Exodus: Gods and Kings: Does It Whitewash?

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Aaron Paul, Ancient Egypt, Ben Kingsley, Christian Bale, Exodus, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Joel Edgerton, Moses, Racial Issues, Ramesses II, Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver, Whitewashing

In my last post I dug into what we know about the race/ethnicity of ancient Egyptians. In this post, I want to dig into the accusations that Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, dir. Ridley Scott) was whitewashing its story.

 

Film vs Fact

The story of the Exodus involves two distinct groups, the Egyptians and the Hebrews. The Egyptians of the 19^th dynasty period, as I explored last time, were probably somewhat ethnically mixed and would probably look to us like Middle Easterners, perhaps with some Nubian features. Ramesses II, according to a French analysis of his mummy, was fair-skinned and red-haired, and therefore might have looked somewhat more ‘white’ than the people he ruled over. The Hebrews of the period would definitely have looked Middle Eastern.

Ridley Scott

So who did Ridley Scott cast in his film? (In this list, I identify the actor’s country of origin, his or her ancestry to the extent I can determine it, and my subjective opinion of what ‘race’ the actor appears to be based on publicity photos)

Here are the Eygptians:

Ramesses II: Joel Edgerton     Australian, of Dutch and English descent,

White

Seti I: John Turturro                American, of Italian descent, White

Tuya: Sigourney Weaver           American, of British descent, White

Priestess: Indira Varma            English, of Indian and Swiss descent, Mixed

Hegep: Ben Mendelsohn          Australian, of British descent, White

Bithiah: Hiam Abbass              Israeli, of Arab descent, Middle Eastern

Nefertari: Golshifteh Farahani  Iranian, of Iranian descent, Middle Eastern

Vizier: Ghassan Massoud           Syrian, probably of Arab or mixed descent,

Middle Eastern

Farahani and Egerton as Nefertari and Ramesses

Here are the Hebrews:

Moses: Christian Bale             English, of English and white South African

descent, White

Nun: Ben Kingsley                   English, of English and Indian descent, Mixed

Joshua: Aaron Paul                  American, of British and German descent,

White

Zipporah: Maria Valverde     Spanish, probably of Spanish descent, White

Jethro: Kevork Malikyan        Turkish, of Armenian descent, Middle Eastern

Miriam: Tara Fitzgerald         English, of British descent, White

Aaron: Andrew Tarbet            American, uncertain descent, White

Maria Valverde, who played Zipporah

(I classified Varma and Kingsley as looking ‘mixed’ because in different photos they can appear variously as White or Middle Eastern.)

So the major Egyptian characters (those who appear in multiple scenes, have a decent number of lines, or play an important role in a scene) are almost entirely played by white actors. Of the non-white actors, only Farahani’s Nefertari is presented as a significant character, and objectively it’s not a large part. Varma’s unnamed Priestess does appear in several scenes, usually with a line or two in each, but I wouldn’t call her an important character.

Of the Hebrews, the only character of significance played by a non-white actor is Nun, played by the mixed-race Kingsley, whom most Americans probably think of as a white actor. Malikyan’s Jethro does play a prominent role in a couple of scenes when Moses is meeting Zipporah, but disappears into the background after that.

Ben Kingsley as Nun

The only characters of any significance at all played by actual Middle Eastern actors are Nefertari and Jethro, neither of whom is truly a key figure in the film.

But among the Egyptians are large numbers of Middle Eastern and black actors playing minor characters like “Egyptian soldier #3.” If you scroll through the IMDb full cast list you’ll see lots of black and Middle Eastern actors playing uncredited roles like “Moses’ General”, “Fan Handler”, and “Egyptian Civilian Lower Class”.

So all of the important characters are played by white actors, a few supporting roles are played by Middle Eastern or mixed-ethnicity actors, and the minor or uncredited roles are played by a mixture of Middle Easterners, blacks, and Latinos (to judge by surnames and photos).

This photo perfectly captures the racial make-up of the cast

Now, as far as Ramesses, Seti, and Tuya are concerned, one could possibly make a case for casting white actors in those roles. As I noted in my previous post, Ramesses II seems to have been fair-skinned and red-haired, although his statuary suggests he might have had Nubian facial features. One of Seti’s few statues depicts him with thin lips (the nose is missing), and his mummy certainly suggests that, at least in terms of facial features, he could have passed for European, although what he looked like in life is a guess. About Tuya we don’t have much to go on. But if Ramesses was fair-skinned, at least one of his parents might have been as well. So if Ridley Scott had wanted to, he could have said something like “Based on the best evidence we have, Ramesses II and his parents appear to have looked European, so in the interests of historical accuracy, we decided to cast white actors in those roles.” It might not have been a very good answer, but at least there would have been a little historical support for it.

Seti I’s mummy

But that’s not how Scott responded to accusations of whitewashing. What he actually said was “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such….I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.”

I’ll give him credit for admitting that money and studio politics were a major factor in his casting decisions. What he’s basically saying is “Look, the studio and the financial backers wouldn’t let me do a big budget film with non-white leads, so I didn’t even consider casting non-whites in the important roles.”

Weaver as Tuya

But I don’t buy it. He’s insisting that because he was making a blockbuster film, he needed actors who can really pack theaters, and whether we like it or not, big name white actors ‘open’ movies much more reliably than non-white actors. But let’s look at the big names in that cast list again.

Christian Bale is undeniably a hot actor, having done Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy in the past decade. So Bale can definitely ‘open’ a big film effectively. Sigourney Weaver is a wonderful actress and probably still a household name, but she hasn’t carried a major film since 1997’s Alien Resurrection, or perhaps 1999’s Galaxy Quest if we’re being a little bit charitable. Ben Kingsley, like Weaver, is a marvelous actor and highly respected, but his only ‘big’ film was 1982’s Gandhi. Like Weaver, he mostly adds prestige to a film rather than drawing the kinds of audiences blockbusters require. Joel Edgerton is nice actor (you might remember him as the lead from 2005’s Kinky Boots or in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty), but he’s not a huge box office draw; I didn’t even know the actor’s name when I saw the film. Aaron Paul is best known from Breaking Bad, so maybe he brought in some fans of that series, but I doubt the studio was banking on him; he’s in a modest supporting role. And after that we get to character actors like John Turturro and Indira Varma. So Bale was cast for his ability to carry a blockbuster. Weaver, Kingsley, and Turturro add some gravitas, but probably weren’t critical to getting the financing for the film, and Edgerton, the number two lead, seems sort of like an afterthought.

