--- description: Ridley Scott's new movie is a retelling of Exodus. How does it compare to the story in the Bible and what we know of history? title: How Christian Bale's 'Exodus' Strays from the Bible image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt102b3351ec03baf3/69876e58428a9e14d2cc5ff7/exodus.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) ## Entertainment Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [faith](/tag/faith/) ## faith Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # How Ridley Scott's _Exodus_ Strays From the Bible ## Video: Playing God: Actors Who Have Tackled The Role [Watch (HLS stream): Playing God: Actors Who Have Tackled The Role](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ZTOy27Qq.m3u8) (1:43)  _Published 2014-12-05. Playing God_ by [Elizabeth Dias](/author/elizabeth-dias/) ## Elizabeth Dias Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Dec 12, 2014 10:00 AM CUT  Christian Bale as Moses in Exodus: Gods and Kings Christian Bale as Moses in Exodus: Gods and Kings20th Century Fox by [Elizabeth Dias](/author/elizabeth-dias/) ## Elizabeth Dias Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Dec 12, 2014 10:00 AM CUT The Biblical story of Exodus hits the big screen on Friday with the release of Ridley Scott’s _Exodus: Gods and Kings_. The story is one of the most timeless in Western history, like the _Odyssey_ or Shakespeare, only imbued with deeper spiritual significance, as Jews, Christians, and Muslims all claim the hero as their own. This newest adaptation is classic Scott-style, very _Gladiator_, set in an ancient Egypt where Ramses is Pharaoh and Moses is Christian Bale. Like any retelling of a classic, Scott’s blockbuster invites questions about the Exodus’ story’s origin and meaning. Most of the basic plot elements of the Biblical story are included in the film’s adaptation—Moses is a Hebrew boy raised in Pharaoh’s house, he leaves Egypt and encounters the divine in a burning bush; he returns to Egypt to free God’s people from slavery under Pharaoh; there are a bunch of horrible plagues; and the Red Sea parts so the Hebrew people can escape Pharaoh’s armies. From a strictly historical perspective, the Biblical Exodus story is murky at best. While there is some evidence that a people named Israel were emerging in Egypt in the late 13th and early 12th centuries BCE, little information exists about Israel’s presence there during the time. The general picture is clearer—Egyptians were in power in the region most of the time, various people groups migrated to Egypt during times of famine because the Nile made Egypt’s agricultural system more stable, and slavery was a part of the economic system of the ancient world. Most likely multiple people groups would have been enslaved, not just Semitic peoples, as slaves were often debt slaves or prisoners of war. ### Ten Actors Who Have Played God (In Film)  Isaac Andrews, Exodus: Gods and Kings In Exodus, God speaks through Malak, a young boy played by Isaac Andrews. The British preteen is no stranger to the ancient world, having previously appeared in the Dwayne Johnson Hercules; his next big role is in the Avengers sequel. Gareth Cattermole—Getty Images; 20th Century Fox  John Huston, The Bible: In The Beginning When casting a powerful, commanding leading man, iconic director John Huston knew to look no further than himself. Huston appeared in his own film as both Noah and the voice of God, part of a side career in acting that went on to include the downright devilish villain in Chinatown. 20th Century Fox  Alanis Morissette, Dogma This goofy religious satire from the mind of Kevin Smith featured Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as fallen angels and Morissette, in a cameo, as the Almighty. Morissette was in the midst of promoting Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, an album inspired by Eastern religion that put forward a more spiritual, enlightened rock star. Lionsgate  Morgan Freeman, Bruce Almighty He'd already played the president, so God wasn't much of a stretch; Freeman, one of America's most trusted actors, brought his resounding tones to bear on the loopy Jim Carrey comedy. Playing God must have its perks: Unlike stars Carrey and Jennifer Aniston, Freeman returned for the sequel Evan Almighty. Universal  Val Kilmer, Prince of Egypt Like John Huston, Kilmer played a double role, inhabiting both Moses and the voice of God, a purposeful statement meant to invoke the manner in which regular people "hear God." JB Lacroix—WireImage/Getty Images; Dreamworks  Graham Chapman, Monty Python and the Holy Grail The late Chapman (pictured right) played multiple roles, just like the rest of the Monty Python troupe; he wasn't just God but also King Arthur and one of the Three-Headed Knight's three heads. John Downing—Express/Getty Images  Rob Zombie, Super Zombie's voice, previously heard on albums including Hellbilly Deluxe and The Sinister Urge, helped motivate Rainn Wilson to become a superhero in the indie Super; director James Gunn used Zombie's voice again in his Guardians of the Galaxy. Getty Images/IFC Films  Whoopi Goldberg, A little Bit of Heaven The Oscar winner was part of the deeply strange Kate Hudson rom-com, in which she appears as God before a terminally-ill Hudson and grants her three wishes. This wasn't new for Goldberg, though: she'd previously played a spin on God in 2002's A Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie. Millenium Entertainment  George Burns, Oh, God! The former vaudevillian played God in Oh, God! and two cutely-titled sequels: Oh, God! Book II and Oh, God! You Devil. In the latter, he played — predictably enough — both God and Satan. Warner Bros./Getty Images  Will.i.am, Joan of Arcadia (TV) The Black Eyed Peas frontman was one of many performers to have appeared as the Almighty on the CBS soap opera about a girl in communication with divine powers. Other Gods included future Star Trek actor Zachary Quinto and The West Wing star Kathryn Joosten. CBS The origins of the written account of the Exodus story in the Bible are equally hard to pin down. “We don’t know when it was written, by whom, and it appears to come from multiple traditions in Israel which were probably both oral and written traditions and probably developed over centuries,” explains Ellen Davis, professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School. But