(Biblical Reception 4) David Tollerton - A New Hollywood Moses - On The Spectacle and Reception of Exodus - Gods and Kings-Sheffield Phoenix Press (2012 - 9999)

BIBLICAL RECEPTION 4 (2016)
Editors
J. Cheryl Exum and David J.A. Clines
Editorial Board
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (Washington, DC),
Colleen Conway (South Orange, NJ), Katie B. Edwards (Sheffield),
Tamara C. Eskenazi (Los Angeles), Philip Esler (Gloucester),
Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher (Linz), John Harvey (Aberystwyth),
Christine Joynes (Oxford), Martin O’Kane (Lampeter),
John F.A. Sawyer (Durham), Jay Twomey (Cincinnati)
A NEW HOLLYWOOD MOSES:
ON THE SPECTACLE AND RECEPTION
OF EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS
Guest Edited by
David Tollerton
Bloomsbury T&T Clark

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First published 2017
© David Tollerton, David Clines, J. Cheryl Exum and contributors, 2017
David Tollerton, David Clines, J. Cheryl Exum have asserted their right under the Copyright,
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ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-7232-2

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Series: Biblical Reception, volume 4
Typeset by Forthcoming Publications (www.forthpub.com)

C on t en t s
Abbreviations vii
Contributors ix
‘Hmmm… But LOVED the Plagues’:

On Engaging with Ridley Scott’s Epic and its Audiences
David Tollerton 1
Depicting the Divine:

The Ambiguity of Exodus 3 in Exodus: Gods and Kings
Matthew A. Collins 9
Exodus: Male Gods and Kings

J. Cheryl Exum 40
Interpreting the Entrails:

Religion and Violence in Exodus: Gods and Kings
Jon Morgan 57
‘See This Great Sight’:

Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings
and the Evolution of Biblical Spectacle in the Cinema
David Shepherd 75
Once upon an Apocalypse:

Exodus, Disaster, and a Long, Long Time Ago?
Michelle Fletcher 91
Picturing the Plagues and Parting the Waves:

The Biblical Effect in Exodus: Gods and Kings
Samuel Tongue 113
vi Contents
The Birth of a Nation:

Civil Religion and Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings
Catherine Wheatley 136
Exodus: Gods and Kings

and the Secular-Religious Transgression of Sacred Boundaries
David Tollerton 152
Index of References 167

Index of Authors 169
A b b rev i at i ons
AB Anchor Bible
AGJU Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des
Urchristentums
BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
CBET Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology
DCLY Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook
FC Film Comment
JARCE Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt
JBQ Jewish Bible Quarterly
JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament: Supplement Series
NCBC New Cambridge Bible Commentary
njb New Jerusalem Bible
nrsv New Revised Standard Version
SBLSP SBL Seminar Papers
STAC Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum
TBN Themes in Biblical Narrative
VTSup Vetus Testamentum Supplements
C on t ri b u tor s
Matthew A. Collins is Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Second

Temple Judaism at the University of Chester
J. Cheryl Exum is Emeritus Professor at the University of Sheffield
Michelle Fletcher is Associate Lecturer at the University of Kent
Jon Morgan is Lecturer in Biblical Interpretation at the University of

Chester
David Shepherd is Assistant Professor in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at

Trinity College Dublin
David Tollerton is Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Contemporary Biblical

Cultures at the University of Exeter
Samuel Tongue is Tutor and Affiliate Research Fellow at the University

of Glasgow
Catherine Wheatley is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College

London
‘ H mm m … B ut L O V E D t he P lague s ’:
O n E ng a g i n g wi t h R i d l ey S cot t ’ s E pi c
a n d i t s A u d i ence s
David Tollerton
Abstract
When a range of British press commentators attended an advance screening

of Exodus: Gods and Kings in December 2014, ‘[t]he general consensus’,
critic James King remarked on Twitter, was best summarized as ‘Hmmm…
but LOVED the plagues’.1 The essays that make up this edition of Biblical
Reception are not, to be clear, the celebration of a universally praised
masterpiece. But this is not to suggest that critical engagement with Exodus:
Gods and Kings is a waste of effort. I propose that if anything, more traction,
more freedom also, is granted by the mixed reception this film has received.
This big-budget production coming from a major Hollywood filmmaker
offers the opportunity to explore an array of relationships between the
exodus story and contemporary identities, between text and visualization,
between miracle and special effect, between commercialization and percep-
tions of sacredness. There is, in other words, plenty to be considered amid
James King’s ‘Hmmm’. In this short introductory article I will offer some
brief contextualization of the contributions that follow.
The Study of Bible and Film
This volume of Biblical Reception comes at a busy time for the critical
study of Bible and film. Recent years have seen the arrival of books such
as Laura Copier’s Preposterous Revelations (2012), Adele Reinhartz’s
1. James King (@jameskingmovies), 16 December 2016, ‘[t]he general consensus

on Moses pic Exodus from @KermodeMovie @nigelfloyd @alanfrightfest and I
seems to be: “Hmmm... but LOVED the plagues” ’, https://twitter.com/jamesking-
movies/status/544893461187805186 (accessed 20 December 2015).
2 A New Hollwood Moses
Bible and Film (2013) and Joan Taylor’s Jesus and Brian (2015), as well
as several methodological articles.2 The near future will see further works,
such as Caroline Vander Stichele and Laura Copier’s Now Showing:
Film Theory in Biblical Studies and Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch and Jon
Morgan’s Noah as Antihero.3
One broad cause for this is the parallel development of two sub-disci-
plines within biblical studies and the study of religion respectively. On
the one hand there has been the twenty-first-century rise of interest in
reception within biblical studies, and on the other, a growing scholarly
focus on religion and film that began to coalesce in the mid-1990s.4 The
precise story of how much they have always spoken to one another may
be open to debate, but from their concurrent appearances the contem-
porary interest in Bible and film is a natural outworking.
A second cause for such interest is, quite simply, that the Bible has
in various guises continued to feature heavily within modern cinema.
A particular event that this volume of Biblical Reception reflects is the
return of the ‘Bible epic’ genre. Previously thought to have died out in
the 1960s, its 2014 return in the shape of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah and
Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings can initially seem like a perplexing
phenomenon.5 Possible explanations for this occurrence are varied, encom-
2. Laura Copier, Preposterous Revelations: Visions of Apocalypse and Martyrdom

in Hollywood Cinema 1980–2000 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012); Adele
Reinhartz, Bible and Cinema: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge,
2013); Joan Taylor, ed., Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and his
Times via Monty Python’s Life of Brian (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Rhonda
Burnette-Bletsch, ‘The Bible and its Cinematic Adaptations: A Consideration of
Filmic Exegesis’, Journal of Biblical Reception 1.1 (2014), pp. 129-60; Matthew
Rindge, ‘Teaching the Bible and Film: Pedagogical Promises, Pitfalls, and Proposals’,
Teaching Theology and Religion 13.1 (2010), pp. 140-55. This list should not be
understood as exhaustive.
3. Caroline Vander Stichele and Laura Copier, eds., Now Showing: Film Theory in
Biblical Studies (Atlanta: SBL Press, forthcoming); Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch and Jon
Morgan, eds., Noah as Antihero (London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
Again, this list should not be understood as exhaustive.
4. See Holly Morse, ‘What’s in a Name? Analysing the Appellation “Reception
History” in Biblical Studies’, Biblical Reception 3 (2014), pp. 243-44; Gregory
Watkins, ed., Teaching Religion and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
p. 4.
5. See Reinhartz, Bible and Cinema, p. 4; Catherine Wheatley, ‘Can Religion
Sell? Noah and the Search for an Audience’, The Conversation, 4 April 2014, https://
theconversation.com/can-religion-sell-noah-and-the-search-for-an-audience-24384
(accessed 20 December 2015).
Tollerton ‘Hmmm… But LOVED the Plagues’ 3
passing the potentials of new computer-generated imagery (CGI), the

allure of dusting off and reconfiguring culturally familiar stories and
Scott’s own commercially successful resurrection of the classical historical
epic with Gladiator (2000). That both Scott and Aronofsky are professed
non-religious filmmakers may also point to a specifically post-secular
appropriation of the Bible as cultural artefact. In the articles that follow,
the question of why the Bible epic has returned arises several times, and
various answers are explored.
That academic study of Bible and film is currently enjoying a favourable
wind does nonetheless raise methodological questions. I will not attempt
to address these at length (it will be interesting to see what discussions
emerge from Stichele and Copier’s Now Showing: Film Theory in Biblical
Studies) but merely flag up a few brief points.
The first is ‘the necessity’, recently noted by Burnette-Bletsch, ‘of
moving beyond descriptive cataloguing to critical analysis of the Bible’s
filmic afterlives’.6 Cataloguing should not be dismissed per se, and it can
certainly produce useful resources, but it seems reasonable to make sure
that most study of Bible and film does not slip into simply observing
when and how the Bible appears on cinema screens. Exodus: Gods and
Kings’ decidedly mixed reception, I suggest, can actually help commen-
tators avoid this trap, and certainly in the articles that follow we have
endeavoured to explore dimensions of critical traction with the film. It is
hoped that looking at Scott’s film in depth, and from a variety of mutually
informing angles, enables us to draw out richer rewards in comparison to
addressing it only in passing amid a wider survey work.
The second broad methodological point to note concerns relation
to biblical text. Some of the articles that make up this volume engage
closely with the interface between Exodus: Gods and Kings and the book
of Exodus’s HB text. Others consider Scott’s film and the story’s cultural
location in broader terms. To my mind, rather like the situation with
reception studies in general, it is worth being fluid and inclusive on such
matters.7 The Bible can be a valuable tool for thinking about contemporary
film and cultures, and contemporary film and cultures can be helpful for
rethinking the Bible. Having said this, when viewed particularly from the
6. Burnette-Bletsch, ‘The Bible and its Cinematic Adaptations’, p. 129.

7. In her recent Biblical Reception article Morse argues in favour of ‘encouraging
a plurality of approaches’ even while scrutinizing terminological issues. ‘What’s in
a Name?’, p. 262. See also Paul Joyce, ‘Foreword’, in Jesus and Brian: Exploring
the Historical Jesus and his Times via Monty Python’s Life of Brian (ed. Joan Taylor;
London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. xvii-xix.
4 A New Hollywood Moses
perspective of biblical scholarship, a core challenge, as Matthew Rindge

has observed, is ‘to construct a fruitful conversation between biblical
texts and films in which the latter are seriously considered on their own
terms’.8
A final issue to note is the requirement for study of Bible and film
to avoid fawning appreciation of what we might declare ‘good’ films.
Gordon Lynch expresses this lament well when reflecting that ‘[w]hen
research in this field is little more than a thinly veiled attempt to indulge
in an uncritical celebration and display of our curiosities and pleasures…
then it can have a show and tell quality which may be entertaining, but
ultimately unsatisfying in broader academic terms’.9 Although Lynch
addresses academic treatments of religion and popular culture in general,
his comments are nonetheless relevant to the more niche field of Bible and
film. But, again, the troubled reception of Exodus: Gods and Kings can
itself end up being oddly helpful in this regard. Engaging with the film’s
‘non-masterpiece’ status is a point worth exploring in more detail.
Exodus: Gods and Kings as Non-Masterpiece
Scott’s film faced hostility even before it reached cinema screens. Christian
Bale’s characterization of Moses as ‘barbaric’ and mentally disturbed
provoked significant comment, and probably more controversial was the
prominent casting of white actors, an issue I will return to below.10 Once
released, the critical response was somewhat middling. King’s ‘Hmmm…
but LOVED the plagues’ comment – that, in other words, Scott’s film is
spectacular but unsatisfying in dramatic terms – was a view that could be
felt across a range of reviews. Writing in The Guardian Mark Kermode
complained of ‘the “seriousness” of the story being trumpeted more by its
running time rather than any narrative depth’, and New York Times critic
A.O. Scott lamented that his directorial namesake ‘confuses excessive
scale with authentic grandeur’, ultimately leaving ‘little room for the
human dimensions of the story’.11
8. Rindge, ‘Teaching the Bible and Film’, p. 142.

9. Gordon Lynch, ed., Between Sacred and Profane: Researching Religion and
Popular Culture (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 157-58.
10. Carey Lodge, ‘Christian Bale Says Moses Is “Schizophrenic” and “Barbaric” ’,
Christianity Today, 27 October 2014, http://www.christiantoday.com/article/christian.
bale.says.moses.is.schizophrenic.and.barbaric/42217.htm (accessed 20 December
2015).
11. Mark Kermode, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings Review – Biblical Epic Drowned
by its Dramatic Failings’, The Guardian, 28 December 2014, http://www.theguardian.
So is Exodus: Gods and Kings actually worth bothering with? Questions

about the relationship between academic consideration of cinema and
perceptions of quality go (at least) as far back as the mid-1990s, when the
current move to studying religion and film started to gain momentum. In
Explorations in Theology and Film (1997) Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz
cautioned that it would be ‘unwise’ to instigate a ‘conversation, however
useful its subject-matter may be, with a “bad film” ’.12 And yet even
by this point Joel Martin, in Screening the Sacred (1995), was already
complaining of an implicit view among scholars ‘that only a highbrow
film can be truly religious’.13 There are, I suggest, several reasons to resist
a notion that only ‘good’ films are worthy of attention.
First, it is clearly the case that ‘bad’ films can be interesting. Consider,
purely by way of illustration, Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom (1984). This is a work of action-adventure that I personally
find quite wearing (that it gave me nightmares in my youth probably does
not help) and even Spielberg would later partially disown it.14 But as a
representation of popular orientalism, of privileging entertainment over
religious sensitivity and of the far-reaching effects of nineteenth-century
British colonial mythmaking, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a
curiously rich case study.15 ‘Bad films’, in other words, can be fertile soil
for critical engagement. Indeed, several contributors to this volume devote
sustained attention to Scott’s arguably overpowering and hyperbolic CGI
com/film/2014/dec/28/exodus-gods-and-kings-review-drowned-dramatic-failings
(accessed 20 December 2015); A.O. Scott, ‘Moses Is Back, Bearing Tablets and Strange
Accents’, New York Times, 11 December 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/
movies/exodus-gods-and-kings-ridley-scotts-biblical-drama.html?_r=1 (accessed 20
December 2015).
12. Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz, eds., Explorations in Theology and Film: Movies
and Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 3.
13. Joel W. Martin, ‘Introduction: Seeing the Sacred on the Screen’, in Screening
the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film (ed. Joel W.
Martin and Conrad Ostwalt; Boulder: Westview, 1995), p. 3.
14. See Brad Duke, Harrison Ford: The Films (Jefferson and London: McFarland,
2005), p. 150.
15. See Kalzaad Navroze Kotwal, ‘Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom as Virtual Reality: The Orientalist and Colonial Legacies of Gunga
Din’, The Film Journal 12 (2005), http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue12/temple-
ofdoom.html (accessed 20 December 2015); Shashi Tharoor, ‘India Jones and the
Template of Dhoom’, The Times of India, 10 March 2007, http://articles.timesofindia.
indiatimes.com/2007-03-10/all-that-matters/27873204_1_film-scores-indian-temple-
steven-spielberg (accessed 20 December 2015); Alexander L. Macfie, ‘Thuggee: A
Orientalist Construction?’, Rethinking History 12.3 (2008), pp. 383-97.
as a mode of rethinking concepts of the miraculous, the historical and the

apocalyptic. Others consider (and take quite varying views of) the merits/
shortcomings of how divinity is depicted in Exodus: Gods and Kings.
The volume’s final article furthermore explores some of the underlying
dynamics behind audience feelings of offence upon encountering Scott’s
film.
But a second, rather obvious issue is that perceptions of filmic quality
are of course wildly subjective, hence the recourse to speech marks
around such crude adjectives of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (even in Marsh and
Ortiz’s caution against the latter). Consider, for example, Pier Pasolini’s
much-discussed Gospel according to St Matthew (1964). In 1995, the
Vatican declared this to be one of the forty-five all-time ‘great films’ and
critical praise can be found in an array of commentaries.16 However, I
can anecdotally attest that this is certainly not the initial reaction of many
British undergraduate students upon encountering Pasolini’s film. Even if
this is in large measure because they have grown up accustomed to a very
different cinematic diet, I still am wary of discounting the authenticity of
their responses.17 Watching Gospel according to St Matthew is a genuinely
gruelling experience for many in this particular audience group. Exodus:
Gods and Kings appears to have been less divisive, but contributors to this
volume themselves vary in their appreciations of Scott’s film (sometimes
implicitly, and sometimes rather less so).18
My point in all this is that straightforward appraisal of a film’s merit
does not provide firm footing from which to assess whether critical
commentary is valuable. Put simply, the question is not whether Exodus:
Gods and Kings is any good, but whether there are interesting conversa-
tions to be had about it. Readers will be unsurprised to hear that I answer
this second question in the affirmative.
16. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, ‘Vatican Best Films List’, http://
web.archive.org/web/20131029191543/http://old.usccb.org/movies/vaticanfilms.
shtml (accessed 20 December 2015); Lloyd Baugh, Imaging the Divine: Jesus and
Christ-Figures in Film (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1997); Peter Fraser, Images of
the Passion: The Sacramental Mode in Film (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1998).
17. I base this anecdotal comment on conversations with students at Bangor
University and the University of Exeter. Asking them to consider critically why their
reactions differ from those witnessed in n. 16 is, of course, arguably as interesting as
also addressing Pasolini’s representational choices.
18. I will leave the reader to discern the lay of the land.
Angles of Approach to Scott’s Film
This volume of Biblical Reception is written by a group of UK and

Ireland-based scholars and is largely based on papers presented at a
workshop held at the University of Exeter in March 2015.19 It should be
acknowledged that it does not, however, amount to the first engagement
with Exodus: Gods and Kings from the perspective of biblical schol-
arship. Several initial short responses written by North American scholars
appeared on the Flood of Noah website shortly after the film’s release,
and Ingrid Lilly, Katie Edwards, Candida Moss and Joel Baden have
all offered commentaries on one of its major talking points: the contro-
versy concerning race and casting.20 Before considering the approaches
to Exodus: Gods and Kings taken by contributors to the current Biblical
Reception volume it is worth addressing this much-discussed issue.
The race and casting controversy that emerged prior to the release of
Exodus: Gods and Kings concerned the overwhelming prominence of
white actors in key roles, a situation only exacerbated by Scott’s comment,
in an interview in Variety, that it would not have been viable to tell
financial backers ‘that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-
and-such’.21 The unhappiness produced by both the casting choices and
Scott’s comments has a variety of wider contexts, most immediately the
parallel controversies that faced Aronofsky’s Noah and other films, such
as Alex Proyas’s Gods of Egypt (2016). Facing criticism for the centrality
19. Matthew Collins and Cheryl Exum are the two contributors who did not attend
this event. I am grateful to the University of Exeter’s ‘Humanities and Social Sciences
Strategy’ for funding the March 2015 workshop.
20. Flood of Noah, ‘Academics on Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings’, 2014,
http://www.floodofnoah.com/#!academic-responses-to-exodus-movie/ctnz (accessed
20 December 2015); Ingrid Lilly, ‘Marching on a Hard Heart: Selma Is the Exodus
That Ridley Scott Failed to Deliver’, Huffington Post, 1 September 2015, http://
www.huffingtonpost.com/ingrid-lilly/marching-on-a-hard-heart-selma-is-the-exodus-
that-ridley-scott-failed-to-deliver_b_6437694.html (accessed 20 December 2015);
Katie Edwards, ‘Exodus: The Tantastic Gods and Kings Epic Is Suspect but Well
Worth a Watch’, The Conversation, 24 December 2014, https://theconversation.com/
exodus-the-tantastic-gods-and-kings-epic-is-suspect-but-well-worth-a-watch-35795
(accessed 20 December 2015); Joel Baden and Candida Moss, ‘Does the New
“Exodus” Movie Whitewash the Bible?’, CNN, 11 December 2014, http://edition.cnn.
com/2014/12/10/showbiz/exodus-whitewash-bible/ (accessed 20 December 2015).
21. Scott Foundas, ‘ “Exodus: Gods and Kings” Director Ridley Scott on Creating
his Vision of Moses’, Variety, 25 November 2014, http://variety.com/2014/film/
news/ridley-scott-exodus-gods-and-kings-christian-bale-1201363668/ (accessed 20
December 2015).
of white actors in Noah, scriptwriter Ari Handel failed to diffuse the issue
when remarking that ‘[a]t the level of myth, and as a mythical story, the
race of the individuals doesn’t matter’.22 Gods of Egypt, a film which
like Exodus: Gods and Kings appeals to classical historical epic genre-
conventions amid portrayal of ancient Pharaonic culture, has faced similar
casting concerns prior to its release.23 More broadly, as Charlotte Canning
has discussed, the casting controversy concerning Scott’s film relates to
continuing discord regarding Hollywood’s relationship with race and, as
Moss and Baden note, a particular debate about race, slavery and Egypt
going back several centuries.24
I offer a short survey of this much-covered and ongoing topic because,
in large measure, the articles that comprise this volume of Biblical
Reception reflect upon earlier commentary but take the conversation in
different directions. Treatments of nationalism, gender and violence build
upon these earlier discussions but move into new terrain. Other contribu-
tions consider marketing, genre-debates, cinema history and contemporary
theories of special effect. There are, the reader may discern, occasions of
overlap in which particular features of Scott’s film are considered from
multiple points of view and with varying purposes in mind. Having said
this, it should also be stressed that these articles are not intended to be
comprehensive. There are plenty of other angles to thinking about Scott’s
film that might be taken. But situated within a wider debate about the
Bible’s frequently controversy-inducing appearances on film, my hope is
that these articles offer fuel for ongoing debate. Such on-screen appear-
ances appear to show no evidence of disappearing anytime soon, and for
students of biblical reception the recurring collisions between ancient text
and one of the modern world’s most high-profile and enduring mass-media
forms is a phenomenon that cannot lie at the periphery of scholarship.
22. Nick Clark, ‘Racism Storm as “Noah” Writer Denies All-White Cast Is “Racist” ’,
The Independent, 17 April 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/
films/news/racism-storm-as-noah-writer-denies-all-white-cast-is-racist-9268130.html
23. Benjamin Lee, ‘Gods of Egypt Posters Spark Anger with “Whitewashed”
Cast’, The Guardian, 13 November 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/
nov/13/gods-of-egypt-posters-anger-whitewashed-cast-twitter-exodus (accessed 20
December 2015).
24. Charlotte M. Canning, ‘Ridley Scott’s Casting of White Actors Is Symptomatic
of Larger Problems’, The Conversation, 17 December 2014, https://theconversation.
com/ridley-scotts-casting-of-white-actors-is-symptomatic-of-larger-problems-35527
(accessed 20 December 2014); Baden and Moss, ‘Does the New “Exodus” Movie
Whitewash the Bible?’.
D ep i ct i n g t h e D i vi ne :
T h e A m b i g u i t y of E xodus 3
i n E x od u s : G od s and K ings
Matthew A. Collins
Abstract
Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings offers a distinctly innovative

approach to the perennial problem of how to depict the divine in film. This
article first briefly considers some of the ways in which previous directors
have grappled with the issue of depicting the divine, before assessing the
effectiveness of Scott’s own ‘solution’, focusing in turn on questions of
implied identity, tangibility, and character/imagery. In particular it is argued
that, whether intentional or not, the ambiguity as to the specific identity of
the divine character mirrors rather precisely an ambiguity present in the
biblical text itself. Similarly, the manner in which the character is portrayed,
while adopting and adhering to a number of modern tropes and keeping
the door open to more naturalistic interpretations, likewise reflects (and
indeed, can shed light upon) much that is in the textual tradition. Ultimately
it is argued that Scott’s representation of the divine can be said to (perhaps
unintentionally) reflect simultaneously both the most progressive and the
most successfully ‘biblical’ depiction to date.
Introduction
Even before it hit cinema screens in December 2014, director Ridley

Scott’s biblical blockbuster Exodus: Gods and Kings was already gener-
ating controversy with regard to casting decisions, the interpretation of
* Thanks are due to David Tollerton for a number of thought–provoking post–

film discussions which helped shape some of the ideas presented here, as well as for
pointing me in the direction of some of the more interesting (and occasionally bizarre)
media reactions to the film.
Moses, and the presentation of the plagues.1 However, it was Scott’s

‘daring approach to representing the divine presence’2 which prompted
Morocco temporarily to ban the film altogether. The distributor was
informed that the film was being pulled from the schedule specifically
on account of its depiction of the divine, while Moroccan cinemas were
threatened with closure should they decide to show it.3 Only after some
careful editing of the film’s dialogue (to be precise, the removal of ‘two
audio passages that alluded to the personification of the Divine’) was it
(re-)approved for screening.4
1. B. Herman, ‘ “Exodus” Controversies: Christian Bale’s “Barbaric” Moses

and All-White Cast Stir Up Critics’, International Business Times, 28 October
2014, http://www.ibtimes.com/exodus-controversies-christian-bales-barbaric-moses-
all-white-cast-stir-critics-1714839 (accessed 13 December 2015). See further:
P. Bond, ‘Christian Bale Calls Moses “Barbaric”, “Schizophrenic” Ahead of “Exodus”
Release’, The Hollywood Reporter, 25 October 2014, http://www.hollywoodreporter.
com/news/christian-bale-calls-moses-barbaric-743874?utm_source=twitter (accessed
13 December 2015); C.M. Canning, ‘Ridley Scott’s Casting of White Actors Is
Symptomatic of Larger Problems’, The Conversation, 17 December 2014, http://
theconversation.com/ridley-scotts-casting-of-white-actors-is-symptomatic-of-larger-
problems-35527 (accessed 13 December 2015); E. Koonse, ‘ “Exodus: Gods and
Kings” Boycott Over White Cast Gains Steam, Ridley Scott Tells Critics “Get
a Life” ’, The Christian Post, 9 December 2014, http://www.christianpost.com/
news/exodus-gods-and-kings-boycott-over-white-cast-gains-steam-ridley-scott-tells-
critics-get-a-life-130912/ (accessed 13 December 2015); S. Vilkomerson, ‘How
Ridley Scott Looked to Science – Not Miracles – to Part the Red Sea in “Exodus:
Gods and Kings” ’, Entertainment Weekly, 23 October 2014, http://www.ew.com/
article/2014/10/23/ridley-scott-red-sea-exodus (accessed 13 December 2015).
2. S.D. Greydanus, ‘ “Exodus: Gods and Kings”: Theological Reflections’,
National Catholic Register, 12 December 2014, http://www.ncregister.com/daily-
news/exodus-gods-and-kings-theological-reflections/ (accessed 13 December 2015).
3. Agence France-Presse, ‘Morocco Says Exodus Film “Represents God” and
Is Forbidden in Islam’, The Guardian, 27 December 2014, http://www.theguardian.
com/world/2014/dec/27/morocco-exodus-ban-islam-represents-god (accessed 13
December 2015).
4. P. Schemm, ‘Morocco Approves “Exodus” Film, After Offending Sections
Cut’, The Times of Israel, 8 January 2015, http://www.timesofisrael.com/morocco-
approves-exodus-film-after-offending-sections-cut/ (accessed 13 December 2015);
N. Tartaglione, ‘Morocco Clears “Exodus: Gods and Kings” for Release, with
Audio Tweaks’, Deadline Hollywood, 7 January 2015, http://deadline.com/2015/01/
morocco-exodus-release-approved-changes-1201342929/ (accessed 13 December
2015).
Collins Depicting the Divine 11
Scott’s rather distinctive approach to grappling with the problem of

how to depict God in film has been variously described as ‘artful and
innovative’5 or ‘one that courts ridicule’.6 The character with whom Moses
converses at the burning bush is given physical form (rather than being
relegated to a disembodied voice), but appears as an 11-year-old boy. This
move opens up a number of very interesting avenues, not only in terms of
how this figure plays out in the film itself, but also for a revisiting of the
biblical text in the light of this characterization.
This article will first briefly consider some of the ways in which
previous directors have grappled with the problem of depicting the divine,
before assessing the effectiveness of Scott’s own ‘solution’, focusing in
turn on questions of implied identity, tangibility, and character/imagery. In
particular it will be argued that, whether intentional or not, the ambiguity
as to the specific identity of the boy’s character mirrors rather precisely an
ambiguity present in the biblical text itself. Similarly, the manner in which
the character is portrayed, while adopting and adhering to a number of
modern tropes and keeping the door open to more naturalistic interpreta-
tions, likewise reflects (and indeed, can shed light upon) much that is in
the textual tradition. Ultimately it is suggested that Scott’s representation
of the divine in Exodus: Gods and Kings might in fact be simultaneously
both the most progressive and the most successfully ‘biblical’ depiction
to date.
Depicting the Divine: The Problem of God

As Scott himself notes, ‘Sacred texts give no specific depiction of God,
so for centuries artists and filmmakers have had to choose their own
visual depiction’.7 In one of our earliest examples of ‘staging’ scripture,
the Exagoge of Ezekiel the Tragedian (a Hellenistic tragic drama about
5. E. Koonse, ‘ “Exodus: Gods and Kings” Stuns Visually, Plagues Moviegoers
with Disengaged Actors’, The Christian Post, 12 December 2014, http://www.
christianpost.com/news/exodus-gods-and-kings-stuns-visually-plagues-moviegoers-
with-disengaged-actors-131109/ (accessed 13 December 2015).
6. M. Kermode, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings Review – Biblical Epic Drowned by
its Dramatic Failings’, The Observer, 28 December 2014, http://www.theguardian.
7. Cited in K. Masters, ‘ “Exodus”: How Ridley Scott Chose his 11-Year-Old
Voice of God’, The Hollywood Reporter, 12 November 2014, http://www.hollywoo-
dreporter.com/news/exodus-how-ridley-scott-chose-748373 (accessed 13 December
2015).
Moses and the Exodus, from the second century bce) seemingly avoids
altogether any physical representation of God in the burning bush scene
(Ezek. Trag. 90–119). Instead the dialogue adapts the text of Exod. 3.4-5
in order to make explicit that Moses can hear only a disembodied voice
(Ezek. Trag. 96–103). To that end, the biblical ‘stage direction’ regarding
the implied physical presence of God in Exod. 3.6 (‘And Moses hid his
face, for he was afraid to look at God’) is likewise seemingly omitted.
Jacques T.A.G.M. van Ruiten points out that this adaptation may allude to
Exod. 33.20 (‘you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live’;
cf. Ezek. Trag. 101), though concedes that: ‘It is possible, however, that…
Ezekiel was just reluctant to present God on the stage’.8
In sidestepping the problem of a physical representation, Ezekiel the
Tragedian hits upon a solution that has been similarly utilized in contem-
porary stagings and screenings of biblical narratives.
[H]ow does one represent a divine figure who is meant to be devoid of

visual appearance and material substance? One answer is readily apparent:
through the voice.9
However, even this is not without its problems, since it nevertheless still
requires choices to be made with regard to embodiment that move beyond
the rather two-dimensional limitations of the text itself.
The voice…is inevitably specific – it is gendered and accented, and some-

time classed and raced, it has a grain, an accent, an intonation, a timbre, a
pronunciation, and even a vocal mannerism, all of which may remain ‘inau-
dible’ in a text. While silent biblical films could simply cite God’s words in
the form of intertitles, talking films were compelled to lend specificity to an
audible voice.10
8. J.T.A.G.M. van Ruiten, ‘A Burning Bush on the Stage: The Rewriting of
Exodus 3:1–4:17 in Ezekiel Tragicus, Exagoge 90-131’, in The Revelation of the
Name yhwh to Moses: Perspectives from Judaism, the Pagan Graeco-Roman World,
and Early Christianity (ed. G.H. van Kooten; TBN, 9; Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 71-88
(78).
9. A. Reinhartz, Bible and Cinema: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2013),
p. 39.
10. E. Shohat, ‘Sacred Word, Profane Image: Theologies of Adaptation’, in A
Companion to Literature and Film (ed. R. Stam and A. Raengo; Oxford: Blackwell,
2004), pp. 23-45 (40).
Although the traditional ‘voice of God’ on stage or screen (‘deep, mascu-

line, serious, resonant’) has become a commonplace indicator of (divine)
authority (itself adopted and exploited for use in marketing and/or for
comic effect),11 others have tackled the problem of inevitable specificity
in rather more inventive ways.
In Cecil B. DeMille’s celebrated epic The Ten Commandments
(Paramount, 1956), Charlton Heston, who played the part of Moses, also
supplied the voice of God emanating from the burning bush.12 Although
modified and further deepened, the voice that Moses hears is thus essen-
tially his own. The animated film The Prince of Egypt (DreamWorks,
1998), another retelling of the Exodus story, initially tried various voices
and effects in order to depict the voice of God, including ‘morphing’
between the voices of different (male/female/adult/child) cast members
from the film.13 Eventually, however, the audio team followed DeMille in
deciding to use the actor playing the part of Moses (in this instance, Val
Kilmer). The overall effect of having the same actor portray both Moses
and the voice of God (here in The Prince of Egypt but also in DeMille’s
The Ten Commandments) is ‘to suggest the kind of voice we hear inside
our own heads in our everyday lives – as opposed to the larger than
life tones with which the Creator has been endowed in prior celluloid
incarnations’.14
11. Shohat, ‘Sacred Word, Profane Image’, p. 40; S. Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers:
Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988), pp. 81-86, 95-99.
12. There is general consensus that Heston provided (or at least contributed to)
the voice of God in this scene (something which he himself affirmed in the 2004
DVD release), though it has also been suggested that the voice is in fact ‘an electronic
amalgam of the voices of Charlton Heston and DeMille’ (the latter having narrated
the film); S. Louvish, Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf (London: Faber & Faber,
2007), p. 429. It has further been rumoured that although Heston provided the voice
for the burning bush scene, someone else stepped in for the scene featuring the giving
of the ten commandments; J.S. Lang, The Bible on the Big Screen: A Guide from
Silent Films to Today’s Movies (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007), p. 123. Donald
Hayne (DeMille’s publicist and biographer) has claimed that it was he who featured in
this later scene; Reinhartz, Bible and Cinema, p. 55 n. 79 (see also: http://www.imdb.
com/title/tt0049833/trivia?item=tr0755443; accessed 13 December 2015).
13. Interestingly this idea was dismissed on theological grounds. R. Buskin, ‘The
Prince of Egypt’, Studio Sound (February 1999), pp. 66-68 (67). [Also available here:
http://www.filmsound.org/studiosound/postpro.html; accessed 13 December 2015.]
14. Buskin, ‘The Prince of Egypt’, p. 67.
Moving away from the Exodus story, John Huston’s The Bible… In
the Beginning (20th Century Fox, 1966), which covered the first half
of Genesis (chs. 1–22), adopted a similar solution to the question of
depicting the divine. John Huston cast himself in both the role of Noah
and as the voice of God (as well as the narrator).15 The effect of this again
is to sidestep the problem of deciding what God’s own voice should sound
like by having the voice that Noah hears be his own. Darren Aronofsky’s
more recent Noah film (Paramount, 2014) takes this a step further by
omitting the voice of God altogether.16 Indeed, although Noah experiences
broadly the same convictions as to what he must do (e.g. build an ark),
these are the result of confusing visions (ostensibly from ‘the Creator’).
At no point are any divine instructions heard. In Aronofsky’s film, at least
from the perspective of the audience, God is rendered not only physically
but audibly absent.
In spite of the manifold problems involved with a physical represen-
tation of the divine, Ella Shohat points out that ‘Hollywood’s biblical
films emerged from a long history of Christian visual representation of
divine figures’.17 Even Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel contains various
depictions of God in a now rather clichéd ‘old man with a beard’ form.
It should thus not come as any surprise that a number of films have
eschewed resorting to a disembodied voice of God and have elected
instead to include a physical, tangible divine figure. Nevertheless, the
issues that arise when casting a ‘voice of God’ (in particular, a move from
the abstract or ambiguous towards specificity) are even more pressing
here.
God’s cinematic incarnation requires concrete choices involving complexion,

facial features, and figure… The visual adaptation of oral and written narra-
tives, including biblical ones about God, forces the painter, photographer, or
film director to take a stance, as it were. Cinematic production necessitates
a selection of actors, and a casting process that inevitably locates face and
body in concepts of gender and race.18
Again, there are rather more traditional cinematic representations of God

which, even when otherwise playing with the nature of the character (e.g.
for comic effect), tend to adopt a physical appearance which conforms
to the stereotype of ‘old white man’ (with or without a beard!). Into this
15. Lang, The Bible on the Big Screen, pp. 186-93.

16. D. Denby, ‘Man Overboard’, The New Yorker, 7 April 2014, http://www.
newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/07/man-overboard (accessed 13 December 2015).
17. Shohat, ‘Sacred Word, Profane Image’, p. 36.
18. Shohat, ‘Sacred Word, Profane Image’, p. 37.
category would fall, for instance: Oh, God! (Warner Bros., 1977); Time
Bandits (Avco Embassy, 1981); Almost an Angel (Paramount, 1990); and
The Acid House (Film4, 1998). Yet other films have deliberately tried to
push these boundaries, playing with audience expectations in order to
create (or reflect) alternative images of the divine.
In Kevin Smith’s comedy Dogma (View Askew, 1999), God appears in
the final scene as a woman (played by Canadian-American singer Alanis
Morissette). She has no lines in the film, since a plot device is that her
voice has destructive power, which necessitates the separate character of
the Metatron, ‘the Voice of God’ (played by Alan Rickman), a figure from
Jewish rabbinic tradition (often equated with Enoch of Gen. 5.21-24).19
In a film that irreverently explores the nature of belief and ‘dogma’, the
image of God in a dress utilizes the interpretative freedom seemingly
offered by the text in order to deliberately subvert audience expectation.
Marc Connelly’s 1930 play The Green Pastures (winner of the Pulitzer
Prize) was made into a film of the same name in collaboration with
William Keighley (Warner Bros., 1936). Loosely based on a woven-
together collection of Bible stories (including the scene of Moses and
the burning bush), its distinctiveness lay in its all African-American cast,
together with a physical representation of God (‘De Lawd’) played by
black actor Rex Ingram (sporting a white beard and dressed in a suit).20
Depicting the divine in human form in this manner, however, generated
accusations of blasphemy and led to the film being banned in a number
of countries (e.g. Australia, China, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, and
the UK).21
Some 70 years later, Tom Shadyac’s comedy films Bruce Almighty
(Universal Pictures, 2003) and Evan Almighty (Universal Pictures, 2007)
similarly contained a black God (played by Morgan Freeman), thus
likewise consciously moving away from the ‘old white man’ stereotype.22
19. S.R. Garrett, ‘Dogma (1999)’, in Bible and Cinema: Fifty Key Films (ed. A.
Reinhartz; London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 89-93.
20. Interestingly, Ingram also played the role of Adam, lending an explicitly
physical/visual dimension to the imago Dei of Gen. 1.27 (Lang, The Bible on the Big
Screen, pp. 83-88).
21. Lang, The Bible on the Big Screen, p. 88; S. Scholz, ‘The Green Pastures
(1936)’, in Bible and Cinema: Fifty Key Films (ed. A. Reinhartz; London: Routledge,
2013), pp. 125-30 (126).
22. The suggestion that white actor Jack Nicholson was also allegedly offered the
role may, however, indicate that the casting of Morgan Freeman was less ideologically
motivated than it might at first appear (see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0315327/
trivia?item=tr2029010; accessed 13 December 2015).
As with The Green Pastures, the physical representation of the divine led
to accusations of blasphemy and calls for censorship, though this time in
Islamic circles (predominantly in Egypt and Malaysia).23 In the light of
the boundary-pushing imagery of a female God (Dogma) and a black God
(The Green Pastures; Bruce Almighty; Evan Almighty), Nicole Kassell’s
A Little Bit of Heaven (Davis Entertainment, 2011) can be seen as the
inevitable coming together of these elements, resulting in the depiction of
God as a black woman (played by Whoopi Goldberg).24
The handful of examples considered here illustrate some of the myriad
ways in which directors have attempted to grapple with the problem of
depicting the divine. In particular, they highlight both the nebulous web
of interpretative issues arising from the non-specificity of the text itself,
as well as the subsequent freedom that this very non-specificity affords
for inventive or subversive representations which can provoke, surprise,
or challenge an audience.
The screening of Scripture is an act of translation; like every act of trans-

lation, it is profoundly ideological. As in the translation of any text, the
movies transform the biblical materials in question, rewriting and recon-
textualizing them… Each of these cinematic texts offers a rewriting of the
Bible that in turn implies a reading or interpretation of the biblical text.25
With that in mind, we turn now to consider Scott’s own proposed

‘solution’ to the problem.
23. Anon., ‘ “Bruce Almighty” Banned in Egypt’, Middle East Online, 6 November
2003, http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=7703 (accessed 13 December
2015); D. McKeegan, ‘Malaysian Muslims Call for Ban on Movie’, The Free Thinker,
13 July 2007, http://freethinker.co.uk/2007/07/13/malaysian-muslims-call-for-ban-
on-movie/ (accessed 13 December 2015); I. Shari, ‘Watch Movie First Before Calling
for Ban, says Rais’, The Star Online, 14 July 2007, http://www.thestar.com.my/story/
?file=%2F2007%2F7%2F14%2Fnation%2F18304636 (accessed 13 December 2015).
24. Goldberg’s earlier role as ‘the Boss’ in Kirk Thatcher’s It’s a Very Merry
Muppet Christmas Movie (The Jim Henson Company, 2002) would also appear to
represent a portrayal of a black female God. S.M. Houston, ‘Five Glorious Times
When God Was a Woman’, Paste, 20 July 2014, http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/
lists/2014/07/5-glorious-times-when-god-was-a-woman.html (accessed 13 December
2015).
25. G. Aichele and R. Walsh, ‘Introduction: Scripture as Precursor’, in Screening
Scripture: Intertextual Connections between Scripture and Film (ed. G. Aichele and
R. Walsh; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), pp. vii-xvi (viii-ix).
‘God Isn’t a Boy!’ – God or Messenger in Scott’s Exodus?
God or Messenger in Exodus: Gods and Kings?