Bale in front of a painfully white-looking Sphinx

When you look at in that light, Scott’s defense reads much more like an excuse. He’s shifting the blame for his casting choices onto the nameless suits of the Hollywood system and essentially saying he had no control over whom he cast. Sure, Bale was the anchor; the film wasn’t going to get made without him, so we probably just have accept that Moses had to be played by a white guy. But Ramesses could probably have been played by almost any young male actor, and certainly Seti and Tuya could have been anyone who could plausibly have been presented as Ramesses’ parents. They could even had cast Tuya as a different race from Seti. And they could have cast Joshua, Aaron, and Zipporah with Jewish or Middle Eastern actors, since only Aaron Paul has any significant name recognition at all. Scott’s defense rings mostly false, and I think the real issue is that he just didn’t want to be bothered to go to bat with the studios and try to produce a more ethnically-appropriate cast.

For me, there’s one thing that seals the deal, that really demonstrates that Scott didn’t particularly care that he was whitewashing his film and producing a cast that makes no historical sense whatsoever.

This character:

That’s Malak, the manifestation of God/angel/boy/figment of Moses’ imagination that speaks for God. This character could have been played by literally ANYONE. The character could have been any race whatsoever, could even have been played by a young girl. The character is entirely made up, so he could look however Scott wanted. No one was going to the film to see the total unknown who played Malak (except presumably that actor’s family), so casting for box office draw wasn’t an issue. If Scott had cast a Yoruba child, a Sudanese, a Latino, a Haitian, an Arab, a Japanese, or an Eskimo, it’s not like the studio could say, “There are no angels of color. God has to be white.”

But Scott cast this kid:

Isaac Andrews is a lily-white English schoolboy. That’s right, Scott choose a white kid to represent God. Even Cecil B. DeMille’s 10 Commandments, made at the height of 20^th century American racial insensitivity, didn’t dare to make God white. So in addition to all the actually important and authoritative characters being white, so is God. Whitewashing doesn’t get any worse than that.

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Exodus: What Race Were the Ancient Egyptians?

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Afrocentrism, Ancient Egypt, Black Athena, Cheikh Anta Diop, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Martin Bernal, Mary Lefkowitz, Racial Issues, Ramesses II

If you were paying attention when Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, dir. Ridley Scott) came out, you probably remember the controversy over whitewashing. Scott was accused of casting white actors in all of the major roles and only casting black actors in non-speaking, servile, or villainous roles. These days, the issue of whitewashing historical films has become a serious issue in many films. So let’s dig into this issue.

Race and Ancient Egypt

First off, let’s address this idea of ‘race’. While Westerners, especially Americans, tend to view race as a biological, and therefore innate, characteristic, the reality is that race is essentially a social and not biological characteristic. In American history, for example, among the groups who have been at some point considered to not be ‘white’ are the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews, all groups that today are generally seen as ‘white’. The Irish and the Italians weren’t white because they were Catholic, and the Jews weren’t white because they weren’t Christian; religion was (and perhaps still is, in the case of Muslims) a key element of whiteness, even though Americans are trained to think of it as being entirely about genetics.

Thinking about race as a biological characteristic was very useful to 19^th and 20^th century Europeans and (white) Americans because it provided a seemingly physical justification for the highly unequal treatment accorded to whites and blacks, and enabled them to engage in things like slavery and later colonization with a clear conscience. If race was a physical quality, then it could be used as evidence that some people, especially sub-Saharan Africans, were biologically inferior and therefore did not have a legitimate claim to their land, resources, and culture.

Most discussions of Egyptian ‘race’ turn on questions of skin color and facial features, so that’s what I’m going to focus on here. Were ancient Egyptians fair-skinned and therefore what we would call ‘white’? Were they dark-skinned and therefore what we would call ‘black’? Or were they something in between, darker-skinned but not what we would call ‘black’? Right away we run into the problem that many people today considered black do not possess particularly dark skin, perhaps because they have mixed-race ancestry but are culturally seen as ‘black’. (To call attention to the culturally-constructed nature of this issue, I’m going to use ‘white’ and ‘black’ in single quotes to refer to the modern notion of race, and terms like ‘Indo-European’ and ‘Nubian’ to refer to ethnic groupings in the Ancient period. I realize I’m over-simplifying a complex issue, since Indo-Europeans were not a single ethnicity but I want to keep this post to a manageable length and I’m not an expert in the extremely complex question of ethnicity in the Ancient World.)

The question of Egyptian ‘race’ is also complicated by the fact that over the 3,000 year history of Pharaonic Egypt, the country was ruled by 32 different dynasties, some of them ruling different parts of Egypt at the same time, and these dynasties did not all have the same ethnic background. (Just to put 3,000 years into perspective, Cleopatra is closer to us chronologically than she is to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza.) Nor did these dynasties all arise from the local population of Egypt. The last dynasty, the Ptolemids, were of Greek origin, and the 27^th and 31^st dynasties were actually the shahs of Persia, ruling through appointed satraps (about whose ethnicity little is known). At least two other dynasties originated outside of Egypt proper as well. And in addition to considering the ethnicity of the different dynasties, we need to also keep in mind that the dynasties may have had different ethnicity from the native people under them.

Another complicating factor is that by the 19^th century, discussions of Egyptian ‘race’ had taken on distinctly cultural and sometimes racist overtones. It was clear to 18^th and 19^th century Westerners that ancient Egypt was a remarkably advanced society, capable of impressive engineering feats such as the Pyramids. Because 18^th and 19^th century Westerners were wrestling with the issue of enslaving black Africans on the basis of their supposed inferiority, many Westerners were unwilling to see ancient Egypt as being ‘African’ in the same way that those from Sub-Saharan Africa were. Arguments were offered that the Egyptians were Caucasians, or at the very least, that they were not Sub-Saharan. Western society wanted to include Egypt in its cultural heritage, and was distinctly unwilling to consider the possibility that ‘black’ people might have made major contributions to that heritage.

On the flip side of the issue, by the 1960s, the emerging Black Pride movement began to assert that Egypt was part of Africa and therefore that the ancient Egyptians were ‘black’. The Senegalese scholar and politician Cheikh Anta Diop, a critic of colonialism, argued for the importance of viewing Egypt within the context of Africa and that Egypt was fundamentally African and therefore ‘black’. The British historian Martin Bernal became deeply interested in the question of Egypt. In 1987, he published Black Athena, which offered the controversial argument that Egypt had essentially colonized ancient Greece, that major elements of Greek civilization were of Egyptian origin, and that 18^th century Europeans had essentially whitewashed the ancient Greeks, willfully obscuring the African roots of Western culture. Although Bernal did not assert that Egyptians were necessarily dark-skinned, the implication that ‘white’ culture had ‘black’ roots was a very attractive one to African American intellectuals, who saw it as a challenge to the racial politics of 20^th century culture.

Martin Bernal

The Black Athena thesis was aggressively criticized by specialists in Classical Greek culture, especially the Classicist Mary Lefkowitz, whose Not Out of Africa accused Bernal of having invented a new origin for Western culture because of racial motives. Classicists have broadly rejected the Black Athena thesis, criticizing its methodology, its lack of solid evidence, its numerous linguistic errors, and its simplistic use of ancient myth. But Bernal and his supporters insisted that Lefkowitz and her followers were displaying their own racial biases. Consequently, the ‘Afrocentric’ interpretation of ancient Egypt is a highly-charged issue for many African Americans, who see non-Afrocentric readings of the evidence as being rooted in cultural bias.