drilling the Biblical story for proof of its narrative elements—that the Red Sea split, the Nile turned to blood, that flies attacked and frogs covered the land—misses the poetic power of the story itself. The Bible as a whole is not designed as a history textbook. It is a collection of different types of writings. Some are historical records, others are laws, poems, prose, and prophecy—written over hundreds of years and in various cultures and languages. The core of the Exodus narrative is actually a song, recounted in Exodus chapter 15, and it is one of the oldest fragments of all Biblical texts, likely dating to the earliest period of Biblical literature. Songs, as Davis explains, are the kind of thing people pass on orally and remember. “Exodus 15 may well be one of the kernels out of which the book of Exodus as we have it grew over centuries in the process of oral and written traditions gradually getting consolidated,” she says. The truth of the Exodus story is poetic—it is the quintessential story of oppression and liberation. The Pharaoh of Exodus, Davis points out, is not named. “It is, you might say, the generic Pharaoh,” she says. “There is a deliberate lack of specification. Pharaoh is the sort of quintessential oppressive ruler in the Bible, and that is how he is remembered in later literature, so he stands for the oppressor of the moment in a sense.” That is one reason the narrative has resonated powerfully generation after generation—there is not just one Exodus story. “Let my people go” is a timeless refrain for redemption. It is at the core of the African-American religious traditions in the United States. In some parts of the world, the Exodus story still is very concrete. Davis worked in South Sudan with the Episcopal Church a few weeks before the new state was declared in July 2011\. Women is the region often carry babies in baskets on their heads, and many of the people she works with, she says, have seen baby baskets torn from women’s heads and boy babies thrown in the Nile—the river runs through South Sudan. “They don’t want those boy babies to grow up and be soldiers,” Davis explains. “It is not a story that disappears.” One of the most striking aspects of Scott’s _Exodus_ is that God is portrayed as young boy. Eleven-year-old Isaac Andrews plays the God character, and the choice is both brilliant and scary. It plays on Scriptural images about becoming like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven and—with the Christmas time release—it makes it impossible to forget that God being born as a child is the New Testament’s own liberation story. But the film’s God-child is also more King Joffrey than let-the-little-children-come-unto-me. He actively inflicts plagues of frogs, gnats and boils upon the Egyptian people, and ultimately kills the first-born of all Egyptian families. It is impossible to escape the irony—a child becomes the killer of children. That raises questions of what kind of God the God of Exodus really is. The film purposefully papers over whether Moses is imagining the child-God, if he is having a vision, or if he is mentally unwell. The Biblical narrative of Exodus portrays God as a king and a man of war—the main drama, Davis explains, is a battle over sovereignty between Pharaoh and Israel’s God. “You have to remember that Israel was most of the time in its history in a situation of being oppressed, and if you are an oppressed people, it is good news to know that God is going to render judgment, because you are not worried about God’s judgment nearly so much as you are worried about what is going to happen to you from the oppressor,” Davis says. “People have always understood that ultimately God renders judgment and brings down the powerful and raises up the lowly, and you have that in the New Testament just as much as you have it in the Old, that has always been viewed as good news.” And spiritual questions like these are the ones that never go away, which means Scott’s version of the Exodus story won’t be the last, no matter what happens at the box office. _Read next:_ [_Ridley Scott Explains Why He Cast White Actors In Exodus: Gods and Kings_](http://time.com/3608724/ridley-scott-white-actors-exodus-gods-and-kings/?xid=time%5Freadnext "undefined") How Christian Bale's Exodus Compares to the Bible and History ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3630829/exodus-bible-movie-ridley-scott-history/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3630829/exodus-bible-movie-ridley-scott-history/"},"headline":"How Ridley Scott's Exodus Strays From the Bible","datePublished":"2014-12-12T10:00:05.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T05:06:43.123Z","description":"The biblical story was poetic, the history is murky at best","url":"https://time.com/3630829/exodus-bible-movie-ridley-scott-history/","keywords":["faith"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt102b3351ec03baf3/69876e58428a9e14d2cc5ff7/exodus.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Elizabeth Dias","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/elizabeth-dias/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt102b3351ec03baf3/69876e58428a9e14d2cc5ff7/exodus.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"DF-04130_R - Christian Bale stars as Moses in EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS.","caption":"DF-04130_R - Christian Bale stars as Moses in EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS.","creditText":"20th Century Fox","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/faith/","name":"faith"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3630829/exodus-bible-movie-ridley-scott-history/","name":"How Ridley Scott's Exodus Strays From the Bible"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Playing God: Actors Who Have Tackled The Role","description":"Playing God","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ZTOy27Qq/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-12-05T19:39:17.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ZTOy27Qq.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/3630829/exodus-bible-movie-ridley-scott-history/","duration":"PT1M43S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/3630829/exodus-bible-movie-ridley-scott-history/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```