Given the prominent role of the deity in the biblical book of Exodus (most
significantly as a conversation partner for Moses), Ridley Scott faced the
same interpretative dilemma in Exodus: Gods and Kings (20th Century
Fox, 2014); namely, the choice between a disembodied voice (so The
Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt), a physical representation
(with all the resultant specificity both those options entail), or an invisible
and inaudible deity (effectively an ‘absent’ deity) as opted for by Darren
Aronofsky in his Noah film earlier the same year. Ultimately ‘one of
Scott’s innovations’26 is the decision to depict Moses conversing with a
physically visible figure but unexpectedly in the form of an 11-year-old
boy (played by British actor Isaac Andrews). Nevertheless, the precise
identity of this character remains somewhat ambiguous and, at the very
least, open to interpretation.
In reflecting upon his own thought process, Scott has stated that he
explicitly wanted to move away from more traditional renderings of the
divine encounter in Exodus.
One of the biggest challenges for me in the film is how do I do this

encounter without having God’s voice from a rock or from the sky, which
I think is what it’s always been. I think in the, erm, the previous epic that I
watched, I think it was the voice of God talked to him and I figured today
we, I shouldn’t do that, I must find another solution…27
However, Scott has clarified that the boy is not in fact meant to be a
physical manifestation of God himself, but is instead a messenger.28 Scott
refers to this character as ‘Malak’ (from the Hebrew ‫[ ַמ ְל ָאְך‬malʾāk],
26. C. Shoard, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings Review – Holy Moses, Wholly Acceptable
for the Devout’, The Guardian, 29 November 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/
film/2014/nov/29/exodus-gods-and-kings-review-christian-bale-ridley-scott (accessed
13 December 2015).
27. Ridley Scott, from the ‘Commentary by Ridley Scott and Jeffrey Caine’ on
the 2015 DVD release of Exodus: Gods and Kings (during the burning bush scene).
28. J. Merritt, ‘Christian Bale and Ridley Scott Talk Religion and “Exodus”: An
RNS Interview’, Religion News Service, 10 December 2014, http://jonathanmerritt.
religionnews.com/2014/12/10/christian-bale-ridley-scott-talk-religion-exodus-rns-
interview/ (accessed 13 December 2015); S. Foundas, ‘ “Exodus: Gods and Kings”
Director Ridley Scott on Creating his Vision of Moses’, Variety, 25 November 2014,
http://variety.com/2014/film/news/ridley-scott-exodus-gods-and-kings-christian-
bale-1201363668/ (accessed 13 December 2015).
meaning ‘messenger’ or ‘angel’ [cf. Gen 22.11, 15; 24.7; 48.16; etc.]), but
significantly the character is never named within the film itself. Indeed,
despite Scott’s assertions external to the movie, for the audience it is
never entirely clear what one is to make of this figure.
Tracing the narrative of the film, the first appearance of ‘Malak’ is
nearly an hour in, when Moses climbs the mountain (presumably Horeb/
Sinai) in a rainstorm. Having slipped and hit his head on a rock, he
awakens to find himself encased in mud. Unable to move, he sees a young
boy dressed in plain robes with closely cut hair, and, in the background,
a bush burning with an eerie blue flame. The dialogue between the two
departs significantly from the biblical text (Exod. 3.1–4.17), but when
asked to identify himself the boy answers ‘I am’ (cf. Exod. 3.14). He has
knowledge which suggests that he is no ordinary or mortal being (e.g.
his awareness of Moses’ past) and speaks in the first person about what
he wants Moses to do (e.g. ‘I need a general’). There is no indication
in this scene that he is merely an emissary or speaking on behalf of a
higher authority. Although not exactly a traditional visual representation
of God, there is nothing in this scene which would naturally lead one to
an alternative interpretation. For any viewer remotely au fait with the
biblical narrative, the imagery of the burning bush anchors the scene in
the Moses–God discourse of Exodus 3 while the self-declaration ‘I am’
appears to reflect a relatively unambiguous identification of the boy with
the deity (Exod. 3.13-14).
This identification is immediately questioned, however, in the following
scene, when Moses (feverish and recovering at home in bed) is tended to
by his wife, Zipporah. She is unconvinced by Moses’ account of what
he saw, insisting that ‘God isn’t a boy!’ Nevertheless, when asked by
Moses to describe what he does look like (‘Then what does he look like?
Describe him, describe him to someone like me’), she is unable to do
so. (Interestingly, although we are not privy to what Moses has told her,
the implication is that he, at this stage at least, appears to have himself
identified the boy with God.)
Shortly after Moses returns to Egypt he confronts Ramases in the
royal stable. When asked who he has been talking to, Moses’ answer is
unequivocal.
Ramases: You’re listening to Hebrews.

Moses: I’m not listening to Hebrews.
Ramases: Who are you talking to?
Moses: God.
In the next exchange between Moses and Malak (following a series of

guerrilla attacks on the Egyptians by Moses’ men), the boy’s utilization of
the first-person to outline his dissatisfaction with their progress once again
gives no indication that he is speaking on anyone else’s behalf.
Malak: At this rate it will take years. A generation.

Moses: I am prepared to fight for that long.
Malak: I am not.
Moses: I thought we were making progress. Now you’re impatient.
After four hundred years of slavery.
Malak: Am I the only one sitting here who’s done nothing about this
until now?
Following the subsequent initial plagues of blood, frogs, gnats, and flies
(cf. Exod. 7–8), Moses sends Ramases a message (written on the side of
one of his horses) identifying these catastrophes as ‘the work of God’.
It is only in their last exchange prior to the final plague (the death of the
firstborn; cf. Exod. 11–12) that the audience seemingly get any indication
that Malak may not be a manifestation of God himself but something else.
Even here, however, there appears to be some tension in the dialogue.
Utilization of the first-person continues to present Malak as the driving
force behind the plagues, but Moses’ response suggests for the first time
that he is in fact only an intermediary.
Malak: These pharaohs who imagine they’re living gods, they’re

nothing more than flesh and blood. I want to see them on
their knees begging for it to stop!
Moses: I’m tired of talking with a messenger!
This outburst comes as something of a surprise, especially given Moses’

own earlier implied identification of the boy with God. It is by no means
incompatible with what has gone before, though equally has not been
suggested (or required) by the dialogue or action thus far, and so in effect
presents the viewer (at a comparatively late stage of the film) with a
seemingly brand new lens through which to interpret this character.
Malak does not reappear until the final scenes of the film. Significantly,
he is present on the mountain (again presumably Horeb/Sinai) when
Moses, having led the Israelites out of Egypt, engraves the laws onto the
stone tablets. Since the biblical text makes explicit that Moses ‘was there
with the Lord’ (Exod. 34.27-28; cf. 24.12; 31.18; 32.16; 34.1), this further
adds to the ambiguity surrounding the precise identity of this character.
In the last scene, an elderly Moses notices Malak (who hasn’t aged at all)
marching with the Israelites as they head towards the Promised Land.
Malak nods at him then slows and stops walking, quickly disappearing
into the crowd who overtake him.
When the credits roll, Isaac Andrews is listed ninth as ‘Malak’.
However, since the name is not used in the film, a viewer would need to
already know the actor (or perhaps some rudimentary Hebrew) in order
to be able to identify from the credits that the boy is in fact a character
named Malak. This and the one time where Moses addresses him as ‘a
messenger’ are nevertheless the only occasions where it is made clear that
the boy with whom Moses has been conversing is not himself God.
The commentary to the 2015 DVD release clarifies matters a little.
When the boy first appears (in the burning bush scene), Ridley Scott states:
This little man is called Malak, which in Arabic, or I think even Hebrew, is
the word for ‘angel’ or ‘messenger’. But of course he never declares that, he
simply talks to Moses…29
One of the writers, Jeffrey Caine, elaborates further:
That raises the question of how do you deal with God? The Bible itself
provides the answer. There’s a device that the Old Testament, and the New
but mostly the Old Testament, uses of the angel or the messenger from
God in human form coming to one of the principals, coming to one of the
prophets, and saying what it is that God wants him to do. Now the Hebrew
word for that, ‘messenger’ or ‘angel’, same, same word in Hebrew, is malʾāk.
So I introduced the idea of a human being called Malak. In this case a small
boy. But there’s something unearthly about him. He’s a normal-looking kid,
except that when you see him you are quite capable of believing that he’s
been sent by God. He seems to be in, everywhere at the same time, he turns
up in different places. He speaks with a wisdom and authority that a little boy
of that age wouldn’t normally have. And Moses isn’t entirely sure that Malak
is even a messenger from God, but he becomes increasingly more convinced
as the story moves on.30
Scott adds, ‘I like to think of Malak as a messenger’.31
29. Ridley Scott, from the ‘Commentary by Ridley Scott and Jeffrey Caine’
(during the burning bush scene).
30. Jeffrey Caine, from the ‘Commentary by Ridley Scott and Jeffrey Caine’
(during the following scene of Moses’ recovery). See further, Merritt, ‘Christian Bale
and Ridley Scott Talk Religion’.
Thus in interviews and commentaries it is made explicit that, in terms

of authorial intention at least, the boy who converses with Moses is not
God but a messenger called Malak. However, for the most part the film
itself remains somewhat ambiguous and arguably leaves itself open to
either interpretation. On the one hand, the boy is indeed once referred to
as ‘a messenger’ and appears in the credits as ‘Malak’, but at other times
he is seemingly identified with God (e.g. by Moses in his conversation
with Zipporah) while both the dialogue and action appear to give the
boy an agency and role that in the biblical text belongs to the deity. This
haziness is in turn reflected in various media reviews of the film which
(erroneously?) identify the boy as God,32 not to mention the Moroccan
controversy, which focused on Scott’s supposed personification of the
deity.33 In end effect, from the point of view of the audience, the precise
identity of the divine figure remains largely unclear and undefined.
God or Messenger in the Biblical Text?

Significantly, however, this very ambiguity can also be found in the biblical
text itself. In the key passage in Exodus 3 where Moses encounters the
divine at the burning bush, it is similarly somewhat unclear what exactly
is encountered.
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of
3.1
Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the
mountain of God. 2There the angel of the Lord [‫ ]מלאך יהוה‬appeared to him
in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked and the bush was blazing, yet it
was not consumed. 3Then Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this
great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up’. 4When the Lord [‫]יהוה‬
saw that he had turned aside to see, God [‫ ]אלהים‬called to him out of the
bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am’. 5Then he said, ‘Come no
closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are
standing is holy ground.’ 6He said further, ‘I am the God of your father, the
God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’. And Moses hid
his face, for he was afraid to look at God [‫]אלהים‬. (Exod. 3.1-6)
32. For example, R. Corliss, ‘Review: Don’t Let Your People Go See Exodus:
Gods and Kings’, Time, 13 December 2014, http://time.com/3632659/exodus-gods-
and-kings-review/ (accessed 13 December 2015).
33. Agence France-Presse, ‘Morocco Says Exodus Film “Represents God” and Is
Forbidden in Islam’; Schemm, ‘Morocco Approves “Exodus” Film, After Offending
Sections Cut’; Tartaglione, ‘Morocco Clears “Exodus: Gods and Kings” for Release,
with Audio Tweaks’.
There appears to be some tension or discrepancy in the passage. In v. 2, it

is an ‘angel of the Lord/Yhwh’ (‫[ מלאך יהוה‬malʾāk Yhwh]) who appears
within the burning bush, yet from v. 4 onwards it is Yhwh/God himself
who speaks to Moses from the bush, while v. 6 further suggests a physical
manifestation of God. Indeed, the angel/messenger (the malʾāk) is not
mentioned again in the ensuing conversation (and in fact does not seem
to reappear in the narrative until Exod. 14.19). Instead it is Yhwh himself
who is said to have ‘come down’ to deliver the Israelites (vv. 7-8) and
who converses with Moses (3.4–4.17). As Alexander A. Fischer notes,
this appearance and almost immediate disappearance raises the question:
‘Why is the angel introduced in Exod 3:2a at all?’34
Further light may be shed on this by examination of some of the
other passages in Exodus (and beyond) which refer to the malʾāk.35 The
angel/messenger is ostensibly absent from Exodus 4–13, and indeed the
narrative appears repeatedly to insist that it is Yhwh/God himself who
is encountered by Moses (e.g. ‘Yhwh…has appeared to you’ [4.5]; ‘in
Yhwh’s presence’ [6.28-30]). In Exodus chs. 14, 23, and 32–33, however,
reference is made to an ‘angel/messenger of God’ (‫[ מלאך האלהים‬malʾāk
hāʾĕlōhîm]; 14.19) and an ‘angel/messenger’ (‫[ מלאך‬malʾāk]; 23.20,
23; 32.34; 33.2), labels we might justifiably associate with the ‘angel/
messenger of the Lord/Yhwh’ (‫ )מלאך יהוה‬of Exod. 3.2. This figure is
sent by Yhwh/God (cf. ‫[ מלאכי‬23.23; 32.34]) to lead the Israelites through
the wilderness.
I am going to send an angel [‫ ]מלאך‬in front of you, to guard you on the

23.20
way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. 21Be attentive to him
and listen to his voice; do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your
transgression; for my name is in him. 22But if you listen attentively to his
voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and a
foe to your foes. (Exod. 23.20-22)
34. A.A. Fischer, ‘Moses and the Exodus-Angel’, in Angels: The Concept of
Celestial Beings – Origins, Development and Reception (ed. F.V. Reiterer, T. Nicklas,
and K. Schöpflin; DCLY, 2007; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 79-93 (81).
35. See initially: F. Guggisberg, Die Gestalt des Mal’ak Jahwe im Alten Testament
(PhD diss., Neuenburg, 1979); W. Hilbrands, ‘Das Verhältnis der Engel zu Jahwe im
Alten Testament, insbesondere im Buch Exodus’, in The Interpretation of Exodus:
Studies in Honour of Cornelis Houtman (ed. R. Roukema; CBET, 44; Leuven: Peeters,
2006), pp. 81-96; C.H. von Heijne, The Messenger of the Lord in Early Jewish
Interpretations of Genesis (BZAW, 412; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). Cf. D.P. Melvin,
The Interpreting Angel Motif in Prophetic and Apocalyptic Literature (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2013).
The malʾāk (the one who is sent) is here clearly distinguished from Yhwh/
God (the one who sends). There is also an implied distinction between the
voice of God and the voice of the messenger, since we appear here (Exod.
23.20-22) to have direct speech from God commanding Moses and/or the
Israelites to likewise ‘listen to his voice’ (v. 21), the voice of the malʾāk.
Nevertheless, there is also perhaps a blurring of the two inasmuch as the
voice of the messenger is implied to convey the commands of the deity
(‘if you listen attentively to his voice and do all that I say’, v. 22). Thus the
revelation that ‘my name is in him’ (v. 21) may suggest that ‘he is not only
authorized by Yhwh, but that in addition he stands for God’s presence’.36
The roles of Yhwh and the malʾāk again appear somewhat blurred (or
confused) in Exodus 13–14.
The Lord [‫ ]יהוה‬went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day, to lead

them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light, so
that they might travel by day and by night. (Exod. 13.21)
The angel of God [‫ ]מלאך האלהים‬who was going before the Israelite army
moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud moved from in front
of them and took its place behind them. (Exod. 14.19)
It is unclear here which of the two is leading the people. Moreover,

the malʾāk in 14.19 might feasibly be identified with the pillar of cloud
(noting the parallel construction of 14.19a-b),37 though this would be at
odds with the explicit claim elsewhere that Yhwh himself is in the pillar
of cloud (e.g. 13.21; 14.24; also Num. 12.5). Alternatively, 14.19 (in
its present form at least) envisages both Yhwh and the malʾāk leading
the people (the pillar and the angel) and then moving behind them to
protect them from the Egyptians, though this seems awkward and may
be indicative of a later insertion (e.g. 14.19a).38 The same ambiguity as to
who exactly led the Israelites out of Egypt (an angel/messenger or God
himself) can also be found elsewhere. For instance, Num. 12.5 considers
Yhwh to have been in the pillar of cloud, while Num. 20.16 suggests
that he sent an angel/messenger to bring them out of Egypt. Similarly,
36. Fischer, ‘Moses and the Exodus-Angel’, p. 85. Fischer suggests that this
concept may also lie behind the reference to the angel/messenger in Exod. 3.2. See
also Heijne, The Messenger of the Lord, pp. 97-98.
37. C.A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence
(AGJU, 42; Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 59.
38. So Fischer, ‘Moses and the Exodus-Angel’, pp. 83-84. Cf. B.S. Childs, The
Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1974), p. 227.
Judg. 6.13 and Judg. 2.1 credit Yhwh and the angel/messenger respec-
tively with the act of bringing the people out of Egypt. From the reader’s
perspective, the nature of the relationship between Yhwh and the malʾāk
is thus unclear and it is not always easy to distinguish them.
In the encounter at the burning bush, whether the ‘angel/messenger
of Yhwh’ or Yhwh/God himself, the text suggests that the conversation
(Exod. 3.4–4.17) involved a physical manifestation of the divine (e.g. 3.6).
Walter Moberly notes that Exodus 33 appears to provide two conflicting
statements regarding Moses’ ability to ‘see’ God:39
Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a
friend. (Exod. 33.11)
‘But’, he said, ‘you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live’.
(Exod. 33.20)
The idea that one cannot see Yhwh and live has given rise to the ‘identity
theory’ approach to the malʾāk, namely that the angel/messenger is ‘a
manifestation of God himself’;40 in other words, ‘the visible or audible
phenomenon through which God manifests himself and communicates
with the person or persons concerned’.41 Thus ‘the angel of the Lord and
the pillar of cloud, etc., are revelations of God in different disguises in
order to spare the life of those who see Him’.42 This would suggest that
the divine presence encountered ‘face to face’ by Moses in 33.11 is in
fact the pillar of cloud (cf. 33.9-10), which might in turn indicate that the
encounter at the burning bush is with the malʾāk Yhwh (cf. 3.2) through
whom a physical/audible manifestation of God is possible (cf. 3.6).
However, Num. 12.5-8 appears to go out of its way to establish that Moses
can indeed see Yhwh himself ‘face to face’ and that he ‘beholds the form
of the Lord’ (Num. 12.8; cf. Exod. 33.11). The ‘identity theory’ similarly
39. R.W.L. Moberly, At the Mountain of God: Story and Theology in Exodus
32-34 (JSOTSup, 22; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1983), p. 65. See further: S.D. Fraade,
‘Hearing and Seeing at Sinai: Interpretive Trajectories’, in The Significance of Sinai:
Traditions about Divine Revelation in Judaism and Christianity (ed. G.J. Brooke, H.
Najman, and L.T. Stuckenbruck; TBN, 12; Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 247-68; and in the
same volume D. Lipton, ‘God’s Back! What Did Moses See on Sinai?’, pp. 287-311.
40. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, p. 55.
41. W.G. Heidt, Angelology of the Old Testament: A Study in Biblical Theology
(Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1949), p. 70. Also, W. Eichrodt,
Theology of the Old Testament: Volume Two (London: SCM Press, 1967), p. 28.
42. Heijne, The Messenger of the Lord, p. 99.
does not account for those passages which do go some way towards
distinguishing between Yhwh/God and the malʾāk (e.g. Exod. 23.20-22).
Thus Charles A. Gieschen acknowledges that, in terms of the relationship
between the two, ‘we do not find a uniform Angel of the Lord tradition’.43
Looking beyond the book of Exodus, a similar ambiguity regarding
the distinctiveness or otherwise of the malʾāk and Yhwh can be found
elsewhere. In Judges 13, an ‘angel/messenger of the Lord’ appears
to Manoah and his wife. Several verses would appear to underscore a
distinction between God and messenger (e.g. v. 5 and vv. 8-9), in particu-
lar v. 16:
The angel of the Lord [‫ ]מלאך יהוה‬said to Manoah, ‘If you detain me, I will
not eat your food; but if you want to prepare a burnt-offering, then offer it
to the Lord [‫’]יהוה‬. (For Manoah did not know that he was the angel of the
Lord [‫]מלאך יהוה‬.) (Judg. 13.16)
However, vv. 21-22 conversely suggest some identity between the two,
such that to see the malʾāk is to see God:
The angel of the Lord [‫ ]מלאך יהוה‬did not appear again to Manoah
13.21
and his wife. Then Manoah realized that it was the angel of the Lord
[‫]מלאך יהוה‬. 22And Manoah said to his wife, ‘We shall surely die, for we
have seen God [‫’]אלהים‬. (Judg. 13.21-22)
The same ambiguity is to be found in Judg. 6.11-24. As with Exodus 3,

we are at first informed that an ‘angel/messenger of the Lord’ appears to
Gideon (Judg. 6.11-12; cf. Exod. 3.2). However, during the course of their
conversation there appears to be a switch to direct speech from Yhwh
himself (‘Then the Lord turned to him’ [v. 14]; ‘The Lord said to him’
[v. 16]; cf. Exod. 3.4), before ultimately reverting to the malʾāk (which
itself alternates between ‘the angel of God’ [v. 20] and ‘the angel of the
Lord’ [v. 21]). This might suggest that the terms are in some way inter-
changeable and that the direct speech of ‘the Lord’ (vv. 14-16) should in
fact be understood as mediated via the angel/messenger.44 The distinction
between Yhwh and the malʾāk is nevertheless immediately reinforced in
vv. 22-23:

44. J.A. Soggin, Judges: A Commentary (2nd ed.; London: SCM Press, 1987),
p. 114.
Then Gideon perceived that it was the angel of the Lord [‫ ;]מלאך יהוה‬and
6.22
Gideon said, ‘Help me, Lord God [‫ !]אדני יהוה‬For I have seen the angel of
the Lord [‫ ]מלאך יהוה‬face to face.’ 23But the Lord [‫ ]יהוה‬said to him, ‘Peace
be to you; do not fear, you shall not die’. (Judg. 6.22-23)
However, although God and messenger are here once more separated,
it remains unclear why seeing the angel/messenger (rather than Yhwh)
should cause Gideon to fear death (v. 22; cf. Exod. 33.20)45 or indeed
why the messenger features here at all if Yhwh can communicate himself
directly (v. 23)!46
In Gen. 16.7-13, the one who finds Hagar is repeatedly identified as
the ‘angel/messenger of the Lord’ (vv. 7, 9, 10, 11). Despite this, v. 13
then states:
So she named the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are El-roi’; for she said,
‘Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?’ (Gen. 16.13)
Matthias Köckert suggests that, although the reader and narrator know
that her conversation was with the malʾāk, ‘[s]ince God is present in
the message of the messenger, Hagar is able to interpret her encounter
as an encounter with God’.47 Gieschen similarly notes that elements of
the passage lend themselves to an identification of the two (‘This angel
speaks and blesses in the first person as God did in his earlier theophanies
with Abram’), and yet the malʾāk ‘speaks of Yhwh’s actions in the third
person’.48
After Hagar’s exile in Genesis 21, there remains considerable ambiguity
in her second encounter with the divine.
And God [‫ ]אלהים‬heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God
21.17
[‫ ]מלאך אלהים‬called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, ‘What troubles
you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God [‫ ]אלהים‬has heard the voice of the
boy where he is. 18Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand,
for I will make a great nation of him.’ (Gen. 21.17-18)
45. See R.G. Boling, Judges (AB, 6A; New York: Doubleday, 1975), pp. 133-34;
Soggin, Judges, p. 122.
46. S.A. Meier, ‘Angel of Yahweh’, in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the
Bible (ed. K. van der Toorn, B. Becking, and P.W. van der Horst; 2nd ed.; Leiden:
Brill, 1999), pp. 53-59 (55).
47. M. Köckert, ‘Divine Messengers and Mysterious Men in the Patriarchal
Narratives of the Book of Genesis’, in Reiterer, Nicklas, and Schöpflin, eds., Angels,
pp. 51-78 (69).
On the one hand the passage maintains some distinction between the
angel/messenger and God, and yet the words ‘I will make a great nation of
him’ (v. 18), spoken by the messenger, would most aptly be understood as
emanating from God (cf. Gen. 12.2). According to Köckert, the messenger
is ‘distinguished from God’ in v. 17, but ‘appears as God himself’ in v.
18.49 (Note in this context Gen. 31.11-13, in which the ‘angel/messenger
of God’ [malʾāk hāʾĕlōhîm] claims ‘I am the God of Bethel’ [v. 13]!)50
The malʾāk thus occupies an ambiguous space and identity, common
throughout the passages in which he appears.51
Various interpreters have attempted to tackle and clarify the role of
the malʾāk in the Exodus narrative. The Septuagint reading of Isa. 63.9
insists that ‘It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved
them’ (cf. Exod. 23.20, 23; 32.34; 33.2; Num. 20.16; Judg. 2.1). In
re-telling the burning bush encounter of Exodus 3, the Exagoge of Ezekiel
the Tragedian (second century bce) omits the appearance of the malʾāk
altogether (Ezek. Trag. 90–95; cf. Exod. 3.2-3). As Ruiten notes, in terms
of staging the scene:
[B]y omitting the angel, Ezekiel gets rid of a problem in the biblical text…
By ignoring the angel, Ezekiel avoids getting involved in a contradiction.52
The New Testament book of Acts, however, in recounting the life of

Moses (Acts 7.20-44), preserves and indeed makes prominent the role of
the angel/messenger from Exod. 3.2:
Now when forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the
7.30
wilderness of Mount Sinai, in the flame of a burning bush… 35It was this
Moses…whom God now sent as both ruler and liberator through the angel
who appeared to him in the bush. (Acts 7.30, 35)
In fact, the passage implies that all of Moses’ communication with God,
including the receiving of the laws on Sinai, came not via direct speech
(cf. Exod. 3.4-6; 33.11; etc.) but through the intermediary role of the
messenger/angel (cf. Acts 7.38).
Exodus Rabbah notes that R. Yohanan identified the malʾāk of Exod
3.2 with the archangel Michael, while R. Hanina claimed he was Gabriel
49. Köckert, ‘Divine Messengers and Mysterious Men’, pp. 69-70.

50. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, p. 24.
51. See further, e.g., Gen. 22.11-18; Num. 22.22-38; etc. Cf. Heijne, The
Messenger of the Lord, pp. 49-120; Köckert, ‘Divine Messengers and Mysterious
Men’, pp. 70-72; Meier, ‘Angel of Yahweh’, pp. 53-59.
52. Ruiten, ‘A Burning Bush on the Stage’, p. 75.
(Exod. R. 2.5). Philo of Alexandria identified this figure with the Logos,53
an understanding subsequently drawn upon by the early Church Fathers,
for whom the malʾāk of the Exodus narrative became a reference to the
second person of the Trinity.54
More recently, the nebulous relationship between the messenger/angel
and the deity has been explored through a number of different interpre-
tative approaches.55 The ‘interpolation theory’, for instance, suggests
that the figure of the malʾāk is a redactional addition to the text in order
to render God less anthropomorphic (i.e., by re-attributing actions and
dialogue originally performed by the deity to an intermediary).56 This goes
some way towards explaining the apparent ambiguity and inconsistency of
the text, though is not without its problems.57 The so-called ‘representation
theory’ suggests that the malʾāk should be understood as a representative
of the deity (a literal messenger or intermediary), who ‘speaks and acts
for God, but is not God’.58 However, as Gieschen notes, this does not
account for those passages where the two seem indistinguishable (and
even interchangeable).59 We have already mentioned the ‘identity theory’,
which views the malʾāk as ‘a manifestation of God himself’60 (in order ‘to
make possible the direct entry of Yahweh into the field of human vision,
53. A.C. Geljon, ‘Philo of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa on Moses at the
Burning Bush’, in van Kooten, ed., The Revelation of the Name yhwh to Moses, pp.
225-36 (226 n. 2); and in the same volume R. Roukema, ‘Jesus and the Divine Name
in the Gospel of John’, pp. 207-23 (219-20).
54. Childs, The Book of Exodus, pp. 84-85; Eichrodt, Theology of the Old
Testament, p. 28; Geljon, ‘Philo of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa’, pp. 232-35;
Hilbrands, ‘Das Verhältnis der Engel zu Jahwe’, pp. 89-90; Roukema, ‘Jesus and the
Divine Name’, pp. 220-21. See further, Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology. This
particular understanding of the malʾāk of Exodus is still held today by Jehovah’s
Witnesses; see Anon., ‘Your Leader Is One, the Christ’, The Watchtower: Study
Edition (15 September 2010), pp. 21-25. [Also available at http://wol.jw.org/en/
wol/d/r1/lp-e/2010685; accessed 13 December 2015.]
55. An overview can be found in Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, pp. 53-
57. Also Meier, ‘Angel of Yahweh’, pp. 57-58.
56. G. von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary (3rd ed.; London: SCM Press, 1972),
pp. 193-94; Meier, ‘Angel of Yahweh’, pp. 57-58.
57. See, e.g., Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, pp. 25-28; J. Barr,
‘Theophany and Anthropomorphism in the Old Testament’, in Congress Volume:
Oxford 1959 (ed. G.W. Anderson; VTSup, 7; Leiden: Brill, 1960), pp. 31-38 (33-34).
59. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, pp. 54-55; Heijne, The Messenger of
the Lord, pp. 105-6.
and to make speech uttered in the divine first person audible’61), and there
are others besides (in particular the ‘hypostasis theory’, which considers
the malʾāk to represent ‘an aspect of God’s personality that has taken on
a distinct, but not separate, identity’).62
Overall, however, the text as we have it remains ambiguous. The
malʾāk and Yhwh/God are at times distinct and at times indistinguish-
able.63 Dialogue in the mouth of the malʾāk frequently appears to come
directly from the deity:
[H]e simply speaks instead of the person who commissioned him. The “I” of
the messenger can no longer be distinguished from the “I” of God.64
As Walther Eichrodt notes, the messenger ‘is no longer clearly distin-

guishable from his master, but in his appearing and speaking clothes
himself with Yahweh’s own appearance and speech’.65
Thus, to return to Scott’s (unintentionally?) ambiguous depiction of the
divine in Exodus: Gods and Kings, there is interestingly a clear biblical
precedent for precisely the kind of ambiguity to be found there. The
specific identity of the divine figure in the film (labelled ‘Malak’ and ‘a
messenger’, but at other times speaking and acting as if a manifestation
of God himself) remains unclear and undefined, yet mirrors somewhat
uncannily the very ambiguity present in the biblical text. Indeed we might
say that Scott’s rendition of the divine is, in this respect at least, a far more
faithful reflection of divine identity, agency, and character in the Exodus
narrative than other (ostensibly rather more traditional) attempts which
have gone before.
61. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, p. 28. Though cf. Meier, ‘Angel of
Yahweh’, p. 58. As well as Exod. 33.20, note Exod. 20.19 and Deut. 18.16.
62. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, p. 55. See further: Gieschen, Angelo
morphic Christology, pp. 53-57; Meier, ‘Angel of Yahweh’, pp. 57-58; R.M.M.
Tuschling, Angels and Orthodoxy: A Study in their Development in Syria and
Palestine from the Qumran Texts to Ephrem the Syrian (STAC, 40; Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2007), pp. 93-101.
63. So too Childs, The Book of Exodus, p. 65: ‘there is a characteristic oscillation
between the angel of Yahweh being an intermediary and his being a manifestation of
Yahweh himself’.
64. Köckert, ‘Divine Messengers and Mysterious Men’, p. 53.
65. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, p. 24.
‘The Boy Was Only in Your Head’ –

The Invisible Divine in Scott’s Exodus
There is, however, yet another layer to Scott’s depiction of the divine in
Exodus: Gods and Kings. Regardless of whether the boy represents God
himself or a messenger, his apparent invisibility to all other characters in
the film leaves a question hanging as to whether this particular ‘image of
God’ is simply all in Moses’ head. This taps into a popular modern trope
(evident also in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah of the same year) which in turn
leaves the audience unsure whether they can trust their own senses (and/
or unsure of the extent to which Moses [or Noah] is a reliable character)
when it comes to the film’s supposed representation of the deity.
In Exodus: Gods and Kings, the majority of Moses’ interactions with
Malak are one-on-one and unwitnessed (e.g. on Horeb/Sinai, both in the
burning bush scene and again later when engraving the laws onto the
stone tablets). However, in the scene in which Malak expresses his dissat-
isfaction with the progress of Moses’ guerrilla warfare (just before the
beginning of the plagues), we see Joshua follow Moses from a distance
and witness the ensuing conversation from behind a boulder. As the
audience, we are privy to the entire exchange between Moses (standing)
and Malak (seated on a rock), yet significantly, when the camera twice
shows us the scene from Joshua’s perspective, we see only Moses talking
to a rock. The implication is that Moses can see Malak (and thus so can
we), but Joshua at least cannot.
Somewhat cleverly, the two brief occasions in this scene where we are
shown Joshua’s perspective both occur while Moses is talking. Although
the dialogue continues, the volume is slightly quieter indicating that Joshua
can hear what is being said, albeit from a distance (indicated also by his
reaction). What is therefore not clear is whether Joshua can hear anything
when Malak speaks, though the scene implies that he probably cannot.
Instead he witnesses Moses seemingly having a one-sided conversation
with thin air. From Joshua’s perspective (and thus arguably by extension,
that of the other characters), Malak is both invisible and inaudible.
In a later interaction with Malak (their last exchange prior to the final
plague), Moses is again followed and watched by Joshua. Once again,
when viewed from Joshua’s perspective, we see only Moses standing on
his own. After the crossing of the sea, Moses is sitting on the sand while
Joshua hovers nearby. Moses reassures him that ‘It’s just me here’ and
beckons him over, which implies that he himself is somehow aware that
Joshua cannot see Malak. (It also suggests that he’s aware of Joshua’s
previous clandestine surveillance!) In the final scene, Malak disappears
into the crowd of Israelites heading towards the Promised Land. As he
stops walking and is overtaken, none of them show any sign that they can
see him.
In the biblical text, as we have already seen, there is some discrepancy
as to whether God is considered to have a physical form that can be
witnessed or not. In Exodus 3, whether it is an ‘angel/messenger of the
Lord’ (3.2) or Yhwh/God himself (3.4-6) who appears in the burning
bush, there is an implied physical manifestation which Moses is afraid to
look at (3.6; cf. Exod. 33.20; Judg. 6.22-23; 13.22). In Exod. 33.11 we are
told that ‘the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to
a friend’. So too in Num. 12.5-8, Moses is said to see and speak to Yhwh
‘face to face’ as one who ‘beholds the form of the Lord’ (v. 8).66
A number of passages portray God with further physical, anthropo-
morphic qualities, suggestive of an implied bodily form. For example,
Exod. 24.9-11, which claims that Moses and 73 others ‘saw the God
of Israel’ and survived, mentions God’s feet (‘Under his feet there was
something like a pavement of sapphire stone’ [v. 10]). It is also predomi-
nantly God who is identified as having written the laws on the stone tablets
(e.g. Exod. 24.12; 32.16; 34.1; though cf. 34.27-28), further specified as
‘written with the finger of God’ (Exod. 31.18; also Deut. 9.10).
Other biblical passages, however, suggest that God cannot (or at least,
should not) be seen. In Exod. 33.20, seemingly at odds with 33.11, Moses
is told ‘you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live’.67 This
fear is similarly found elsewhere in the biblical text (e.g. Gen. 16.13;
Judg. 6.22-23; 13.22). Nevertheless it is qualified such that Moses may
see God’s back (again indicative of a physical form) but not his face
(Exod. 33.21-23).68 The New Testament letter to the Hebrews by contrast,
in describing the exodus (Heb. 11.23-29) emphasizes the invisibility of
God (a theme common throughout the New Testament):69
By faith he [Moses] left Egypt, unafraid of the king’s anger; for he perse-
vered as though he saw him who is invisible. (Heb. 11.27)
66. Note also, Gen. 32.30 (‘I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is
preserved’) and Num. 14.14 (‘They have heard that you, O Lord, are in the midst of
this people; for you, O Lord, are seen face to face’).
67. Moberly, At the Mountain of God, p. 65.
68. See further Fraade, ‘Hearing and Seeing at Sinai’, and Lipton, ‘God’s Back!’.
Cf. Deut. 4.12 (‘You [the Israelites] heard the sound of words but saw no form; there
was only a voice’).
69. E.g., Jn 1.18; 5.37; 6.46; Rom. 1.20; Col. 1.15; 1 Tim. 1.17; 6.16; 1 Jn 4.12.
See further, A. Malone, ‘The Invisibility of God: A Survey of a Misunderstood
Phenomenon’, Evangelical Quarterly 79.4 (2007), pp. 311-29.
Interestingly, in considering the burning bush episode, Exodus Rabbah

regards the phrase ‘appeared to him’ from Exod. 3.2 as indicative that
‘other men were with him, yet only Moses saw’ (Exod. R. 2.5), drawing a
parallel with Dan. 10.7 (‘I, Daniel, alone saw the vision; the people who
were with me did not see the vision’).
In Darren Aronofsky’s Noah film (Paramount, 2014), the character of
God (‘the Creator’) is both invisible and inaudible, at least from the point
of view of the audience. There are no audibly transmitted divine instruc-
tions, as we find in Genesis 6–9; instead Noah seemingly experiences a
series of confusing visions which he struggles to interpret.70 This leads to
another intriguing interpretative avenue however. Aronofsky’s depiction
of the divine leaves open the possibility that the visions are all in Noah’s
head; thus not only an invisible divine encounter but an imagined one.
Noah himself is determined and resolute in his actions (at least for the
most part), but the audience have to take their legitimacy and supposed
divine sanction on trust. Nevertheless, as he becomes convinced that he
must also kill his granddaughters, that trust is slowly worn away and
replaced by doubt, leaving the audience unsure whether he is truly a
reliable character.
Noah is portrayed as an extremist, attempting to do God’s will, but only

God’s will as interpreted through Noah’s mind.71
Although miraculous events may ultimately point towards some unseen

divine presence in the narrative, the specific manner in which the divine
is depicted in Noah means that, even at the end, it is never really clear to
what extent Noah’s actions and convictions genuinely reflected the will of
‘the Creator’ (something Noah himself appears to doubt as he segregates
himself from his family and turns to alcohol in the penultimate scene).72
Scott’s depiction of the divine in Exodus: Gods and Kings can feasibly
be interpreted in a similar light. Although we the audience see the boy
Malak, none of the other characters do. When Joshua spies on Moses,
he appears to be talking to himself. The foundation for this particular
70. ‘Absent God’s audible voice, Noah is left in the state of anguish, confusion,
even despair as he tries to work out what the Creator is demanding of him and why’
(K. Recklis, ‘Noah as a Main Character’, Noah’s Flood, n.d., http://www.floodofnoah.
com/#!noah-movie-main-character-/c3me [accessed 13 December 2015]).
71. S. Sheinfeld, ‘What Moses Learned from Noah’, Noah’s Flood, n.d., http://
www.floodofnoah.com/#!academic-responses-to-exodus-movie/ctnz (accessed 13
December 2015).
72. Sheinfeld, ‘What Moses Learned from Noah’.
interpretative strategy is seemingly deliberate and laid out by Scott at the

very beginning of the burning bush scene. As Moses climbs the mountain
in a rainstorm, he slips and hits his head on a rock. The screen goes black.
After awakening to the ethereal blue glow of the burning bush (and unable
to move), he encounters Malak for the first time.
In the following scene, Moses is feverish and in bed. His wife,
Zipporah, questions his account of events.
Zipporah: You were hit on the head. Anything you saw, or think you
saw, afterwards was an effect of that.
Moses: The storm. The storm started before I was hit on the head. It
was, it was not a storm. There was something…
Zipporah: Fine, fine, fine, there was something.
Moses: It was something else. There was something. It was
something else.
Zipporah: But the boy was only in your head.
Moses: How do you know? How do you know?
Zipporah: Because God isn’t a boy!
Moses: Then what does he look like? Describe him, describe him to
someone like me.
Zipporah: Do you know what you sound like?
Moses: Yes, I sound, I sound delusional.
The audience is thus provided with both the means (the rock) and the
lens (Zipporah) through which to arrive at a rather more naturalistic
interpretation of Moses’ religious experience. Similarly in the wider film,
‘plausible naturalistic rationales’ are offered for many of the plagues,73
while the parting (in fact more a drawing back) of the sea is attributed to
a tsunami.74 Scott himself notes, ‘I’m always trying to address this stuff
logically rather than magically’.75
73. Greydanus, ‘ “Exodus: Gods and Kings”: Theological Reflections’.