Mary Lefkowitz

An unfortunate aspect of this whole scholarly debate, which I am going to refer to simply as the ‘Afrocentric debate’, has been the tendency for the race/ethnicity of those involved to be seen as a factor. Many of the Afrocentrists have tended to be African Americans and Africans, and they have sometimes been accused of allowing their desire for a more glorious ‘black’ heritage to lead them into serious scholarly mistakes. On the other side, most of those arguing for a more traditional reading of Egyptian ethnicity (the ‘Eurocentrists’, although I think that’s a problematic term) have been accused of either actively trying to co-opt Egypt into the European past or simply to deny ‘black’ people a piece of their rightful cultural heritage. Both sides of the debate frequently express frustration and bafflement that the other side fails to see what “is plainly true”.

Adding to the issue is that few of the Afrocentrists have been trained Egyptologists (Diop was a chemist and anthropologist, Bernal an expert on Chinese history). Their opponents argue that their lack of proper training has caused them to misunderstand Egyptian culture and misread the facts, while their supporters argue that the Afrocentrists are able to see the facts more clearly because they are not trapped inside a West-centric perspective. In some cases, Afrocentrists have accused their opponents of deliberate fraud meant to perpetuate a racist narrative of Western origins. (To me as a scholar, this is one of the biggest weaknesses of the Afrocentric position; historical data can be exceptionally misleading unless you’ve been trained how to understand it. So the fact that few of the leading Afrocentrists have the specialized training to sift through the evidence fully makes me less willing to accept some of their analysis. But it doesn’t in and of itself render their analysis invalid.)

Cheikh Anta Diop

Some General Issues

Most 20^th century scholars who have looked at the ethnic origins of the general Egyptian population seem to agree that the general population was probably indigenous to the Nile Valley, having been there since before 3000 BC, when recorded Egyptian history begins. So these people were Africans, but not Sub-Saharan in origin. However, there is also evidence that before 3000 BC, there was a migration of Middle Eastern peoples into Egypt. If that’s correct, the basic population of Egypt would have been a mixture of the indigenous Nilotic people and Middle Easterners. Studies of Pre-Dynastic skeletons have shown that Egyptians had a mixture of cranio-facial characteristics similar to other Africans, Middle Easterners and even some Indo-Europeans. Their body proportions are similar to Sub-Saharan Africans.

Dental evidence suggests that the basic Egyptian population remained relatively constant from the Pre-dynastic period down through the end of Pharaonic Egypt, so that there is not likely to have been a major shift in ethnicity during this period. The study’s author, Joel Irish, has said that his evidence suggests the population was a mixture of several distinct groups, including Saharans, Nilotics, and Middle Easterners. Their teeth most strongly resemble modern North Africans and Middle Easterners.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t tell us much about skin color. For that, we need to turn to artwork. Egyptian tomb art, which depicts skin color much more clearly than monumental reliefs do, tends to follow a pattern in which men are colored reddish-brown and women are colored a lighter yellow-brown. This is often seen as being a result of the tendency for Egyptian men to spend more time out of doors and therefore to be much more deeply tanned, but it also sometimes seen as being part of a common pattern in which fair skin is considered a mark of feminine beauty (we find the same dichotomy in much Indian artwork, and arguably in modern American entertainment media as well). So tomb paintings aren’t particularly useful in determining what color Egyptians’ skin was, although the Egyptians did sometimes depict Sub-Saharans with black skin, suggesting that they may have seen skin color as a difference between the two groups.

Note the way the males and females have different skin colors

The Egyptian name for their country was Kemet (strictly, it was KMT, since Egyptian hieroglyphics don’t really have written vowels in the English sense. But conventionally those three letters are translitered as Kemet). The linguistic root of Kemet is ‘black’, so the word is generally translated as ‘the Black Land”. Scholars have traditionally seen this as a reference to the fertile black soil deposited by the Nile during its annual flooding, which allowed for settled agriculture. Kemet is contrasted with Deshret (DSRT), which means “the Red Land” and which referred to the barren sand that characterizes Egypt away from the Nile. However, Afrocentric scholars, including Diop, argued that Kemet was a reference not to the land but to its inhabitants. However, Egyptologists have not been persuaded by this reading.

The Tomb of Ramesses III contains a mural referred to as the ‘Table of Nations’, a common element in tomb painting in which a series of people provide guidance for the soul of the deceased to reach the Underworld. A drawing of this (referred to as Plate 48), done by the early German archaeologist Richard Lepsius was published posthumously. Diop pointed out that Plate 48 depicts the Egyptians and the Nubians as both being black-skinned. From this, he concluded that the Egyptians were black. In 1996, the Czech-American Egyptologist Frank Yurco examined the Table of Nations in Ramesses’s tomb and pointed out that Plate 48 is not an exact depiction of the mural; rather it’s a pastiche of four different figures that Lepsius drew next to each other when those figures are not next to each other in the mural; he also noted that the first figure is incorrectly labeled an Egyptian when it’s actually a Nubian in the original mural. Manu Ampim, professor of African and African American Studies, has accused Yurko of deliberate misrepresentation of the mural. (If you want to explore Ampin’s analysis, he’s posted a whole webpage of it here. However, his assertion that ‘rmT’ means ‘Egyptians’ in hieroglyphics is wrong; it’s a determinative sign meaning ‘people’, but it needs additional glyphs to designate a specific group of people. So he seems to be mistranslating the hieroglyphics.)

Lepsius’ Plate 48

Afrocentrists frequently point to a passage in the writings of the 5th century BC historian Herodotus in which he describes the Egyptians as being “melanchroes“, which means ‘dark-skinned’. But the Eurocentrists respond that the term doesn’t mean ‘black-skinned’, since Homer describes Odysseus as being melanchroes. Eurocentrists also point to several ancient historians who specifically say that the Egyptians do not look like “Ethiopians” because they’re not so dark-skinned. You can read more about that facet of the debate here.

The Pharaohs

Looking at individual dynasties and specific pharaohs gives us another perspective. As already noted, the 27^th dynasty, the 31^st dynasty, and the Ptolemid dynasty (technically the 32^nd dynasty, but they’re usually not given a number) were of non-African origin and so were Middle-Eastern and Greek. The 25^th dynasty (ruled from c.760-656 BC) were rulers of Nubia who conquered Egypt from the south. They definitely register as ‘black’ by today’s standards; in artwork they are shown with wide noses and full lips even when their skin color is not clear. The 23^rd dynasty (ruled 880-720 BC) came from Libya, meaning they were Berbers and thus fairly light-skinned. Many Berbers can pass for Europeans today.

