative and is therefore an incredible resource for a christian to make full use of to better understand popular perceptions of the Bible and how to interact with them.

     The need to understand popular (not necessarily secular, as many christians are very uninformed in their theology) perceptions of the Bible is so that well-informed christians can have edifying conversations with unbelievers in an effort to share with the Gospel. Movies like the one being discussed here and the previously released Noah are wonderful opportunities for christians to have a conversation with those who do not believe. It is easy to become wrapped up in arguing who is right, but we easily forget that God has a monopoly on truth and has need of us to defend Him in this way. Rather, through moments such as discussing a movie like Exodus: Gods and Kings, we are afforded an opportunity to talk about God’s Word. How could this be a bad thing? We wouldn’t be simply doing factual damage control in talking about this movie, but we would be, in highlighting the differences between the film and the text, bringing into focus the story of God’s great and wonderful work to save us from sin and death (the lamb’s blood over the doors, the first Passover). In short, this film is an easy way to share the Gospel. That seems to me to be quite redemptive. Do I then see this film as good in itself? No. It is as fallen and as broken as the man who made it. But as a tool by which I might share the Gospel with unbelievers, yes, this movie is a must see for all christians. Or we risk losing a chance to share the Good News with a world that, though fallen and sinful, is interested in the Bible enough to spend millions and millions of dollars making movies about it.

     The weakest of the redemptive factors are the small moments of visual wonder within the film. Some of scenes within the movie were quite beautiful and it was a pleasant experience to have a visualization of what settings in Exodus might have looked like. To see Pharaoh and his army running in front of a massive wall of crashing water was, for a moment, quite powerful, all details aside. Small snapshots of the plagues were also quite interesting. It is one thing to read about a plague, it is quite another thing to see it. And that is, perhaps, the best way to describe this idea. Exodus: Gods and Kings is a big-budget film that visually delivers, giving a sense of scope and scale that are, at times, hard to glean from the text alone. This is in no way wholly redemptive of the entire film in terms of quality, but it would be foolish to ignore the importance of being able to visualize even small bits and pieces of the Biblical narrative. It is, at times, easy to become disconnected from the reality of the text and get lost in the theological implications. The narratives contained within the Bible actually happen in real places, to real people.

     And that is, perhaps, the heart of my opinion concerning this film. This really happened as the Bible said it did, to real people, in the real places, at the Will of a real God. The film is identified, in my eyes, by a divergence from the truth. This divergence has its incredibly powerful uses, but it is an irredeemable divergence in regards to what is true and what is not. This film is a test for christians that is all too easy to fail. God loves Ridley Scott and it would be a shame if christians treated his film as an excuse, because of fear and pride, to fire potshots from their moral high ground instead of responding with a desire to engage, with truth and love, with the Gospel of Jesus as the one and only lamb of the one and only God whose blood spared us from eternal death. God is not afraid of Exodus: Gods and Kings and neither should we be.