74. One of the writers, Jeffrey Caine, explicitly describes the film’s rendition of
the parting of the sea as ‘naturalistic’ and ‘depicted in the film as a tsunami’ (Jeffrey
Caine, from the ‘Commentary by Ridley Scott and Jeffrey Caine’ [during the crossing
of the sea scene]). Also, Foundas, ‘ “Exodus: Gods and Kings” Director Ridley Scott
on Creating his Vision of Moses’; Merritt, ‘Christian Bale and Ridley Scott Talk
Religion’.
(during the crossing of the sea scene). Similarly he states elsewhere, ‘I wanted every-
thing to be reality based’ (Merritt, ‘Christian Bale and Ridley Scott Talk Religion’).
Thus the film very much leaves open the possibility that Moses’
encounter with Malak at the burning bush (cf. Exod. 3) was all in his head
and the direct result of his injury. In the scene immediately following his
recovery, he speaks to his son Gershom but for a brief moment ‘sees’ him
as Malak (who turns and addresses him). An instant later he sees a rather
confused-looking Gershom once more, which suggests that it was simply
his imagination or, at the very least, that Malak was not physically present.
In one of the final scenes of the film, Moses is in a cave on Mount
Horeb/Sinai engraving the laws onto the stone tablets. It is noteworthy
that he creates the tablets himself, while Malak looks on, since the biblical
text most commonly attributes this act to God (Exod. 24.12; 31.18;
32.16; 34.1; though cf. 34.27-28). Here Moses and Malak have their final
conversation and reflect on what the future now holds. Most significantly,
however, at the end of the scene the camera switches to a wide-angle shot
which shows Moses to be alone in the cave. The result is similar to that
when Moses was seen from a distance by Joshua (from his perspective,
Moses was speaking to himself), except, since there is no one else in the
cave from whose perspective the audience is now viewing events, the
implication is that when we ourselves stand back from the scene, Malak
is in fact nowhere to be seen.
The effect of this is that, in terms of depicting the divine, Scott
can both have his cake and eat it. The film contains both a physical,
tangible, anthropomorphic figure with whom Moses can converse, and yet
simultaneously consistently refuses to affirm his existence. A relatively
traditional straightforward rendering and a more naturalistic interpretation
are both on offer to the audience. Scott suggests that ‘Malak could also
be his conscience’,76 and says of the burning bush encounter in particular
that ‘You could also look on this scene as a symbolic scene of Moses’
conscience’.77 Thus ‘even in a film in which God plays a central role,
His existence can’t be taken for granted’.78 In Scott’s Exodus, Malak may
feasibly be a manifestation (or messenger) of the deity or the product of
Moses’ imagination, but the interpretative onus is for the most part placed
firmly upon the viewer.
76. Merritt, ‘Christian Bale and Ridley Scott Talk Religion’.

78. R. Collin, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings, Review: “Bold and Uncompromising” ’,
The Telegraph, 26 December 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/
filmreviews/11260170/Exodus-Gods-and-Kings-review-bold-and-uncompromising.
html (accessed 13 December 2015).
‘Is This Your God?’ – The Character of the Divine in Scott’s Exodus
Finally, given the distinctive nature of Scott’s answer to the age-old

problem of depicting the divine, we might ask what effect his decision
to cast an 11-year-old boy in the role has upon issues of character and
imagery. Regardless of whether Malak is to be interpreted as God or
messenger (cf. Exod. 3.2), what is the impact of electing to represent the
divine in the form of a child?
Certainly the casting of an 11-year-old boy can be said to undermine
audience expectation. This innovative approach contrasts sharply with
more ‘traditional’ images of the divine (old-white-man-with-a-beard
syndrome) and belongs rather to the tradition of other ‘subversive’ reimag-
inings of the figure (e.g. God as a woman in Dogma, etc.). Scott himself
claims that the use of child imagery for the divine evokes ‘innocence and
purity’,79 although there are also other possible connotations. The apparent
disparity between childlike form and a mature, unsettling personality
means that Isaac Andrews’s Malak has a creepiness about him which is
somewhat reminiscent of the familiar horror movie trope of unnerving
children.80 One of the writers, Jeffrey Caine, refers to him as ‘unearthly’,81
while Time magazine describes him as ‘a boy-God with a Goy bod’.82
Far from ‘innocence and purity’, most reviewers have picked up instead
on Malak’s angry outbursts and irritable behaviour, characterizing him
variously as: ‘a petulant pre-teen…a little brat’;83 ‘a scowling boy with
a curt manner and a temper…fierce, petulant, spiteful’;84 ‘an impudent
imp, a chav who deserves an ASBO’;85 and ‘a child rolling dice…a water-
poisoning, disease-spreading, child-murdering higher power’.86 It is this
79. Masters, ‘ “Exodus”: How Ridley Scott Chose his 11-Year-Old Voice of God’.
80. E.g., Pet Semetary (dir. M. Lambert; Paramount, 1989); The Sixth Sense (dir.
M.N. Shyamalan; Buena Vista, 1999); Birth (dir. J. Glazer; New Line Cinema, 2004);
Hide and Seek (dir. J. Polson; 20th Century Fox, 2005); Orphan (dir. J. Collet-Serra;
Warner Bros., 2009); The Unbroken (dir. J.M. Murphy; In the Dark, 2012).
81. Jeffrey Caine, from the ‘Commentary by Ridley Scott and Jeffrey Caine’
82. Corliss, ‘Review: Don’t Let Your People Go See Exodus: Gods and Kings’.
83. K. Edwards, ‘Exodus: The Tantastic Gods and Kings Epic Is Suspect but Well
Worth a Watch’, The Conversation, 24 December 2014, https://theconversation.com/
exodus-the-tantastic-gods-and-kings-epic-is-suspect-but-well-worth-a-watch-35795
84. Greydanus, ‘ “Exodus: Gods and Kings”: Theological Reflections’.
85. N. Abrams, ‘Exodus – Our Verdict’, Jewish Quarterly, 27 December 2014,
http://jewishquarterly.org/2014/12/exodus-verdict/ (accessed 13 December 2015).
86. Collin, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings, Review: “Bold and Uncompromising” ’.
last in particular which makes Scott’s casting decision especially powerful.

The final plague (Exod. 11–12) becomes in effect an image of a child
killing children. When Ramases confronts Moses, holding the body of his
dead son, he asks:
Ramases: Is this your god? Killer of children? What kind of fanatics

worship such a god?
There is thus an interesting correspondence of imagery and visual

association between Malak on the one hand and the Egyptian firstborn
children (including Pharaoh’s son) on the other. (Indeed there is also a
correspondence with Moses’ own son, Gershom, which the film plays with
in the scene when Moses looks at him and sees Malak.)
Malak’s actions are continuously questioned in the film (e.g. by
Zipporah: ‘What kind of a god tells a man to leave his family?’) and
bring him into conflict with Moses. After the plagues begin, Moses on two
separate occasions calls out to an absent Malak, questioning the morality
of punishing everybody and expressing his unhappiness with Malak’s
methods. In their last exchange prior to the final plague, Moses tries to
convince Malak that Ramases’ own army will turn against him.
Malak: I disagree. Something worse has to happen.

Moses: I disagree. Anything more would be…
Malak: Would be what? What were you about to say? Cruel?
Inhumane?
…
Moses: Anything more is just revenge!
Malak: Revenge? After four hundred years of brutal subjugation?
These pharaohs who imagine they’re living gods, they’re
nothing more than flesh and blood. [Shouting] I want to see
them on their knees begging for it to stop!
When Malak reveals the nature of the final plague, Moses’ response is one
of shock and horror (‘No, no, you cannot do this. I want no part of this!’).
Coupled with our earlier discussion, the result is ‘a Bible epic that isn’t
sure that God exists, and isn’t sure he’s benevolent’.87
Even in their final conversation in the penultimate scene of the film
(on Mount Horeb/Sinai), Moses and Malak reflect upon their disagree-
ments.
87. N. Pierce, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings Review’, Empire, 10 October 2015, http://
www.empireonline.com/movies/exodus-gods-kings/review/ (accessed 13 December
2015).
Malak: I’ve noticed that about you. You don’t always agree with me.
Moses: Nor you me, I’ve noticed.
Malak: Yet here we are, still speaking.
Examples of such questioning of divine morality can similarly be found in

the biblical text itself. In Exod. 32.7-14, Moses has to dissuade God from
angrily wiping out the Israelites for worshipping the golden calf (‘to kill
them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’
[v. 12]). Likewise in Num. 14.11-35, when the Israelites refuse to enter the
Promised Land, God’s initial reaction is to ‘strike them with pestilence’
(v. 12) and ‘kill this people all at one time’ (v. 15), though Moses manages
to have the sentence commuted somewhat (vv. 20-35). These episodes
form part of a wider tradition of both disagreeing with and negotiating
with God (e.g. Gen. 18.22-33). This role is expanded further in Exodus
Rabbah, which places particular emphasis on Moses’ arguments with God
(e.g. Exod. R. 3.4, 12; 6.1-2; 16.3; 42.1; 43.7; 51.4).88
Albert Mohler claims that, since Scott ostensibly intends Malak to
be a messenger (cf. Exod. 3.2), in his epic ‘God is actually hidden from
view, along with his purposes, motivations, and character’.89 However,
as we have already seen, the precise identity of Malak is ambiguous to
say the least, and, whether God or messenger, the role he plays in the
film is clearly as a representative of the divine. Thus, regardless of both
Scott’s intention and audience interpretation (which may not match up),
the divine character is nevertheless accessible via Malak. Indeed, Scott’s
decision to portray this figure in the form of a child may provide us with a
rather thought-provoking window through which to view the biblical God
of the exodus. Malak displays a ‘childlike’ capacity for rage, petulance,
and at times even apparent cruelty, as well as being quick to anger and
seemingly prone to tantrums. Scott’s casting choice thus moves beyond
merely a representation of ‘innocence and purity’ (though those elements
may also be there) in order to provide a simple yet insightful means of
re-approaching the biblical text. This child imagery (quick to lash out,
but quickly calmed) may, it turns out, in fact offer a surprisingly apt lens
through which to reconsider aspects of the divine character in the biblical
text itself.
88. See further, M. Graves, ‘Scholar and Advocate: The Stories of Moses in
Midrash Exodus Rabbah’, Bulletin for Biblical Research 21.1 (2011), pp. 1-22.
89. R.A. Mohler, Jr, ‘Moses without the Supernatural – Ridley Scott’s “Exodus:
Gods and Kings” ’, AlbertMohler.com, 15 December 2014, http://www.albertmohler.
com/2014/12/15/moses-without-the-supernatural-ridley-scotts-moses-gods-and-
kings/ (accessed 13 December 2015).
Conclusions
Despite Scott’s assertions that Malak should be viewed as a messenger

rather than as God himself, there is an arguable lack of clarity or
consistency in this presentation. Objection to the film has tended to
focus on Scott’s supposed personification of the deity,90 while various
reviews have (erroneously?) identified the boy as God.91 Despite authorial
intention, this betrays an ongoing ambiguity on the part of the audience
with regard to the specific identity of the divine character who converses
with Moses. However, this very ambiguity is itself distinctively biblical.
The burning bush encounter of Exodus 3 introduces the character of the
malʾāk, whose relationship to (or identity with) Yhwh/God, both here and
throughout the Exodus narrative (not to mention the rest of the Bible),
remains uneasy, inconsistent, and ultimately unclear. In attempting to
grapple with the perennial problem of how to depict the divine, Scott
(unintentionally?) manages to reflect with uncanny precision precisely
this biblical ambiguity.
In his casting choice and handling of the character’s interactions, he
moreover presents an innovative and progressively thought-provoking
image of the divine (adopting and adhering to a number of modern
tropes); one that is both in keeping with, and can shed light upon, the God
of Exodus, while (in the vein of Aronofsky’s Noah) at the same time never
entirely affirming his existence. A relatively traditional straightforward
treatment and a more naturalistic interpretation are thus both on offer
to the audience. The result is a rendering of the divine which captures
perfectly the ambiguous identity and character of the deity of the Exodus
90. Agence France-Presse, ‘Morocco Says Exodus Film “Represents God” and Is
Forbidden in Islam’; Schemm, ‘Morocco Approves “Exodus” Film, After Offending
Sections Cut’; Tartaglione, ‘Morocco Clears “Exodus: Gods and Kings” for Release,
with Audio Tweaks’. Note that it was also banned in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates,
attributed to ‘historical inaccuracies’: Agence France-Presse, ‘Egypt Bans “Zionist”
Film Exodus and Cites “Historical Inaccuracies” ’, The Guardian, 26 December
2014, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/26/egypt-bans-hollywood-exodus-
christian-bale (accessed 13 December 2015); M. Radhakrishnan, ‘ “Exodus” Will
Not Release in the UAE’, Gulf News, 27 December 2014, http://gulfnews.com/life-
style/celebrity/hollywood/exodus-will-not-release-in-the-uae-1.1432595 (accessed 13
December 2015); A. von Tunzelmann, ‘Does Exodus: Gods and Kings Deserve to
Be Banned for Historical Inaccuracy?’, The Guardian, 4 January 2015, http://www.
theguardian.com/film/shortcuts/2015/jan/04/exodus-gods-and-kings-deserve-banned-
historical-inaccuracy (accessed 13 December 2015).
91. E.g., Corliss, ‘Review: Don’t Let Your People Go See Exodus: Gods and
Kings’.
narrative, but whose implied existence within the film is ultimately

dependent upon which of the available interpretative paths the viewer
opts to take. Accordingly, though at first sight an unusual and unexpected
approach, in the final analysis Scott’s representation in Exodus: Gods and
Kings can be said to (perhaps unintentionally) reflect simultaneously both
the most progressive and the most successfully ‘biblical’ depiction of the
divine to date.
E x od u s : M a l e G od s and K i ngs *
J. Cheryl Exum
Abstract
The article examines the relation of Ridley Scott’s recent film Exodus: Gods
and Kings to the biblical account in the book of Exodus, focusing princi-
pally on (1) issues raised by the absence of women and the masculinity of
God in text and film, and (2) the film’s naturalization of the miraculous,
which is in tension with its reliance on CGI for dramatic effect, and its
naturalization of God, which is undermined by the written word with which
the film begins. Cinematic decisions regarding the portrayal of God and the
miraculous, particularly the motivation of the deity and the brutality of the
plagues, it is argued, draw attention to problematic and disturbing aspects
of the biblical account.
Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings has not done as well at the box
office as other twenty-first-century biblical movies such as Noah and
The Passion of the Christ.1 For a major director like Scott, who has such
successful films as Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise and Alien to his
credit, to tackle a biblical film seems to me risky.2 Any biblical film faces
* This article is a revised version of one of the Tate-Willson lectures I presented

at Southern Methodist University in March 2015. I take this opportunity to thank
the University for the invitation and my audience for their questions and stimulating
discussion.
1. According to Variety, on its opening weekend Exodus: Gods and Kings grossed
$24.5m, whereas Noah grossed $43.7m on its debut in March 2014 and The Passion
of the Christ (2004) $83m; Brent Lang, ‘Box Office: “Exodus: Gods & Kings” Tops
Charts with $24.5 Million’, 14 December 2014, http://variety.com/2014/film/news/
box-office-exodus-gods-kings-tops-charts-with-24-5-million-1201379097/ (accessed
1 January 2016).
2. Another highly regarded British film director and a contemporary of Scott,
Nicolas Roeg, for example, failed miserably with his Samson and Delilah (1996); see
my discussion in J. Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations
of Biblical Women (2nd rev. ed.; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012), pp. 266-75.
Exum Exodus 41
not only the challenge of dealing with the miraculous but also the more
difficult issue of how to deal with a character whom many members
of your audience identify with ‘the real God’ in whom they believe. In
what follows, I am interested specifically in the relation of the film to the
biblical account, which I will discuss by focusing primarily on two of
the film’s key features: its portrayal of the deity (which is not unrelated
to its lack of interest in women), and its naturalization of the miraculous,
which is curiously at odds with its impressive use of CGI to dramatize the
extraordinary nature and incomparable effect of the plagues.
Exodus: Gods and Kings has been widely, and not unjustly, criticized
for its lack of racial diversity as well as of realism in casting white
Western actors in the lead roles of a Middle Eastern and North African
story, while relegating actors of colour to supporting roles.3 The issue,
of course, is larger than a single movie, and other big-budget Bible
films, like The Passion of the Christ, Noah, and Cecil B. DeMille’s much
older Ten Commandments are equally guilty. Hollywood does not have
a good record on race, as the recent Oscar debate over the film Selma
shows.
Some critics have also drawn attention to the virtual absence of women
in Exodus: Gods and Kings, but gender politics has not become the
major issue that racial politics has. Considering how much gap-filling is
required to turn the biblical story into a two-and-a-half-hour sword-and-
sandals epic, Scott could have done better on this score too, especially
if one compares the considerable number of strong women characters in
DeMille’s 1939 version. One cannot say that the film is not ‘accurate’ in
this respect, however, for the biblical account itself has no central women
characters either, apart from the birth story of Moses, which Exodus: Gods
and Kings does not include.4 The film does give a minor role to Zipporah
(played by María Valverde) as a romantic interest, and it tries to show
that, unlike the biblical Moses, its Moses is committed to his wife and
child and wants them with him on the journey to the promised land, even
3. Scott’s defence that it was a matter of economic necessity, and his comment
that he could not have obtained the necessary financial backing if he had cast
‘Mohammed so-and-so from such-and-such’ simply fuelled the rancour of his critics.
See his interview in Scott Foundas, ‘ “Exodus: Gods and Kings” Director Ridley
Scott on Creating his Vision of Moses’, Variety, 25 November 2014, http://variety.
com/2014/film/news/ridley-scott-exodus-gods-and-kings-christian-bale-1201363668/
(accessed 1 January 2016).
4. Not that Exod. 1 and 2 is all that favourable to women; see Exum, ‘The Hand
That Rocks the Cradle’, Chapter 3 in Plotted, Shot, and Painted, pp. 85-104.
though he abandons them to return to Egypt.5 It is an interesting secondary

plot – a diversion that makes Moses look better – that is not, however,
allowed to get in the way of the ‘real’ story. The real story is about men,
and the absence of central female characters in the film draws this fact to
the viewer’s attention (assuming viewers care about such things).
Like the biblical account, Scott’s film is about male gods and kings.
The contest in both the film and the Bible is between two rival gods –
Pharaoh, god of Egypt (and to some extent the other Egyptian gods), and
Yahweh, the god of Israel – a contest to show who is the most powerful.
In the film, God says he wants to bring Egypt to its knees, to show whose
god is the real god by showing who is the most powerful: ‘These pharaohs
who imagine they’re living gods – they’re nothing more than flesh and
blood. I want to see them on their knees, begging for it [the devastation
caused by the plagues] to stop.’ In the film, it is also a contest between
Moses and Ramases, raised as brothers but bitter rivals, with Ramases’
father Seti favouring the clearly more capable Moses, and Moses destined
to become the true leader. An early scene shows Ramases humiliated
when his battle plan, about which Moses expresses reservations, fails, and
it is left to Moses to step in to save the day. To make matters worse, in the
battle Moses saves Ramases’ life.6 Ramases’ final humiliation comes at
the Red Sea, when he alone survives the destruction of his army.
Who Is the Lord That I Should Obey Him and Let Israel Go?
Power is a central feature of the male ideology that pervades the Bible,
and the biblical god is nothing if not powerful. Whereas some commen-
tators see God’s power and strength as the key theme of the exodus
narrative,7 they neglect to point out that power and strength are typically
5. Zipporah plays no role in the exodus account after her strange rescue of Moses
on the way to Egypt (Exod. 4.24-26); in Exod. 18.2-3 the reader learns that Moses
had sent Zipporah and her two sons away and that his father-in-law Jethro brought
them to him in the desert.
6. There has been a prophecy that ‘in the battle a leader will be saved and his
saviour will some day lead’. Ramases tells Moses to ride the other way if he sees him
in any danger.
7. See, e.g., David M. Gunn, ‘The “Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart”: Plot, Character
and Theology in Exodus 1–14’, in Art and Meaning: Rhetoric in Biblical Literature
(ed. David J.A. Clines, David M. Gunn and Alan J. Hauser; Sheffield: JSOT Press,
1982), pp. 72-96 (73, 80-81); Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical,
Theological Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), pp. 118-19, 155
et passim.
Exum Exodus 43
associated with and valued by men, for whom they are important, if not
necessary, attributes (no woman in the Bible is called strong). One way
that men demonstrate their power and strength is through aggression and
violence.8 In the book of Exodus, God reveals to Moses his plan to smite
Egypt with his wonders at the outset of the account of deliverance, when
he commissions Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt (Exod. 3.19-20).
He has already determined what the last plague will be, and he tells Moses
about it before Moses returns to Egypt to confront Pharaoh:
When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the
wonders that I have put in your power. But I shall make him stubborn, so that
he will not let the people go. Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘This is what
the Lord says: Israel is my first-born son. I tell you, let my son go that he
may serve me, but if you refuse to let him go, then I shall kill your first-born
son.’ (Exod. 4.21-23)9
Before the account of the plagues begins, God again declares to Moses:
You shall say all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall tell
Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave his land. But I shall make Pharaoh stubborn
that I may multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt. When Pharaoh
does not listen to you, I shall lay my hand upon Egypt and with great acts of
judgement lead my armies, my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. And the
Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against
Egypt and bring the Israelites out from among them. (Exod. 7.2-5)
After the first six plagues, when Pharaoh still refuses to grant the Israelites
their freedom, God reiterates his motives in unequivocal terms, stressing
his power to destroy Egypt and his reasons for sparing them thus far:
For this time I am going to inflict all my plagues on you, on your officials
and on your people so that you will know that there is no one like me in all
the land. Had I stretched out my hand to strike you and your people with
pestilence, you would have been swept from the land. But I have let you
survive for this reason: to display my power to you and in order that my fame
may resound in all the land. (Exod. 9.14-16)
8. Yahweh Sebaoth, the Lord of hosts, is god of the armies, both the heavenly
armies and the Israelite armies. In discussing power, strength and violence as distinc-
tively male attributes, David J.A. Clines notes that this is his favourite title according
to the prophets: 2117 occurrences of Yahweh, 236 of Yahweh Sebaoth. ‘The
Scandal of a Male Bible’, 2015, available via Academia.edu, https://www.academia.
edu/10977758/The_Scandal_of_a_Male_BIble (accessed 1 January 2016).
9. It is sons who matter, not daughters.
This is the backdrop against which both the biblical account and the film
are played out: a display of power that will bring Egypt to its knees. In
both the Bible and the film, the Hebrews are the victims and the Egyptians
are the victimizers. The fact that the Hebrews have suffered grievously
at the hands of the Egyptians somehow helps to justify the revenge God
takes on Egypt (‘revenge’ is the term Moses uses in the film).
Central to the biblical account but absent in the film is a curious feature
that serves further to underscore God’s power. In the biblical story, God
acts against his own interests. He wants Pharaoh to let the Hebrew slaves
go, but, at the same time, he makes Pharaoh stubborn so that he will not
let the people go. Why? ‘For this reason: to display my power to you and
in order that my fame may resound in all the land.’ He repeats this many
times.
The Lord said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh, for I have made him and his
officials stubborn, in order to display these signs of mine among them, so
that you can recount in the hearing of your son and your son’s son how I
made fools of the Egyptians and what signs I performed among them, so that
you would know that I am the Lord’. (Exod. 10.1-2)10
The Lord said to Moses, ‘Pharaoh will not listen to you, so that more of my
wonders may be displayed in the land of Egypt’. Moses and Aaron worked
all these wonders in Pharaoh’s presence, but the Lord made Pharaoh
stubborn, and he did not let the Israelites leave his land. (Exod. 11.9-10)
It is not enough when Pharaoh finally allows the Israelites to leave Egypt.
At the crossing of the sea, God’s continuing, overriding concern is to
demonstrate his power and to gain honour:
I shall make Pharaoh stubborn and he will pursue them, and I shall gain
HONOUR for myself at the expense of Pharaoh and his whole army, and the
Egyptians will know that I am the Lord. (Exod. 14.4)
You, raise your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide
it, so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry land. And I, I shall
make the Egyptians stubborn so that they will go after them and I shall
gain HONOUR for myself at the expense of Pharaoh and all his army, his
chariots and his horsemen. And when I have gained HONOUR for myself at
the expense of Pharaoh and all his army, his chariots and his horsemen, the
Egyptians will know that I am the Lord. (Exod. 14.16-18)
10. Note, again, the interest in sons, not daughters.

Exum Exodus 45
Why does a god need to gain honour? How much honour does a god
need, and what, exactly, is honour? There have been numerous studies
of the concept of honour in the ancient Mediterranean world, and Israel,
like its neighbours, has been described as an ‘honour–shame’ society.
In the biblical literature, honour, kavod, is a male concern and a male
prerogative. Women do not have honour and cannot gain it, although they
can be shamed. A woman can have a minus quantity of honour. But her
normal state is to be of zero honour, which cannot be augmented.11 In
English Bibles, kavod is typically translated ‘honour’ when used of men,
but ‘glory’ when used of God. But there is no reason for giving the word
a different meaning based solely on who is said to have it or want it (no
reason, that is, except the translators’ bias, their reluctance to let God
appear too human). As David Clines points out in no uncertain terms:
Wherever it appears, the honour of Yahweh is the honour of a male, for that
is the only kind of honour there is. Every time we encounter his honour, we
must remind ourselves that we are moving in a male sphere.12
11. Clines, ‘Scandal’. The only exceptions are Exod. 20.12 || Deut. 5.16, and
Isa. 66.11. Of the commandment, Clines writes: ‘Exod. 20.12 (|| Deut. 5.16) is the
exception that proves the rule. Difficult though it is to know what a son’s honouring
his mother might entail, such honour is evidently in a domestic context (the same
would no doubt be true of honouring one’s father, for one wonders whether a son
would be in a position to honour his father in the public sphere).’ The Hebrew of
Prov. 11.16 associates a gracious woman with honour, but it appears from the lack of
parallelism that something has dropped out of the verse; the LXX has a fuller version:
‘A gracious wife procures honour for her husband, but a seat of dishonour is a woman
who hates justice’. Cf. njb, nrsv. Prov. 8.18 mentions honour in relation to personified
Wisdom, of which Clines writes, ‘In Prov. 8.18 Wisdom, personified as a woman,
says, “Riches and honour are with me”; that does not mean that she herself has
honour, but that through her the young man who is addressed will attain honour (as
v. 21 makes clear in reference to wealth, “I endow those who love me with wealth”)’.
In Isa. 66.11 Jerusalem as a mother is said to have honour. Again Clines: ‘Those who
mourn for her are to suck and be satisfied with her breasts of consolation; they should
drain them out and delight themselves “in the breast(s) of her glory” (‫)מזיז כבודה‬. If
it turns out that women can have honour or glory, and such honour consists of full
breasts, this is nothing like the honour that men possess. The idea that a woman’s long
hair is her honour (1 Cor. 11.15) is similar. Taken together, these texts do not overturn
the general statement that women in the Bible are not the objects of honour.’
12. Clines, ‘Scandal’.
Honour is the recognition of a man’s status by his social group. As such,

it is open to challenge, and thus honour has to be constantly maintained
and defended. Because a man’s honour ranking is relative to those of other
males in his group, honour is obtained at other men’s expense: ‘When I
have gained honour for myself at the expense of Pharaoh and all his army,
his chariots and his horsemen…’13 In the biblical story of the exodus and
in the film Exodus: Gods and Kings, God could be compared to a super-
power, demonstrating his superiority by crushing his enemy with weapons
of mass destruction like the plagues and the waters of the sea.
Naturalizing the Conflict by Naturalizing God
In portraying the conflict between gods and kings for modern audiences,
the screenplay by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, Jeffrey Caine and Steven
Zaillian aims to make events seem as realistic as possible. They naturalize,
filling gaps and presenting the story in ways that make it more intelligible
to modern audiences in terms of our attitudes and values and assumptions
about the way the world works and the way people behave. Naturalizing
is inevitable in any modern version of a biblical story.
It is somewhat surprising that Exodus: Gods and Kings ignores the
theme of God’s making Pharaoh stubborn rather than naturalizing it,
as, for example, DeMille did in The Ten Commandments by having
Queen Nefretiri harden her husband’s heart (it is useful to have a feisty
woman character to blame). But making Ramases responsible for his
own decisions is itself a way of naturalizing the rivalry between God
and Pharaoh, leaving Scott free to concentrate on the rivalry and hostility
between Moses and Pharaoh. Ramases, we might say, has free will. He
will not let the Hebrews go because it is not economically viable (the
dialogue is at times quite modern) and because he will not be told what
to do by Moses, whom he views as a threat to his throne, or by Moses’
god, whom he does not recognize. Ramases is portrayed as unduly cruel;
for example, he sends his soldiers to attack Hebrews in their homes and
hangs innocent Hebrew families on a daily basis in an attempt to force the
Hebrews to give Moses over to him. When the plagues have destroyed the
food supply, he refuses to give anything from his storerooms to feed his
starving people. ‘Are you suggesting that I should starve too?’, he asks
his advisor. When some of his people raid the storerooms in desperation,
13. In this context a line of dialogue DeMille gives Ramases after his army is
destroyed in the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments is telling: ‘Better to die in battle
with a god than live in shame’.
Exum Exodus 47
he has them killed. This characterization helps justify the severity of the
plagues, making them seem more deserved – until, that is, one realizes that
many innocent people are affected (but more of that later). During the ninth
plague, Ramases addresses Moses as though he feels his presence in the
darkness, declaring that, if one more thing happens, he will have Hebrew
infants drowned in the Nile as Moses should have been. ‘I am the god, I
am the god’, he shouts, and he will prove ‘who’s more effective at killing:
you [Moses], this god, or me’. By making the killing of infants Ramases’
idea, the film presents the death of the first-born of the Egyptians as a kind
of poetic justice: what Ramases planned for the Hebrews is what is done
to him and his people.14
In contrast to the pharaoh of the film, the pharaoh of the Bible is pretty
much a puppet. Though sometimes Pharaoh appears to be stubborn of his
own accord, his stubbornness is essentially a literary function to enable
the biblical god to demonstrate his power, and to gain honour at the
expense of the Egyptians.
In addition to showing Pharaoh as wholly responsible for his own
actions, Exodus: Gods and Kings naturalizes events even further by raising
the possibility that the god character is a figment of Moses’ imagination.
Moses’ first encounter with this god occurs after he has been knocked
unconscious, his leg broken, in a rock slide. He comes to, completely
submerged in mud except for his face – a very eerie scene – and he sees
a burning bush. A young boy appears before him and identifies himself as
‘I AM’. He is enigmatic and exasperating, as witnessed in their clipped
exchange, which presages what will be an uneasy relationship.
God: I need a general.

Moses: Why?
God: To fight. What else?
Moses: Fight who[m]? For what?
God: I think you know. I think you should go and see what’s
happening to your people now.
In contrast to the biblical god, who gives Moses specific instructions

about what he should do and what he (and Aaron) should say, this god is
not forthcoming about his intentions. And Moses is a man more driven by
an inner need than by a divine command. ‘You won’t be at peace until you
do’, the boy tells him.
14. Ramases comes across more sympathetically as a father, especially during

the last plague.
This scene fades directly into a scene in which Moses, back in his tent,
regains consciousness. He appears to be delirious, which is what his wife
thinks, when he tells her that God has appeared to him. She points out
that he was hit on the head and anything he saw or thinks he saw is the
result of his injury. ‘The boy was all in your head’, she assures him wisely,
‘because God isn’t a boy’.
Moses’ next encounter with his new-found god takes place after his
return to Egypt. He has been training – believe it or not – a Hebrew army.
It is a small army to be sure, but one does wonder how their training
exercises go unnoticed by the Egyptians. Since they are too few to take
on Ramases’ armies directly, Moses has them use guerrilla tactics against
the Egyptian people, because he believes only the Egyptian people can
force Ramases to agree to free the Hebrew slaves.15 Moses explains
what he has achieved so far to God, who tells him that he has not done
enough. Clearly annoyed at the lack of divine approval of his leadership,
Moses points out that ‘wars of attrition take time’ and asks God why he
is impatient now, after four hundred years of slavery. This scene, once
again, makes clear that Moses’ relationship with his god is argumentative
and difficult, but Moses’ question about what God has done also recalls
Exod. 5.23, where Moses tells God, ‘You have done nothing at all about
rescuing your people’. Their conversation, such as it is, ends as curtly and
fractiously as it began:
Moses: You do not need me.