Pharaoh Taharqa of the 25th dynasty, depicted as a sphinx

But beyond those five dynasties, the evidence gets less clear. The first two dynasties came from Thinis, somewhere in the southern reaches of Upper (South) Egypt, which could have had a larger Sub-Saharan population simply because it was closer to Nubia (one ancient historian says that the southern end of Upper Egypt was a mixed-ethnicity zone but that the inhabitants were not as dark as the Nubians). Other dynasties from Upper Egypt include the 11^th, the 17^th-19^th, and perhaps the 16^th, and thus may also have had greater Nubian influence. The other dynasties were based in Lower (North) Egypt, further away from Nubia and therefore probably had a smaller Nubian element. But this doesn’t automatically mean that rulers from Upper Egypt were themselves Nubian.

An important case in point is the 18^th dynasty pharaoh Ramesses II (the guy I argued in my last post was most likely to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus). A 1974 French study of his mummy determined that he was fair-skinned and had red hair, with a beaked nose. So even though his dynasty came from Upper Egypt, he does not appear to have been Nubian.

Ramesses II

We do possess the mummies of many pharaohs, but the desiccated and decayed state they are in makes analyzing skin color and facial features extremely difficult. Tutankhamun’s DNA was recently analyzed and while it revealed some interesting information about his ancestry, the scientists who conducted the study concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to give a clear statement about his ethnicity. (Sadly, that didn’t stop some racists from insisting that the study proved Tut was Caucasian.) And it’s unlikely that DNA studies will shed much light on this issue, because most mummies have been handled so often, both in modern times and in the ancient period, that they are badly contaminated with other people’s DNA.

Egyptian statues of pharaohs are often made from black stone and thus depict their subjects as black-skinned, but that may simply be a question of materials. It might also be meant to associate the pharaoh, who as a living god is the source of Egypt’s abundance and fertility, with the fertile black soil of Kemet. And other statues are painted red the same way that Egyptian men in tomb paintings are red.

Bust of Tutankamun

In terms of facial features, statues of pharaohs are a mixed bunch. Some certainly depict pharaohs with wide noses, full lips and other features that suggest they were ‘black’. Take a look at this gallery of pharaonic statues to see what I mean. (I’m not persuaded that all of them have ‘black’ features, but a good number of them certainly do. Note that the first image is of Narmer, the first pharaoh of Egypt, but it was made during the 25th dynasty and so does not offer evidence of what the historical Narmer looked like. Instead it reflects the influence of the Nubian dynasty ruling Egypt at the time.)

But other pharaohs are shown with thin lips and narrower noses, like this statue of 18^th dynasty pharaoh Hatshepsut.

Hatshepsut

And some have thin lips but wide noses. Of course, much of this rests on the assumption that lips and noses are solid guides to ethnicity, which they aren’t. They’re good clues, but not proof.

And all of this assumes that Egyptian statues are meant as portraits in the modern sense, when in fact they may be intended to convey symbolic truths rather than to offer a genuine likeness (as I said, many scholars think that black skin is intended to suggest fertility, so perhaps other features were symbolically-loaded as well). Consider for example the statues of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel; they show him with Nubian features even though that 1974 study suggested he was fair skinned and red-haired. Of course, with mixed ancestry, one might have fair skin and still have Sub-Saharan features.

Ramesses II

And consider the famous bust of Nefertiti.

Nefertiti

From her facial features, she could easily be mistaken for a European, even though her skin color is a bit darker. However, some Afrocentrists insist that they see Sub-Saharan features in Hatshepsut and Nefertiti. I don’t, but an Afrocentrist might suggest that my ‘white’ eyes are trained to not see African features. And that brings us back to the social construction of race. Both Afrocentrists and Eurocentrists are looking at the same images and reading them in contradictory ways.

Nefertiti’s not a pharaoh, only a pharaoh’s wife. And that raises another issue. Most pharaohs had multiple wives. Some were their biological sisters (and in a few cases daughters), but other were royal women from other kingdoms. It’s highly likely that many pharaohs had wives who were variously Egyptian, Nubian, Berber, Mesopotamian, Hittite, and perhaps even Greek (those last two being Indo-European). There was no fixed rule for determining which son succeeded his father as the next pharaoh, so it’s likely that many dynasties were ethnically mixed, with the mothers of pharaohs coming from different ethnic groups even within a single dynasty.

The problem here is that we are looking to put ancient Egyptians into modern boxes. We have a category of ‘race’ that probably would have meant very little to them, and their concerns are hard for us to make sense of because their mental world and artistic conventions are so far removed from ours.

Were the pharoahs ‘white’? No, not the way we mean the term. I highly doubt that even fair-skinned, red-haired Ramesses II would have looked ‘white’ by modern standards, though he might have looked close to it; the 23^rd dynasty might have as well. Were they ‘black’? In the case of the 25^th dynasty, absolutely they were. In the case of other dynasties, I think it’s probable that some of them might well have looked like modern African Americans (who are themselves often of very mixed ancestry), at least if the statuary was trying to offer a realistic portrait. Others probably would have looked very Middle Eastern to our eyes. Unless DNA studies advance to the point that they can give us clear scientific evidence to answer this problem, I think the best answer is to say that over the course of 3,000 years, Egyptian pharaohs were a very mixed group in terms of their ancestry, skin color, facial features, and hair.

In my next post, I’ll tackle what all of this means for Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Want to Know More?

Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Volume 1) is the first of four volumes on his theory. Mary Lefkowitz’ Not Out Of Africa: How “Afrocentrism” Became An Excuse To Teach Myth As History (New Republic Book)  is the appropriate companion piece to read with it, to get both sides of the argument.

Exodus: Gods and Kings: Film Vs Fact

Tags

Ancient Egypt, Exodus, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Moses, Ramesses II, Religious Issues

My previous post compared Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, dir. Ridley Scott) with the Biblical account of the Exodus. This post is going to look at the historicity of the Exodus. This is a big topic and one that bumps into the challenge of separating belief from verifiable historical evidence. As a Christian, I can believe in the Bible as a matter of faith, but as a historian, I have to look at the actual evidence. And I am a long ways from being a specialist in ancient Egyptian history or Biblical archaeology or any of the other specific fields required to really speak authoritatively on this problem.

As I mentioned in my last post, the essential problem with comparing the Biblical narrative with historical fact is that scholars have not found any Egyptian documents that fit with the Biblical text. One of the biggest challenges is simply pinning down when the Exodus is supposed to have happened.

 

Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus?

(Warning: I’m going to gloss over some very complicated issues of chronology in this post, chief of which is that the regnal dates for Egyptian pharaohs are less fixed than they seem; most of the regnal dates I’m going to cite can actually vary by nearly a half-century, for reasons too complex to tackle here, unless people really want me to get into the messy details. I’ll do my best to explain the core issues but understand there’s more going on here that I’m leaving out for brevity’s sake.)

Throughout Exodus, the ruler of Egypt is simply identified as ‘Pharaoh’ with no additional reference to which pharaoh we’re talking about. Given that Egypt was ruled by pharaohs for close to 3,000 years, that means there are a lot of candidates to look at. Modern scholars have offered arguments for most of the pharaohs from Dedumose I (d.c. 1582 BC) to Setnakhte (d.c.1186 BC). Scholars have generally agreed that the New Kingdom period, including the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th dynasties and running from around c.1550 to c.1069 BC is the right period. (Just for reference, the famous Akhenaten was an 18^th dynasty pharaoh ruling from about 1353-1336 BC, and his even more famous son Tutankhamun died around 1323 BC. The 18^th dynasty died out about 1292 BC and was succeeded by the 19^th dynasty.)

1 Kings 6:1 says that the Exodus happened 480 years before the construction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem (which happened some time around 970 BC, give or take a decade), which would put the Exodus happening around the 1440s, 1446 to be precise, if you assume that various Biblical details are exactly correct. 1446 falls during the reign of the 18th dynasty Pharaoh Thutmose III (step-son of the famous female pharaoh Hatshepsut). But during this period, Canaan was part of the Egyptian empire, and an Exodus from Egyptian territory into Egyptian territory makes little sense. And Thutmose’ reign was one of the cultural and military high points of the New Kingdom, which doesn’t exactly fit with the story of military disaster told in Exodus

Many historians consider that 480 number symbolic, because the same figure of 480 years is said to separate the construction of Solomon’s Temple and the Second Temple. (Also, the anonymous author  of 1 Kings doesn’t give us any clue how he calculated that figure of 480 years, and he’s not likely to have had a lot of written records to work from.) ‘480 years’ may well be a way of saying 12 generations of 40 years each. If Jewish authors used 40 years to stand for a single generation (note that Moses is said to have lived for 120 years, with his life falling into neat 40 year chunks), then perhaps that 480 figure is a different way of saying 250 years (much closer to an actual human generation), which would give the Exodus a date around 1210 or so. That date falls late in the reign of Ramesses II (who reigned 1279 to 1213 BC, one of the longest reigns in human history) or slightly after, during the reign of his son Merneptah (r. 1213-1203 BC). Consequently, most historians who accept the Exodus as a fact have argued that Ramesses is the pharaoh of the Exodus.

Statue of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel

Another small point in Ramesses’ favor is his son Merneptah became pharaoh because all of his older brothers had already died, which fits into the story of all the Egyptian’s first-born sons dying.

Additional support for the idea that Ramesses II is the Pharaoh of the Exodus comes from Exodus 1:11, “So [the Egyptians] put slave masters over [the Hebrews] to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and [Pi-]Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh.” Pithom (or Per-Atum, the “House of Atum”) has never been definitively identified, but Pi-Ramesses (or Per-Ramesses, the “House of Ramesses”) has been fairly definitively identified since the 1960s as a city built in the Nile Delta, on the easternmost branch of the Nile. Ramesses II built it as a new capital, since the location was much closer to the Canaanite territories of the Egyptian Empire, as well as a good spot from which to stop an invasion of Egypt by the Hittites (since such an invasion would have to go through the northern Sinai peninsula. (The previous capital was Avaris, also on the same branch of the Nile. The film inaccurately depicts Ramesses as ruling from Memphis, much further to the south, slightly below the point where the Nile splits into different branches at the Delta.)

Pi-Ramesses is not far from Tanis and Avaris

So the Biblical claim that the Hebrews built Pi-Ramesses fits with what we know of Ramesses II’s building work. His father Seti possessed a summer palace there, and Ramesses was born in the area, so it is more accurate to picture an existing complex being developed into a large city (ultimately housing about 300,000 people). But Exodus says that the city was built as a ‘store city’. Scholars have debated what a ‘store city’ is, but since Pi-Ramesses was apparently intended as a new capital, the text seems to be wrong, unless Ramesses built the city and then decided it could serve as a capital. Or perhaps it was only Pi-thom that was intended to serve as a store city. So if we are going to find evidence of the Exodus outside the Bible, it appears that the mid- to late-13^th century BC is the period to look in. A few scholars have argued that the Biblical ‘Ramesses’ is not a reference to Pi-Ramesses, but that view does not seem to command much acceptance.

Pi-Ramesses today

(Incidentally, this reference to the Hebrews building store cities in Egypt is what lies underneath Ben Carson’s infamous claim that the Pyramids were built for grain storage. He’s conflating the Biblical claim of store cities with the popular misconception that the Pyramids were built with slave labor.)

Some professional and amateur scholars make arguments for other pharaohs. Ahmose I, the founder of the 18th dynasty, who ruled c.1539-c.1514) is sometimes pointed to because of the so-called ‘Tempest Stela‘, which describes a period of darkness and severe storms. But his reign seems way too early for the Exodus. Another popular candidate is Amenhotep II (r.1427-1401), son of Thutmose III. The argument here is that there were actually two Amenhotep IIs. The first died four years into his reign and his successor took the same name to disguise the humiliating death of his predecessor. As a theory, it’s a big stretch with only a small amount of evidence to support it (which I don’t want to get into). And it’s worth pointing out that Pi-Ramesses was built centuries after their rule.

There’s also the question of whether the Pharaoh of the Exodus died along with his army. Exodus does not explicitly claim this, but many assume that the pharaoh must have been with his army when it was destroyed by the sea. Since Exodus 2 says that the pharaoh at whose court Moses was raised died before Moses saw the Burning Bush, scholars have looked for a pharaoh who had a very long reign followed by a pharaoh who had a short reign (assuming that pharaoh died during the Exodus). None of the candidates fit that pattern exactly, which is why the two Amenhotep IIs theory is appealing. But for my money, the fact that Exodus insists that Pi-Ramesses was built during the reign of Pharaoh makes Ramesses II or his son Merneptah the best candidate. He comes closer than any of the others.

 

Evidence

Unfortunately, after more than a century of searching for evidence, archaeologists and Egyptologists have yet to find any clear proof for the events described in Exodus. Exodus 12: 37-38 says that at the time of the Exodus, the Hebrews numbered around 600,000, not counting women and children. Factoring in women and children, the text is claiming that a population of close to 2 million people emigrated from Egypt (probably larger, since the figure of 2 million is assuming one woman and child per man). In the 13^th century, Egypt is estimated to have had somewhere between 3 and 3.5 million inhabitants, so if we read the numbers as literal in a modern sense, Exodus is claiming that literally half the population of Egypt were Hebrews, a figure that seems impossibly large. Even if we assume that modern scholars have severely underestimated the total population of Egypt, the numbers seem implausible (among other details, Exodus 1 claims that these 2 million Hebrews were served by just 2 midwives). Given the Biblical tendency to use numbers symbolically (or at least non-literally), it is likely that this figure of 600,000 men should be understood that way. (Indeed, the statistic 603,350, which is given in the book of Numbers, translates in Hebrew numerology to “the children of Israel, every individual.”) Otherwise, it is hard to see how the loss of half its population would not have triggered a complete collapse of Egyptian civilization, something for which there is no evidence.