God: Maybe not.
Moses: So what do I do? Nothing?
God: For now you can watch.
The abrupt change of scene that next takes place is perhaps the most
dramatically effective use of editing in the entire film. It is the cinema
audience who watch the spectacular devastation as plague after plague
relentlessly afflicts the land of Egypt.
A further significant encounter between Moses and God takes place
after the ninth plague. When God tells Moses, who sympathizes with the
people he grew up with, what the last plague will be, Moses wants no
part of it. While Moses is speaking with God, Joshua is watching from a
distance. Joshua sees Moses talking, but he does not see the manifestation
of God. So, is ‘I AM’ a figment of Moses’ imagination? Or can only
Moses and no one else ‘see’ this god?
15. They destroy food supplies, set ships afire on the Nile, and provoke Egyptian
retaliation against the Hebrew slaves.
Exum Exodus 49
Moses speaks to God again before the crossing of the Red Sea, though
this time the conversation is one-sided and the boy does not appear, as he
had on other occasions. Caught between the advancing Egyptians and the
sea, Moses feels that he has failed his people and his god. As night falls,
out of frustration he throws into the sea the sword that Pharaoh Seti had
given him while he was still a prince of Egypt (Moses is still the mighty
warrior, not a larger-than-life nomadic-looking prophetic miracle worker
like Charlton Heston in DeMille’s epic, and his sword replaces Heston’s
iconic staff).16
The next morning, the waters begin to recede, and Moses retrieves his
sword. He tells the Hebrews to follow him through the sea, declaring,
‘You have honoured me with your trust. Now I honour you with my
faith.’ What does this peculiar line of dialogue mean? The Hebrews have
trusted Moses and now, because the waters are receding, Moses has faith?
Is Moses affirming his belief in this god only he can see, even when he
does not see him? ‘Follow me and you will be free’, he continues, ‘God
is with us’.
Naturalizing the Miraculous
If naturalizing Moses’ experience of God required some inventiveness,

little imagination is needed to naturalize the plagues. The first nine, at
least, can conveniently be explained as natural phenomena, which is
precisely how an Egyptian official in Exodus: Gods and Kings describes
them. More clay is in the Nile than usual and has been stirred up by the
wild thrashing of crocodiles, changing its colour, fouling the water and
killing the fish. Frogs driven out of the water die and decompose, giving
rise to gnats and maggots and flies. The official is hanged before he can
explain the connection between the increase in these pests and the disease
that affects animals and humans.17
This is not a new way of looking at the plagues; biblical scholars have
entertained explanations that make the plagues more naturalistic, from
saying that the Priestly source has magnified the events of the earlier
Yahwist source to observing how it might be possible for each plague to
16. Significantly, Moses’ sword has Ramases’ name on it and Ramases’ sword
has Moses’ name on it to remind them that they should always look after each other.
17. DeMille too included a naturalistic interpretation in The Ten Commandments
by having an Egyptian report the events between the Nile turning to blood and the
hail, and not showing the plague of darkness. He also has Ramases command that the
first-born of Israel should die, thus making him partly responsible for the nature of
the last plague.
give rise to the one that follows.18 But no naturalistic interpretation can
suitably explain the death of the firstborn. Nor is the final plague the only
obstacle to naturalizing the plagues, for in the biblical account the land
of Goshen, where the Hebrews resided, was spared from the plagues after
the third one, an issue the film, which is interested only in the destruction
of Egypt, does not attempt to address.
With the crossing of the Red Sea we encounter once more a phenom-
enon that lends itself to naturalization. In biblical scholarship the sea
is frequently identified as a more easily crossable sea of reeds. In
Exodus: Gods and Kings a strong current allows the Hebrews to cross,
and a tsunami comes crashing down on their Egyptian pursuers. Scott
considered this to be a credible solution. Comparing his rendering of the
spectacle to DeMille’s in The Ten Commandments, he explained, ‘You
can’t just do a giant parting, with walls of water trembling while people
ride between them. I didn’t believe it then, when I was just a kid sitting
in the third row. I remember that feeling, and thought that I’d better come
up with a more scientific or natural explanation.’19
In tension with the film’s drive to naturalize is the desirability of dra-
matically staging sensational events, which computer generated imagery
makes possible and which audiences of action films have come to expect.
Exodus: Gods and Kings has some truly stunning CGI, which overwhelms
the audience with breath-taking scenes of destruction vividly depicting
the vast extent of the plagues and their calamitous effects in a way that
18. Famously in a detailed study by Greta Hort, ‘The Plagues of Egypt’, ZAW
69 (1957), pp. 84-103; 70 (1958), pp. 48-59. At the time of writing the following explana-
tion of the plagues, which has long been advanced in various sources with minor
variations, could be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagues_of_Egypt (accessed
1 January 2016): ‘Rising temperatures could have contributed to the spread of toxic
fresh water algae in the Nile. When the algae died, it turned the water red. Fish would
have been killed and frogs would have left the water and died. With no frogs to eat
them, insect populations would have increased and the rotting corpses of fish and frogs
would have attracted more insects. Biting insects would have transmitted disease to
livestock and humans. Hail and locusts are natural occurrences, and a hamsin, a dry
sand-filled windstorm, sometimes produces darkness. One explanation for the death of
the first-born is that, if the food supply was destroyed, priority would have been given
to feeding infants and they would be more likely to be affected by any toxin or disease
carried by food, but this fails to take into account older first-born sons or infants who
were not the first born.’
19. ‘Christian Bale Describes Moses as “Barbaric” and a “Likely Schizophrenic” ’,
The Independent, 27 October 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/
christian-bale-describes-moses-as-barbaric-and-a-likely-schizophrenic-9821127.html
(accessed 1 January 2016), citing an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
Exum Exodus 51
only film can achieve. Rather than having Moses confront Pharaoh to
announce each plague or agree to its cessation, which both builds suspense
and slows the pace in the biblical account, in Exodus: Gods and Kings the
plagues take place one after another, relentlessly, in quick succession. The
plagues are duly considered by some critics to be visual highlights of the
film, along with later scenes of the Egyptian chariots, racing in pursuit of
the Hebrew slaves and falling off the side of the cliffs, the parting of the
waters and the crossing of the sea, and the waters crashing down upon the
Egyptian chariots.20
Curiously, having offered plausible explanations for many of the
Bible’s miraculous events, Scott undermines the naturalizing tendency
of his film by having it open, Star Wars style, with the printed word, in
20. See e.g. Justin Chang, ‘An Improbably Anglo-led Cast Aside, Ridley Scott’s
Old Testament Epic Is a Genuinely Imposing Spectacle’, Variety, 29 November,
2014: ‘a sensationally entertaining yet beautifully modulated stream of visual won-
ders that make it all but impossible to tear one’s eyes from the screen’, http://variety.
com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-exodus-gods-and-kings-1201364857/ (accessed
1 January 2016); Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings, Review: Christian Bale
and Joel Edgerton Give Full-blooded Performances’, The Independent, 26 Decem-
ber, 2014: ‘Exodus: Gods And Kings doesn’t short change us as far as the crowd
scenes, storms, battles, chases and recreation of ancient Egypt in all its pomp are
concerned’, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/exodus-
gods-and-kings-review-christian-bale-and-joel-edgerton-give-fullblooded-perfor-
mances-9945384.html (accessed 1 January 2016). Some film critics, though, were
not so impressed. See e.g. Stephanie Merry, ‘ “Exodus: Gods and Kings” Movie
Review: Source Material One of Many Sore Spots for Ridley Scott’, Washington Post,
11 December 2014, who remarks that some scenes ‘may have been inspired by the
sensationalists at the Weather Channel’ and that ‘ “Exodus” has much more in common
with “The Day After Tomorrow” and other examples of disaster porn than “The Ten
Commandments” or “The Passion of the Christ” or even “Noah” from earlier this year’,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/exodus-gods-and-kings-
movie-review-source-material-one-of-many-sore-spots-for-ridley-scott/2014/12/11/
f933084e-7ca6-11e4-9a27-6fdbc612bff8_story.html (accessed 1 January 2016); Lou
Lumenick, in the New York Post, 11 December, 2014, complains about the ‘cheesy
special effects’ and believes that ‘overdoing the not-great special effects eventually has
a numbing effect – and the long shots of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis look
awfully fake’, http://nypost.com/2014/12/11/christian-bale-is-god-awful-as-moses-in-
exodus/ (accessed 1 January 2016); and A.O. Scott, in The New York Times (11 Decem-
ber 2014), remarks, ‘He [Scott] turns the 10 plagues into a science-fiction apocalypse and
stages the climactic pursuit of the Hebrews by the Egyptian army with the thundering
precision of a cavalry battle in a John Ford western. (The parting of the Red Sea,
unfortunately, is a digital washout.)’, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/movies/exodus-
gods-and-kings-ridley-scotts-biblical-drama.html?_r=0 (accessed 1 January 2016).
white on a black background. His text gives the date as 1300 bce and
informs the audience that the Hebrews have been slaves to Egypt for
over four hundred years, that they have not forgotten their homeland or
their God, and that God has not forgotten them. The words, ‘God has not
forgotten them’, places God firmly as a character in the film rather than a
possible figment of Moses’ imagination, and thus introduces, at the film’s
beginning, the prospect that divine activity is behind the events.
Scott’s Version and the Biblical Version

In Exodus: Gods and Kings, when God appears to Moses beside the
burning bush, he does so in the form of a young boy. Although in the
closing credits his name is given as Malak (an obvious use of the Hebrew
term for ‘messenger’, sometimes translated ‘angel’), the boy is never
called Malak in the film. Intentionally or not, the film creates a confusion
similar to that between God and his messenger in the Bible, where a
messenger calls to Moses from the burning bush, after which it is God
who speaks to him directly.
When asked in an interview about his intention in using a young boy
to represent God, Scott observed, ‘Sacred texts give no specific depiction
of God, so for centuries artists and filmmakers have had to choose their
own visual depiction. Malak exudes innocence and purity, and those two
qualities are extremely powerful.’21 ‘Innocence’ and ‘purity’ are hardly
words I would use to describe this spoiled brat. The description of him
as ‘petulant’ fits him well, and has been used by numerous critics, among
them Mark Kermode, who considered the casting of an upper-class British
school boy in the role of god to be ‘a daring move, perhaps, but also
one that courts ridicule’.22 What I find particularly offensive about this
representation is its anthropomorphism.23 Rather than being truly radical,
it reinforces the popular idea of God as male, though a young boy as
21. Carrie Dedrick, ‘Ridley Scott Casts 11-Year Old Boy to Speak as God
in “Exodus: Gods and Kings” ’, http://www.christianheadlines.com/blog/ridley-
scott-casts-11-year-old-boy-to-speak-as-god-in-exodus-gods-and-kings.html
22. Mark Kermode, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings Review: Biblical Epic Drowned
by its Dramatic Failings’, The Guardian, 28 December 2014, http://www.theguardian.
23. Some Muslim countries banned the film because it contains a ‘represen-
tation of god’; see, e.g., Neela Debnath, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings Banned in
the UAE Over “Religious Inaccuracies” ’, The Independent, 28 December 2014,
Exum Exodus 53
opposed to the old man with a long white beard of fine art. The idea of a
child running the universe is chilling, and this male child already demon-
strates a propensity for a distinctively male characteristic in the Hebrew
Bible, violence.24 I found him irritating and it is clear from their various
encounters in the film that Moses does not find him particularly agreeable
either. One wonders if he will grow up.
The divine boy dresses shabbily like the Hebrew slaves, but he is
upper class. His dress sense notwithstanding, this divine being with his
Italia Conti accent belongs to the elite. Fortunately he does not have
a major role in the film, in contrast to the god of the biblical account.
Scott’s decision to have God reveal himself to Moses as a child does, as
Kermode observes, court ridicule. It may be daring, but it is less so if he
is a figment of the imagination of a schizophrenic, which is how Christian
Bale, who plays Moses in the film, described him.25 Whatever one thinks
of it, a significant side effect of the casting is that it encourages viewers
to think about the nature of the god of the exodus in the Bible. Does
anything about this ill-tempered child resonate with the biblical picture?
Are the screenwriters making this portrayal up, or are they basing it on
something they perceive in the text?26 Does their film script bring out the
temperamental side of God and the cruelty of the plagues in a way that
gets neglected in most discussions of the exodus as a story of deliverance
from oppression?
Whatever its flaws, Scott’s interpretation of the exodus story seeks to
come to terms with the text’s complex portrayal of God and its presen-
tation of the plagues as miracles – central aspects of the biblical version
that are not without their difficulties for readers and that have somehow to
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/exodus-gods-and-
kings-banned-in-the-uae-for-religious-mistakes-9946857.html (accessed 1 January
2016).
24. On violence as a component of hegemonic masculinity, see David J.A.
Clines, ‘Dancing and Shining at Sinai: Playing the Man in Exodus 32–34’, in Men
and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond (ed. Ovidiu Creangă; Sheffield:
Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), pp. 54-63; see also David J.A. Clines, ‘He-Prophets:
Masculinity as a Problem for the Hebrew Prophets and Their Interpreters’, in Sense
and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll (ed. Alastair
G. Hunter and Philip R. Davies; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), pp. 311-
28 (314-16); Clines, ‘Scandal’.
25. According to The Hollywood Reporter, as quoted in ‘Christian Bale Describes
Moses as “Barbaric” and a “Likely Schizophrenic” ’.
26. For example, God’s anger at Moses when Moses is reluctant to accept his
call, or the strange vignette about God trying to kill Moses in Exod. 4, or even God’s
motivation, discussed above, in sending the plagues.
be rendered visually in the film. The ‘solutions’ offered by the screenplay

make us aware not only of the resistance of some textual elements to
naturalization but also of the perplexing, if not troubling, portrayal of God
the director has inherited from the biblical story.
Readers of the biblical story cannot fail to notice that innocent Egyp-
tians must also suffer the cataclysmic effects of the plagues, all because
God has caused Pharaoh to refuse to let the Israelite slaves go. Even the
Hebrews suffer the effects of the first three plagues. Moreover, the death
of the firstborn, with numerous infants and children killed, seems like an
excessive punishment for Pharaoh’s god-induced stubbornness: ‘There
was great wailing in Egypt for there was not a house without its dead’
(Exod. 12.30). In Exodus: Gods and Kings, God wonders if Moses finds
him cruel and inhumane. When Ramases tells Moses and the Hebrew
slaves to leave Egypt, he calls their god ‘a killer of children’. ‘What
kind of fanatics worship such a god?’, he asks. This is not the first time
that Scott has a character challenge the nature of this god. Earlier in the
film, when Moses prepares to leave Midian to return to Egypt, his wife
Zipporah asked, ‘What kind of god tells a man to leave his family?’ It is
a question Moses cannot answer.
To Ramases’ question, ‘What kind of fanatics worship such a god?’,
Moses replies, ‘No Hebrew child died last night’. Under the circumstances
this seems particularly cold-hearted, coming from the man who wanted no
part of this vengeance. Is Scott suggesting that God is, perhaps, childish –
malicious in the casual way a spoiled child can be?
What kind of god needs to demonstrate his superiority by bringing
his opponents to their knees? Could he not have done something equally
impressive but less destructive? Exodus: Gods and Kings is not likely
to make viewers change their minds about God, but it does challenge
viewers to think about how the film’s portrayal of God and of the exodus
event relates to that of the biblical text.
God’s Law and the Promised Land
As Exodus: Gods and Kings comes finally to an end, there is a scene of

Moses carving the ten commandments onto a slab of stone. The divine
boy tells Moses that ‘a leader can falter but stone will endure. These
laws will guide the people in your stead.’ By including this scene, which
seems somewhat anticlimactic in the story as presented in Exodus: Gods
and Kings,27 the screenplay acknowledges the centrality of the law for the
27. One might compare DeMille’s film, in which the giving of the law at Sinai
and the tablets of the law play a much greater role.
Exum Exodus 55
people of Israel,28 and the plot development of the film thereby reflects
the movement of the biblical story itself from servitude to Pharaoh,
followed by an exodus from Egypt that leads to Sinai and servitude to
the god of Israel.
In addition to the giving of the law at Sinai, the biblical exodus story
also looks forward to the occupation of the promised land, a theme that
features prominently in Exodus: Gods and Kings. The Hebrew slaves in
Egypt are preoccupied with returning to their homeland, even though
they themselves have never lived there, as Moses points out to them.
Like the Torah, which ends in Deuteronomy with Israel outside the land,
Exodus: Gods and Kings ends before the conquest of Canaan.29 But not
without informing its audience what is in store for Moses’ people.30 After
the crossing of the Red Sea, Moses and Joshua sit on the shore and talk
about settling in Canaan. Will the people who live in the land allow the
Hebrews to settle there? Joshua points out that they have no choice. The
Hebrews are too numerous; they are ‘as big as a nation of tribes’. Here
the film alludes to the occupation of the land as described at various
points in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua, and especially the basic
picture given in Joshua 1–12 of a united conquest of the entire land. But
the biblical account also indicates that the Israelites are not so numerous.
Their god does their fighting for them – their male-identified god, God
the divine warrior: ‘The Lord is a man (’ish) of war, the Lord is his name’
(Exod. 15.3).
28. A view expressed by Alex Goldberg, an orthodox rabbi, in a review of

Exodus: Gods and Kings: ‘I believe that Moses existed but that’s not the point. From
a Jewish perspective, what matters is the theophany on Sinai and receiving the laws.’
Cited in Andrew Brown, ‘Man versus Myth: Does It Matter if the Moses Story Is
Based on Fact?’, The Guardian, 30 November 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/
film/2014/nov/30/moses-man-versus-myth-ridley-scott (accessed 1 January 2016).
Cf. U. Cassuto’s comment about the Decalogue: ‘We now reach the climax of the
entire Book [of Exodus], the central and most exalted theme, all that came before
being, as it were, a preparation for it, and all that follows, a result of, and supplement
to, it’ (A Commentary on the Book of Exodus [trans. Israel Abrahams; Jerusalem:
Magnes Press, 1967], p. 235).
29. So too does DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.
30. Moses’ recognition of the Hebrews as his people is an important theme of
Exodus: Gods and Kings. When the boy-god sends him back to Egypt, it is to ‘see
what’s happening to your people’, and, when Moses complains that the Egyptians are
being treated excessively cruelly, the boy-god defends himself by criticizing Moses
for still not thinking of the Hebrews as his people.
When the Lord your god brings you into the land that you are about to enter
and possess, and he removes many nations before you – the Hittites, the
Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the
Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and stronger than you – the Lord
your god will give them over to you and you will conquer them. You must
utterly destroy them. You shall not make any treaty with them or show them
any mercy… For you are a people consecrated to the Lord your God. The
Lord your god has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of
all the peoples on the face of the land. (Deut. 7.1-2, 6)
When you crossed the Jordan and came to Jericho, the inhabitants of Jericho
fought against you – the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the
Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites and the Jebusites – and I handed them
over to you. I sent hornets ahead of you, which drove out the two Amorite
kings before you. It was not by your sword or by your bow. I have given you
a land on which you have not laboured, cities you have not built, although
you live in them, vineyards and olive groves you have not planted, although
you eat their produce. (Josh. 24.11-13)
The divine warrior will defeat the inhabitants of Canaan just as he defeated
the Egyptians at the Red Sea. This god who leads both Israelite and heavenly
armies is well represented by the Moses of Exodus: Gods and Kings, with
his trusty sword, who first leads Egyptian, then Hebrew armies.31
And so the victims will become victimizers. Their genocide and dis-
placement of the people of Canaan may appear justified by their suffering
in Egypt, but people who have done them no harm will be dispossessed
and innocent people will be killed, like the Egyptians for whom Moses,
but not God, feels compassion in Exodus: Gods and Kings.32
Had Scott continued to film the biblical story (and he may do so), it
would no doubt be a further story of male gods, male leaders and male
kings, with perhaps a few cameo roles given to women. The recently
announced forthcoming film about King David could be the sequel we’ve
been waiting for.33
31. Cf. depictions of the divine warrior in such texts as Deut. 7.16-24; Ps. 68.7-18;
Hab. 3; 2 Sam. 5.17-25; Joel 2.11. In Exodus: Gods and Kings, armed Hebrews stand
behind Moses when Ramases tells him the Hebrews must leave Egypt.
32. On the theme that the people of the land are dispossessed because they are
evil, and that, when Israel sins, it too is punished by losing the land, see Regina
M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997).
33. See Justin Kroll, ‘Fox, Scott Free and Chernin Reteam on Biblical King
David Film’, Variety, 8 July 2014, http://variety.com/2014/film/news/fox-scott-free-
and-chernin-reteam-on-biblical-king-david-film-exclusive-1201258761/ (accessed 1
January 2016).
I n t er p r et i n g t h e E nt r ai ls :
R el i g i on a n d V i ole nce
i n E x od u s : G od s a n d K ings
Jon Morgan
Abstract
In his 2004 study of the reception history of Moses and the exodus, Brian
Britt highlights the way in which one of the key aspects that defines literary,
cinematic, and other interpretations and reworkings of the biblical story
is how they represent the violence inherent to the narrative. From the
response to lead actor Christian Bale’s pre-release comments that Moses
was ‘barbaric’ and, from an Egyptian perspective, ‘a terrorist’, it was clear
that issues relating to violence were going to be both prominent in Ridley
Scott’s 2014 film Exodus: Gods and Kings, and significant in terms of how
(particularly religious) audiences would respond to it. In this article, I offer
a close reading of the film’s handling of violence, and argue that there are
significant connections throughout between these instances and its repre-
sentations of religion and belief, something that might well be expected,
given the shape of contemporary discourse surrounding religion. I propose
that the narratological and ideological apex of the film is found in the
scenes surrounding the enactment of the final plague, and that the way in
which these scenes are presented creates a counter-narrative within the film,
which disrupts its otherwise conventional ideology. In turn, I argue, these
disruptions gesture to some often-unacknowledged tensions and overlooked
aspects of both the biblical narrative and the common frameworks through
which it has been and is read and received.
Introduction
In the weeks leading up to its release in December 2014, much of the
discussion surrounding Exodus: Gods and Kings revolved around two
controversies. On the one hand was the response from director Ridley
Scott to the intense criticism of the film’s all-white central cast; and,
on the other, comments about the nature of the character of Moses
made by lead actor Christian Bale. Scott’s dismissal of the claims of

whitewashing as reflecting a pronounced naivety about the reality of
big-budget filmmaking (and more significantly financing) – including the
now infamous reference to the implausibility of his casting ‘Mohammed
so-and-so from such-and-such’1 – further riled (if hardly surprised) liberal
critics and commentators, and added fuel to calls for a boycott. Bale, by
contrast, seemed determined to clash with conservatives when he declared
at a Los Angeles press conference that he thought Moses was ‘likely
schizophrenic’ and ‘one of the most barbaric individuals that I have ever
read about in my life’,2 before later claiming in an interview with ABC
News that, while a freedom-fighter to the Hebrews, Moses was ‘a terrorist
in terms of the Egyptian empire’.3
While being embedded at once in broad contemporary debates
surrounding inherent racism in entertainment media and the threat of
Islamist terrorism, the basic substance of both of these controversies also
maps directly onto questions that are quintessential to the reception history
of the exodus story. The issue of how markers of the ethnic, national, and
religious identities of the Egyptian characters are appropriately consti-
tuted, for example, derives directly from interpretation concerning the
fundamental shape of the narrative. Where the basic structure of what
Jan Assmann famously dubbed ‘the Mosaic distinction’4 pertains – that
is to say the archetypical symbolism of the distinction between Israel
and Egypt which maps onto monotheism and idolatry, truth and error,
the present and the past, and so on – then there will always be a tension
between the influences of exoticism, Orientalism, and ‘primitivism’,5
1. Scott Foundas, ‘‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’ Director Ridley Scott on Creating
his Vision of Moses’, Variety, 25 November 2014, http://variety.com/2014/film/news/
ridley-scott-exodus-gods-and-kingschristian-bale-1201363668/ (accessed 1 December
2015).
2. Paul Bond, ‘Christian Bale Calls Moses “Barbaric”, “Schizophrenic” Ahead
of “Exodus” Release’, The Hollywood Reporter, 25 October 2014, http://www.
hollywoodreporter.com/news/christian-bale-calls-moses-barbaric-743874 (accessed
20 December 2015).
3. Christian Bale, interview shown on Nightline, ABC News, 1 December 2014,
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/christian-bale-ridley-scott-tackling-exodus-
gods-kings-27296468 (accessed 20 December 2015).
4. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 1-8.
5. For an exploration of the particular conception of ‘primitivism’ that I have in
mind here, see Fred Myers, ‘ “Primitivism”, Anthropology, the Category of “Primitive
Art” ’, in Handbook of Material Culture (ed. Chris Tilley et al.; London: Sage, 2006),
pp. 267-84.
Morgan Interpreting the Entrails 59
and the nature of and mechanism for the transformation of Moses the
Egyptian into Moses the Israelite. Likewise, in any representation of the
exodus the role of and emphasis on violence, and the location of Moses in
relation to it, represents a key interpretative decision. The fact that Moses
is often required to be both an uncompromising warrior and the measured
bastion of morality is just one of a number of tensions and paradoxes that
surround his depiction in biblical and post-biblical contexts, and inform
Bale’s observation that Moses’ character has a difficult, uneven, and
fractured quality.6
In this article I pick up the thread of the second of the pre-release
controversies outlined above by examining the depiction of violence in
Exodus: Gods and Kings, and in particular the relationship between the
emphatic violence it depicts and the religious themes it explores. I offer
a close reading of the film that highlights these themes, and offer an
analysis which contends that the way in which the film is so thoroughly
a product of the prevailing culture with respect to the dynamic between
religion and violence awkwardly disrupts its otherwise generic tone and
narrative structure. I argue that while this disruption makes Exodus: Gods
and Kings a less tonally harmonious and narratively cohesive film, it also
renders it a more interesting retelling of the exodus story than would
otherwise have been the case. While few of its interpretative elements are
novel, the combination of emphases that it presents is, I argue, strange and
unusual in creative ways. I propose that the tensions and disruptions in the
film map onto often unacknowledged tensions in and overlooked aspects
of both the biblical narrative and the common frameworks through which
it has been and is read and received. I contend that, therein, the film makes
a valuable contribution to contemporary interpretation by leveling perhaps
unexpected challenges at the popular reception of the Exodus story.
Omens and Interpretation
Towards the end of the film’s first scene, Seti, the soon-to-die Egyptian
Pharaoh, demands of his High Priestess that she tell him what the entrails
of the bird she has just killed and dissected say about the preemptive strike
he is about to launch against the approaching Hittite army. ‘They don’t
say anything’, she replies, ‘they imply, and that is open to interpretation’.
This depiction of extispicy is intriguing for several reasons. It would be
amiss in an analysis of the depiction of the relationship between religion
6. Bale’s identification of this quality with schizophrenia is problematic, and is

not repeated here.
and violence to ignore the fact that here, right away, we have the two
tangibly combining (and in a way that, as we will see, helps to establish
the differing concerns and perspectives of the central characters). Another
is the fact that the High Priestess’s sassy line about divination’s requiring
interpretation sits somewhat uncomfortably alongside the fairly specific
prophecy regarding what will occur during the impending offensive that
she goes on to elucidate without much recourse to either rumination or
qualification (‘a leader will be saved, and his saviour will someday lead’).
The aerial establishing shots and explanatory titles with which the film
opens introduce the broad dynamic of Egyptian imperial power and Israelite
longing, in the wide, brash grammar of the historical epic. This first scene
brings us into the palace, introduces the central characters, and establishes
their motivations. Ultimately, the scene accomplishes two things of impor-
tance. Primarily, it packages and delivers the prophecy, which thereafter
shapes the dynamic between and destiny of the two central characters,
drawing on the classic trope by establishing Moses and Rameses as both
rivals and doubles.7 But, moreover, through the High Priestess’s somewhat
ill-fitting emphasis on interpretation, it also accomplishes the more subtle,
but no less significant, work of grounding the overarching context of
ideological contestation. Just as her work necessitates that she interpret, the
wider function of her role immediately becomes the object of interpretation,
and the ways in which the principal characters express their interpretation
positions them in relation to each other and to religion.
The instigator of and other actor in the ritual, Seti, is depicted as devout,
but troubled. Despite his unease concerning the impending confrontation
remaining un-ameliorated, he consumes the blood of the slaughtered
bird and gives thanks for the generous wisdom of the gods. Rameses,
however, is situated more circumspectly. From the analytical discussion
between him and Moses that follows, it is clear that his allegiance to the
royal cult is less keen than his father’s. However, perturbed by the impli-
cations of her prophecy, he resolves to remove the High Priestess when
he takes the throne – something which he, in fact, does not do, keeping
her in office until it becomes clear, much later, that she cannot cleanse
the bloody Nile. Moses distances himself from the ritual further still.
7. For the theoretical basis for the concept of the mimetic doubling of protagonist
and antagonist, see Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (trans. Patrick Gregory;
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 146-61. For a discussion
of the use of doubling in cinematic retellings of the exodus story, see Brian Britt,
Rewriting Moses: The Narrative Eclipse of the Text (JSOTSup, 402; Sheffield:
T. & T. Clark, 2004), pp. 40-58.
Regardless of how he feels about the Priestess’s prophecy, he makes

it clear that he has no truck with divination, or, by implication, any
magic. ‘Do the entrails say we should abandon reason and be guided by
omens?’, he mockingly inquires of the High Priestess. This line is likely
to particularly resonate with those familiar with the way in which the
biblical narrative is driven by the effects of signs (’oṯ) and wonders/omens
(môphēṯ), which together constitute the biblical nomenclature for what in
postbiblical traditions have become known as plagues.8
Scott’s portrayal of Moses as an artist, a friend to animals, a sensitive
lover, and a champion of human rights finds clear parallels in the well-
established tradition of portrayals of Moses in modern fiction and film
as a representative of the Romantic ideals and the high humanism of the
Enlightenment.9 However, even among these elements, the emphasis on
his being a staunch defender of reason who is incredulous about why
anyone would have any truck with ritual superstition is emphatically
anachronistic and deeply significant. In 1956, it was essential for Cecil B.
DeMille’s anti-communist rhetoric to tie skeptical rationalism and atheism
to Egyptian idolatry, but there this is seen most clearly in the attempts to
provide naturalistic explanations for the plagues, once Moses is already
Yhwh’s messenger.10 Scott also employs the trope of Pharaoh’s advisors’
reasoning naturalistic explanations for the plagues when they arrive, but it
is significant that Moses’ skepticism regarding signs and omens and strong
preference for reason is established from the outset.
While following the tradition of making him once-removed from
Egyptian culture, Exodus: Gods and Kings makes it clear that Moses
is generally hostile to religion, and that becoming the obedient servant
of the Hebrew god will involve not simply the blossoming of an innate
difference, but a full-blown religious awakening. Simultaneously, it is
established that Rameses’ refusal to give credence to the signs-and-omens
to come will also represent a shift (a hardening, perhaps) in his religious
sensibilities. More than anything else, it is this central dynamic – the
juxtaposition of, on the one hand, Moses’ prophesied rise to power and
the inevitable burgeoning of his faith in and devotion to the God of
the Hebrews, and, on the other, Rameses’ succession to the throne and
the development of his own theological sensibility – that, to my mind,
8. See Carol Meyers, Exodus (NCBC; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005), pp. 71-88.
9. See Britt, Rewriting Moses, pp. 13-27.
10. The Ten Commandments, dir. Cecil B. DeMille (Los Angeles, CA: Paramount,
1956). See Melanie J. Wright, Moses in America: The Cultural Use of Biblical
Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 106-107.
most clearly defines Scott’s film. Moreover, it is my contention that the

principal fixer of this dynamic is the central characters’ response to and
interpretation of violence.
It comes as little surprise that, with regard to the Hittite offensive,
Seti and Rameses were right to have been concerned. Whether as a
vindication of the truth of its revelation, or a demonstration of the power
of its suggestion, the prophecy determines the shape of the narrative.
In saving his life during the attack, Moses effectively emasculates his
brother/double with his own sword, at once seemingly fulfilling the
prophecy, demonstrating his military prowess and leadership credentials,
and locating himself and Rameses vis-à-vis Seti’s remark that ‘the men
who crave power are best fitted to acquire it, and least fitted to exercise
it’. In the presentation of Rameses’ official report of the offensive before
Seti, religious language is utilized in the service of the cover up of Moses’
lifesaving intervention – the audience is left little room to be anything
but dismissive of the invocation of ‘the help of the gods’. The scene is
important because of the space it allows for reflection on the ways in
which the High Priestess’s prophecy was echoed in the events of the
battle, and highlights tensions between the characters that know what
happened and Seti (who only suspects). Yet the scene also functions to
undermine these religious elements by depicting them as a tool of clerical
misdirection.
Waiting for a Miracle
The first waypoint on Moses’ journey to power, and faith, is Pithom –

one of the cities that, according to Exod. 1.11, the Israelite slaves were
forced to build. The exchange that we witness there between Moses
and Hegep, the viceroy of the city, about the fundamental character
of the slaves not only speaks of Moses’ sympathy for Hebrew culture,
but also functions as a significant foreshadow. Hegep suggests that it is
unsurprising that the slaves are conniving and savage when in their own
language their name means ‘those that fight with God’. Moses quickly
interjects that Israelite means ‘one who wrestles with God’, emphasizing
that the translation makes a significant difference. The notion that the
Hebrew theological tradition is one that is intrinsically tied up with
struggle grounds and reinforces the expectation of what is to come, and
the distinction between chaotically fighting and nobly wrestling speaks
meaningfully to the competing ideologies that are already at work. Like
the entrails, the name ‘Israelite’ implies something, and that implication
is open to interpretation.
Later, Moses the heroic leader of the Hebrews will return to a hellish
Pithom – shot wide and dark, and replete with images of stacked bodies
and skeletal slaves that clearly evoke the Holocaust – but for now he
inspects the slaves as an Egyptian prince, witnessing tableaux that
speak to Hebrew courage and dignity as much as to Egyptian cruelty.
The education concerning all things Israelite that he receives from Nun,
wrapped in secretive storytelling and daubed with paleo-Hebrew, fuels
Moses’ inward fascination, but does little to convince him of the virtues
of Israelite religion. And this much is expected. Primed by the biblical
narrative, or perhaps more meaningfully by DeMille, we know that the
realization of what Scott has emphatically framed as a religious conversion
narrative will surely occur in the context of a wilderness miracle.
Having come to realize that Nun’s tall tale about his real ancestry
and ethnicity is true, Moses flees Egypt, and, with a brevity that befits
the biblical text, crosses a desert, stumbles exhausted and thirsty upon
a Midianite well, and is in a very short space of time married and father
to a seven- or eight-year-old boy. Despite what Moses has learned about
his true heritage, Scott seems at pains to demonstrate that his worldview
survives more or less unscathed. We are offered a snapshot of Moses
and Zipporah’s touchingly egalitarian, exotic, and thoroughly modern
wedding, but must assume that it is a civil ceremony given the continuing
emphasis on their division concerning matters of faith. In one of several
saccharine-sweet and somewhat ropey familial scenes, we are led to
believe that Moses has somehow managed to live in a community in the
shadow of Mount Sinai for at least the number of years that his son is
old without ever learning of the mountain’s religious significance to the
people of that community; that is, until his son explains it. In response,
Moses is dismissive, advising the boy not to believe in tall tales. When
Zipporah remonstrates, accusing Moses of confusing their son by not
affirming the community’s beliefs (which, it is implied, involve a worship
of Yhwh that meshes neatly with the beliefs and practices of the slaves
in Egypt), Moses responds in a strongly humanist tone: ‘but what can be
wrong in teaching him to believe in himself?’
When the expected wilderness miracle arrives, it is not very miraculous
at all. Moses the Egyptian-prince-cum-Midianite-mountain-shepherd is
caught in a rockslide. Having hit his head and landed neck-deep in a
quagmire, he finds himself conversing with a young boy, similar in age
and appearance to his own son, but who, it turns out, speaks as the God of
the Hebrews. The boy, listed in the credits as Malak (‘angel’), but never
named in the film, reveals that Moses has been chosen to be the warrior
that will lead the Hebrew slaves to freedom. In media reports of the
response to the film among conservative Christian and Muslim commu-

nities in particular, a huge amount of emphasis was placed on the fact that
Scott depicts God as a nine-year-old boy. However, in addition to being
one of the film’s most distinctive aspects, I would argue this is also one of
its most widely misinterpreted.
A common response to the film, especially among conservative
Christians, has involved the notion that the depiction of God as a young boy
was intended to have a squarely anti-theological function, being designed
to convey the idea that the God of the Bible is rash, capricious, and petulant.
Shortly after its release, the influential conservative Christian commentator
Glenn Beck discussed Exodus: Gods and Kings on his show The Glenn
Beck Radio Program (the flagship broadcast on the [Beck-owned] media
network The Blaze), and denounced it as ‘one of the most dangerous films
I’ve seen, religiously speaking’ and ‘a very subversive movie for religion’,
going on to advise his audience to ‘avoid it like the plague that it is’.11 In
highlighting the aspects that he found most offensive, Beck cites the repre-
sentation of God in the film, calling it ‘bizarre’, and saying of the character
Malak that ‘impetulant [sic] would be too kind of a word’. Approaching
the film from a very different perspective, biblical scholar Katie Edwards
has also emphasized this aspect of Malak. ‘Scott’s God is’, she argues
‘a little brat’ who ‘throws tantrums, raises his voice, and acts out during
moments of pique’.12 While the nature of these discussions themselves has
been extremely interesting, even setting aside the significant question of
whether or not this child is a representation of God or a messenger from
God (as the character’s name would imply), I have two concerns regarding
this interpretation of Malak.
First, it is not clear to me that Malak actually is especially rash,
capricious, or petulant. Rather, the clearest and most primary concern
seems to be to portray Malak as maximally sinister by depicting him as
measured and calculating in his ruthless exercise of power. In Moses’
early encounters with Malak, Scott consistently employs cinematic tropes
associated with horror cinema. For example, at one point Moses sees
his son, sitting on a ledge up ahead playing with some clay spheres, like
marbles. However, as he draws alongside him, the camera cuts to the clay
11. Glenn Beck, The Glenn Beck Program, The Blaze, 15 December 2014, http://
www.glennbeck.com/2014/12/15/could-exodus-gods-and-kings-be-the-most-danger-
ous-movie-of-the-year/ (accessed 20 December 2015).
12. Katie B. Edwards, ‘Exodus: The Tantastic Gods and Kings Epic Is Suspect
but Well Worth a Watch’, The Conversation, 24 December 2014, https://theconversation.
com/exodus-the-tantastic-gods-and-kings-epic-is-suspect-but-well-worth-a-watch-
35795 (accessed 20 December 2015).
spheres that moments before were scattered about, showing them now
neatly stacked in an eerily perfect pyramid. The child’s head swiftly pivots
to reveal Malak’s stern face, and Moses is startled. The tone and technique
clearly invoke classic paedophobic horror motifs, which, as film scholar
Dominic Lennard has pointed out, primarily function to communicate the
precisely un-childlike nature of specific, sinister children.13 Scott himself
said of Malak in an interview with the New York Times that ‘one gets the
sense that he comes from a very clean place. He only speaks logic and
truth.’14 Moreover, speaking that ‘logic and truth’ in the clipped British
accent of actor Isaac Andrews, the character also appears to manifest the
classic Hollywood trope of casting Brits as arch-villains – a technique
which, as Michael Wood argues, consciously evokes the dynamics of
America’s colonial past.15 In his appointment of Moses as the leader of
the Hebrew militia, his expression of a desire to see Pharaoh, and Egypt
in toto, suffer, and his brief discussion of how he intends to achieve that
end, it seems to me that Malak is precisely not what we would expect of
a petulant child. He is less a tantruming brat than an unsettlingly focused
strategist, ruthless in the exercise of power.
However, focusing too much on what Malak’s characterization implies
about Scott’s interpretation of God in the exodus narrative, risks missing
a significant aspect of Moses’ character arc. When Moses, dazed from
the rockslide, first encounters Malak, Scott dresses the scene with a
small, cold-bluish burning bush. Rather than being the focus of Moses’
theophanic encounter, the magical non-consuming fire that is the classic
symbol of the supernatural encounter framed in both the biblical narrative
and the filmic tradition, this bush appears only incidentally, crackling
and sparking behind Malak in a way that implies it precisely is being
consumed by the surrounding flames. More significantly, while the
audience is shown the fire, it is not clear that Moses, still lying in the mire
in which the rockslide had left him, sees it at all. The bush speaks to the
audience about their expectations, while the mysterious child speaks to
Moses about his destiny.
13. Dominic Lennard, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror
Film (New York: SUNY Press, 2014).
14. Ridley Scott, quoted in Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes, ‘And a Little
Child Shall Lead Them: “Exodus: Gods and Kings” Portrays the Deity as a Boy’, The
New York Times, 28 November 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/29/movies/
exodus-gods-and-kings-portrays-the-deity-as-a-boy.html (accessed 20 December
2015).
15. Michael G. Wood, America in the Movies or, ‘Santa Maria, It Had Slipped My
Mind’ (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1975), pp. 183-84.
The appearance of Malak and the appeal of his direct challenge to