A large emigration (even if not 2 million people) would plausibly have left archaeological evidence (600,000 people camping out at Mt. Sinai, for example, would probably leave refuse in the form of animal bones, broken pots, and broken tools), but archaeologists have yet to find evidence for any such camps.

Nor do Egyptian texts make any reference to either the Hebrews as a slave people, to the 10 plagues, or to the destruction of an Egyptian army in the sea. The closest scholars have found to a reference to the Hebrews in Egypt are references to a people called the Habiru or Apiru, mentioned in various sources between about 1800 BC and 1100 BC, who live in the Fertile Crescent and Canaan. These people are various described as nomads, rebels, raiders, laborers, slaves, and thieves. But the term seems to be a catch-all term for people in that region, and not a specific ethnic or cultural group, and the similarity of ‘Habiru’ to ‘Hebrew’ appears to be accidental rather than linguistic. And remember, this group is supposed to be half the population of Egypt. If the Hebrews were such a large segment of the population, why is there no clear mention of them?

The Ipuwer Papyrus, a New Kingdom copy of a text composed sometime between the late Old Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period (so, between roughly 1850 BC and 1600 BC) describes a period of anarchy in which society has turned upside down: the laborers are not working, the poor have become rich, the nobles are distressed, death and blood are everywhere, barbarians have invaded Egypt, and cats and dogs have generally started living together, just like Bill Murray once said. In other words, the text is a description of a society in which nothing is working properly and it seems like the end of the world. Some details are evocative of the Exodus story: there is pestilence in the land, the river is blood, the servants are rebelling and not working and they have taken the riches of the nobles, grain is destroyed and the cattle moan, the land is without light, and everyone is lamenting. But the text also includes a lot of details that don’t fit the Biblical narrative (a barbarian invasion, children are having their brains dashed out, widespread warfare and violence, crocodiles are killing people, the nobles are being beaten and forced to labor, the poor are living in mansions, the king has been overthrown by a mob, and so on. So while some people have tried to use the Ipuwer Papyrus as evidence for the Exodus, this requires that they ignore all the parts of the text that don’t fit the story, and it also requires the Exodus to have happened hundreds of years earlier than any scenario the Tanakh/Old Testament envisions.

The Ipuwer Papyrus

There are a few bits of indirect evidence in support of the Biblical narrative. A monument erected by Merneptah, Ramesses II’s successor contains the word ‘Israel’ in a context that suggests a group of migratory people, which does fit the Biblical narrative for what happened to the Hebrews after they left Egypt. The Egyptian form of ‘Yahweh’ occurs in a temple built by Ramesses II. Some of the Hebrew names in Exodus seem to reflect Egyptian linguistic influence, including ‘Moses’. But overall, the evidence is not convincing unless one is already convinced.

One argument is made that Egyptian sources may not mention the facts connected to the Exodus because Egyptians didn’t like commemorating royal failures. That’s certainly true. Ramesses II, to take a very relevant example, depicted himself as the victor of the battle of Kadesh when Hittite sources make it very clear the battle was a draw. Occasionally the Egyptians posthumously tried to obliterate the evidence of unpopular pharaohs; Thutmose III had the name of his predecessor Hatshepsut chiseled off of monuments. So Egyptians were more than willing to rewrite their own past by glossing over events and people that did not fit with their ideology. So it is possible that Ramesses II might have ordered the suppression of evidence of the 10 plagues and the Exodus, which would have made him look very weak, and not the living god he claimed to be.

Ramesses II at Kadesh

But there are three flaws with this argument. First, despite Egyptian efforts to rose-color the past, scholars have found considerable evidence of the things they tried to obliterate; Hatshepsut’s reign is fairly well documented. Papyrus documents often contain references to things the pharaohs clearly wanted kept secret (like the political trial of a wife of Ramesses III who was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate him, or the destruction of royal mummies by tomb-robbers). So it’s unlikely that Ramesses would have been able to completely eliminate evidence of these events. Second, the fact that we can see a reason why evidence was suppressed doesn’t prove the event happened and was covered up. At best, it only means that it is possible that such a thing could have happened. Absence of evidence is not evidence. Third, even if all mentions of the Exodus itself were scrubbed, why aren’t there mentions of the Hebrews in Egyptian documents and monuments from before the Exodus?  Purging centuries of records would almost certainly have been beyond the capacity of ancient Egyptian government.

So because the actual evidence for the Exodus is so scanty and unpersuasive, most archaeologists and Egyptologists have argued that specifically searching for evidence of the Exodus is pointless. The resources for archaeology is scant enough that they are better spent on projects more likely to bear important fruit. More skeptical scholars argue that the lack of evidence means that the Exodus is best regarded as a story invented centuries after the fact to explain where the Hebrews came from.

However…

To my mind, there’s a major problem with arguing that the story of the Exodus was invented to provide an origin for the Hebrews. Most cultures, when they are inventing their origins, like to provide a noble and heroic ancestry for themselves. Consider all the people who wanted to be descended from those noble and tragic Trojans: the Romans, the medieval Britons, the Merovingians, and the Norse, among others. People invent ancestors who are gods and towering heroes.

But the Hebrew origin story is quite different. In the Exodus story, they acknowledge being helpless slaves, entirely oppressed and unable to save themselves until Yahweh sends Moses. Moses is timid and unwilling, a lousy speaker who needs help just delivering his message. When he does liberate the Hebrews, they respond by constantly doubting and challenging him; they repeatedly fail to trust Yahweh despite the miracles they see, and have to be punished more than once. Moses periodically loses his temper and disobeys Yahweh and winds up being punished for it. Pretty much everyone in this story looks bad at least once. And why make their great liberator the foster-son of the hated Egyptian ruler?

So the Exodus story doesn’t fit with the sorts of stories people invent for themselves. If the Exodus were simple a made-up story, we’d expect the Hebrews to be far more noble and consistent than they are. We’d expect Moses to be more of a paragon of virtue. To my mind, the constant moral failings revealed in the story make it surprisingly plausible, despite the lack of evidence and the hard-to-accept miracles. The core of the story simply looks real to me in a way that, for example, Vergil’s Aeneid doesn’t. Does that mean that the Exodus must have happened? No. But for me at least, it’s a peg I can hang some faith on.

Want to Know More? 

Exodus: Gods and Kings is available on Amazon. If you want to read the story, check out the Bible!

Exodus: Gods and Kings: Film vs Narrative

Tags

Ancient Egypt, Ben Kingsley, Christian Bale, Exodus, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Joel Edgerton, Moses, Ramesses II, Religious Issues, Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver

How do you a historical analysis of a movie based on a sacred text that scholars have not been able to find much factual corroboration for? It’s not possible to compare the Biblical story of the Exodus to historical records from Egypt, because Egyptian records make no clear reference to the event, and the Exodus narrative doesn’t identify the pharaoh involved, making it hard to know when the events are supposed to have taken place. So how do I review Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, dir. Ridley Scott)?