Moses, to fulfill his destiny and become the warrior-leader of the Hebrews,
do away both with the need for an arresting visual image to accompany
the traditional disembodied voice, and with any clear sense that the
encounter is miraculous. Moses’ direct inquiry ‘who are you?’ provokes
the most mystical aspect of the scene, when, in a reply reminiscent of
Jesus’ response to questions about his identity in Jn 8.58, Malak grandly
proclaims ‘I am’. It is worth noting here that the power in what Moses
witnesses comes from words, not images. Malak captures Moses’ attention
not by how he appears as much as by what he says. What he offers Moses
is a chance to fulfill his true nature, which has less to do with his ethnicity,
and much more to do with his prowess as a warrior. As such, this mundane
‘miracle’ scene conveys something equally as important about Scott’s
Moses as it does about Scott’s God.
The Great Man Moses
It is clear from the Hittite battle depicted early on that Scott’s Moses is
a quintessential modern hero in the making. He is a powerful and skilled
fighter, and a liberally minded and unfalteringly courageous spokesman.
He is very much not the reluctant, self-exiled, prince-turned-shepherd
with a speech impediment depicted in Exodus 3.16 Scott’s Moses is a
forthright and cocksure warrior who never says anything when he has
the opportunity to shout it. This is, as Christopher Hays has labeled him,17
MovieMosesTM – in effect, Hollywood’s conception of the man that the
16. For discussions of the interpretation of Moses’ speech impediment, see Jeffry
Tigay, ‘ “Heavy of Mouth” and “Heavy of Tongue”: On Moses’ Speech Difficulty’,
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 231 (1978), pp. 57-67; Stuart
Pollack, ‘The Speech Defect of Moses’, JBQ 26 (1998), pp. 121-23; James L. Kugel,
The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 296-97;
Britt, Rewriting Moses, pp. 117-30; S. Levin, ‘The Speech Defect of Moses’, Journal
of the Royal Society of Medicine 85 (1992), pp. 632-33; William H.C. Propp, Exodus
1–18 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 210-11. For a fascinating and
insightful discussion of the various examples of bodily otherness associated with
Moses and how they relate to his prophetic status and masculinity, see Rihannon
Graybill, ‘Masculinity, Materiality, and the Body of Moses’, Biblical Interpretation
23 (2015), pp. 518-40.
17. Christopher B. Hays, ‘Live By the Sword, Die By the Sword: The Reinvention
of the Reluctant Prophet as MovieMosesTM’, Noah’s Flood, 20 December 2014, http://
media.wix.com/ugd/32af69_952a2488414b484793eab1030adfe1a7.pdf (accessed 20
December 2015).
biblical Moses seems to want to persuade Yhwh to send instead. He

embodies all the classic properties necessary for the classic great man
myth.18 Notably, Scott’s Moses performs no magic – there is no place for
the cinematic staple staff-into-snakes scene – and, as a polished orator,
has no need of proto-Priestly assistance from Aaron, who is one of several
characters in the film whose primary function is to be referred to on
screen by a name mentioned in the biblical story. Scott’s Moses is defined
not by a staff, but a sword. Totemically, his sword, one of a matching
pair bestowed by Seti on his two sons, binds him to Rameses and to the
ideals of imperial power. This Moses does not need a miracle; he needs a
purpose. And that is what Malak offers him.
Despite its lack of miraculous or emphatically revelatory packaging,
Moses is changed by the encounter with Malak. Not only has he become
a believer, but (in a move reminiscent of many representations of a
Jesus who is at once very Jewish and yet in important ways transcends
Jewishness19), his witness disrupts the tradition. ‘God is not a boy!’,
declaims an exasperated Zipporah. ‘What sort of a god asks a man to
leave his family?’, she continues, as Moses, ignoring her, sharpens his
sword. ‘If that’s what faith means’, she most tellingly asserts, ‘I will
trade mine to keep you’. In the space of moments, Moses the skeptical
rationalist has apparently been transformed into Moses the zealot convert,
whose newfound belief is so profound that it instantly throws his wife’s
into question. Later, during a conversation between Moses and Malak, a
reverse shot from the perspective of Joshua, who is watching on in secret,
shows Moses to be alone. This can be interpreted as a suggestion that
Moses’ mental state is not trustworthy, or as a double down on the idea
of the new-found faith of the former skeptic confounding or transcending
that of the devout.
Ultimately, Zipporah finds that there is no reasoning with Moses. It
is not important whether Moses understands any particular tradition, or
what it means to worship his new-found God; the revelation that he has
been chosen to raise an army and fight is a revelation that this Moses
18. For a discussion of the great man myth and how it pertains to Moses, see
James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred: Liberation from the Myth of
Sanctioned Violence (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1991), pp. 98-103.
19. This has been a key theme in James Crossley’s recent work; see in particular
James Crossley, Jesus in an Age of Terror: Scholarly Projects for a New American
Century (London: Equinox, 2008); and James Crossley, ‘Jesus the Jew since 1967’, in
Jesus beyond Nationalism: Constructing the Historical Jesus in a Period of Cultural
Complexity (ed. Halvor Moxnes, Ward Blanton, and James Crossley; London:
Equinox, 2009), pp. 119-37.
receives with apparent ease. Later, when he appears back on the doorstep
with 400,000 freed Hebrew slaves in tow, his theological instincts are
vindicated, and the transfer of religious authority completed, by a heartfelt
declaration to Zipporah: ‘you honoured me with your trust, now I will
honour you with my faith’.
Somewhat reminiscent of the Abram of Genesis 14 who leads an army
to rescue Lot and recover the plundered treasures of Sodom and Gomorrah,
Moses gathers and trains the slave militia with enthusiasm as a warm and
swelling soundtrack accompanies their plucky efforts. Fascinatingly, their
immediate and deliberate recourse to targeted attacks against not only the
imperial infrastructure but also Egypt’s civilian population seem to speak
directly to the freedom-fighter/terrorist distinction, and their flaming-
arrow attacks are shot against a midnight blue sky in a way more than
passingly reminiscent of news footage of rockets over Gaza. And yet,
when Malak points out the failure of the rebels’ efforts, and declares that
therefore Moses must watch and learn as God finishes off Egypt once and
for all, Moses argues about whether such drastic measures are necessary.
As the plagues come towards their grizzly end, like Abraham pleading for
Sodom in Genesis 18, Moses entreats Malak to reconsider. Not only does
this resistance play into the theological theme of Moses’ fully becoming
one who ‘wrestles with God’, but it also underscores the problematic
nature of the plagues.
The guerilla campaigns lead Rameses to retaliate, challenging Moses
over which of them is better at killing. However, as the campaign of
plagues crescendos, Exodus: Gods and Kings leaves us with no doubt that
the god of the Hebrews is the best killer of all. While the initial plagues are
subject to increasingly far-fetched naturalistic explanations by Rameses’
chief advisor, it is clear that the Pharaoh is less concerned with how the
plagues happened than with why his High Priestess cannot counteract
their effects. This comic scene – in which Ewen Bremner’s court advisor
sounds (both in terms of what he is saying and the accent in which he is
saying it) more like a figure of the Scottish Enlightenment than an ancient
Egyptian aide – parallels the humour that infuses the courtly reaction to
the first two plagues in the biblical narrative. As David Gunn notes, the
fact that in the text the Pharaoh’s magicians are also able to turn the Nile
to blood and call forth frogs (Exod. 7.22; 8.7) only serves to exacerbate
the problem.20 In relation to the bloodied Nile, the fact that his magicians
20. David Gunn, ‘The “Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart”: Plot, Character and
Theology in Exodus 1–14’, in Art and Meaning: Rhetoric in Biblical Literature (ed.
David J.A. Clines, David M. Gunn and Alan J. Hauser; JSOTSup, 19; Sheffield: JSOT
Press, 1982), pp. 72-96 (75).
can emulate Moses’ sign is connected with Pharaoh’s heart remaining

hardened. However, when the same thing occurs with the frogs, the penny
seems to drop. In Gunn’s words, ‘frogs upon the land are frogs upon the
land, whoever conjures them up. What matters is getting rid of them.’21
In the text, the power of Egyptian magic is self-defeating; only Yhwh
and his magicians can offer a solution (Exod. 8.8-14). In Exodus: Gods
and Kings the scene is significant by virtue of how it calls back to and
contrasts with the film’s opening, where both Moses and Rameses are to
various degrees dismissive of magic and aligned with reason. Rameses
is unconsoled by the rational (if stretched) explanations of the plagues
offered by his advisor, and troubled by the inefficacy of his High
Priestess in the face of their impact. Both hang. At the same time, Moses
is beginning to realize that, for all his skepticism, his destiny has indeed
proven to have been firmly tied up with magic, signs, and wonders.
We witness in these scenes the ways in which the religious sensibilities
of both central characters have shifted and are shifting. When Moses first
returns to Egypt and visits Rameses to demand the release of the slaves,
the Pharaoh accuses him of ‘listening to Hebrews’. Moses replies that he
is not listening to Hebrews, but listening to God, and, puzzled, Rameses
inquires ‘which God?’ Moses does not offer a reply, but the message is
clear enough. In the next scene, Rameses declares before his court of
Moses that ‘he has lost his mind. He has found a god. His god, not one
of ours.’ Later, in the face of Moses’ insistence that God will continue to
punish Egypt if Rameses does not relent, and in a way that will involve
personal tragedy, Scott transforms the angered Pharaoh into a defiant
defender of theological orthodoxy: ‘I am a god! I am a god!’ As the final
plague approaches, both central characters have completed their journeys
of religious transformation – and now their theological ideologies will be
tested in the fire of extreme violence.
The Morning after the Night Before

As Moses recognizes that he is powerless to divert Malak from his inten-
tions, Scott shoots Rameses as the picture of the doting father, cradling
and lullabying his infant son to sleep. In so doing, he steps away from
DeMille’s careful framing of the death of the firstborn as the Pharaoh’s
own murderous barbarism turned back against him. For all its conven-
tional aspects, it begins to become clear that Exodus: Gods and Kings is
less obviously divided along the standard ideological lines that comprise
21. Gunn, ‘The “Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart” ’, 75.

the Mosaic distinction than we might expect of a glossy Hollywood epic

seemingly in the mould of DeMille. Rather than serving just desserts to
a killer of Israelite children, the logic behind the work of Scott’s angel of
death seems simply to be that extreme violence is the only truly effective
means of transforming the situation and achieving the divine will –
especially as that will explicitly involves causing the Egyptians to suffer.
While perhaps shocking, this logic is not entirely alien to the biblical text.
The curious motif of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart raises significant
questions about his freedom to be anything other than a convenient
cipher.22 As Yhwh tells Moses early on in his prophetic commission in
Exod. 3.19, ‘I know, however, that the king of Egypt will not let you go
unless compelled by a mighty hand’ (nrsv).
Reinforcing this thrust, Scott wraps his massacre of the Egyptian
innocents in yet more horror tropes that mimic, but transcend, the estab-
lished cinematic tradition. Borrowing DeMille’s image of a creeping
blackness moving over Egyptian roofs, Scott conveys a more brutal malev-
olence that easily outstrips that of the earlier, holocaust-imagery-laden
shots of Egyptian cruelty. He then shoots tight on Moses’ face as the cries
of Egyptian anguish start to go up across Memphis. The Israelites’ ritual of
smearing blood around their doors is included, but not emphasized – mercy
is far less important here than vengeance. The morning after introduces the
film’s most poignant and powerful scene. Here, Zipporah’s earlier question
about what sort of a god separates families pales into insignificance in the
light of Rameses’ devastating inquiry, which he directs at Moses while
cradling the limp body of his firstborn: ‘Is this your god? Killer of children!
What kind of fanatics worship such a god?’ The chilling gloat that Moses
offers in response – ‘no Hebrew child died last night’ – seems to convey
that he has resolved to interpret the events as a grand vindication, of God,
of his faith, and of his destiny to lead. He resisted, pleaded, and wrestled
for a while, but, in the end, divine power has overcome him. Moreover,
from the perspective of the audience, the ambiguity that Scott has hereto
maintained through an emphasis on naturalism rather than the magical/
miraculous, has collapsed.
In an interesting recasting of the biblical claim that the final plague
would cause Pharaoh not to release the Israelites, but to drive them out
(Exod. 11.1), Rameses’ instruction to Moses to take the people and go is
infused more with moral disdain than fear, acknowledgment of defeat,
or recognition of the power of the Hebrew god. The scene hangs heavy
over the film. Given the shape of the narrative thus far, and the horror of
22. For a thorough exploration of the issues raised by the motif, see Gunn, ‘The
“Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart” ’.
what has unfolded, it seems extremely difficult to empathize with Moses’

interpretation. And yet, that is precisely what the film appears to require.
An unnerving juxtaposition in tone results from the fact that the shots
which follow, depicting the liberated Israelite slaves walking to freedom
accompanied by soaring strings in a major key, stand among the film’s
most triumphant.
Intriguingly, when the Egyptians arrive at the Red Sea, Exodus: Gods
and Kings once again radically de-emphasizes the miraculous, departing
from both text and cinematic tradition by, as with the plagues, denying
Moses clear agency and juxtaposing a naturalistic explanation in the
form of a tsunami-inducing comet with a quasi-magical trope involving
Moses flinging his sword into the sea in anger, only to find it standing
Excalibur-tall in the newly revealed sand. Scott milks his version of
the parting scene (which involves more of a backing up) for its epic,
CGI-rendered spectacle, but there is no sense that it relates in any clear
way to what God did in Egypt. Certainly Scott makes no space for
anything like the declaration (clearly inspired by the Roman centurion of
the Synoptic Gospels23) that DeMille puts in the mouth of his vanquished
Pharaoh: ‘his god is God’.24
As the film heads towards its close, setting aside an intriguing moment
of postcolonially inflected angst shared between Moses and Joshua on
the Canaan-side bank of the Red Sea, the overriding mood is one of the
emergence of stability and the re-establishment of identity – of calm
after a storm. The same Malak who was utterly ruthless in his response
to the idolatries of Egypt, witheringly shakes his head at the sight of the
liberated Israelites worshipping the golden calf. Depicted fleetingly and
from a distance, cramped in the middle of a single, wide shot of flickering
torches and dancing accompanied by the sounds of Orientalist percussion,
anyone not familiar with the story would likely miss the significance
entirely. There is no sense here that God might be considering wiping
out the newly liberated people for their defiance (Exod. 32.10), or that
Moses might be about to orchestrate a grizzly massacre (Exod. 32.26-29).
Instead, the emphasis is squarely on how the people require more lasting
guidance than can be offered by one man. Liberty has been won through
an act of extreme violence, and must now be maintained by a code of law
written on stone slabs. Moses chisels them himself, over tea with Malak.
At the end of a lighthearted discussion about how the two have disagreed
in the past, Malak offers Moses a final opportunity to express any qualms
23. Mt. 27.54 // Mk 15.39 // Lk. 23.47.

24. The Ten Commandments, dir. Cecil B. DeMille (Los Angeles, CA: Paramount,
1956).
he has with the plan and to ‘put down the chisel’. Starting with the camera
tight on Moses’ hands as he deliberately continues to engrave, Scott cuts
to a medium shot which lasts just long enough for the audience to register
that the hunched, candlelit figure is alone, leaving us to ponder for how
long that has been the case.
Conclusion
Exodus: Gods and Kings opens with a religious ritual that, we are
explicitly told, requires interpretation. Thereafter, it presents a series of
events – some based closely on the biblical text and its canon of popular
reworkings, and others represented in novel ways – that may or may not
imply magical or miraculous activity, and asks us to do the interpretative
work. The audience’s interpretative journey is guided and mirrored by
those of the two central characters, presented as doubles to emphasize
their gradual divergence. Indicative of a far more complex and uncertain
moral landscape than the ones reflected in either of DeMille’s Moses
films, or in Disney’s The Prince of Egypt,25 Scott clearly intends to offer
the first cinematic adaptation of this scale that contends seriously with the
ideological and ethical issues in play. The shape of contemporary public
discourse means there is little option for a mainstream adaptation of this
story not to reflect on the problematic nature of the religio-ethnic violence
of the source material. Exodus: Gods and Kings quite clearly evokes and
plays with the distinction between freedom fighters and terrorists, and
highlights, especially in the depiction of Malak, the darkness in the story’s
fundamental recourse to extreme violence in the service of religious
ideology.
At the heart of the film lies the final plague. Here, all ambiguity seems
to drop away in the face of an act of extreme violence with very few
possible explanations. Regardless of whatever was responsible for the
crocodiles or flies, Moses’ religious awakening in the wilderness, or the
giant, backed-up wave of the Red Sea, there seems little room here to deny
that Rameses’ question ‘Is this your god? Killer of children!’ is squarely
rhetorical. The intense and lingering horror of the final plague and its
aftermath cuts square through the film’s otherwise conventional structure
and tone. The following scene of triumphant liberation strikes an odd note
given that the suffering of the Egyptians and its apparent emotional effect
on Moses are given more dramatic emphasis than the depictions of the
suffering of the Israelite slaves offered early on in the film.
25. The Prince of Egypt, dir. Simon Wells, Brenda Chapman, and Steve Hickner
(Glendale, CA: DreamWorks Animation, 1998).
In his analysis of the reception history of Moses and the exodus in

modern literature, Brian Britt argues for the dominance of works that
he describes as constituting a literature of repression.26 Such retellings,
he argues, follow the conventions of biography or Bildungsroman, and
portray Moses as an heroic and wise Enlightenment humanist, favour
naturalistic interpretation, marginalize the function of magic, and radically
deemphasize the role of violence. In so doing, Britt contends, such works
‘repress the complexity of biblical and post-biblical traditions’.27 By way
of contrast, Britt identifies examples of a minority counter-tradition of
what he calls literature of confrontation, which draw out and play with
details from the biblical and popular postbiblical tradition at odds with the
social, political, and theological norms of their day.28 Siegfried Kracauer
proposes what is in some ways a parallel distinction in the epilogue of
his classic Theory of Film.29 Adumbrating the relationship between a film
and the world in which it was produced (both ideological and physical),30
Kracauer argues that films ‘confront visible material reality with our
notion of it’ and, in so doing, ‘may either confirm these notions or give the
lie to them’.31 In applying this distinction, Kracauer speaks of films that
‘corroborate’ the hegemonic view of the world, and those that ‘debunk’ it.32
To borrow Britt’s language, there is a sense in which Exodus: Gods and
Kings is squarely a film of repression. It inherits and embodies several of
the conventions of Moses the great man, and at its conclusion seems to
26. Britt, Rewriting Moses, pp. 13-27. By way of germane examples, Britt high-
lights: Louis Untermeyer’s Moses: A Novel and Burning Bush (1928), W.G. Hardy’s
All The Trumpets Sounded (1942), Leon Kolb’s Moses, the Near Easterner (1956),
and Howard Fast’s Moses, Prince of Egypt (1958), which, he argues, all rely on
classic Romantic representations of Moses found especially in Schiller, Goethe, and
Heine (p. 22).
27. Britt, Rewriting Moses, p. 16.
28. Britt, Rewriting Moses, pp. 27-39. Britt’s key examples of this are: Lincoln
Steffens’s Moses in Red (1926), Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain
(1939), and Thomas Mann’s Tables of the Law [Das Gesetz] (1943). Although
notorious for both its ambition and ambiguity (arguably to its own detriment), Mann’s
novella possibly offers the most revealing comparison with Exodus: Gods and Kings.
Tables of the Law emphases the use of violence as a tool in the creation of moral
order, but does so in the context of a portrayal of Moses as a dark, near-deranged
dictator, that is clearly intended to parody Hitler.
29. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 304-308.
30. Hence Kracauer’s choice of subtitle.
31. Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 306.
32. Kracauer, Theory of Film, pp. 306-307.
offer an endorsement of the neat ideology of Assmann’s Mosaic distinction.

However, in its profound emphasis on the nature of the violence that both
gives rise to the liberation of the Hebrews, and fixes the end point of
Moses and Rameses’ journeys of ideological and theological interpre-
tation, the film also confronts uncomfortable and often overlooked or
under-considered aspects of the biblical tradition and its popular reception,
in particular the recourse to extreme violence, Pharaoh and Moses’
apparent lack of agency, the unquestioned exercise of divine power, and
the comfortable representations of liberation and miraculous intervention.
In attempting to give credence to the weight of these issues and more than
gesture at their contemporary relevance, Scott creates a powerful counter-
narrative within the film. However, in Kracauerian terms, this does not
function to debunk the ideological status quo. In fact, the apparent need
to focus on the violence inherent in the narrative, to represent it in ways
that conjure up news footage of contemporary conflict, and to linger on the
emotional weight of its effects – even when these foci function to create
tensions that are not well suited to a mainstream studio blockbuster – might
well be best explained by the desire for a film of this type at this moment
in time to corroborate discourses that inextricably connect religion with
violence.
The effects of these tensions at the centre of the film are unsettling. The
emotional and moral weight of the question ‘who would worship such
a god?’ echoes long over everything that happens thereafter, disrupting
the film’s tonal harmony and, by releasing dramatic tension before the
Red Sea is reached, also the function of its narrative arc. In the scenes
depicting the crossing of the Red Sea and the production of the tablets
of the law, the film picks back up the trope of providing possible natural-
istic explanations for the events depicted but, by then, the point seems to
be moot. To misquote the traditional Passover song Dayenu: if He had
slaughtered their firstborn, but not parted the Red Sea, it would have been
enough. However, what might be seen to constitute Exodus: Gods and
Kings’ biggest flaw as a piece of conventional, epic filmmaking makes it
both a more interesting and nuanced piece of art, and constitutes its most
important contribution to the reception history of the exodus story.
‘S ee T h i s G r eat S i ght ’:
R i dl e y S cot t ’ s E x od u s : G ods and K ings
a nd t he E vol ut i on of B i b li cal S pe ctacle
i n t h e C i n em a
David Shepherd
Abstract
This study builds on recent explorations of the notion of spectacle in the
genesis and evolution of the biblical film by surveying its significance in the
cinematic reception of the Moses/Exodus tradition. Analysis of Scott’s film
suggests that the novelty of his contribution to the continuing evolution of
the spectacle of Exodus in the cinema lies not only in its deployment of CGI
to enhance the spectacle of both the plagues and the interpolation of human
violence, but also in Scott’s reluctance/reticence to display the spectacle of
the ‘supernatural’. It is suggested that this latter tendency, when considered
alongside Scott’s persistent valorization of the discourse of spectacle at the
expense of mere story, may well help to explain why some have accused
his film of eliminating all signs of the supernatural from his Exodus: Gods
and Kings.
The Spectacle of Exodus:

From La Vie de Moïse to The Prince of Egypt
When he made his big screen debut in Pathé Frères’ La Vie de Moïse in
1905, Moses must have seemed an obvious choice for the French film
pioneer, Charles Pathé. First, as with the stories of Pathé’s earlier biblical
favorites, Jesus and Samson, it could be safely assumed that audiences
already knew the life of Moses in broad outline before the lights went
down. The chief advantage of not needing to tell the story of Moses was
that it left Pathé’s unknown director free to illustrate only the most iconic
moments of the story in the slightly more than five minutes of moving
pictures he was permitted.
What’s more, Moses’ story, like the stories of Jesus and Samson, was
well-supplied with ‘great sights’, which offered ample opportunity to
display the cinematic miracles and visual wonders that entranced both
film-makers and filmgoers at the advent of the so-called ‘cinema of attrac-
tions’.1 The greatness of sights like the finding of Moses in the bulrushes
or Moses bringing water from the rock was confirmed both for audiences
and film-makers by the regular appearance of these scenes in paintings by
great artists of the western tradition, not least in the nineteenth century
which would at its end give birth to moving pictures.2 More realistic
even than the realist paintings of orientalists like Long, Poynter or Alma
Tadema, it was of course the fact that these moving pictures actually
moved, almost miraculously, which gave them an unparalleled, indeed
uncanny, capacity to convey the true extraordinariness of these great
sights of the Bible.
In some cases, such miracles might be achieved with stage tricks
borrowed from cinema’s live action rival, the theatre, as is the case when
Pathé’s Moses in 1905 brings forth water from a rock and manna is simply
sprinkled down on to the set from a height well out of camera shot.3 Yet,
if Pathé’s burning bush, with its cloth ribbon flames flapping in the breeze
of a hidden fan, represented little advance on the tricks of the theatre, the
power of moving pictures to turn a staff into a snake before audiences’
astonished eyes, whether by stop-motion techniques or dropped frames,
afforded moving pictures a unique capacity to make biblical miracles
appear truly miraculous. Thus, endowed with a story which did not need
to be told and spectacles which demanded to be shown, it is small wonder
that the Bible furnished the earliest cinema with the subject matter of
some of its most expensive, most watched, most lengthy and most iconic
films.4
1. See, for instance, Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film,
its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (ed.
Thomas Elsaesser; London: BFI, 1990), pp. 56-62. For a re-evaluation of the concepts
associated with the ‘cinema of attraction(s)’ see Wanda Strauven, The Cinema of
Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2007).
2. For illustration of the ways in which early biblical films drew upon the visual
and performing arts, see David J. Shepherd, The Bible on Silent Film: Spectacle, Story
and Scripture in the Early Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
and David J. Shepherd, ed., The Silents of Jesus in the Cinema (1897–1927) (New
York: Routledge, 2016).
3. See Shepherd, Bible on Silent Film, pp. 52-54 for the treatment of these scenes
and their typological significance.
4. For treatment of biblical films in the silent era, see Shepherd, The Bible on
Silent Film, and Shepherd, The Silents of Jesus.
Shepherd ‘See This Great Sight’ 77
That Moses and other biblical subjects remained popular throughout

much of the silent era and then fell spectacularly out of favour with the
advent of sound, is, I have argued elsewhere, a function of the fact that
the biblical film became inextricably bound up with the notion of silent
spectacle, remaining throughout the era not primarily a story to be told
but rather a spectacle to be shown.5 That the biblical film survived and
resurfaced so regularly throughout the three decades of the silent era is
not only testament to the silent era’s dependence on spectacle, but also
to the ways in which the various species of spectacle associated with the
biblical film changed with the social, political and cinematic times.
Thus, in 1910, five years after the Pathé film, both the water from
the rock and the manna from heaven were included again when Stuart
Blackton directed his American blockbuster Life of Moses for Vitagraph.6
By 1923, however, DeMille could find no place for these scenes in the
first of his two versions of The Ten Commandments, moving directly from
the greater cinematic spectacle of the parting of the sea to the unabashed
visual extravagance of the giving of the Law at Sinai, intercut with the
episode of the Golden Calf.7 At the same time, while Pathé’s five-minute
life of Moses opens with the Finding of Moses, Blackton’s much longer
1909 film would be the first, but far from the last, to begin instead with
the spectacle of Hebrew suffering at the hands of the Egyptians, a scene
which would in DeMille’s subsequent 1923 film be directly influenced by
Poynter’s remarkable nineteenth-century painting, ‘Israel in Egypt’.8
When, in the 1950s, Hollywood responded to the threat of television’s
small screen by making its cameras, screens and films even bigger, it was
of course primarily an appetite for epic spectacle rather than melodramatic
story which persuaded DeMille to resurrect Moses, now in Technicolor
and Vistavision.9 When the biblical film was eventually crushed beneath
its own epic weightiness, an outlet for the spectacle of the cinematic
5. For the most recent articulation of this argument see my final reflections in
Shepherd, The Silents of Jesus. Early silent films (not least biblical ones) were of
course rarely truly ‘silent’ in that they were often accompanied by either music or
voice-over narration
6. For discussion of this film, see Shepherd, The Bible on Silent Film, pp. 61-94.
7. See David Shepherd, ‘ “An Orgy Sunday-School Children Can Watch”?
The Seduction of Spectacle and the Spectacle of Seduction in DeMille’s Ten
Commandments (1923)’, in The Ancient World in the Silent Cinema (ed. M. Wyke and
P. Michelakis; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 262-74.
8. See Shepherd, The Bible on Silent Film, p. 230.
9. For more on Hollywood’s response to the advent of television see, for instance,
Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959 (Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2003), pp. 162-68.
Jesus was found first in musicals like Godspell (1973) and Jesus Christ
Superstar (1973) and then in the parody of the epic, Monty Python’s Life
of Brian (1979).
In the case of Moses, the parody came first in the form of Wholly Moses
(1980), a hapless and quite unfunny attempt to do to Moses what Life
of Brian had done to Jesus.10 The spectacle of Moses as musical came
later, courtesy of DreamWorks’ The Prince of Egypt (1998). But with the
film’s animated recreation of DeMille’s epic Egypt, its live-action-like
cinematography, its opening chariot sequence, animated wall paintings and
especially its singing and dancing scenes, it might be argued that at the
time it was released in 1998, The Prince of Egypt was the fullest expression
of ‘Exodus as spectacle’ in the history of the cinema.
With this genesis and evolution of the Moses/Exodus tradition as
spectacle in mind, it is worth considering the place of Scott’s Exodus:
Gods and Kings within this development and the recent renaissance of the
biblical cycle/genre.11
The Spectacle of the Supernatural in Exodus: Gods and Kings

Much as Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) does, Scott clearly exploits the
capacities of CGI in an effort to reproduce the iconic spectacles of the
cinematic Moses tradition on an epic scale to rival and indeed surpass
the visuals of DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1923/1956) and The
Prince of Egypt (1998).12 Thus, we see a large number of aerial shots of
Scott’s vision of ancient Memphis, Pithom, the Egyptians in battle with
the Hittites and of course the departure of the Hebrews from Egypt. The
spectacle of the suffering of the Hebrews in Egypt, a prominent feature
in both versions of DeMille’s Ten Commandments and lightly glossed
10. See David Shepherd, ‘When Brian Met Moses: Life of Brian (1979), Wholly
Moses (1980) and the “Failure” of Biblical Parody’, in Jesus and Brian: Exploring
the Historical Jesus and his Times via Monty Python’s Life of Brian (ed. Joan Taylor;
London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 43-54.
11. Whether the biblical film might better be described as a cycle than a genre is
an open question. For a useful consideration of similar issues in relation to the termi-
nology of the ‘epic’, see Andrew B.R. Elliott, ‘Introduction: The Return of the Epic’,
in The Return of the Epic Film Genre: Aesthetics and History in the 21st Century (ed.
Andrew B.R. Elliott; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 4-10.
12. For a useful discussion of the use of CGI in recent ‘epic’ films prior to
Noah (2014) and Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) see Andrew B.R. Elliott, ‘Special
Effects, Reality and the New Epic Film’, in Elliott, ed., The Return of the Epic Film,
pp. 129-43.
even in the Prince of Egypt, receives a very full treatment in Scott’s

Exodus: Gods and Kings. In addition to the traditional scenes of Hebrews
in ‘hard bondage’ in building Pithom, Scott’s Hebrews endure repeated
hangings as Ramases seeks to extract Moses from them and break their
will. Perhaps the most striking single spectacle of Hebrew suffering is
the one in which Joshua smiles while he is being flogged by an Egyptian.
The flogging itself, the exchange which emphasizes Joshua’s remarkable
endurance, and indeed the size and scale of the welts on his back seem
calculated to evoke the stoic resistance to physical suffering characteristic
of Mel Gibson’s Jesus throughout the flogging scene of the Passion of the
Christ.13 If so, it is not the first biblical film to supplement the spectacle
native to its own narrative with one drawn from another.14
While Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings passes over the finding of Moses
in the Nile, the spectacle of Egyptian violence against Hebrew families
depicted with such relish both in Blackton’s The Life of Moses (1909–10)
and Andréani’s Moïse sauvé des eaux (1911) is resituated by Scott within
the narrative of Egyptian reprisals for Hebrew armed rebellion. Indeed,
this rebellion and reprisals for it, Moses’ killing of the assassins sent to kill
him, the extended battle scene of the Egyptians and Hittites, the Egyptian
executions of their own people, and the other violence described above
make this the most violent Exodus ever filmed.15 This is of course in
keeping with Aronosky’s Noah, which likewise mounts a level of violence
which exceeds Curtiz’s 1928 offering, Noah’s Ark, and rivals even The
Passion of the Christ (2004), which as indicated above, metes out human
violence on a scale unprecedented in the genre of the Jesus film. While
some of this violence in Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings is integrated
into the narrative of his film, and reflects his remaking of Moses as a
kind of General Maximus, it also reflects the evolution of violence in the
13. For a much-needed longer historical perspective on the spectacle of the

suffering of Christ seen in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), see
Alison Griffiths, ‘The Monstrous Epic: Deciphering Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the
Christ’, in The Epic Film in World Culture (ed. R. Burgoyne; New York: Routledge,
AFI Film Reader, 2010), pp. 315-45 (esp. pp. 325-45).
14. See for instance, the discussion of Michael Curtiz’s Noah’s Ark (1928) in
Shepherd, Bible on Silent Film, pp. 279-88.
15. Like DeMille’s versions in 1923 and 1956, Scott chooses to pass over
Exodus’s own account of the Hebrews’ armed conflict with the Amalekites (cf.
Blackton’s apparent fleeting reference to this episode in his Life of Moses [1909–10]),
whether for reasons of narrative pacing, or because Moses plays a more passive role
in Exod. 17 than could be accommodated within Scott’s remaking of Moses as a
general, or indeed perhaps because the avoidance of the supernatural is less easy in
this biblical battle-scene.
American cinema since the biblical films of the fifties.16 A further illus-
tration of Scott’s penchant for the spectacle of violent destruction may be
seen in the fate of the Egyptian chariots pursuing the Hebrews. While the
destruction of the Egyptian chariots by the sea is of course invoked by
Exodus itself and ubiquitous in cinematic depictions of it, Scott offers the
audience the added spectacle of some of the chariots being destroyed as
the mountain pass on which they travel collapses under the burden of the
thunderous progress of horse and chariot.
If it is clear that Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings makes a spectacle
of violence to a greater extent than previous cinematic treatments, it is
his aversion for another species of spectacle – namely that of the super-
natural – which may well be even more of a novelty in the cinematic
reception of the Exodus. Within the ancient tradition of Exodus itself the
narratorial awareness of the notion of spectacle is nowhere greater than in
the episode of the burning bush (Exod. 3.2-4 nrsv):
There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush;
he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses
said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is
not burned up’. When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, God
called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am’.
Scott’s scene begins with the spectacle of another rockslide which

buries Moses, who then awakes to hear a boy – later identified as the
messenger of God – calling him. While the camera is positioned so that
we can see the burning bush clearly behind the boy, Moses’ face is turned
upward toward the heavens such that the bush can only be seen on the
periphery of his vision at best, if at all. The bush burns with an ethereal
light but, unlike the bush of biblical provenance, this bush does give every
appearance of being consumed, if the ash floating in the air is any indica-
tion.17 Far from turning aside to see the ‘great sight’ of the burning bush
as in the biblical tradition, Christian Bale’s Moses can apparently barely
see it at all. Instead, the bush is effectively and quite literally upstaged by
the boy who proceeds to commission Moses to return to Egypt to save
his people. Indeed, this diminishing of the spectacle of the supernatural
is aided and abetted by the abandonment of the booming stentorian voice
16. For a series of useful approaches and perspectives see David T. Slocum, ed.,
Violence and American Cinema (New York: Routledge/AFI Film Readers, 2000).
17. Compare, for instance, the DreamWorks’ scene in which the miraculous
quality of the fire is established when Moses touches the fire and discovers that it
burns neither his staff nor his hand.
of DeMille’s God or the ethereal whisper of The Prince of Egypt’s God,

in favour of a divine messenger in Scott’s film who speaks in the clipped
cadences of an English public school boy. Whereas all previous cinematic
versions of the Exodus make much of the spectacle of the supernatural in
this scene, the elision of spectacle here by Scott is the viewer’s first hint
that he will take a rather different approach.
Further clues are offered by the radical abridgment of the dialogue
between Moses and the messenger at this point, including the omission
of both God’s promise to extend the divine hand and strike Egypt with
all ‘my wonders’… (Exod. 3.20) and the supernatural spectacles of the
leprous hand and especially the staff-cum-snake included in the first film
of the Exodus.18 Moses’ subsequent fevered conversation with his wife
hints at the uncertainty of divine revelation/delusion (as in Aronofsky’s
Noah), but the fact that Moses mentions the storm (conjured up ex nihilo
by Scott) rather than the divine spectacle of the biblical burning bush,
would appear to confirm Scott’s diminishing of the spectacle of the super-
natural in this pivotal scene.19
While, in their own way, both DeMille’s 1956 Ten Commandments and
even DreamWorks’ The Prince of Egypt make much of the spectacle of
the supernatural staff which becomes a snake and proceeds to swallow
its Egyptian rivals,20 when Bale’s Moses returns to Egypt to confront
Pharaoh, he brandishes not the staff, in a public display of the super-
natural, but instead a sword, foreshadowing the spectacle of human
force which follows.21 Indeed, following the diminishing of the divine
fire at Sinai, it is noteworthy that it is the spectacle of human fire which
animates and dominates the Hebrew rebellion against Pharaoh and his
forces. An act of arson leads to a spectacular conflagration in a granary
before the fire-tipped arrows of the Hebrews – resembling nothing so
18. While the transformation of the staff into a snake was included in Pathé’s La
Vie de Moïse (1905) neither of the signs proved popular with subsequent filmmakers.
19. Compare for instance the conversation between Moses, his wife and Joshua
following the Burning Bush episode in DeMille’s 1956 Ten Commandments in which
Heston’s Moses admits that ‘my eyes could not look upon Him… He is not flesh, but
spirit, the light of eternal mind.’
20. In The Prince of Egypt, this scene serves as the occasion for the Egyptian
magicians’ musical extravaganza, ‘Playing with the Big Boys’, yet, the supernatural
transformation of staff into snake and back into staff is also clearly displayed, as is
the Hebrew snake’s swallowing of the Egyptian ones.
21. There could hardly be a greater contrast between Scott’s Moses and DeMille’s
1956 Moses (Charlton Heston) at this point, given the latter’s clarification to Joshua
on his return from Sinai, that it will not be by the sword, but by the shepherd’s staff
that the Hebrews will be freed.
much as modern tracer fire – set an Egyptian flotilla alight on the Nile as
night falls. The camera rests on Pharaoh as he and the viewer watch the
spectacle of the burning ships, which leads directly to his decision to quell
the rebellion by fighting fire with fire, as Egyptians troops proceed to burn
Hebrew houses and their inhabitants.
The divine messenger’s subsequent comment to Moses, ‘I’ve been
watching you fail’, confirms Moses’ rebellion as nothing more than
ineffectual spectacle while the boy’s command to Moses that ‘for now,
you can watch’ invites the viewer to assume that the plagues which follow
will now belatedly reflect the spectacle of the truly supernatural. Thanks
to its judicious use of CGI, Scott’s plague sequence itself is arguably one
of the most visually stunning – and indeed harrowing – versions ever
committed to film. Moreover, the message delivered to Pharaoh in Hebrew
on a horse affirms to Pharaoh the Hebrew claim that ‘these catastrophes
are the work of God’. Yet the actual cause of the plagues is complicated
for the viewer by two scenes in which an Egyptian sage explicates the
natural links between the initial series of plagues, which then seem to be
corroborated by the images of the plagues themselves: the thrashing of the
spectacularly oversized crocodiles leads to the disturbing of the red clay,
which kills the fish and ejects the frogs, who then die and attract the flies,
etc.22 While Pharaoh’s eventual execution of the sage might be interpreted
as his dismissal of the naturalistic explanation, the sage’s death, like that
of the female priest, more likely reflects their shared inability to halt the
plagues rather than their failure to explain them.
One plague which has proven persistently difficult to explain apart
from supernatural causality is the final one – the death of the Egyptian
firstborn.23 Given both the messenger’s signalling of the divine intention
to Moses immediately before the tenth plague and the suggestion that
Scott was unable to depict the death of the firstborn in naturalistic terms,24
22. For a survey of recent rationalist explanations of the plagues and their own
analysis, see N. Joel Ehrenkranz and Deborah Sampson, ‘Origin of the Old Testament
Plagues: Explications and Implications’, Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 81.1
(2008), pp. 31-42.
23. Ehrenkranz and Sampson, ‘Origin of the Old Testament Plagues’. For a
recent endorsement of the suggestion that the firstborn died from eating contaminated
grain, see Colin Humphreys, The Miracles of Exodus: A Scientist’s Discovery of the
Extraordinary Natural Causes of the Biblical Stories (London: Continuum, 2003),
pp. 140-43.
24. When Stephen Greydanus, in an interview for the National Catholic Register,
asks if Scott depicted the final plague in a less naturalistic fashion than the other
plagues, Christian Bale interjects: ‘[Ridley] has said it’s the one he couldn’t find
any other way to tell it. It just had to be told in that fashion.’ ‘The Exodus: Gods
one might expect Scott’s aversion for the spectacle of the supernatural to
relent in his depiction of the final plague. Such an expectation, however,
is not fulfilled in Scott’s treatment of the death of the firstborn.
First, in marked contrast to the other plagues in Scott’s film, but in
keeping with the Exodus account of the tenth plague, Scott’s death of the
firstborn is significantly narrativized – the plague itself is embedded in a
sequence in which we see Pharaoh being warned by Moses, the Hebrews
offered instructions to ensure that the plague ‘passes over’ them, and then
the doorposts and lintels being smeared with blood in keeping with these
instructions.25 Once the plague has done its work, Scott moves without
delay to draw out the narrative implications, by focusing the viewer’s
attention on the death of Pharaoh’s firstborn and those of his people.26
Thus whereas the other naturalistic plagues are depicted by Scott as pure
and unadulterated spectacle unencumbered by significant narrative devel-
opment, Scott’s treatment of the tenth plague suggests that he is to some
extent less interested in the spectacle of the death of the firstborn and
comparatively more interested in the story of it.
Indeed, that the most supernatural of Scott’s plagues is his least
spectacular one is confirmed by his depiction of it. While the first cinematic
treatment of the tenth plague (Life of Moses, Vitagraph 1909–10) made
a spectacle of the death of the firstborn by causing an angel armed with
a sword to appear (and then disappear) in the houses of the Egyptians,
DeMille’s 1956 Ten Commandments deployed a sinister greenish gas to
creep along the ground and claim its victims. DreamWorks’ The Prince
of Egypt (1998), however, signals the divine origins of its tenth plague
by commencing its sequence with a star of white light appearing in the
night sky over Egypt. From this star, a ray of lethal white light shoots
downward toward the city and Pharaoh’s palace. As it races in and out
of the Egyptian houses, taking its terrible toll on the Egyptian firstborn,
the spectacle of the deadly stream of light in the dark night causes the
Egyptian guards to recoil in fear as it breaches the palace in search of its
royal victim.
and Kings Filmmakers Talk about the Challenges of Portraying God, Moses and
the Plagues’, 12 October 2014, http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/interview-
exodus-filmmakers/#ixzz3kn5phSoI (accessed 15 September 2015).
25. That viewers as early as 1910 might find this ritual fascinating to watch is
suggested by its sustained treatment in both Feuillade’s L’Exode (Gaumont) and
Blackton’s Life of Moses (Vitagraph).
26. For an astonishingly bold treatment of the tragic implications of the plague
for the Egyptian people see the discussion of Feuillade’s L’Exode in Shepherd, Bible
on Silent Film, pp. 112-17.
By contrast, Scott’s treatment of the sequence begins not with light

in the heavens, but rather a dark shadow which gradually creeps across
Pharaoh’s city apparently just before dawn. The shadow itself is seen first
by Moses and then by the Hebrews within their houses, but the darkness
itself is not the plague, for Scott’s ninth plague of darkness has already
come and gone. Based on the gasping of the Egyptian firstborn, it appears
that the plague itself is what is hidden in or by the darkness – an invisible
additive to the atmosphere which either poisons the lungs of the Egyptian
firstborn, or snatches their breath away altogether. Thus in keeping with
Scott’s aversion for associating spectacle with the supernatural, the only
plague which Scott sees as undeniably supernatural in origin is one
which cannot be seen at all.27 Scott’s reluctance to make a spectacle of
the supernatural is confirmed by the effect of this invisible divine wind –
which extinguishes not only the lives of the firstborn, but also the only
thing which may be seen in the dark of night: the fires which burn in the
Egyptians’ homes and the Pharaoh’s palace.
Scott’s reluctance may also been seen in his treatment of the divine
‘cloud’ which protects the vulnerable Hebrews according to the Exodus
tradition (Exod. 14.19-20). Exploiting the fact that this cloud gives light
(14.20) and is accompanied by fire (14.24), DeMille in both versions of
his Ten Commandments (1923; 1956) creates the cinematic spectacle of
a protective wall of fire which intervenes between the Hebrews and the
pursuing Egyptians. Seeking to emulate and indeed outdo DeMille, The
Prince of Egypt increases the spectacle by having its version of the wall of
fire miraculously stretch to thwart, at every turn, the Egyptians’ attempts
to outflank it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Scott’s reticence regarding the
spectacle of the supernatural leads him to pass over such fiery displays
altogether, perhaps for the simple reason that without a forest for fuel,
walls of fire are not particularly susceptible to anything other than super-
natural explanation. Thus, while we have already seen that Scott’s burning
bush quite literally pales in comparison with earlier versions and with the
spectacle of the fires of human conflict conjured up by Bale’s Moses on
his return to Egypt, here before the parting of the sea, the spectacle of the
supernatural fire is extinguished by Scott altogether.
Scott’s preference for making a spectacle of the naturalistic is also
confirmed by his treatment of perhaps the most iconic moment of
spectacle in the history of the cinematic depiction of the Exodus: the
27. In L’Exode, Louis Feuillade in fact passes over entirely a depiction of the
actual deaths of the firstborn in favour of focusing on its consequences. See Shepherd,
Bible on Silent Film, pp. 112-17.
parting of the sea. The combination of CGI, location footage shot in Spain
and underwater shots taken in the tanks at Pinewood Studios,28 enables
Scott to produce a parting of the sea the spectacle of which exceeds the
efforts of even DeMille, who also made use of the latest technology to
produce his memorable versions, first in 1923 and then 1956.29 While the
slow retreat of the water makes Scott’s initial shots less dramatic than the
explosive parting and monumental walls of water in DeMille’s versions or
indeed The Prince of Egypt, the cinematography and CGI of Scott’s shots
of the returning tsunami-like wave allow him to create an undeniably
extraordinary visual effect which is unprecedented in the cinematic
tradition of the Exodus.
Both DeMille’s versions and The Prince of Egypt follow the earliest
cinematic depictions of this scene and the Exodus tradition itself by
making clear how the parting of the sea is a divine initiative facilitated
by Moses.30 Scott’s Moses does cry out to God, but his prayer is one of
despondency and resignation at what he perceives to be his inability to
fulfil his divine vocation to lead the people to freedom.31 Rather than
extending his staff over the sea, Christian Bale’s Moses hurls his sword
into the sea, evidently a symbol of resignation that his own efforts to
deliver the Hebrews by armed rebellion have failed. Indeed, the subse-
quent initiating of the parting of the sea scene with the spectacle of a light
falling from the night sky facilitates Scott’s intention to depict the parting
28. See Bryan Alexander, ‘Ridley Scott Has a Way with Water in “Exodus”
Scene’, USA Today, 11 December 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/
movies/2014/12/11/ridley-scott-director-exodus-gods-and-kings/20212693/
(accessed 7 September 2015).
29. For discussion of DeMille’s 1923 scene and the arguably even more accom-
plished version produced for Michael Curtiz’s Die Sklavenkönigin (1924) see
Shepherd, Bible on Silent Film, pp. 253-54.
30. Despite Moses clearly praying to the heavens in 1905’s La Vie de Moïse (Pathé),
the emphasis in the narration which accompanies the silent film is on the agency of
Moses who ‘…performed a miracle’. In DeMille’s 1923 The Ten Commandments,
divine involvement is signalled by an intertitle quoting Exod. 14.21: ‘And Moses
stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back and made
the sea dry land and the waters were divided’, while in DeMille’s 1956 version, any
doubt regarding divine involvement is removed by Heston’s proclamation ‘The LORD
of Hosts will do battle for us; behold his mighty hands’ as he stretches out his staff over
the water.
31. See Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) for a similar scene in which Noah also
sits on a sea shore despondent at what he perceives to be his own failure to live up
to his divine vocation.
of the sea as the result of a tsunami caused by an asteroid.32 This expla-

nation is among several which have been offered as a means of explaining
the parting of the sea in terms of the natural, rather than the supernatural
as traditionally understood.33 That this was Scott’s intention seems to be
suggested by his own admission that:
I have to part the Dead [sic] Sea—but I’m not going to part the Dead Sea,
because I don’t believe I can part the Dead Sea and keep shimmering water
on each side. I’m a very practical person. So I was always thinking of
science-based elements.34
Thus, armed with a ‘scientific’ explanation for Exodus’s parting of the sea,
Scott is happy to make an unparalleled spectacle of the most iconic scene
in the cinematic tradition of Exodus.
Finally, like both versions of DeMille’s Ten Commandments and The
Prince of Egypt, Scott’s film omits the battle with the Amalekites (Exod.
17) (see n. 15 above) and the ‘miracles’ of the water from the rock and
the manna, to expedite the arrival of the Hebrews at Sinai.35 At Sinai in
DeMille’s two earlier films (1923 and 1956), he offers an unrelenting
succession of spectacle by intercutting the orgiastic scenes of the worship
of the calf and cataclysmic destruction at the foot of the mountain, with
the no less spectacular explosion of the divine laws one after another from
the sky.36 Scott by contrast offers only a very slight visual referencing of
the Calf scene in the distant background as Moses ascends the mountain.
Scott’s giving of the law, however, is again revealing. Whereas
DeMille’s commandments are ‘written with the finger of God’ in the
sky, exploding onto the screen in an extravagant excess of light and
smoke (1923) or etched in stone with animated fire (1956), in Scott’s
32. The clear picturing of an asteroid suggests that if Scott’s reading about ancient
earthquakes inspired the decision to part the sea with a tsunami, he then preferred
to have the tsunami caused by a cataclysmic collision rather than an earthquake.
See Sarah Vilkomerson, ‘How Ridley Scott Looked to Science – Not Miracles – to
Part the Red Sea in “Exodus: Gods and Kings” ’, Entertainment Weekly, 23 October
2014, http://www.ew.com/article/2014/10/23/ridley-scott-red-sea-exodus (accessed
7 September 2015).
33. See for instance, Colin Humphreys, The Miracles of the Exodus: A Scientist’s
Discovery of the Extraordinary Natural Causes of the Biblical Stories (London:
Continuum, 2003), p. 5, who locates the supernatural quality of the miracles recorded
in Exodus in the divine ordering and timing of natural events.
34. Greydanus, ‘The Exodus: Gods and Kings filmmakers’.
35. For the inclusion of these scenes in versions prior to 1923 see n. 3 above.
36. See Shepherd, ‘ “An Orgy Sunday-School Children Can Watch” ’.
scene, the only fingers writing – or rather carving – are those of Moses.
Theoretically, Scott’s scene leaves open the possibility that the laws are
merely those of Moses, but what is perfectly clear is that if, as seems more
likely, Scott means for the viewer to understand that the laws have been
given by divine dictation, there is no sign in Scott’s scene of anything like
the spectacle of the supercharged visual extravaganza of DeMille’s divine
revelation of the word. Indeed, in the candle-lit gloom of the scene, Moses
himself appears hardly able to see the words he is carving into the stone
and the viewer catches only a fleeting glimpse of them.
If it is then reasonably clear from the above how Scott’s Exodus: Gods
and Kings diminishes the spectacle of the supernatural to an unprec-
edented extent in the cinematic history of the Exodus, in favour of natural
and human varieties of spectacle, what is perhaps even more interesting,
and arguably even more novel, is the manner in which Scott’s film actually
reinforces his own particular interpretation of the tradition, by valorizing
the discourse of spectacle at the expense of story.
Seeing Is Believing: Discourses of Spectacle and Story
This process begins in the sequence devoted to Moses’ visit to Pithom.

When the viceroy doubts what may be learned ‘by talking with’ the
Hebrews, Moses insists that he will proceed instead ‘by looking at them,
when I talk to them’. ‘You can tell a lot about somebody’, he says ‘by
looking them in the eye’. Here is the first suggestion in the film of the
epistemological centrality of seeing. What can be heard, words alone,
may not necessarily be trusted. To be believed, something or someone
must be seen.
Initial confirmation of this comes when Joshua begs Moses to hear
what Joshua’s father, Nun, has to tell him, but Moses only proceeds to
the prayer house to meet Nun after he has been shown a sign: a paleo-
Hebrew ‘mem’ for ‘Moshe’. When Nun then recounts for Moses the
story of his origins, infancy and deliverance and the truth about Moses’
identity, however, Moses’ response is telling: ‘The truth is that it’s not
even that good a story. And I thought you people were meant to be good
storytellers.’ While Moses will of course come to understand the truth of
this story, Moses’ line here is a suggestive one because unlike virtually
every other cinematic depiction of Exodus/the life of Moses, Scott’s film
simply passes over the hiding and finding of Moses in the Nile. In Scott’s
film, a scene which a hundred years ago offered unmissable spectacle
is now relegated to the status of mere story and in a film which is so
manifestly driven by spectacle, the truth of the story cannot save it from
being not merely omitted, but damned by Moses and Scott as ‘not even
that good a story’. Even more tellingly, Moses’ own critical devaluation of
the Hebrew narrative tradition serves as a diegetical validation of Scott’s
diminishing of story and the triumph of Moses and Exodus as spectacle
in his film.
This theme is resumed after Moses has admitted to being a Hebrew
to prevent Ramases from cutting off Miriam’s arm if she does not admit
to being Moses’ sister. When Ramases’ mother Tuya reminds her son,
Ramases, of Moses’ earlier ‘confession’ Ramases exclaims:
That wasn’t an admission, [he] simply did not want her arm lopped off. I
saw it in his eye. He does not believe this story. I don’t want to believe it.
You want to believe it because it’s an opportunity to be rid of him, which
you always wanted.
Like Moses, Ramases is convinced that truth is revealed not necessarily

by what is said, but by what Ramases sees when he looks, in this case,
Moses, in the eye. That Ramases is right – that it is not appearances
which may be deceiving but rather words – is confirmed at the end of
the following scene, when, before he is exiled, Moses himself is finally
persuaded of his Hebrew identity by Bithia and Miriam. Indeed, here,
Moses will not believe the story told to him even by Bithia and Miriam,
until the latter produces something which can be seen, a small ring which
Miriam insists Moses was wearing when she brought him to the river.
Having seen this, Moses then finally believes, confirming that what is said
alone cannot be trusted to reveal the truth. Rather it is only what can be
seen, what can be observed, which can be and should be believed.
The valorization of what is seen at the expense of mere story is finally
reinforced in Moses’ conversation with his son, Gershom, who is clearly
upset as Moses prepares to leave him and Zipporah to return to Egypt.
Moses insists, ‘I will see you again’, but then asks Gershom, ‘Do you
believe me?’ The boy replies by shaking his head. ‘Good for you’, says
Moses in reply, ‘Never say just what people want to hear…’ Because he
looks his son in the eye, Moses presumably discerns that Gershom has
answered truthfully, but in doing so Moses casts further doubt on the
general reliability of mere words. This general unreliability of what is
merely heard is then contrasted with what is reliable when Moses insists,
‘But I will…I will see you again’ (and by implication will also be seen
by him). Yet again, whereas mere words may deceive, the departing
Moses thus inculcates in his young son the epistemological supremacy of
spectacle – that ‘seeing really is believing’.
At one level, Scott’s epistemological valorization of the discourse of

spectacle (i.e. what must be seen) may help to explain why some have
accused his film of eliminating all traces of the supernatural from Exodus:
Gods and Kings. Given that there are, as we have seen above, no shortage
of references to the supernatural per se in the film, accusations that the
divine is entirely absent may simply disclose the extent to which, for some
viewers, the depiction of the supernatural is inextricably bound up with,
and required to be ‘spectacular’.37 At another level, however, if as we have
suggested Scott insists on depriving the supernatural of any meaningful
spectacle in his film, and if the metadiscourse of the film itself also insists
that it is only spectacle which truly matters – that it is only what may be
seen which may be believed – then it is far from preposterous to suggest
that the film seems to enshrine a belief in what is human and natural at the
expense of a belief in the supernatural.
Ultimately, the supremacy of spectacle over story in Scott’s film is of
course a validation of the aesthetic and economic virtues of the kind of
big budget spectacle films for which DeMille in his time and Ridley Scott
in his, have become famous.38 However, the triumph of spectacle may
also offer some insight into Moses’ reappearance in the cinema of the
early twenty-first century. If, as we have suggested, Scott’s resurrection
of the Exodus on cinema screens makes little space for the spectacle of
the supernatural so characteristic of Moses’ screen debut more than a
century ago, his film does seem to reflect the conviction that while the
power of God to make miracles may be increasingly doubted today, the
power of the cinema to make miracles is just as great at the beginning of
this century as it was at the beginning of the last.
That cinema’s visual miracles must be of such scale and splendor that
they cannot be adequately reproduced on a television, however large it
may be, is explained by Hollywood’s urgent need for cinema audiences
to see and believe in the cinema itself and continue to buy tickets, at a
time when the threat to it is no less great than when the cinema was in
its infancy in the early twentieth century,39 nor indeed in the 1950s, when
37. See for instance, Albert Mohler, ‘Moses without the Supernatural: Ridley
Scott’s Exodus: God’s and Kings’, 15 December 2014, http://www.albertmohler.
com/2014/12/15/moses-without-the-supernatural-ridley-scotts-moses-gods-and-
kings/ (accessed 15 September 2015).
38. See Andrew Pulver, ‘Ridley Scott: From Aliens to Exodus, a Cecil B. DeMille
for the Digital Age’, The Guardian, 28 November 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/
film/2014/nov/28/ridley-scott-alien-exodus-film (accessed 15 September 2015).
39. See W. Uricchio and R. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph
Quality Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 160-94.
DeMille enlisted Moses in Hollywood’s battle to ward off the threat of

television as it was emerging.40 Of course, if Hollywood’s insatiable
appetite for spectacle persists, then it may well be that the renaissance
currently being enjoyed by the biblical film will endure a bit longer. But
if subsequent biblical films follow in Scott’s footsteps, the irony may well
be that those interested in the spectacle of the supernatural will end up
watching more films based on the pantheon of Marvel than the pages of
the Bible.41
40. See Lev, The Fifties.

41. Stan Lee’s own invocation of the ‘biblical’ strongman Samson in his account
of conceiving Superman is an apt illustration of the ‘supernatural’ characteristic of
the majority of the superhero genre: ‘I am lying in bed counting sheep when all of
a sudden it hits me. I conceive a character like Samson, Hercules, and all the strong
men I have ever heard tell of rolled into one. Only more so’ (as cited in M. Benton,
The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History [Dallas, TX: Taylor Publishing,
1993], p. 22).
O n ce u p on a n A p ocaly pse :
E x od us , D i s a s t er , a nd a L ong ,
L on g T i m e A g o ?
Michelle Fletcher
Abstract
This chapter examines the cinematic inheritance of Ridley Scott’s Exodus:
Gods and Kings. However, rather than exploring its resemblance to sword-
and-sandal epics, it will focus on its dialogue with a more unexpected
form: disaster films. It will begin by examining film posters, a key indicator
of filmic resemblance. This will show that while the posters presented
audiences with clear reminders of Scott’s gladiatorial past, they also echoed
apocalyptic films such as The Day after Tomorrow and 2012. An exami-
nation of the history of disaster movies will then be carried out, revealing
distinct cycles of films, each speaking to their audience’s contemporary
concerns, such as technological hubris, millennial anticipation and post-9/11
fears. This analysis will then be used to explore Exodus: Gods and Kings’
own dialogue with disaster, asking how it builds on past manifestations, and
how it also offers its own distinct presentations. Finally, we will return to its
posters in order to question what current concerns might be evoked by the
threats and fears portrayed in Scott’s film.
Introduction
It is frequently assumed that the Apocalypse of John is firmly focused on

future destruction, having little to do with current concerns or past events.
However, although the text may present visions of an end yet to come,
these resound with the past as HB textual references abound. For example,
* I would like to thank David Tollerton for organizing the fantastic event which
led to this volume, and also all my co-presenters for their inspiring thoughts and
invaluable feedback.
Revelation 6’s horsemen resonate with those from Zechariah, Revelation

9’s locusts resemble those of Joel; Revelation 13’s Beasts recall those of
Daniel 7, and Revelation 16’s plagues bring to mind those of Exodus.1 As
a result, analysing the Apocalypse’s portrayal of the future often involves
searching for resemblance to the ‘gone before’: exploring inter-texts,
examining the morphology of genres, and looking at the presence of the
past.2 It is this approach of reading for ‘resemblance’ and ‘presence of the
past’ that this chapter utilizes in order to explore the apocalyptic nature of
Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. Due to the film’s subject matter
we may be forgiven for expecting it primarily to evoke historical delights
such as DeMille’s dazzling epics and Scott’s gladiatorial exploits.
However, this examination will argue that Exodus: Gods and Kings has as
much in common with Hollywood’s future-focused apocalyptic disaster
1. The Apocalypse never quotes the HB, but rather extensively alludes to it, a
constant source of debate for Apocalypse scholarship, e.g. Steve Moyise, The Old
Testament in the Book of Revelation (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995);
Gregory K. Beale, John’s Use of the Old Testament in Revelation (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1998); David Mathewson, A New Heaven and a New Earth: The
Meaning and Function of the Old Testament in Revelation 21:1–22:5 (London:
Sheffield Academic Press, 2003).
2. For overviews of ‘past-seeking’ approaches see Jon Paulien, ‘Dreading the
Whirlwind: Intertextuality and the Use of the Old Testament in Revelation’, Andrews
University Seminary Studies 39.1 (2001), pp. 5-22; Steve Moyise, ‘Models for
Intertextual Interpretation of Revelation’, in Revelation and the Politics of Apocalyptic
Interpretation (ed. Richard B. Hays and Stefan Alkier; Waco, TX: Baylor University
Press, 2012), pp. 31-46; Adela Yarbro Collins, ‘Presidential Address: The Use of
Scripture in the Book of Revelation’ (Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense, Leuven, 23
July 2015). For in-depth examinations in relation to specific books and genres see
Gregory K. Beale, The Use of Daniel in Jewish Apocalyptic Literature and in the
Revelation of St. John (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984); Jean-Pierre
Ruiz, Ezekiel in the Apocalypse: The Transformation of Prophetic Language in
Revelation 16, 17–19, 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989); Jan Fekkes, Isaiah
and Prophetic Traditions in the Book of Revelation: Visionary Antecedents and their
Development (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994); Marko Jauhiainen, The Use of Zechariah
in Revelation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005); Frederick David Mazzaferri, The
Genre of the Book of Revelation from a Source-Critical Perspective (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1989); David E. Aune, ‘Intertextuality and the Genre of the Apocalypse’, in
SBL Seminar Papers 1991 (SBLSP, 30; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), pp. 142-60;
Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation
(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1993); Michelle Fletcher, ‘Apocalypse Noir: How
Revelation Defined and Defied a Genre’, in The Book of Revelation: Currents in
British Research on the Apocalypse (ed. Garrick V. Allen, Ian Paul, and Simon P.
Woodman; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), pp. 115-34.
Fletcher Once upon an Apocalypse 93
films as sword-and-sandal epics, and that this cinematic heritage can be

used to reassess its relationship with the past, present, and future.3 To do
this I will begin by examining a central filmic resemblance indicator:
posters. This will reveal a penchant for the past, but with disaster also
looming on the horizon. An examination of the history of disaster movies
will then be carried out, revealing how cycles of films have altered to
accommodate contemporary concerns. This analysis will then be used to
inform our reading of Exodus: Gods and Kings, asking how it inherits an
apocalyptic past and utilizes this in a new temporal location. Finally, we
will postulate how its presentation of disaster might inform our under-
standing of present cultural concerns.
Exodus: Gods and Kings’ Poster Dialogue
Promotional posters have always been a key tool for marketing films.4 In
their early years film posters drew on their predecessor, the circus poster,
and so featured eye-catching art, bold colours, and tantalizing images of
what awaited audiences inside the cinema’s darkened rooms.5 This trend
continued throughout the twentieth century, with different countries and
decades producing unique forms.6 However, with the rise of photo-shop
3. This chapter’s focus will be on films produced by Hollywood, and European
and US fields of marketing, contextualization, and reception. This is because the
majority of studies concerning disaster movies are written from this perspective.
However, it is important to remember that this is only one area and perspective among
a globalized market.
4. For the emergence of film posters as key marketing tools in early twenti-
eth-century America see Gary D. Rhodes, ‘The Origin and Development of the
American Moving Picture Poster’, Film History 19.3 (2007), pp. 228-46.
5. Indeed, the images they offered were so tantalizing and their usage so
widespread that cries for censorship resounded in pre-war America. See ‘The Origin
and Development of the American Moving Picture Poster’, pp. 238-43.
6. For an extensive examination of global post-war film poster production and the
trends emerging in different locations and time periods see Dave Kehr, ‘Introduction’,
in Art of the Modern Movie Poster: International Postwar Style and Design, by Jütka
Salavetz et al. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008), pp. 8-9. For compendiums of
posters from specific decades and genres see Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh, Film
Posters: Science Fiction (Cologne; London: Evergreen, 2006); Tony Nourmand and
Graham Marsh, Film Posters of the 30s: The Essential Movies of the Decade: From
the Reel Poster Gallery Collection (Cologne [and London]: Evergreen, 2005); Tony
Nourmand and Graham Marsh, Film Posters of the 1990s: The Essential Movies of the
Decade, from the Reel Poster Gallery Collection (London: Aurum Press, 2005); Tony
Nourmand and Graham Marsh, Exploitation Poster Art (London: Aurum Press, 2005);
and a more globalized market, film posters have become part of an

integrated marketing strategy, as Dave Kehr points out: ‘today, the poster
is no longer the center of film promotion. Television advertising has taken
over that role, and the one-sheet poster, once ubiquitous in America, is
now produced mainly for lightbox display in theater lobbies, carrying
the same ‘key art’ designed to be used in platforms from bus panels to
Internet banners’.7 What this means is that contemporary film posters are
primarily about presenting quickly identifiable messages which feed into
other platforms, and require little engagement.8 Kehr summarizes this as
‘the message must be fast and hard: who’s in it, and what it’s about’.9
Yet these creations are more subtle than may first appear, with conven-
tions and a complex media machine behind the end product.10 The film
poster, as Finola Kerrigan states, needs to ensure that ‘the images used
must resemble the essence of what is being presented’.11 However, this
process goes far deeper than the images: colour, fonts, taglines, and layout
all trigger conventions, and signal filmic affiliations.12 This means that
posters often portray the footsteps the new film follows in, indicating what
audiences should expect.
Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh, Film Posters of the 60s: The Essential Movies
of the Decade (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1998). For more specific localized
examinations see Eladio Rivadulla, Jr, and Jessica Gibbs, ‘The Film Poster in Cuba
(1940–1959)’, Design Issues 16.2 (2000), pp. 36-44; Sim Branaghan and Stephen
Chibnall, British Film Posters: An Illustrated History (London: BFI Publishing, 2006);
Otto Buj, ‘Plastered’, FC 43.3 (2007), pp. 24-25; Otto Buj, ‘In the French Style’, FC
43.6 (2007), p. 27; Otto Buj, ‘Pole Position’, FC 43.4 (2007), p. 14; Otto Buj, ‘Buy
American’, FC 44.3 (2008), p. 20.
7. Kehr, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.
8. ‘The emphasis now is not on execution, but on concept and communication.
A person flipping through a magazine, surfing the Internet, or driving past a billboard
may not have the time or training to appreciate Peter Strausfeld’s woodcuts or Zdeněk
Ziegler’s selection of typefaces.’ Kehr, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.
9. Kehr, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.
10. Finola Kerrigan, Film Marketing (Amsterdam and London: Butterworth-
Heinemann, 2010), p. 131, points out that each actor’s agent will be fighting to get
them top billing on the poster (the top left most often), images have rights attached to
them, and director’s billings are caught up in guilds and other such groups. Therefore,
this process of legal struggles before a poster can be conceptualized can determine the
images, the font, and the layout.
11. Kerrigan, Film Marketing, p. 133.
12. For a discussion of the conventions at work in film posters, and the subtle
messages of resemblance entwined in colour, font, layout, phrasing, quality, target
audience etc. see Kerrigan, Film Marketing, pp. 133-40. E.g. Kerrigan points out
Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings was expected to be following in

footsteps that were sandal-clad, walking the well-trodden path of classic
biblical epics and previous Scott productions such as Gladiator (2000)
and Kingdom of Heaven (2005). With the release of Darren Aronofsky’s
Noah (2014) earlier in the year it seemed that the sword-and-sandal epic
was making a come-back, and initial glances at their film posters would
seem to support this suggestion. However, as we shall now see, a more
in-depth examination of the poster signalling of these bible-based films
points to a different cycle of resemblance, and therefore to a different set
of dialogue partners.
Exodus: Gods and Kings’ promotional posters do indicate a strong
resemblance to Gladiator.13 For a start, there is the unmissable reference
of ‘from the Director of Gladiator’ situated directly above the title (Fig.
1) and the uncannily resonating tagline ‘He defied an empire and changed
the world’.14 There are also other more subtle signals to be found. The
initial promotional poster of Gladiator (Fig. 2) presented a lone armour-
clad figure standing in the centre of the poster with a sword in his hand
and the arches of the colosseum behind him. The title and the background
have an ethereal golden glow.15 When compared to the Exodus: Gods
and Kings poster the similarity of the images is obvious: each figure is
centred, dressed for war, and set against the background of an historical
that the dominant colours when promoting a romance are blue and white, while the
‘from the director of’ indications point audiences to the gravitas of the director and
the seriousness of the picture.
13. Although, as with any marketing campaign, a series of posters were
produced which changed as the campaign progressed I focus on those at the centre
of the campaign, and used throughout Europe and the US, rather than those which
functioned more as ‘teasers’ featuring different characters.
14. Gladiator’s famous tagline being ‘The general who became a slave. The slave
who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an empire.’ Kerrigan points out
how signalling to director’s previous work is used to generate a more high-brow aura.
Kerrigan, Film Marketing, pp. 136-40.
15. These warm hues and layout continued when the extended version was
released. There was the introduction of a dark stormy sky, more clarity added to the
image of Crowe playing Maximus (who had sprung to stardom through the role),
and a far more detailed historical background depiction. See image here: http://www.
imdb.com/media/rm1028758784/tt0172495?ref_=ttmi_mi_typ_prd_1 (accessed 21
December 2015). The tenth anniversary DVD release presented a similar layout to
the extended edition release, offering a dark, stormy sky and armour-clad warrior who
is clearly Crowe, but with cool blue and grey tones replacing the orange and brown.
See image here: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3011742720/tt0172495?ref_=ttmi_
mi_typ_prd_3 (accessed 21 December 2015).
city-scape.16 It appears that consumers are being firmly pointed to Scott’s

previous epic triumph. However, an examination of the year’s other
biblical epic Noah, featuring Gladiator-tastic Russell Crowe, can help us
see other resemblances.
Figure 1. Promotional poster for Exodus: Gods and Kings, directed by

Ridely Scott, 2014, 20th Century Fox/Scott Free Productions/The Kobal
Collection.
16. The storm brewing behind the figure also points to the later posters for DVD
releases mentioned above.
Figure 2. Initial release poster for Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott,

2000, DreamWorks/Universal/The Kobal Collection.
Just as Exodus: Gods and Kings’ posters clearly drew on Scott’s

previous accomplishments, so Noah’s posters unsurprisingly drew on
the Crowe star-factor, with initial release posters centring his image,
with his face to the camera and axe in hand, as cool dark rain fell behind
him.17 This layout not only evokes the Gladiator images described above
but also Ridley’s Scott’s other Russell romp, Robin Hood (2010), which
too had grey hues, a camera-facing Crowe, and a wielded weapon.18 Yet,
early teaser posters indicate other more unexpected filmic relationships.
Although mentioning only Crowe’s name at the top of the poster (a clear
indicator of a star vehicle), the image used in this teaser poster has his
17. See image here: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm38000384/tt1959490?ref_

=ttmi_mi_typ_pos_9 (accessed 21 December 2015).
=tt_ov_i (accessed 21 December 2015).
back turned to the camera and so the audience’s attention is directed not
to him, but to what he is facing: giant crashing waves, also set in a cool
blue and grey palette (Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Early promotional poster for Noah, directed by Darren

Aronofsky, 2014, Paramount Pictures/The Kobal Collection.
Later campaign posters presented images of all the major stars in the
top right, the ark in the centre, and waves crashing in the bottom left, all
against a bluer background.19 These two poster layouts do not resemble
Gladiator but point to very different filmic ideas: that of disaster. Most
startling is the resemblance of Noah’s back-turned image to Roland
Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), which depicts a monk standing on a mountain
facing a giant wave (Fig. 4). The land on which the monk and Crowe stand
is the same in form, both with an outcrop to the top right hand corner, and

=ttmi_mi_typ_pos_1 (accessed 21 December 2015).
waves crashing towards the figure. The blue-character poster centring on

the ark also has a clear parallel in the poster of another disaster-centred
film. What is more, it is a film directed by Ridley Scott: White Squall
(1996), whose promotional images feature the faces of the cast in the top
right of the poster, the boat in the centre, and the waves crashing in the
bottom left.20 Therefore, although Crowe’s historical epic exploits might
be part of the message sent out by Noah’s images, it is not all; disaster
movie resemblance can also be seen.
Figure 4. Promotional poster for 2012, directed by Roland Emmerich,

2009, Sony Pictures Entertainment/The Kobal Collection.

=tt_ov_i (accessed 21 December 2015).
Figure 5. Promotional Poster for Exodus: Gods and Kings, directed

by Ridley Scott, 2014, Century Fox/Scott Free Productions/The Kobal
Collection.
What, then, can this tell us about Exodus: Gods and Kings? When
viewed in light of the above, closer inspection of the filmic poster
reveals subtle differences from those of Gladiator. While Bale’s face
is towards us, selling his star quality, his back is turned, indicating that
he too is facing something which our gaze should focus on. As we look
closer we see that between the stormy sky and the shimmering portrayal
of Egypt and rivers of blood, tornadoes spin. Rivers of blood may evoke
the ‘past’ the film is portraying but these tornadoes are not part of the
Exodus story, instead resonating with films with disaster on the horizon.
If there is any doubt, the pre-release posters (Fig. 5) press the point
home, as a stormy grey sky emits tornadoes which touch an enormous
brilliantly blue wave, brought into proportion by a tiny figure walking
towards us on dry land.21 Swords maybe, but the sandals seem rather
soggy, as disaster akin to ‘giant wave films’ very clearly creeps into the
poster’s signalling.
Therefore, it is to disaster movies that we now turn in order to examine
their history and see how Exodus: Gods and Kings (and Noah) can be seen
to evoke scenes from these cycles.22 We will then explore what insights
reading them in relation to apocalyptic scenarios can offer which differ
from their usual assumed relationship with historical epics.
Moving into the Realm of Disaster
Scenes of disaster are as much part of film history as posters, with

their emergence marked by clear cycles,23 each with its own distinctive
character.24 As Stephen Keane points out, the early years of cinema were
21. This is, of course, similar to Noah’s position in relation to the wave as well
as the monk’s in 2012.
22. For an erudite genre reading of Noah in relation to the disaster film genre see
Laura Copier and Caroline Vander Stichele, ‘Death and Disaster: 2012 Meets Noah’,
in Now Showing: Film Theory in Biblical Studies (ed. Caroline Vander Stichele and
Laura Copier; Semeia Studies; SBL Press, forthcoming). Unlike that examination, our
study is not a genre study, and does not aim to categorize Exodus. Rather, it seeks to
examine certain evocations generated by Exodus: Gods and Kings in order to situate
it among past and present dialogue partners triggered through poster resemblance, and
to show a more complex field of reference and resonance than epic-focused readings
may indicate.
23. For an overview of cycles see Stephen Keane, Disaster Movies: The Cinema
of Catastrophe (2nd ed.; London: Wallflower Press, 2006), pp. 6-15.
24. We need to be careful not to create monolithic accounts of Hollywood
production through hindsight-covered eyes, nor to assume that we can map what
was happening in the real world in Hollywood. Film production, as Keane and Nick
Roddick point out, is far more complex and often more random than that. However,
clear trends are noticeable and so it is these we will focus on, before conjecturing our
own ideas about more recent trends, informed by the examinations of others. Again,
these will make no claim on having uncovered intentions or the motivations behind
film production, but rather will draw attention to some resonances which can be
particularly felt by present-day audiences.
For an excellent entry point into the sense of disaster in cinema including
different plot formulations depending on budgetary concerns see Susan Sontag,
‘The Imagination of Disaster’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Penguin
Modern Classics; London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 209-25. Disaster movies have not
received as much attention as films which fit more conventional genre classifications,
and there is much debate surrounding whether a film is classed as a disaster movie,
notoriously filled with scenes of destruction of the ancient world, particu-

larly from Italian studios such as The Last Days of Pompeii (1908 and
1913) The Fall of Troy (1910), Quo Vadis? (1912) and Intolerance (1916).25
Yet by the 1930s audience demands and tastes had altered, and along with
them so had the sense of disaster. While futuristic science-fiction films
laced with a good dose of destruction were becoming more popular, along
with biblical-based films,26 so too were those based on events more rooted
in contemporary situations. W.S. Van Dyke’s San Francisco (1936) and
Henry King’s In Old Chicago (1937) brought cinema into the ‘real world’,
and events which were to befall participants became part of a narrative of
‘just desserts’, creating what can be seen as some of the earliest disaster
movies.27. Real-life war stilted the thirst for imminent disaster somewhat,
and by the 1950s politically weighted biblical epics and science fiction
doom fantasies fed tastes for destruction, as the realization that the world
could end with the touch of a button emerged, shifting the concerns of
the present into settings of unrealized futures and pasts long ago.28 It was
not until the 1970s that disaster rooted in reality was properly back on the
menu, and it was this decade which brought the disaster movie to the fore,
producing landmarks such as George Seaton’s Airport (1970), Ronald
Neame’s The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Mark Robson’s Earthquake
(1974), and John Guillermin’s Towering Inferno (1974).29 It was also
or whether it is a movie that simply carries a sense of disaster. Key works on these
debates and disaster film format more generally are Keane, Disaster Movies; Maurice
Yacowar, ‘The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre’, in Film Genre Reader
II (ed. Barry Keith Grant; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), pp. 261-79; Ken
Feil, Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006).
25. Keane, Disaster Movies, p. 6. These films were produced by a largely Italian
contingent, hence their preferred subject matter.
26. Keane notes Maurice Elvey’s Transatlantic Tunnel (1935), William Cameron
Menzies’s Things to Come (1936) and Cooper and Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933).
27. Keane, Disaster Movies, p. 13 points out that in the 1930s they were referred
to as disaster films whereas by the 1970s they had become disaster movies, which
were then examined from a more genre-classifying perspective.
28. ‘What marks the 1950s out from previous decades was the realization that
nothing less than the end of the world could be brought about by the mere pressing of
a button’. Keane, Disaster Movies, p. 11. For discussion on the Cold War mentality
in films see David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and
Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
29. This decade has received by far the most filmic scholarly focus on disaster
movies. Films are read in relation to their dialogue with the now and also their lasting
effect on present cinema. E.g. Keane, Disaster Movies, pp. 16-43; Yacowar, ‘The Bug
during this decade that sword-and-sandals films all but disappeared,30 as

overt moralizing and religious rhetoric were replaced with a sense of
indiscriminate and immediate disaster.31 In these movies disaster was the
main event, and it was intimately connected with man’s (read male) hubris
and his pushing the boundaries of the scientifically possible; wanting to
fly (Airport), building above safety features (Towering Inferno), believing
humanity to be above the gods (Poseidon Adventure). And in all this,
localized communities of survivors were created, bringing people from
different classes together who had to learn to put those issues aside and
unite. Yet, being humble and just did not necessarily mean you survived,
and being egotistical did not seal your demise.32 Rather, the disaster was
believable and portrayed with a sense of realism through events infused
with contemporary concerns, as technology galloped ahead, political
times were shaky, and destruction was able to strike at anyone. However,
after nearly every possible present-day strife had been portrayed (includ-
ing three Airport sequels),33 and parody had run amok (e.g. James Frawley’s
in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre’; Nick Roddick, ‘Only the Stars Survive:
Disaster Movies in the Seventies’, in Performance and Politics in Popular Drama:
Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television 1800–1976 (ed.
David Bradby; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 243-69.
30. For discussions on the decline of epics associated with biblical themes see
Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the
Hollywood Cinema (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009).
31. The films of the 1970s are used to formulate concepts of what does and
does not constitute a disaster movie. Although our focus here is not a genre study to
determine whether Exodus: Gods and Kings is or is not a disaster movie, the features
mentioned in Roddick’s pioneering study are worth noting (as summarized by Keane,
Disaster Movies, p. 13): ‘the disaster is diegetically central, factually possible, largely
indiscriminate, unexpected though not necessarily unpredicted, all-encompassing,
and ahistorical in the sense of not requiring a specific conjecture of political and
economic forces to bring it about’. These factors are not agreed upon by all disaster
film critics, but Roddick does draw attention to some central aspects worth consid-
ering. Roddick, ‘Only the Stars Survive: Disaster Movies in the Seventies’.
32. Keane presents an in-depth analysis of the Poseidon Adventure and Towering
Inferno to reveal that despite Roddick’s title ‘Only the Stars Survive’, this was in
fact not always the case. Often learning from mistakes was part of the disaster motto
and more often than not most of the stars did in fact not survive, e.g. The Poseidon
Adventure and Earthquake.
33. These were Jack Smight’s Airport ’75 (1974), Jerry Jameson’s underwater
thriller Airport ’77 (1977) and David Lowell Rich’s nuclear-missile-dodging The
Concorde…Airport ’79 (1979).
The Big Bus [1974], Jim Abrahams, Airplane! [1980]), disaster movies
petered out, waiting in the wings until twenty years later when a number
of factors brought them back, 1990s’ style.
Disaster Becomes Apocalypse When, and Now
The dawn of a new millennium, CGI, and a culture of assurance led to