The film tells the story of Moses (Christian Bale) and Pharaoh Ramesses II (Joel Edgerton) as they fight over whether or not Ramesses will free the enslaved Hebrews. We get all the major beats of the Exodus narrative, including the burning bush, the ten plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea. But the film takes substantial liberties with the narrative. Scott decided to take the approach that all of the miraculous events could have had modern scientific explanations, and so he left the question open as to what was actually happening in Egypt.

I guess the place to start my analysis is to see where the film follows the Biblical narrative and where it doesn’t.

 

Moses Gets His Start

The film basically follows the Biblical birth-narrative for Moses (described in back-story rather than shown), that when the Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew boys killed because the Hebrews were multiplying too quickly, Moses’ mother put him in a basket and floated him down the Nile, so that he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter. Bithiah. As a result he’s raised in the royal household and rises to become a general, a detail not in the original text. We get to see Moses and Ramesses fighting the Hittites and Moses saving Ramesses’ life in battle.

This allows the film to develop the relationship between Moses, Ramesses, and Seti I (John Turturro), Ramesses’ father, who quietly regrets that he cannot make Moses his successor, because he can see that Moses is a better leader than Ramesses. Ramesses slowly comes to resent his foster brother. None of this is in the book of Exodus; the ruler is simply called Pharaoh, and there is nothing to suggest that the Pharaoh whom Moses confronts is not the same Pharaoh who ordered the deaths of the Hebrew boys.

Edgerton and Bale as Ramesses and Moses

So the whole “Moses and Pharaoh are foster brothers” element of the film is made up; in doing this, Scott is probably drawing off of Cecil B DeMille’s Ten Commandments. Since DeMille’s 1956 version was a partial remake of his 1923 silent film of the same name, I suspect that the idea to make Moses and Pharaoh brothers ultimately goes back to Jeanie MacPherson, the screenwriter who penned the silent version’s script. The three films certainly have a lot of parallels beyond the ‘foster brothers’ angle: the emphasis on enormous sets, villainous Egyptians whipping Hebrews, white people playing all the principle roles, and many others. But I’ll confess to not having researched the history of Moses fiction, so perhaps I’m off-base there.

The Biblical narrative does not explain how Moses rediscovers his birth family, but in the film Moses meets Nun (Ben Kingsley), who tells him of his Hebrew parentage. He initially conceals the fact, but the villainous Egyptian Hegep (Ben Mendelsohn) tells Ramesses, who threatens to cut off the arm of Miriam (Tara Fitzgerald), a palace slave who is also Moses’ sister and the one who brought the baby to Bithiah’s attention in the first place. So Moses admits the truth, at which point Queen Tuya (Sigourney Weaver, given pretty much nothing to do except dislike Moses), Ramesses’ mother, persuades the pharaoh to exile Moses and send assassins after him. This is a deviation from the original text, in which Moses flees after killing an Egyptian (a detail that does happen in the film, but is not the reason why Pharaoh wants him dead).

Then we get Moses’ meeting with the shepherdess Zipporah (Maria Valverde) and her father Jethro, which happens the way it does in the Biblical text. They get married with suspiciously modern-sounding wedding vows, have a son, and debate whether to raise him religiously or not. Zipporah wants Gershom to be able to decide for himself what he believes when he reaches adulthood, while Moses wants to raise him to believe in himself. This whole sequence is laughably modern in the way it thinks about issues of marriage, family, and religion, and is in some ways the real low point of the film.

Moses and Zipporah swearing to ‘trust whatever they do not yet know’ of each other. The scene with the Unity Candle got cut

 

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Moses

Then Moses wanders up Mt Horeb looking for some lost goats. He gets caught in a landslide during a storm and is knocked out, and when he wakes up he’s trapped in mud. He sees a burning bush and has a conversation with a young boy, identified in the credits as Malak (the Hebrew word for ‘angel’ and ‘messenger’). While the choice to use this mysterious boy as Yahweh’s mouthpiece in the film attracted a lot of attention, I actually don’t find the idea problematic. Throughout the Biblical narrative God and Moses talk a good deal, but the text rarely explains what that looked like. Scott made the reasonable choice that it needed to be depicted visually rather than just using a booming voice from nowhere. And, as Christian Bale said in an interview, “I’m always interested in asking other people’s opinions on it. How would you have represented God, if you were in Ridley’s position? It can be very easy to pick apart someone’s choice for a depiction of God. But if you are put in Ridley’s shoes, it’s an immensely difficult thing. How on earth do you do that?” That’s a pretty fair point. Scott had to make a choice about how to show that, and his choice was inevitably going to bother some people.

Malak (Isaac Andrews)

 

So for the rest of the film, when Moses talks with God, he has a conversation with Malak. Malak is a bit like Harvey the Pooka; only Moses can see him, which raises the question of whether Malak is all in his head. That’s Bale’s interpretation. “I think [Moses] was likely schizophrenic and was one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life.”

A bigger issue than Malak’s appearance is his personality. As divine messengers go, he’s very angry, and wants to take revenge on the Egyptians for what they’ve done to His people. As the film goes on, Moses becomes more and more appalled at what is happening to the Egyptians, whom he naturally cares for, and he argues with Malak several times. The notion of arguing with God is a very Jewish notion, and does have at least a bit of support in the text, since Moses is initially very resistant to acting as God’s messenger and keeps trying to offer excuses for why he’s not the best man for the job. But the Biblical Moses slowly becomes more certain over time, and directs his anger not at God but at the Hebrews when they become disobedient. But the film does do a nice job of exploring the uncertainty of a prophet, a common theme in the Tanakh/Old Testament.

 

Back to Egypt

Moses heads back to Egypt and meets his brother Aaron (Andrew Tarbet). In the original text, Aaron is an important figure who accompanies Moses on repeated visits to Pharaoh’s court and performs the famous staff-into-snake miracle. In the film, Aaron is pretty much an afterthought, with virtually no dialog or function. As a matter of fact, I kept thinking Joshua was Aaron, because Joshua keeps sneaking off to watch Moses talk to empty air (since no one else can see Malak) and Aaron basically just disappears into the background.

In the Biblical narrative, Moses and Aaron’s visits to Pharaoh alternate with the various plagues, as Pharaoh remains unmoved by what is happening. Scott’s film pares down the meetings, perhaps because the repetition doesn’t make for compelling cinema, At one point, a visit from Moses is replaced by Moses writing a text on a horse’s side and sending it to the court, a really bizarre choice that isn’t explained and just seems silly.

Pharaoh’s response to Moses’ first visit is the famous ‘bricks without straw’ edict, but in the film Ramesses issues that order long after the plagues begin. Instead, when Pharaoh refuses to release the Hebrews, Moses trains them in guerilla tactics and they start blowing stuff up and attacking ships with fire arrows, because you can’t skip the Shit Blows Up and the Fire Arrows at Night scenes in films like this.

I’m a bit conflicted about this. A charitable reading of this is that the film is trying to highlight the ineffectiveness of violence compared to God’s power. But given that the film doesn’t want to definitively say that Yahweh exists, I think it’s more likely to just be an attempt to bring some macho violence to a film that doesn’t really get to have much of that.

Moses teaching the Hebrews how to do archery

Malak shows up and tells Moses he’s taking way too long to liberate the Hebrews, and that it’s time to get Biblical on Ramesses’s ass. The Ten Plagues all occur, in almost the right order (the death of the livestock and the boils are switched). But Scott favors a naturalistic explanation for the plagues. The Nile turns to blood when large crocodiles slaughter a bunch of fishermen (ignoring the Biblical detail that even water than was kept in buckets and jars was affected), and the blood kills the fish and forces the frogs out of the water. Without the frogs in the river, lice and flies proliferate, giving many people boils. Then a disease strikes the livestock, which die bleeding for the mouth. Then a massive hailstorm strikes, followed by a swarm of locusts that eat all the crops in the field. Because Ramesses is by this point just being an asshole, he refuses to release any food from the royal granaries, which provokes a food riot, which Ramesses crushes with his soldiers.

Then darkness sets in, and Ramesses declares that if one more bad thing happens, so help him God, he’s gonna kill all the Hebrew babies just cuz. But apparently this gives Yahweh an idea…

Malak tells Moses that he wants to humiliate Ramesses and gives him the rules for the Passover, which Moses teaches to the Israelites. A shadow sweeps across the land and all the Egyptian boys die. This is the only one of the plagues that the film makes no real attempt to naturalize.

What is nice about the plagues sequence is that it does a very good job of dramatizing just how appalling the Biblical plagues are in the text; at different moments, they’re frightening, disgusting, dangerous, and tragic, and the made-up detail about the food riot highlights the undercurrent of the Biblical narrative, which is that the plagues are destroying Egypt’s economy, ruining all the sources of food and driving the people to desperation and panic. Naturalistic explanations or not, Scott’s film drives home for those who believe the Biblical narrative just how horrible it would have been to live through.

The Plague of Locusts

 

The Parting of the Sea

When Moses first leaves Egypt, he crosses the sea at what the film identifies as the Tiran Straits, which the film apparently thinks separates Egypt from the Sinai peninsula. In reality, the Tiran Straits separate the southern end of the Sinai peninsula from Arabia and the Gulf of Aqaba from the Red Sea. The Straits are depicted as shallow enough to walk across, when in reality its shallowest channel is 240 ft deep. So the geography is way off. Moses tries to lead the Israelites to the Tiran Straits, but decides that because Pharaoh will easily be able to follow them with his chariots, so instead he takes a mountain pass, gets lost, and runs into the Red Sea. So apparently Moses is as bad at map-reading as Ridley Scott is.

Egypt is to the left of the Sinai peninsula

Frustrated, Moses takes a nap, and when he wakes up, the water has inexplicably receded. Scott says that his treatment of this event is based on a tsumani caused by an earthquake that happened around 3000 BC off the Italian coast. I’m a bit skeptical about this claim, since there aren’t records about Italy reaching back that far, and I’m not sure how archaeology could document the temporary recession of water like that, but let’s put that aside. The film ignores the Biblical details about the pillar of smoke and fire that separated the Hebrews and the Egyptians or the powerful wind that split the water in two. Moses hurriedly leads his people across and Ramesses foolishly leads his men into the sea. Then tornadoes and a huge tidal wave sweep in and destroy the army and Ramesses barely gets out alive.

The Red Sea, starting to un-part

A little later, Moses carves the 10 Commandments at Malak’s instruction and rides off to Canaan.

Although the film deviates from the narrative in a variety of ways (the reason Moses has to leave Egypt, the guerilla war against Egypt, omitting most of the meetings between Moses and Pharaoh), these are comparatively small alterations to the text that can mostly be understood as simplifying the structure of the narrative and trying to add more ‘action’ to the film (which is to say, violence). It’s hard to have a blockbuster film without at least one major battle and a Shit Blows Up scene.

The biggest deviation from the text comes in the desire to pare out or naturalize the various miracles. The idea of using science to explain away Biblical miracles emerged in the 18^th century as a way of demonstrating the superiority of the Scientific Revolution over the supposed ignorance and superstition of the past. I’ve never found it a particularly useful way to understand Biblical miracles because it relies on the assumption that ancient people were so steeped in ignorance and superstition that they were incapable of exercising even the smallest bit of rational thought, curiosity, or skepticism. It assumes that people who lived far more intimately with nature than we do today were unable to actually observe nature. It also ignores the whole question of why ancient people interpreted a scientific phenomenon in a particular way, so it doesn’t actually explain very much. And Biblical miracle stories often emphasize that the observable facts don’t fit with naturalistic explanations. The whole point of saying in Exodus 7:19 that even water in jars and buckets will turn to blood is to demonstrate that natural explanations couldn’t explain it. For the first several miracles, Pharaoh’s wise men are able to duplicate the miracles, but after the third plague they admit they can’t reproduce the effects. The text is fairly plain; these events defy natural explanation. Accept the story as a miracle or discount it and explore why a culture would tell stories about miracles that didn’t happen, but trying to naturalize the miracles is just condescending to our ancestors.

Sucks to be Egyptian

Scott was clearly trying to avoid having to replicate DeMIlle’s Ten Commandments, and you can’t blame him. While that film also makes alterations to the text, it plays the miracles pretty much as written, so if Scott had followed the same strategy, all he would have gotten was a bigger remake of a Hollywood classic, and critics would probably have complained that he wasn’t bringing anything fresh to the film. Like it or not The Ten Commandments works quite well, as long as you accept the 50s film conventions and Heston’s acting style. There’s no point in remaking a successful film (although these days Hollywood doesn’t understand that), so I think Scott made the right choice to take the film in a very different direction. Its portrait of a deeply uncertain and conflicted Moses who argues with a very certain and angry Yahweh is an interesting one, one that highlights elements of the original text that don’t normally get a lot of attention. I’m not sure the film really succeeds, but it’s a valiant effort to breathe new life into a familiar story.

Next time, I’ll take a poke at the historical issues around the Exodus narrative.

 

Update: When I wrote this post, I forgot about a reference in Exodus 2 about the pharaoh who raised Moses dying before Moses saw the Burning Bush. So the Moses and Pharaoh are foster brother” thing is actually readily derivable from Exodus itself, although it is not pointed out in the text.

“Want to Know More?

Exodus: Gods and Kings is available on Amazon. If you want to read the story, check out the Bible!