a new influx of high grossing disaster movies, many portraying events
familiar from the 1970s’ cycles.34 However, among this more familiar
format, movies of a different scale and tone to those of its 1970s’ prede-
cessors appeared, which Conrad Ostwalt calls ‘the secular apocalypse’,35
and King calls ‘apocalypse, maybe’.36 These films are those such as
Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact (1998), Michael Bay’s Armageddon (1998),
and Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996). These films showed
disaster on a whole new level, moving from the localized into the realm of
world-wide catastrophe. In this cycle global annihilation was just on the
horizon, as events depicted a future just ahead of the viewer’s, one which
was made believable as science explained the situation, and so I would
like to label these films ‘apocalypse when…’37 In these films, although
disaster appears inevitable it is thwarted by human ingenuity, sacrifice,
technology, and teamwork, indicating how humanity can rally together to
save itself, and in Independence Day and Armageddon make a fair few
wisecracks along the way.38 Therefore, race and politics are put aside in
34. CGI meant that destruction could be more graphic than ever before, and so
more standard disaster formats appeared, e.g. eruptions (Mick Jackson’s Volcano
[1997] and Roger Donaldson’s Dante’s Peak [1997]), storms (Jan de Bont’s Twister
[1996] and Mikael Salomon’s Hard Rain [1998]), building catastrophes (Rob Cohen’s
Daylight [1998]) and serious depictions of hubris and historical doom (James
Cameron’s Titanic [1997]).
35. First labelled in Conrad Ostwalt, ‘Visions of the End: Secular Apocalypse
in Recent Hollywood Film’, Journal of Religion and Film 2.1 (1998), https://
www.unomaha.edu/jrf/OstwaltC.htm (accessed 6 September 2016), and expanded in
Conrad Ostwalt, Secular Steeples, 2nd Edition: Popular Culture and the Religious
Imagination (London: A. & C. Black, 2012).
36. Geoff King, Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster
(London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000), pp. 143-73.
37. For informative discussions of this stage of the cycle see King, Spectacular
Narratives, pp. 143-73; Keane, Disaster Movies, pp. 63-88.
38. On the notion of camp within these supposedly man’s man movies see Feil,
Dying for a Laugh. It is also important to note the difference in Deep Impact’s and
Armageddon’s handling of the same subject matter but with a very different deliv-
erance. Leder’s scenes of destruction were far more serious and were delayed until the
order to bring about victory against the vicious threat of the apocalypse
instigating ‘other’ (be it comet or spaceship).39
Yet this loud and proud disaster-gone-apocalyptic cycle could not last,
first because audiences had seen New York city destroyed from more
angles than imaginable, and second because of what played out in reality
across TV networks during the post-millennial years.
What had started in Hollywood fiction had forever scarred minds,
as Hollywood’s ‘apocalypse when’ played out in real time on TV with
9/11,40 the East Asian Tsunami, Himalayan earthquakes, and Hurricane
Katrina all showing cinematic scenarios striking in the here and now.41
Unsurprisingly disaster movies had become undesirable.42 However,
final moments of the film. For a discussion on the differences, and the added ‘female
factor’ of Deep Impact see King, Spectacular Narratives, pp. 164-73; Keane, Disaster
Movies, pp. 81-85; Rachel Williams, ‘ “They Call Me Action Woman”: The Marketing
of Mimi Leder as a New Concept in the High Concept “Action” Film’, in The Action
and Adventure Cinema (ed. Yvonne Tasker; London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 385-97.
Leder’s film in many ways foreshadows the more serious post-9/11 sentiments of
survival that appear in the next cycle. However, the notion of ‘apocalypse when’, of
humanity rallying together, holds true. Sacrifice is the name of the game rather than
indiscriminate killing.
39. Of course, the idea of annihilation was not unknown to cinema, as is clear with
films such as Rudolph Maté’s When World’s Collide (1951). However, these were set
firmly within the fantastical future, where humans had spaceships to escape threats.
In these 1990s’ films, although ‘aliens’ are the threat, the catastrophe is fought in a
world contemporary with the viewer, using weapons and resources that are already in
existence.
40. ‘There was an uncanny feeling that we had seen something like this before’
(Keane, Disaster Movies, p. 89). For the filmic techniques of reality versus fiction
in 9/11 footage replays see Geoff King, Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to
‘Reality’ TV and Beyond (Bristol: Intellect, 2005).
41. The Daily Mail’s front cover on 12 September 2001 simply read: ‘Apocalypse:
New York. September 11, 2001’. As events continued, ‘apocalypse now’ ideas infused
headlines. E.g. after Hurricane Sandy The Daily News produced an award-winning
edition headlined ‘Apocalypse N.Y.’ and Newsweek ran an edition in March 2011
showing an enormous wave with the title ‘Apocalypse Now: Tsunamis. Earthquakes.
Nuclear Meltdowns. Revolutions. Economies on the Brink. What the #@%! Is Next?’
Cataclysmic events were no longer something to be enjoyed in the safety of your own
cinema seat – they had become real.
42. It is of course important to remember that a film’s production can take
many years and so a mapping of current events onto cinematic images needs to
be tempered and kept general. Feil, Dying for a Laugh, pp. 119-41, examines the
post-9/11 sensibility in Jon Amiel’s The Core (2003), which was a disaster movie but
an incredibly camp and panned one, and Phil Alden Robinson’s The Sum of all Fears
you can’t keep a good margin down, and, as we have seen, the idea of
disaster has always drawn viewers. Therefore, rather than erase the notion
of apocalypse and disaster, the solution was to shape-shift it. This is
exemplified in the arrival of Roland Emmerich’s The Day after Tomorrow
(2004) and can further be traced in Emmerich’s 2012 (2009).43 From the
same director as Independence Day the rhetoric in these films shifted
almost unrecognisably. Although still following the ‘apocalypse when’
format of scientifically explainable disaster in the here and now, humanity
was no longer able to rally around the disaster and ‘kick the ass’ out of
it. Instead, like the biblical Apocalypse’s tribulation, humans had to live
through disaster and destruction, and survive. This survival sentiment
oozes from the scripts: ‘Only a few hours ago, I received word that a
small group of people…survived in New York City against all odds…and
in the face of tremendous adversity’ (Day after Tomorrow), and ‘As you
know…catastrophe has struck our nation…has struck the world. I wish
I could tell you…we could prevent the coming destruction. We cannot’
(2012).44 As well as a shift in rhetoric, the depiction of ‘apocalypse when’
changed. Keane and Ken Feil point out that ‘self-censorship’ occurred in
the wake of 9/11, and so disaster was now to be portrayed in a way which
was more sensitive and respectful.45 Global disaster could again lurk on
the horizon, but it was in a way where disaster was not prevented, and
where it occurred at a respectful distance.
Therefore, when the aforementioned 2012 arrived in 2009, it was in
many ways the disaster movie to end all disaster movies, but presented
through a post-apocalypse now lens, so I label it a ‘disasta-lypse’. Set
in the present of 2009 and then moving into the year of the Mayan
(2002). He shows that critics found the destruction of landmarks in The Core to be
somewhat distasteful and unappealing. For discussions on more widespread post-9/11
media mentalities see Wheeler W. Dixon, Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles
of Destruction in American Cinema (London and New York: Wallflower, 2003);
Wheeler W. Dixon, Film and Television after 9/11 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2004). See also Timothy Corrigan, American Cinema of the 2000s:
Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
43. For an extended and informative discussion of how The Day after Tomorrow
differed from its predecessors see Keane, Disaster Movies, pp. 95-103. On critics’
responses, particularly in relation to post-9/11 sensibilities, see Feil, Dying for a
Laugh, pp. 142-58.
44. C.f. Johnathan Mostow’s Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines (2003): ‘I
should have realized our destiny was never to stop Judgment Day. It was merely to
survive it…’ All film quotes are transcribed.
45. Keane, Disaster Movies, pp. 89-103; Feil, Dying for a Laugh, pp. 119-58.
apocalypse, scientifically explainable events unfolded which evoked past

disaster movie experiences, with a capsizing ship, volcanic eruptions,
tectonic shifts, collapsing buildings, icy hazards, and flooding on a
global Everest-high scale all rolled into one film. It culminated in world
annihilation, with nearly all humanity wiped out, and only a very select
few survivors in ‘arks’, floating towards Africa to start afresh as a kind
of return to creation. Yet despite this annihilation, 2012 was not actually
the blood bath it sounds, as Manohla Dargis points out: ‘Swirling dust
and flying debris serve that commercial purpose, not rivers of blood and
body pulp. So the dust swirls in 2012, and debris and bodies fly, though
at a careful distance.’46 It is the end of the world on a spectacular scale,
evoking its predecessors, contemporary concerns, and a destructive level
previously unseen, but all devoid of real life terror.
Yet the ‘catch-all, but safely’ approach of 2012 raised the question of
where, then, could Hollywood go from here? If disaster and destruction
with gore and trauma could not be played out here and now, how could
there be any future for the disaster movie? The solution suggested by
our Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings film poster analysis was to shift
the timescale and replace the tricky situation of ‘apocalypse when’ with
‘apocalypse then’. Noah’s lone figure facing disaster, and the swirling
tornados and eerily familiar clear blue waves of Exodus: Gods and Kings
evoked past disaster movie experiences, and signalled that they were
going back to their god-given roots by returning to historical destruction,
and as Armageddon promised (but never actually delivered), ‘basically,
the worst parts of the bible’.47
Apocalypse Then
We have seen how post-9/11 disaster moved into a sanitized and safe
version, which as Dargis pointed out showed destruction but ‘not rivers of
blood and body pulp’. Yet this, as we have seen, is exactly what Exodus:
Gods and Kings’ promotional posters promised audiences. Therefore,
it seems that destruction laced with body pulp and rivers of blood was
more palatable when biblically coated. What is more, despite being rated
46. Manohla Dargis, ‘When the World Hangs in the Balance, a Reliable Calendar
Is Needed: 2012’, The New York Times, 12 November 2009, http://www.nytimes.
com/2009/11/13/movies/13twentytwelve.html?_r=0 (accessed 21 December 2015).
47. This is said by Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) when describing the effects
of boiling seas, nuclear winters, and social breakdown if the comet hit.
12A,48 Exodus: Gods and Kings and Noah not only promised disaster
and ‘the worse parts of the Bible’: they delivered them. For example, in
Noah not only was the destruction of humankind presented as the waves
hit as expected in disaster movies, but also the death screams of survivors
haunted those in the ark, in an extended post-disaster terror. Noah does
not just see visions of destruction; he stands on a ground which very
clearly becomes blood.49 In Exodus: Gods and Kings the rivers do not
just ‘become blood’ but rather human blood flows graphically and loudly
as giant crocodiles attack, starting the flow of rotting frogs and festering
boils. Also, after the wave hits all is not cleansed, as is often the case in
‘apocalypse when’ presentations,50 but rather the vultures feast on the
flesh of the animals destroyed.51 ‘Apocalypse then’ seems to open not only
the watery floodgates, but also the bloody ones as well.
Yet, the central terror of Exodus: Gods and Kings (and a potential, yet
averted threat in Noah) is not actually the scenes of disaster but the spectre
of who dies in the film. As already stated, a central point of tension within
disaster movies is the indiscriminate nature of the disaster, and working out
who will live and who will die.52 This has led to surprising and unexpected
moments such as Jennifer Jones’s plummet in the Towering Inferno,
Shelly Winters’s rescuing-attempt-induced heart attack in The Poseidon
Adventure, and Tia Leone’s safety-shunning bravery in Deep Impact. Yet
in an ‘apocalypse then’ scenario creating this tension is more challenging,
as Neale points out: ‘the particular challenge of historical disaster films is
to make the historically pre-determined as absorbing as possible, drawing
audiences into the absolute certainty of disaster and following a variety of
48. PG-13 in the USA.

49. As an apocalypse scholar this evoked for me the graphic depictions of Revela-
tion: ‘the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine
press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles’ (Rev.
14.20).
50. This sense of cleansing and rebalancing is near unanimously recognized and
is evident in the closing scenes of the films. For example, at the end of Day after
Tomorrow, those in the ISS claim ‘have you ever seen the air so clear?’, Volcano
presents a closing scene where ash renders all faces the same colour, and 2012 shows
a united group of once opposing countries heading for a new world.
51. Again, the idea of such destruction seems to resonate strongly with the worst
parts of the bible as in Rev. 19 where the birds of the air feast on the beasts and
the kings of the earth. This does not mean that I am arguing that the film is directly
dialoguing with Revelation, but rather that the scenes it presents resonate with those
parts of the Bible which are seen as the most violent and ‘unsuitable’.
52. ‘The question of who will survive is central to the basic narrative pleasure of
disaster movies’ (Keane, Disaster Movies, p. 5).
characters towards either death or survival’.53 Moving into the realm of

the biblical leads to a tension-creating solution which is, to say the least,
disturbing: the death of children.
In contrast to the gore and pus of the previous plagues which science
could go some way to explain, the presentation of the death of the first-born
is uncanny and silent as last breaths are quietly gasped amid extinguishing
candles.54 It is a silent destruction, more akin to the freeze induced deaths
of the crashed military helicopter in The Day after Tomorrow, and as the
darkness creeps over the city its movement mimics that of a watery wave,
evoking past scenes of nature-induced destruction. However, here we are
not seeing swathes of people indiscriminately killed, or hardened pilots
extinguished. Rather, it is children and babies that are breathing their last.
The death of children is hinted at in ‘apocalypse whens’ but it is seldom
depicted.55 Yet in Exodus: Gods and Kings, not only is it depicted, it is
dwelt upon. And what is more, the death is the reverse of random, and it
is this, coupled with its child-victims, which is so very tense and affecting.
It is a ‘wave’ like no other: pointed, aimed, and ruthless, only taking its
chosen targets as it silently glides across the landscape, leaving the rest
unscathed. In the same way, Noah created tension in a pre-programmed
disaster plot, not through Tubal-cain’s embarkation, but through the silence
of sleeping babies put under the knife, literally. Therefore, in the land of
modern ‘apocalypse then’, while waves still wash away everything, as
seen before, they have added blood-soaked disaster and most strikingly
depart from previous cycles of disaster movies with this never-before-
seen science-defying child-peril added as the real shock factor.
53. Keane, Disaster Movies, p. 73.

54. My thanks to Jon Morgan for drawing attention to the ‘horror’ film resonances
evoked in this scene as darkness appeared and the music became menacing.
55. E.g. in Deep Impact, prior to the wave hitting, a child and her mother are
shown running, but they are carefully out of shot when the waves hit. The same for the
scenes of washing people away: adults are shown in the crowd, not children. Again, in
Armageddon, when the comet hits Paris there are scenes of children playing as it flies
over their heads, but their demise is not shown. This can be seen again and again when
disaster strikes as the CGI-ed figures taking the brunt of the effects are inevitably
adults. Indeed, King, Spectacular Narratives, pp. 170-73, points out that the saving of
children is often a key point of hope and sacrifice in these stories, guaranteed to create
over-brimming emotion e.g. the grandmother’s sacrifice for her grandchildren in
Dante’s Peak, Rourke’s rescue of his daughter and a young boy in Volcano, Stamper’s
meditations of young Grace in Armageddon, and the adult sacrifice for the saving of
children in Deep Impact.
Present Fears
What, then, does this reading of Exodus: Gods and Kings as an ‘apoca-
lypse then’ dialoguing with ‘apocalypse whens’ present us with? At
first glance it may appear that the disaster film has simply gone full
cycle, returning to its roots of the downfall of civilizations due to divine
wrath, where the good are saved and the evil destroyed as God wins out
whatever the odds. Yet, as we have seen, the disaster cycles are always
altering, always adapting, always dialoguing with past cycles, and most
significantly, always dialoguing with the present. Aside from the pure thrill
of disaster, we have seen that each cycle, while evoking much of what
has gone before, at the same time has also resonated with contemporary
concerns. Keane sees this as imbuing these films with ‘ways in which often
excessive scenes of disaster and destruction can be said to take on more
reflective, contextual meanings’.56 Thus we see the fear of technical hubris
and a sense of moving beyond class systems in 1970s’ disaster films; the
praise of technology and race defying human ingenuity in the buoyant
1990s’ disaster; and the need to sanitize and survive together in a post-9/11
Hollywood. Therefore, rather than looking to the ‘then’ aspect of Exodus:
Gods and Kings’ disaster presentation (i.e. its past setting and biblical
roots) our examination of disaster films has revealed that it is to the ‘now’
we should turn our gaze, asking what are the ‘present’ currents that we see
in light of its disaster-ridden filmic heritage.57
What is most striking about Exodus: Gods and Kings (and also to
an extent Noah) compared to its disasta-lypse inheritance is not the
additions of blood and gore (audiences have always demanded these –
the past setting simply side-lined taste-censorship), but the additions of
pre-programmed outcomes for a chosen few, be that death or redemption.
56. Keane, Disaster Movies, p. 5.

57. Of course these examinations are best carried out with hindsight and any
attempt to carry out an analysis of the now in the now is always rife for speculation,
but I root this discussion firmly in what we have observed in the film, and how this
stands out from earlier cycles of disaster, for as Keane points out, ‘In order to appeal
to audiences, films must also reflect the times in which we live. With particular regard
to disaster movies, they are said to be borne [sic] out of times of crisis. Whether
human or environmental, alien or accidental, most of all disaster movies provide for
solutions in the form of a representative group of characters making their way towards
survival.’ Keane, Disaster Movies, p. 5. For the enduring power of destruction
see Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’; Karen J. Renner, ‘The Appeal of the
Apocalypse’, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 23.3 (2012), pp. 203-11.
As already stated, when destructive waves strike, they choose exactly who
they leave and who they take in a way unknown in the past. Moses’ and
Rameses’s survival would, in previous films, have been risible, akin to
Bruce Willis turning up at the end of Armageddon through some comet-
shattering miracle that placed him at exactly the right point of cosmic
entry. And the direct striking of children, let alone only children, has
been unfathomable in previous cycles. Rather than a scenario in which
characters can learn, sacrifice themselves to alter outcomes, or defy
expectations, Exodus: Gods and Kings presents a scene where fates of
individuals, and even the ‘innocent’, are already determined, and disaster
comes silently, pinpointing specific households and individual targets.
Does this seem to resonate with any contemporary issues and fears? I
leave the reader to fill in the gaps to avoid accusations of speculation,
but if you are seeing similar fears to those I am observing then it is fair
to say that enough recent Hollywood outputs seem to represent similar
undercurrents.58
Therefore, if we re-examine Exodus: Gods and Kings’ pre-release film
poster in light of all this we can see signalled deviations from previous
disaster-ridden footsteps. As already seen, in the pre-release poster we see
the lone figure of Moses marching towards us with the blue wave looming
behind (Fig. 5). Disaster is on the horizon, but it is the lone figure amid
disaster who stands out, and in light of all we have seen, seems to sum up
this particular 2014 version of disaster: destruction strikes and destroys
exactly who it chooses.
Conclusion
We return to where we began: apocalypse, film posters, and the ‘presence

of the past’. In our examination we have seen how applying past-focused
approaches used for reading the destruction portrayed in the Apocalypse of
John can facilitate an analysis of resemblance in Exodus: Gods and Kings’
film posters. This brought us not to the expected sandals but to disaster,
and by exploring the history of the disaster film, the presence of its past
cycles rang out in Scott’s film. Through examining the cycles of disaster
movies we uncovered a rich inheritance as the early depictions of ancient
destruction moved to reality-rooted small group struggles in the 1970s’
58. E.g. James Wan’s Furious 7 (2015), culminating scene in LA, Kathryn
Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), M’s speech to the tribunal in Sam Mendes’s
Skyfall (2012), SPECTRE’s global information system, House of Cards series 3, and
Homeland.
‘disaster movies’, and then presented the threat of the end of the world
in race-defying ‘arse-kicking’ 1990s’ ‘apocalypse whens, developing into
survival stories and respectful distance of the post-9/11 ‘disasta-lypse’.
Exodus: Gods and Kings clearly resonated with these films, but was also
distinct. It was, like Noah, an ‘apocalypse then’, where the action shifts
to the past, allowing for more gore, and most noticeably not presenting
indiscriminate disaster but rather targeted destruction, targeted even at
children. It was, then, like its predecessors, about age-old disasters while
also resonating with contemporary concerns. After all, disaster has always
been part of cinema, with crumbling buildings, giant waves, and human
casualties presenting constants in an ever-changing sea of cycles. Indeed,
disaster has always been part of life, as demonstrated by our starting
point, the biblical Apocalypse, which itself resounded with destruction
from previous HB scenarios. Yet, while the disasters humans face remain
remarkably similar throughout history, allowing resemblance and presence
of the past to be felt, we have seen that the presentation of these events
morphs and changes for new times and places. Therefore, our examination
of disaster cycles has shown that whenever we encounter disaster we
should be aware that whether it is an apocalypse when or an apocalypse
then, it is always, beneath the surface, an apocalypse now.
P i c t ur i n g t h e P l a g u es and P art i ng
t he W av es : T h e B i b l i cal E ffe ct
in E x od u s : G od s and K ings *
Samuel Tongue
Abstract
‘It makes you realize what God could have done if he’d had the money.’1
James Thurber’s acerbic comment after seeing Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical
epic The Ten Commandments (1956) becomes, in this article, a way to read
Ridley Scott’s updated version of the story in his Exodus: Gods and Kings
(2015). To film and produce the immersive special effects that mark the
biblical epic remains an expensive and thus necessarily commercial under-
taking. In this article, however, I place the industrial Hollywood context in
dialogue with theoretical treatments of the special effect. By examining how
biblical content is fused with new media technologies, especially Computer
Generated Imagery (CGI) and virtual effects, I trace what I am calling the
‘biblical effect’, demonstrating how the Bible continues to function as an
active signifier of ‘religion’ in the multimedia electronic age. If the miracle
and the special effect are intertwined in their phenomenological heritage,
how, then, does the technicity of the biblical epic continue to activate
a general ‘bible-ness’ that can be interpreted in myriad ways? Utilizing
the work of film critics, philosophers of religion, and cultural theorists,
* This article is indebted to the supportive and wide-ranging conversations with

colleagues at conferences and seminars held at the University of Exeter (‘Exodus and
the 21st Century Bible Film’, 26–27 March 2015) and University of Chichester (‘The
Use of the Bible in Contemporary Culture’, 25–27 June 2015). My thanks go to David
Tollerton, Jonathan Morgan, Katie Edwards, David Shepherd, Michelle Fletcher,
and Catherine Wheatley. Petri Merenlahti was also of great assistance in helping me
source material at a moment’s notice.
1. James Thurber quoted in George MacDonald Fraser, The Hollywood History of
the World (London: Penguin, 1988), p. xii.
I suggest that thinking through the ways in which the Bible (through the
biblical epic) becomes an ‘effect’ – information to be received, reinter-
preted, and consumed – offers a way of understanding how religion, as
a discursive category, becomes a ‘special effect’ in itself, mediated (and
manipulated) through signs and wonders.
Introduction
New Yorker Magazine cartoonist James Thurber’s comment after seeing

The Ten Commandments (1956; see above) pricked delightfully at Cecil
B. DeMille’s inflated pretensions for his biblical epic. Quoting from
DeMille’s autobiography, Ilana Pardes notes that, in this, his second
version of the Exodus story, DeMille ‘sought to resurrect the past for his
audience as it “really was” and was moved most by letters from admirers
who claimed that the picture “made God real to them” ’.2 Paramount
Studio’s huge financial outlay meant that, through DeMille’s directorial
prowess, God’s previously merely textual and thus decidedly low-budget
miracles could be repackaged into an audio-visual extravaganza of
cinematic showmanship (and help defeat Communism into the bargain).3
While the production values of the biblical epic demand large injec-
tions of financial capital, Thurber’s comment plays into some deeper
issues around the return of this particular filmic genre, particularly in
how directors, production designers, and cinematographers visualize the
ultimate in special effects – God’s miraculous intervention into the natural
order to change the course of events. In this article, I want to examine
how, in its ‘electronic materiality’ (to use Manuel Castells’s term), Ridley
Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings contributes to what I am calling the
‘biblical effect’, the constant and inevitable fusion of biblical content
with its own technicity, its message with its medium. I shall demonstrate
how this contributes to thinking about the Bible as part of a hypertextual
2. Ilana Pardes, ‘Moses Goes Down to Hollywood: Miracles and Special Effects’,
Semeia 74 (1996), pp. 15-31 (20). Pardes is quoting from Cecil B. DeMille, The
Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille (ed. Donald Hayne; Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1959), p. 435.
3. DeMille takes the unusual step of arriving ‘on stage’ before the film begins
to deliver a short introduction to his specific Cold War interpretation of the Exodus
narratives. As he explains ‘the theme of this picture is whether men ought to be ruled
by God’s laws or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Ramases.
Are men the property of the State or are they free souls under God? This same battle
continues throughout the world today.’ Cecil B DeMille, The Ten Commandments
(Paramount Pictures, 1956).
Tongue Picturing the Plagues and Parting the Waves 115
consumption of signs, operating as neither fact nor fiction, but information.

This sidesteps the inevitable debates about the accuracy (or otherwise) of
how a film recycles an often essentialized and idealized biblical original.
Instead, this understanding of the ‘biblical effect’ offers an account of how
the Bible continues to function as an active signifier of ‘religion’ in the
multimedia electronic age. I will argue that the return of the CGI-enhanced
biblical epic and its filmic special effect links with how Hent de Vries
identifies ‘the interfacing of the religious and the medium, the theological
and the technological’.4 De Vries approaches this interface through his
study of the mutuality of miracles and special effects and his focus on
this shared heritage animates my own argument. Visualizing the plagues
inflicted on Pharaoh’s Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea is not possible
without the genesis of special effects in the miraculous. Ultimately, I shall
suggest that thinking through the ways in which the Bible (through the
biblical epic) becomes an ‘effect’, information to be received, reinter-
preted, and consumed, offers a way of understanding how religion, as a
discursive category, becomes a ‘special effect’ in itself.
In order to trace religion through the biblical epic, I shall first outline
how the return of the biblical epic is tied to certain cultural, commercial,
and industrial interests. The biblical epic is a genre that has had a surprising
reboot in the last few years5 and this phenomenon needs to be addressed
to understand the genre’s signifying practices and how this plays into an
analysis of what I am calling ‘the biblical effect’ in the complex inter-
fusing of spectacular (miraculous) effects and narrative content. I shall
then sharpen my focus somewhat and discuss how the CGI and special
effects of Exodus: Gods and Kings contribute to the ‘biblical effect’ by
4. Hent de Vries, ‘In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the Task of
Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies’, in Religion and Media (ed. Hent de
Vries and Samuel Weber; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 3-42 (23).
5. In terms of biblical epics (rather than more overtly Christian films such as
God’s Not Dead [Harold Cronk, 2014] and Heaven Is for Real [Randall Wallace,
2014]), 2014 saw the release of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. Other epic projects in the
Hollywood pipeline include a film on the apostle Paul (produced by Matt Damon
and Ben Affleck, and starring Hugh Jackman as Paul) and rival versions of the life
of King David, including one to be produced by Ridley Scott. See Catherine Shoard,
‘Forget Goliath: Rival King David Movies in the Works’, The Guardian, 27 October
2014, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/27/goliath-rival-king-david-mov-
ies-in-the-works (accessed 23 August 2015). See also Justin Kroll, ‘Fox, Scott Free
and Chernin Reteam on Biblical King David Film (Exclusive)’, Variety, 2015, http://
variety.com/2014/film/news/fox-scott-free-and-chernin-reteam-on-biblical-king-da-
vid-film-exclusive-1201258761/ (accessed 21 August 2015).
building on Vivian Sobchack’s explorations of Hayden White’s ‘history

effect’ as she takes this into epic film. I will then couple this with Aylish
Wood’s analysis of the ways in which digital effects and CGI extend the
director’s capabilities in creating what she calls ‘timespace’, essentially a
way in which spectacular imagery can also contribute to narrative agency,
overcoming the traditional opposition between the spectacle and narra-
tive.6 This sense of the spectacular image as dynamic and active plays
into the vexed question of how to screen miracles and/or supernatural
events in ways that can appeal to a ticket-buying audience along a diverse
spectrum, from sceptic to believer.
The concluding section will then place my analysis of Exodus: Gods
and Kings in dialogue with the work of Hent de Vries, Samuel Weber,
and Manuel Castells in order to open up a debate on how such cinematic
and effect-laden ‘bible-ness’ relaunches the Bible onto the ocean of multi-
media and hyperlinked information. The genre specificity of the biblical
epic contributes to the idea of religion itself as a special effect.
In order to approach the shores of this electronic ocean, I shall first
provide some context for how Ridley Scott has influenced the reboot of
the historical and biblical epic and the uses to which he has put the genre.
This will demonstrate how the epic form both creates and comments upon
its putative themes.
The Epic, Resurrected
In a recent collection, The Return of the Epic Film: Genre, Aesthetics and
History in the 21st Century, a number of essays argue that it is Ridley
Scott7 and his film Gladiator (2000) that has resurrected the genre (the
cover even has Russell Crowe’s fur-clad Maximus inspecting his legions
on horseback8). Many critics credit Gladiator as ‘the catalyst, if not the
cause, for the revival of the epic’,9 especially through its making epic
6. Aylish Wood, ‘Timespaces in Spectacular Cinema: Crossing the Great Divide
of Spectacle versus Narrative’, Screen 43.4 (2002), pp. 370-86.
7. Jeffrey Richards, ‘Sir Ridley Scott and the Rebirth of the Historical Epic’, in
The Return of the Epic Film: Genre, Aesthetics and History in the 21st Century (ed.
Andrew B.R. Elliott; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 19-35.
8. And, in an interesting aside, Russell Crowe also stars as Noah in Darren
Aronofsky’s own biblical epic of the same name. Has Crowe become the new
Charlton Heston, a cipher over which Hollywood can sketch its new/old historical
and biblical heroes?
9. Andrew B.R. Elliott, ‘Introduction: The Return of the Epic’, in Elliott, ed., The
Return of the Epic Film, pp. 1-16 (4-5).
cinema commercially viable again after the genre’s nearly 40 years in the
wilderness ‘since the box office failure of The Fall of the Roman Empire
in 1964’.10 Building on the surprise success of Gladiator, Scott then
directed Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and Robin Hood (2010), a trilogy
that Jeffrey Richards argues is ‘essentially the same film made three
times’11 with a working class hero (gladiator, blacksmith, archer) battling
‘arrogant upper-class opponents: Emperor Commodus, Guy of Lusigan,
King John of England’.12 With Exodus: Gods and Kings, we have a similar
theme where a former prince of Egypt discovers his Hebrew slave roots
and frees his people from the despot Ramases.
Richards frames Scott’s epics around a historical presentism, suggesting
that these films are more about contemporary geopolitics than they are
about recreating a historical period. What is interesting in this light is
Scott’s decision to now turn to the biblical epic, and especially the Exodus
narratives, with their obvious geopolitical overlay in depicting the story of
the Hebrews on their way to the ‘promised land’ of Canaan. According to
an interview with Scott Foundas in Variety, Scott was
compelled by the notion of Moses as a reluctant hero – a nonbeliever like

himself who only gradually comes to accept the circumstances of his birth
and prophesied destiny, and even then finds himself actively questioning
God’s plans and his own role in them. It was also a story rife with contem-
porary echoes, from the revolutions of the Arab Spring to the latest wars for
control of the Holy Land.13
The latter is strongly hinted at in the film through Moses’ conversation

with Joshua after Moses has been washed up on the beach having survived
the tsunami of the returning Red Sea. Joshua is full of the hope of Canaan
but the still-dripping Moses counsels caution: ‘If we get there [the resident
tribes will] see us as invaders…we’re as big as a nation of tribes…this
many people… What happens when we stop running?’
In another telling scene, after the final plague culminating in the death
of the firstborn of Egypt, Ramases, overcome with grief, carries his
dead son to Moses and asks: ‘Is this your God? Killer of children? What
kind of fanatics worship such a God?’ Scott and his writers insert a bold
10. Richards, ‘Sir Ridley Scott’, p. 21.

11. Richards, ‘Sir Ridley Scott’, pp. 33-34.
12. Richards, ‘Sir Ridley Scott’, p. 34.
13. Scott Foundas, ‘ “Exodus: Gods and Kings” Director Ridley Scott on Creating
his Vision of Moses’, Variety, 2014, http://variety.com/2014/film/news/ridley-scott-
exodus-gods-and-kings-christian-bale-1201363668/ (accessed 17 January 2015).
question mark over the reasonableness of religious belief and invoke a

metaphorical marker for the religious fanaticism that is now often used,
across different media outlets, as a simplified entry-point into discussing
Islamist terrorism.
Raising such questions as to the legitimacy of this new ‘nation’ arriving
in Canaan and the dangerous outworking of certain religious beliefs adds
a palpable strand of liberal presentism to this film and this is an important
part of the film’s discursive potential in relation to studies of its place in
constructing a certain idea of religion. I want to suggest, however, that
tackling a biblical epic adds extra layers of complexity that are not just
evident in the thinly veiled commentary on contemporary geopolitics
that the film itself provides. The rebooted biblical epic’s presentism runs
through its technological construction and visualization of the special
effect/miracle, both in how this is handled as part of the storyworld’s
narrative, but also in how the epic itself participates in making the Bible
present again, suggesting that the biblical Exodus (rather than a multitude
of other religious/non-religious stories, narratives, motifs) is a religious
effect worth re-animating at this present point in cultural history.
Of course, Scott would deny that the film itself is ‘religious’ even as he
tries to be ‘respectful’ to the story. His focus is on the human dimension.
This meant
fundamentally accepting the existence of Moses and the key events of his
life, culminating in the liberated Israelites’ long march from Egypt toward
the promised land of Canaan… ‘Once I accept that, how do I proceed, with
the greatest respect to the story? It’s so easy to (give the finger) to religions,
and we’ve kind of got to stop that. If you believe, you believe; if you’re
faithful, you’re faithful. I don’t care what your religion is. The same if
you’re agnostic. That should be accepted too.’14
One of the ways in which Scott approaches this respectful retelling within
the epic genre is to attempt to depict plausible, rationalized miracles, a
practice that also marks the history of post-Enlightenment liberal biblical
and theological scholarship. According to Scott Foundas, for ‘the most
celebrated episode of Exodus lore – Moses and the Israelites crossing
the Red Sea – Scott imagined a kind of uber-tsunami, inspired by actual
evidence of a massive underwater earthquake off the coast of Italy circa
3000 BC’.15 This is one example of how Scott and his own cast of a
thousand CGI designers attempt to tread the apparently rationalizing line
14. Foundas, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’, n.p.

15. Foundas, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’, n.p.
between spectacular effect, narrative plausibility, and biblical event-ness.

Yet, even with the commitment to ‘plausibility’ (a rather slippery concept
in itself), these conflicting demands contribute strongly to what I am
calling the ‘biblical effect’ in the biblical epic. As I have noted above, this
‘biblical effect’ sidesteps simplistic notions of fact or fiction. In order to
understand how the genre itself helps produce the effect, I now turn to
examine the technicity inherent in this cinematic form and the Bible it
helps create.
The Technologies of the Biblical Epic
Steve Neale observes that attempts to define genres of films are problematic
and the term ‘epic’ is not a simple one. However, he does outline that the
epic, ‘essentially a 1950s and 1960s term’, can be used ‘to identify, and to
sell two overlapping contemporary trends: films with historical, especially
ancient world, settings; and large scale films of all kinds which use new
technologies, high production values and special modes of distribution
and exhibition’.16 During the golden age for the biblical epic17 these
technologies took the form of expensive multi-projector systems such
as Cinerama (1952), or the cheaper and more successful CinemaScope
(1953) and VistaVision (1954), which managed to widen the image
projected from normal 35mm film stock. VistaVision even used DeMille’s
The Ten Commandments to advertise their new technologies. As John
Belton explains, by moving away from the old smaller screens, ‘Cinerama
and CinemaScope…engulfed their audiences, wrapping images as great
as 26 by 24 feet around them’.18 Cinema-going was changing and
‘virtually every wide-screen film was treated as a potential blockbuster’.19
Production values grew as studio executives reasoned that this would
inflate profits, especially when competing against the arrival of television
in affluent homes.20 But herein lies the conservative nature of the biblical
16. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London and New York: Routledge,
2000), p. 85.
17. E.g. Samson and Delilah (Cecil B. DeMille, 1949), Quo Vadis (Meryn LeRoy,
1951), David and Bathsheba (Henry King, 1952), The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953),
The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956), and Ben-Hur (William Wyler,
1959).
18. John Belton, ‘Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking Cinemascope, and Stereo
phonic Sound’, in Hollywood in the Age of Television (ed. Tino Balio; Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1990), pp. 185-208 (185).
19. Belton, ‘Glorious Technicolor’, p. 186.
20. Belton, ‘Glorious Technicolor’, p. 187.
epic – big bangs need big bucks which means you need to please big
audiences. Within the old studio system, this rarely translated into radical
film-making; as Belton notes the ‘wide-screen format produced a…
different perception of generically similar material: biblical spectacle
remained biblical spectacle, but became…markedly more spectacular’.21
Indeed, as Gerald Forshey adds, because of the melodramatic nature of
the narratives, ‘these films dramatized the fantasy that people very much
like us would eventually triumph in this world if we stayed close to the
principles most familiar to us and most commonly accepted’.22
During the Cold War period, superior technological advances did not,
of necessity, demand narrative advance. Biblical narratives from both Old
and New Testaments became a full-colour palette with which to paint
‘dramatic oppositions between atheism and idolatry and a belief in one
true God, and between religious, political and personal freedom and the
repressiveness of “totalitarian” empires, states and regimes, often repre-
sented in the ancient-world films by Egypt or Rome’.23 And yet, as Neale
points out, such presentism on the part of directors such as DeMille could
be turned on its head; for some audiences the ‘imperial decadence of Egypt
or Rome can always be read as 1950s or 1960s America’,24 especially
through the emphasis on the conspicuous consumption involved in the
Hollywood studio’s film-making process itself.
This short excursus through some of the defining technological traits of
the biblical epic sets up the relationship between the biblical, the techno-
logical, and the commercial that mark the genre’s inheritance. For Ridley
Scott in Exodus: Gods and Kings, the balancing act comes in the form of
utilizing the technological effects at his team’s disposal to suggest that
the miracles cited in Exodus can have natural causes, while not overtly
alienating potential audience members and losing revenue in the process.
As Samuel Weber notes, however ‘extraordinary it may be, an effect
is “special” only by touching on something shared, something held in
common by those it affects’.25 The special effects have to be spectacular
while remaining somewhat familiar, allowing for multiple interpreta-
tions of the causes for the miracles yet based on the generic material of
21. Belton, ‘Glorious Technicolor’, p. 190. My emphasis.

22. Gerald E. Forshey, American Religious and Biblical Spectaculars (Westport
and London: Praeger, 1992), p. 9.
23. Neale, Genre and Hollywood, p. 82.
24. Neale, Genre and Hollywood, p. 83.
25. Samuel Weber, ‘Special Effects and Theatricality’, Emergences: Journal for
the Study of Media and Composite Cultures 10 (2000), pp. 119-26 (120).
selected biblical narrative. As I shall explore further below, the special

effect is a paradoxical phenomenon, both within the storyworld of the
film and within its wider social constructions, especially as it informs
that discursive concept we call ‘religion’. Before we get to that point,
however, I want to think more deeply about how the ‘markedly more
spectacular’ electronic materiality of CGI and special effects in Gods and
Kings offer new ways of picturing the Bible and registering its effects on
a cinema audience.
The ‘Biblical Effect’ of Hollywood Miracle
Roland Barthes, writing in 1959 on his experience of the new technology

of CinemaScope, celebrates his own emergence ‘as a little god because
here I am, no longer under the image but in front of it, in the middle of
it, separated from it by this ideal distance, necessary to creation, which is
no longer that of the glance but that of the arm’s reach (God and painters
always have outstretched arms)’.26 However, in this short meditation, he
is beset by anxiety. On the one hand the infinitely larger vista means that
he can ‘freely pick out what interests me’ on-screen, offering a radical
ocular freedom. Yet, on the other hand, he becomes aware that he begins
‘to feel surrounded’.27 CinemaScope offers the ‘balcony of History’ but,
for Barthes, as ‘the epical dimension is born’,28 instead of being offered
a critical and subversive history, he is concerned that he shall become
immersed in a sensuous web of seductive Hollywood mythologies by
religious spectacles such as The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953). Barthes’
complaint is that these new and awe-ful cinematic technologies could
merely mirror entrenched religio-political hierarchies, rather than offer
radical correctives to false consciousness.
However, moving from CinemaScope and VistaVision and into contem-
porary CGI and other enhanced special effects, and contra Barthes,
Mark Jancovich makes the point that complaints about the ubiquity of
these technologies are often built on the ‘long-standing assumption that
“high-tech” is somehow “inhuman” and dominates the spectator through
the spectacle. Awe at special effects, it is presumed, can only result in
26. Roland Barthes, ‘On CinemaScope’, trans. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jouvert

3 (1999), http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v3i3/barth.htm (accessed 17 March
2015).
27. See James Morrison, ‘On Barthes On CinemaScope’, Jouvert 3 (1999), http://
english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v3i3/barth.htm (accessed 19 March 2015).
28. Barthes, ‘On Cinemascope’, n.p.
uncritical submission and deference.’29 Although, as I have noted above,

these technologies are inextricably linked with the commercial viability
of the biblical epic, on both sides of the cinematic event – from the
production of the effects to their viewing by an audience – these technol-
ogies offer much more fluidity, interpretative ambiguity and nuance than
is often brought into analysis. And they are fundamental in both the
production and the consumption of the ‘biblical effect’ of the epic film.
Spectacularity, Monumentality, Immersiveness
As Kirsten Moana Thompson has argued, digital innovations in special

effects ‘have enabled the intensification of the historical epic’s distinctive
genre attributes of spectacularity, monumentality, and immersiveness’.30 In
the opening sequence of Exodus: Gods and Kings and in other establishing
shots throughout, the camera’s slow tracking and swooping shots over the
city of Memphis or the quarries of Pithom ‘subtly trace the dynamic and
far-flung vision which the…epic offers us’31 as we absorb all three genre
attributes from our comfortable balcony of ‘History’. However, a funda-
mental ambiguity arises with the use of these techniques. As Andrew Elliot
suggests, such CGI effects actually serve two contradictory purposes: ‘the
first is their ability to showcase spectacular sequences (a sine qua non of
the epic film), but the second is for its opposite function, to enhance verisi-
militude by masking the artifice involved in creating such sequences’.32 As
Elliot goes on to state, ‘the extensive reliance on special effects visible in
the epic film’s return in the twenty-first century is designed both to support
the narrative by its seamless integration within the logic of the film and
to shake the audience into a state in which they simultaneously accept the
world on offer while admiring the craft on offer’.33
29. Mark Jancovich, ‘ “There’s Nothing So Wrong with a Hollywood Script That
a Bunch of Giant CGI Scorpions Can’t Solve’: Politics, Computer Generated Images
and Camp in the Critical Reception of the Post-Gladiator Historical Epics’, in Elliott,
ed., The Return of the Epic Film, pp. 57-73 (61).
30. Kirsten Moana Thompson, ‘ “Philip Never Saw Babylon”: 360-Degree
Vision and the Historical Epic in the Digital Era’, in The Epic Film in World Culture
(ed. Robert Burgoyne; Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 39-62 (45).
Emphasis in original.
31. Thompson, ‘Philip Never Saw Babylon’, p. 32.
32. Andrew B.R. Elliott, ‘Special Effects, Reality, and the New Epic Film’, in
Elliott, ed., The Return of the Epic Film, pp. 129-43 (131).
33. Elliott, ‘Special Effects, Reality, and the New Epic Film’, p. 141.
Yet this verisimilitude remains rooted in the material world in inter-

esting ways that undermine the assumption that the special effect is
always already hypervirtual and merely computer-generated. Some of the
monumental CGI in Exodus: Gods and Kings is, in fact, a blending of real-
world sets with modern advances such as CGI and 3D scanners where the
latter are additional tools used alongside such traditional techniques as set
building and model making. As production designer Arthur Max explains,
some of the statues that are used in the Memphis and Par Ramases scenes
were sculpted from foam as ‘partial statues; we’d make them up around
the thighs, and then we had the heads, and we digitally connected the two
in some cases’.34 In addition, physical sets were built (at Pinewood in
England and Almeria in Spain) which meant that, according to Max, ‘you
get the reference of a real object – say a column or a statue – with real
light falling on it, and then the digital effects department can extend it’.35
Max also notes that Ridley Scott ‘wanted a romantic, stylized version of
ancient Egypt – not what you’d get by studying at the British Museum’,36
using artists such as David Roberts, Jean Leon Gerome, and Edward John
Poynter as visual touchstones.37 This is a different type of verisimilitude,
not necessarily concerned with historical or scientific accuracy (as was
apparent with Scott’s account of the reasons for the Red Sea’s parting)
but attempting to create a spectacular yet believable space in which the
narrative can unfold. The ‘biblical effect’ thus slips between materiality
and virtuality, where both are recoded into information that can circulate
in a filmic version of Castell’s ‘electronic materialization’,38 becoming
available to wider communication networks and thus continuing to
cite blockbuster ‘bible-ness’ as a powerful signifier of religion. The
material needs the virtual and the virtual requires the material in order to
34. Ryan Lambie, ‘Production Designer Arthur Max on the Making of Exodus’,
Den of Geek, 2014, http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/exodus/33370/production-de-
signer-arthur-max-on-the-making-of-exodus (accessed 21 August 2015).
35. Lambie, ‘Arthur Max on the Making of Exodus’, n.p.
36. Lambie, ‘Arthur Max on the Making of Exodus’, n.p.
37. After working on Gladiator, visual effects supervisor John Nelson (who won
an Academy Award for his team’s efforts), commented that Ridley Scott’s dictum was
‘that everything had to look real… Real and stunningly beautiful. After viewing the
first assembly, he came up to me and said it still didn’t feel like it was a big effects
movie; so to me, that meant it was a big, big success.’ Quoted in Kevin H. Martin,
‘A Cut Above: Gladiator’, Cinefex: The Journal of Cinematic Illusions 82 (2000),
pp. 14-16, 21-22, 27-31.
38. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (2nd ed.; 3 vols.; The
Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture; Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), p. 1:406.
create a cinematic verisimilitude. This kind of enhanced visual literacy

is an important part of the ‘biblical effect’ that is created by the film,
demonstrating how fact and fiction blur into information to be used and
interpreted as the spectator watches and creates the storyworld.39
Vivian Sobchack, writing in the late 1980s,40 looks back on what she
calls the ‘surge and splendour’ of the golden age of the historical epic.
During this period she notes that the genre ‘is regarded as a suspect
form of both cinematic and historical representation’41 and that, for
many critics, there is ‘something uncomfortably embarrassing about the
historical epic’s visual and aural excessiveness, about the commercial
hype that surrounds its production,…its spectatorial invitation to indulge
in wantonly expansive, hyperbolic, even hysterical acts of cinema’.42
However, Sobchack is not content to simply dismiss the epic genre as
an embarrassment but is concerned to explore a phenomenology of the
form and to unpack some of the ideological underpinning of the immersive
spectacle that worried Roland Barthes so much. She argues that the epic’s
dual focus on both spectacular excess and seamless verisimilitude, ‘its
modes of representation and rhetoric [constitute] a representational excess
that yields a particular “history effect” ’.43 It is as if ‘History emerges in
popular consciousness not so much from any particular accuracy or even
specificity of detail and event as it does from a transcendence of accuracy
and specificity enabled by a general and excessive parade and accumu-
lation of detail and event’.44 Hollywood’s historical epics (including
Scott’s work) thus provide a ‘narrative construction of general historical
eventness…an admixture of different kinds (and not merely periods) of past
events: mythic, biblical, folkloric, and quasi- or “properly” historical’.45 I
39. It is worth mentioning in this account the huge significance of digital effects
in creating the ‘biblical effect’ that there were some six VFX houses who completed
the final 1300 shots in the film (although 1400 were actually produced): MPC, Double
Negative, Lola, Peerless, Method, and Scanline. These are all interlinked through high
bandwidth internet technology so that scenes can be uploaded from all of the offices
across the world, twenty-four hours a day. A modern blockbuster is thus a perfect
example of Castells’s version of electronic materiality.
40. This is the period that Allen Barra famously defines as the era of the ‘incredible
shrinking epic’. Allen Barra, ‘The Incredible Shrinking Epic’, American Film 14
(1989), pp. 40-43, 45, 60.
41. Vivian Sobchack, ‘ “Surge and Splendor”: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood
Historical Epic’, Representations 29 (1990), pp. 24-49 (24).
42. Sobchack, ‘Surge and Splendor’, p. 24.
43. Sobchack, ‘Surge and Splendor’, p. 29.
44. Sobchack, ‘Surge and Splendor’, p. 28. Emphasis in the original.
45. Sobchack, ‘Surge and Splendor’, p. 28. Emphasis in the original.
want to suggest that this ‘general historical eventness’ and effect can
be nuanced further into thinking about a specifically ‘biblical effect’ or
‘general bible-ness’ in the biblical epic. Sidestepping one-dimensional
debates about the narrative accuracy of the biblical epic in its relation
to textual precursors, the digitally enhanced spectacle of Exodus: Gods
and Kings mixes the ‘general and excessive parade’ of the historical epic
with the ‘biblical effect’ of the plausible miracle. This digital depiction of
the miraculous as plausibly real, alongside the CGI-rendered solidity of
pyramids and statues, informs the ‘biblical effect’ of the biblical epic in
a more active phenomenological fashion as the virtual and the real blur
along the lines of miraculous intervention and special effect.
I have examined some of the static and monumental visual elements
that contribute to the general ‘bible-ness’ of the biblical epic. But the
verisimilitude of the special effect requires not just excellent monumen-
tality in the form of architectural detail but also a careful handling of the
immersion of the audience in sequences that are supposed to depict mirac-
ulous events. This takes my analysis on to the more avowedly spectacular
scenes in Exodus: Gods and Kings.
Picturing the Plagues

Ridley Scott has claimed that what attracted him to Moses is not ‘the big
stuff that everybody knows. Its things like his relationship with Ramases’.46
However true this might be for Scott, the contemporary biblical epic is
also a blockbuster in the ‘sense of producing something “newer”, “bigger”
and “more sensational” to compete with the proliferation of rival media
attractions’.47 Thus, spectacle and narrative are often held in an uneasy
tension. Yet, as Geoff King notes, the fact that ‘even the most heavy-
handed blockbuster is seen as a potential cornucopia of profits beyond
the box office does not necessarily undermine its status as a more-or-less
coherent narrative text’.48 Although 20th Century Fox clearly recognized
that spectacle was one of the main factors in selling the film,49 I want to
46. Eric Spitznagel, ‘Q + A: Ridley Scott’s Star Wars’, Esquire, 2012, http://
www.esquire.com/the-side/qa/spitznagel/ridley-scott-prometheus-interview-9423167
47. Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (London: I.B. Tauris,
2002), p. 201.
48. King, New Hollywood Cinema, p. 214.
49. This is such a key factor that 20th Century Fox released official teaser trailers
of each of the plagues, and even a decidedly low-budget YouTube series on how
modern cities might look if subjected to Yhwh’s wrath.
move beyond the spectacle as merely ocular titillation and examine how,
through digital effects, the cinematic process of visualizing the plagues is
able to overcome the perceived dichotomy between visual spectacle and
narrative plausibility and progression. This leads into an analysis of how
Yhwh’s actions become realized as special effect.
In Gods and Kings, the audience is slowly initiated into the cause
and effect structure of the plagues. Moses has returned from exile and
threatened Ramases, demanding Ramases free the Hebrew slaves, telling
him that he has God on his side. Ramases decides that he wants Moses
dead and begins to hunt down the Hebrews in the city and to execute them
publicly until Moses turns himself in. Moses and his band of guerrilla
fighters have been carrying out attacks on Ramases’ grain stores and
infrastructure but Ramases merely responds with more and more execu-
tions and violence. Nothing seems to shift his resolve. That is, until Yhwh
intervenes. From a nearby mountain, Moses and Malak (the angel/child
that represents God but is only visible to Moses) watch Ramases’ attacks
continue unabated. Moses turns to Malak: ‘You don’t need me’, he says.
‘Maybe not’, Malak responds. ‘So what do I do? Nothing?’ Moses asks.
Malak answers: ‘For now, you can watch’.
Of course, this is aimed at both Moses and the audience. In talking with
Pharaoh in the biblical Exodus, Yhwh explicitly frames the plagues as a
kind of shock and awe: ‘For by now I could have stretched out my hand
and struck you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been
cut off from the earth. But this is why I have let you live: to show you
my power, and to make my name resound through all the earth’ (Exod.
9.15-16). So, we watch.
Instead of a series of separate events, the film partially threads a kind
of narrative plausibility through the excessive spectacle: first, a horde of
crocodiles attack Egyptian fisherman before turning to a frenzied canni-
balism, making the Nile run with blood. Frogs emerge from the river, then,
unable to return to the polluted waters, die and decay, which creates a
breeding ground for gnats and flies. Even the Egyptian expert-scientist has
a rational explanation for all of these first events (although this eventually
breaks down and results in his execution). The rest of the plagues then
unfold with the death of Egyptian livestock, painful skin boils, a thunder-
storm of hail and fire, crop-devouring locusts, and perpetual darkness,
before culminating in the death of the Egyptian firstborn.
In terms of how such computer-generated effects contribute to the
storyworld of Exodus: Gods and Kings and to the ‘biblical effect’ I am
tracing here, Aylish Wood’s concept of ‘timespace’ in spectacular cinema
is especially useful. She argues that ‘digital effects have the potential to
introduce a spatial progression to narrative’50 and can thus integrate the

perceived dichotomy between spectacle and narrative alluded to above.
As Wood highlights, there are two sides to the debate of how time, space
and narrative intersect: ‘The first position suggests that spectacle inter-
rupts the flow of narrative, and the second that it enhances the effect
of narrative’.51 According to the first position, too much emphasis on
spectacle effectively halts the movement of the narrative, merely dazzling
and stimulating the senses and over-filling the viewable space. The second
position echoes what I have already mentioned in the historical epic: that
‘digital effects intensify the verisimilitude of an imagined world’ even
though, in distinction to Sobchack, Wood suggests that spectacle is thus
‘realigned with unity rather than excess’.52
However, Wood goes beyond this impasse to offer a more complex
analysis of the use of digital effects. She argues that, classically, narrative
progresses through time, and that
space, and by extension spectacle, remains a subordinate element in the

generation of meaning because it is seemingly there only to support and
unify, to give rise to the place in which the changing events occur. This
position denies space a temporal dimension. Digital effects, however, most
specifically when they extend the duration of spectacle or give extended
movement to spatial elements, introduce a temporal component to spaces.53
For Wood, both time and spectacular space can influence narrative
progression. Filmic space contributes to the mise-en-scène (literally,
‘placing on stage’) and integrity of the image but it can also be tempo-
ralized; as ‘timespace’ it can actively add to the storyworld’s narrative.54
As she goes on to explain, spectacle is frequently referred to as ‘depthless,
or as having an excess of surface’, yet
spectacle is more image-full than mise-en-scène as it accumulates ever more

details. This property is enhanced through digital effects because they can
be used to lengthen the screentime during which spectacular elements can
be seen, or lengthen the time that spectacular elements remain convincing
before drawing attention to themselves as illusions.55
50. Wood, ‘Timespaces in Spectacular Cinema’, p. 371.

51. Wood, ‘Timespaces in Spectacular Cinema’, p. 371. Emphasis in the original.
As image-full spectacles, the digitized plagues accumulate a greater

detail (just as Vivian Sobchack identifies) than was previously possible
to earlier filmmakers. This excess of spectacular detail overwhelms
any claims for accuracy. Thus Scott’s almost-but-not-quite rationalized
plagues contribute to the narrative development of the Hebrew’s flight
from Egypt within the film’s storyworld but also, and more importantly
for my argument, help fulfil an audience experience of ‘biblical event-
ness’. The plagues become virtually real, a special effect that affects how
‘bible-ness’ is produced and consumed. I shall expand on this below.
However, integrating Aylish Wood’s analysis further, I want to turn to the
dynamic spectacle of the parting of the Red Sea and its contribution to
producing and communicating a divinely backed biblical event-ness.
Parting the Waves
Within the context of Exodus: Gods and Kings the digital effects of
picturing the plagues and animating the Red Sea wave go beyond the
merely spectacular, simply providing a backdrop to the rest of the action.
Wood distinguishes between ‘dynamic’ and ‘non-dynamic’ digital effects
in the creation of ‘timespace’.56 The non-dynamic are those monumental
effects that add detail to the fictional backdrop; the dynamic are those
effects that extend the movement and duration of the spectacle. In Exodus:
Gods and Kings, Memphis and Pithom are rendered in CGI detail as
space, but the plagues – the crocodiles, frogs, and flies and the ‘mighty
hand’ of Yhwh at the Passover – are extended dynamic effects; they
become an example of ‘timespace’, contributing to both mise-en-scène
and narrative development. Although in classical Hollywood film it is the
mobile human character that responds to situations in the storyworld, with
the increasing use of digital effects other spectacular elements ‘can have
the effect of modifying the situation, and as such can operate as mobile
agents of the narrative’.57 Yhwh’s computer-generated ‘mighty hand’
exerts agency as part of this enhanced ‘biblical effect’ engendered by the
biblical epic form.
Scott’s vision of the parting of the Red Sea uses considerably less
water than DeMille’s 1956 production, not least in part because Scott
‘remembers scoffing at biblical epics from his boyhood like…The Ten
Commandments… “with walls of water trembling while people ride
between them… I didn’t believe it then, when I was just a kid sitting in

the third row. I remember that feeling, and thought that I’d better come
up with a more scientific or natural explanation.” ’58 We have already seen
how his envisioning of the crossing involves reimagining the sea draining
away as a prelude to a massive tsunami wave. And yet, whether we are
watching DeMille’s parting or Scott’s tsunami they both create a general
‘biblical event-ness’. Where they differ is that ‘where the panoramas of
the historical epic of the 1950s proffered contemplative but relatively
static vistas from the Balcony of History, the new era of digital effects
enables an affectively exciting and intensely embodied spectatorship’.59
A key element in this affective spectatorship is the dynamism of the
digital effect. Wood notes that in the film Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996), the
digital tornadoes are not merely a backdrop to the romantic love story ‘but
act as another dimension of narrative’.60 The twisters appear and reappear,
exhibiting an unaccountable behaviour of their own; ‘they do not appear
briefly as a plot device to allow something else to happen: instead, they
form an additional narrative dimension that competes with that of the
human figures’.61 Building on this, and coming closer to the immersive
liquid dimension of the biblical wave, in the film The Perfect Storm
(Wolfgang Petersen, 2000) Wood suggests that ‘timespaces are created
when the images of the storm become more central to the narrative. This
occurs as the images of the storm shift from simply providing a coherent
location to become instead a competing narrative element about the power
of the storm itself.’62 Because digital techniques continue to advance, such
images can remain onscreen for a longer period of time, maintaining their
verisimilitude within the storyworld and becoming mobile agents in the
narrative.
The wave in Gods and Kings is a perfect example of Wood’s concept
of timespace. Moses, with Ramases’ armies at his back, has led the fleeing
tribes to the edge of the Red Sea. He sits staring at the water, which, for
an audience in the know, is becoming increasingly portentous. In a fit of
anger, he hurls his Egyptian-made sword into the sea where it sinks and
comes to rest in the sandy bed of the shallow sea. As night falls, Moses
sees a meteor plunge from the heavens and disappear over the horizon.
58. Sara Vilkomerson, ‘How Ridley Scott Looked to Science – Not Miracles – to
Part the Red Sea in “Exodus: Gods and Kings” ’, Entertainment Weekly, 2014, http://
www.ew.com/article/2014/10/23/ridley-scott-red-sea-exodus (accessed 20 March
2015).
59. Thompson, ‘Philip Never Saw Babylon’, p. 56.
The withdrawal of the sea could thus be linked, for Scott’s implied
sceptical viewer, with the impact of the meteor in the far distance. It is left
unsaid as to whether Moses interprets this as a divine sign.
In the morning, Moses realizes that the sea is retreating and the hilt
of his sword appears to demonstrate how low the water has fallen. The
Hebrews begin to cross and when Ramases arrives and realizes that his
quarry are getting away, he leads his armies in a charge across the seabed.
On the far horizon, the wave re-enters the storyworld as a gigantic wall
of water, twisting waterspouts connecting it to the heavens. According
to the Moving Picture Company, the special effects studio that worked
extensively on the film, Scott wanted ‘operatic and performing skies
throughout the scene, ramping up the drama to the point where the wave
approaches’.63 The digital effects allow the skies themselves to become
part of the narrative ‘timespace’.
The encroaching wave allows for shots that frame Moses and Ramases
at opposite ends of a stage, but is also an increasingly spectacular and
dramatic digital effect of the invisible God. First, the wave offers a kind of
spatial dimension that provides a vivid and iconic backdrop for the action
between the main characters. Then, secondly, it develops into a dynamic
mobile agent, a prolonged special effect that suggests a divine agency
overwhelming the comparatively insignificant human characters.64
As the wave hits, everything is fully immersed in the effects as the
camera switches to underwater views of the Egyptians, horses, chariots,
and Moses and Ramases being tossed away in the wave’s massive turbu-
lence. As the bruised and battered Moses and Ramases haul themselves
out on their respective shores, each on the other side of the Red Sea, the
audience are also left overwhelmed by the dynamic spectacle of the wave
and its agency in the turn of events.
Of course, this was always to be expected as the blockbuster biblical
epic must deliver on spectacular scenes. However, in terms of how I
am theorizing the ‘biblical effect’ of the biblical epic, this expectation
is intertwined in a general ‘biblical event-ness’. The Bible is supposed
to be spectacular; does it not have the master of special effects, the
miracle-maker, at its core? And are not the events life-changing and world-
defining? The biblical epic confirms this by choosing the most spectacular
63. ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’, MPC Film, 2015, http://www.moving-picture.

com/film/filmography/exodus-gods-and-kings_12415d14155b (accessed 31 August
2015).
64. According to their website, ‘MPC worked with Scanline FX and their
Flowline water simulation software to create churning water travelling in front of the
wave and breaking water on the wave’s lip’. ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’, MPC Film.
and consumable of biblical narratives and motifs and repackaging and

rebooting them again and again. To return to flesh out my opening state-
ments, how then does the ‘biblical effect’ contribute to thinking more
deeply about religion as a special effect, as information, as technicity?
From ‘Biblical Effect’ to Religion as Special Effect
In this final section, I want to think about how cinematic special effects
play into the social consumption of ‘bible-ness’ and what this means
for the transmission of the Bible into mediated information, interfusing
with other forms of information in a networked society. Special effects
become a form of picturing religion, asserting codified information that
is not necessarily consumed passively but interactively, effectively and
affectively.
Samuel Weber’s thinking on the special effect marks my approach here.
He suggests that
what is so ‘special’ about ‘special effects’ has much more to do with a

certain exteriority, with an outwards movement than the familiar phrase
would tend to suggest to a casual observer. If this outwards movement is
important or essential to what is ‘special’ in the ‘special effect’, then a new
question will have to be addressed: ‘out of’ what and toward what else? To
sum up these two questions: Does the ‘outward’ movement that makes an
effect special, necessarily entail a movement ‘into’ something else, and, if
so, what or where?65
For Weber, this outwards movement is rooted in the etymology of the

special effect. As he highlights, one of the connotations of effect derives
‘from the Latin, ex-facere, to make something out of something else. The
emphasis here is not just on the transformation, the moving away, but
also – as something “made” or “fabricated”, on a movement towards a
defined goal… An effect, in this sense, implies a certain work and, with
it, a certain intentionality or deliberateness.’66 In Weber’s thought, this
is where the theatricality of the special effect enters (and it is useful to
remember that, in North America at least, cinemas are still often known as
‘movie theatres’, exhibiting film’s deep roots in performative spectacle).
Essentially, ‘an effect, whether special or not, makes something “out” of
something else, producing an event outside of itself’67 and the outward
65. Weber, ‘Special Effects and Theatricality’, p. 120. Emphasis in the original.
movement of the event-producing special effect finds its destination in

the audience. As Weber notes, ‘a special effect therefore cannot be said
to consist exclusively in a collection of images or sounds, but also, and
perhaps above all, in the responses those images and sounds produce in
an audience’.68 I am suggesting that it is in the deliberately constructed
outward movement of the ‘biblical effect’ that ‘bible-ness’ is produced,
communicated, and received by a viewing audience. Miraculous biblical
events are thus rendered repeatable as special effects to confirm the Bible
as the arche-text of the ‘Western’ religious canon but also to demonstrate
how, in their very technicity, human agency and skill are able to recreate
them and experience them without a divine mandate.
There is a deep and abiding paradox here; as Weber outlines, the special
effect has to touch on a certain commonality: ‘One of the chief tasks
in interpreting “special effects” will be that of understanding how it is
possible that something that is on the one hand extremely singular, in the
sense of being extraordinary, can also be extremely familiar and common,
part of the experience or expectations of a group or species’.69 The special
effect, according to Weber, is thus both particular and extraordinary, but
in its exteriority, in its reaching out, it is part of a common interpretative
resource, part of the experience or expectation of a species. Thus, as we
have seen, a biblical effect such as picturing the Red Sea parting has to
be both ‘miraculous’ (digitally and religiously) and ‘expected’. Within
the storyworld it is miracle; within audience experience it is constituted
as a special effect, both believable and technical at the same time. The
‘biblical effect’ blurs these affects into hyperreal information.
Hent de Vries takes the special effect as inherently ‘religious’ in the
sense that it shares its phenomenological inheritance with the miracle.
He echoes the paradox outlined by Weber above but extends it in a way
useful for the present discussion. The special effect and/or miracle is an
extraordinary event, a singular sign of a divine intervention. Yet they both
demonstrate their ‘artificiality and technicity’.70 Miracles are a technical
performance of signs and wonders; as de Vries suggests:
those who performed lesser miracles in [God’s] name (whether as imposters

or not) drew on a certain technical skill. The apostles performed miracles –
powerful acts (dynameis), signs and wonders (semeia and terata) – speaking
in tongues, healing and exorcising, that accompanied their diffusion of the
Word and the spreading of the Spirit and in so doing established its authority.71
70. Vries, ‘In Media Res’, p. 25. Emphasis in the original.
71. Vries, ‘In Media Res’, p. 24. Emphasis in the original.
It would seem that Ridley Scott might stand in the venerable tradition of
offering a certain technicity that the hand of God has always needed. This
seemingly supplementary use of manipulated special effects, paradoxi-
cally, adds a theatrical authority to the Word.
Developing the etymological richness of the concept, de Vries notes
that ‘the word “effect”, from the Latin effectus, the past participle of
efficere, “to bring about, to accomplish, to effect, to perform”, in effect
(that is to say, virtually) comes to stand for any event or action whose
structure finds its prime model in the theological, perhaps even theistic
concept of God…’.72 The plagues of Egypt and the parting of the Red
Sea in Exodus: Gods and Kings share in this complex structure. As I
have argued above, utilizing the work of Aylish Wood on the ‘timespace’
of digital effects, these spectacular ‘agents’ are dynamic, powerful acts
(dynameis) that, following de Vries, play into the interface between the
mediatized special effect and the religious effect of the miracle. It has
also been important to outline the material issues and concerns of the film
industry in the making of the biblical epic, the work that goes into blurring
real and virtual worlds, the fabrication that has always been part of the
production and selling of the immersive cinematic experience that fasci-
nated and repelled Roland Barthes so much. The ‘biblical effect’ clearly
remains a marketable commodity.
As a tentative conclusion that demands more research (and that
continues to take biblical studies into much broader terrain), I want
to suggest that the outward movement of these special effects – their
intentionality, their fabrication, their manipulation – contributes to the
‘electronic materiality’ of the Bible and its circulation as a placeholder
for an always already mediatized apprehension of religion. The return
of the biblical epic makes the Bible into a hyperreal effect, a generalized
‘biblical event-ness’ that is also a technique to invoke (and provoke?)
‘religion’. Graham Ward laments that ‘true religion’ is being emptied
of its potency and meaning-making potential by becoming ‘a special
effect, inseparably bound to an entertainment value… The religious is
used rhetorically in the creation of the illusions of transcendence, to help
simulate euphoria in transporting events.’73 Yet, following my under-
standing of the close family resemblances between the special effect and
the miracle, it is clear that religion has always had a use value in creating
illusions of transcendence, or, at the very least, in attempting a delib-
erate moving towards and away from. If, in a contemporary networked
society, ‘the grid of electronic communication overlies everything we do,
72. Vries, ‘In Media Res’, p. 24.

73. Graham Ward, True Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 133.
wherever and whenever we do it’,74 the ‘biblical effect’ of the biblical epic
is to translate the virtuality and technicity of the textualized miracle, the
imagining of divine agency, into hyperreal information, to be used and
assimilated in myriad ways.
Manuel Castells outlines that because ‘culture is mediated and enacted
through communication, cultures themselves – that is, our historically
produced systems of beliefs and codes – become fundamentally trans-
formed, and will be more so over time, by the new technological system’.75
This networked society where, according to Castells,
the communication of all kinds of messages in the same system, even if

the system is interactive and selective (in fact, precisely because of this),
induces an integration of all messages in a common cognitive pattern…
From the perspective of the user (both as receiver and sender, in an
interactive system), the choice of various messages under the same commu-
nication mode, with easy switching from one to the other, reduces the mental
distance between various sources of cognitive and sensorial involvement.
The issue at stake is not that the medium is the message: messages are
messages. And because they keep their distinctiveness as messages, while
being mixed in their symbolic communication process, they blur their codes
in this process, creating a multifaceted semantic context made of a random
mixture of various meanings.76
The messages emanating from the special effects of the biblical epic
are mixed together into a multifaceted semantic context engendered by
networked spectators. Following Samuel Weber’s sense of the special
effect as having a social recognisability, a common cognitive pattern, I
want to suggest that one facet of the ‘biblical effect’ in the networked
society is to make the Bible especially recognisable as ‘religious’, with
all the connotations of the ‘globalatinization’77 of that word. As Castells
goes on to argue, every cultural expression ‘from the most elitist to the
most popular comes together in this digital universe that links up in a
74. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 1:xxx.

75. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p. 1:357.
76. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, pp. 1:402-403. Emphasis in the
original.
77. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at
the Limits of Reason Alone’, in Acts of Religion (ed. Gil Anidjar; London: Routledge,
2002), pp. 40-101. Derrida suggests that the fusion of Christianity with contemporary
teletechnologies goes some way towards making this ‘Latinate’ religion the hegemonic
and globalized conceptualization of the possibilities inhering around the concept/word
religion.
giant, non-historical hypertext, past, present, and future manifestations

of the communicative mind. By so doing, they construct a new symbolic
environment. They make virtuality our reality.’78 The ‘biblical effect’,
constructed from the technicity of the cinematic special effect, becomes
effective in producing the Bible as information alongside ‘on-demand
pornography, soap operas, and chat-lines’.79 Castells hopes that, in
this great digital levelling, societies are ‘finally and truly disenchanted
because all wonders are on-line and can be combined into self-constructed
image worlds’.80
However, the ‘special effect’ of religion, bound up with its technicity
and mediality, is traceable in part to its etymological double-nature. As
Weber reminds us, ‘two semantic fields are generally considered to be
the origins of the Latin religio, dividing scholarship from classical times
to the present: the Ciceronian interpretation deriving religio from legere,
to gather or assemble…and the version of Lactance [Lactantius] and
Tertullian, explaining religio by ligare, lier, to bind’.81 Although Weber
relates his analysis of the impossible iterability of ‘religion’ to an analysis
of theatre, his conclusion on the position of the spectator is telling. As
he explains, ‘the “spectator” thus emerges as the aporetic site not just of
legere, as gathering together, and ligere, as binding, but of the “enigmatic
re-” that binds and collects such a movement of binding and collecting,
but only by at the same time separating them from themselves’.82 Exodus:
Gods and Kings could be seen as part of the process of Castells’s disen-
chantment. But this ‘enigmatic re-’, in the form of the spectator of the
special effect, separate but immersed like Moses in the influx of the Red
Sea, will still be watching the bright lights flicker on the screen, gathering
their own meanings from the electronic materiality of the biblical
spectacle. Echoing Castells, all wonders might well be online but, as
Hent de Vries reminds us, in another globalatinization, ‘to wonder at’ is
still rooted in the miraculous.83 The plug-ins of mediated religion remain
legion.

81. Weber, ‘Religion, Repetition, Media’, p. 53.
82. Weber, ‘Religion, Repetition, Media’, p. 54.
83. ‘Lest we forget, the word miracle comes from Latin miraculum and the verb
mirari, which means “to wonder at” ’. Vries, ‘In Media Res’, p. 25.
T h e B i rt h of a N at i on :
C i v i l R el i g i on a n d R i dle y S cot t ’ s
E x od u s : G od s a nd K ings
Catherine Wheatley
Abstract
In André Bazin’s 1951 essay ‘Cinema and Theology’, the critic claims
that religion holds a longstanding fascination for filmmakers, and an
enduring appeal for American film audiences, not least as it appears in the
biblical epic. Testament to the longevity of this genre is a plethora of films
concerned with matters of Christianity released during the period 2013–15
and including, but not limited to, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, Harold Cronk’s
God’s Not Dead, Randall Wallace’s Heaven Is for Real and, of course,
Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. North American attitudes towards
religion have, however, shifted quite dramatically in the sixty-year period
since Bazin’s pronouncement. The aim of this paper is to examine Exodus:
Gods and Kings in relation to the historical and sociological contexts that
inform them, asking how its formal qualities, including what I will posit as
the film’s ‘melting pot aesthetic’, connect not only to an enduring myth of
civil religion as described by Peter Berger, Grace Davie and others, but also
to the contemporary political climate. Following Jonathan Rosenbaum’s
arguments about cinema’s engagement with religion post-9/11, I will argue
that Exodus: Gods and Kings is part of a body of recent films that are
experiential, communal, and – crucially – that turn around an amorphous
religiosity, which has more to do with the myths of the nation, and of
Hollywood, than any specific Judeo-Christian creed or belief system.
Introduction
‘The cinema has always been interested in God’, wrote the French critic
André Bazin, in his 1951 essay, ‘Cinema and Theology’. Bazin continues,
‘The Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles were hits in France as well as
in America. At the same time in Italy, the Rome of the first Christians
Wheatley The Birth of a Nation 137
provided filmmakers with subjects that required gigantic crowd scenes,

which were later seized upon by Hollywood and are still present today.’1
History, it seems, has borne him out. God’s on-screen presence has waxed
and waned over the years, but He has never disappeared from our screens
entirely, and the years 2013–15 saw the release of a number of films in
which a Judeo-Christian God played a prominent (if usually off-screen)
role. Among these works are Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, Harold Cronk’s
God’s Not Dead, Randall Wallace’s Heaven Is for Real, and of course,
Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. In response to these releases,
certain critics have concluded that Hollywood is making a ‘return to
religion.2
Bazin’s essay, however, points towards an emerging split in national
cinematic engagements with the Bible, namely between American epics
and European spiritual pieces, one which is significant for my purposes
here. Although Bazin begins by drawing an equivalent between European
and American epics, stating that this ‘immense catechism-in-pictures
was concerned above all with the most spectacular aspects of the
history of Christianity’, he goes on to lambast Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo
Vadis, among other works, for its over-reliance on ‘everything that is
exterior, ornamental, liturgical, sacramental, hagiographic and sacra-
mental’, while praising Augusto Genina’s Heaven over the Marshes
precisely for its rejection of such categories: arguing that in place of
an iconographic or symbolic representation of religion, Genina’s film
offers a phenomenology of sainthood, honoring God’s universe through
rendering its reality and, by means of its reality, its mystery.3 He thus sees
in European cinema the possibility for capturing ‘through the very nature
of its characters, story and events’, ‘the total transcendence of grace’, and
attributes ‘the international vulgarisation’ of religious imagery on screen
to America, and in particular to ‘the Catholic minority in Hollywood,
whose influence is great’, and who ‘found in the cinema a remarkable
tool of propaganda’.4
Having set up this binary, Bazin might take some responsibility for
the endurance of a cliché which associates on the one hand Hollywood’s
Bible films with star power, sentiment and spectacle, and on the other
1. Andre Bazin, ‘Cinema and Theology’, in Bazin at Work: Major Essays and
Reviews from the Forties and Fifties (ed. Bert Cardullo; trans. Bert Cardullo and
Alain Piete; New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 61.
2. See, for example, Tom Shone, ‘A Movie Miracle: How Hollywood Found
Religion’, in The Guardian, 31 July 2014
3. Bazin, ‘Cinema and Theology’, pp. 65, 63.
4. Bazin, ‘Cinema and Theology’, p. 63.
European ‘art-house’ spiritual or ‘transcendental cinema’ with realism,

transparency, ambiguity and authentic engagement with religion.5 This
is a cliché which has one foot in reality, and in this much it is like the
contemporary assumption that the United States is a religious society,
Europe a secular one, an assumption examined in some detail by Peter
Berger, Grace Davie and Effie Fokas in their book Religious America,
Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations.6 The reality to which each of
these clichés refers is rather more complicated than we might at first think;
yet the cliché does indeed mirror reality. How and why this might be is a
matter that demands careful attention.
The aim of this article is therefore quite simple: through an exami-
nation of the overlapping contexts that inform Ridley Scott’s adaptation
of the Moses story in Exodus: Gods and Kings I will demonstrate the
film’s formal and thematic connections to the notion of American ‘Civil
Religion’, as described by Peter Berger, Grace Davie and others, in both
its historical and contemporary iterations. Beginning with an overview of
the complex historical relationship between nation, religion and cinema
in the USA, I will go on to examine the contemporary media climate, in
which post-9/11 religiously themed film strives for ‘shock rather than
sublimity’.
Civil Religion and the American Cinema

Before looking at the current state of affairs, I want to take a quick detour
by way of the contrasting histories of religion in the USA and Europe, con-
centrating on the factors which shed light on the current religious situation
in each place. By taking this detour, we can see how the cliché takes shape
and how it is explained, as well as how it is called into question.
According to Berger et al., survey data show that both Catholic and
Protestant churches are in ‘deep trouble’ in Europe: ‘Attendance at
services has declined sharply, there is a shortage of clergy, finances are
in bad shape, and the churches have largely lost their former importance
in public life’.7 This, of course, was not always the case, and naturally
there are differences within Europe. But in Europe, post-Enlightenment,
a narrative of progression equates modernity with secularism. I mean
here secularism in all three of the senses delineated by Jose Casanova in
5. See, for example, Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Cinema (New York:
Da Capo, 1972).
6. Peter Berger, Grace Davie and Effie Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe?
A Theme and Variations (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008).
7. Berger, Davie and Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe, p. 11.
Public Religions in the Modern World.8 These are, first, the separation of
Church and State, secondly the decline of belief and practice and finally
the marginalization of religion to the private sphere. It is the former
that has perhaps had the greatest impact: where once the Church was a
powerful political force, it has now become a marker of national identity
and cultural heritage. Church-going meanwhile is viewed at best fondly
as an outmoded indulgence, at worst askance as a sinister pursuit tainted
by the scandals that have torn through the Catholic Church in recent
years.
The situation in the United States is fundamentally different. This is a
country founded on a creed of ‘freedom to believe’, rather than ‘freedom
from belief’. In terms of institutional and constitutional structures, the link
is with ‘religion in general’ and not with a particular faith, a sentiment
nicely captured in the oft-repeated words of Dwight D. Eisenhower: ‘Our
government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply-held religious
belief – and I don’t care what it is’. Exactly the same idea is evident in the
many expressions of religion blended with patriotism that can be found in
modern America – from the printing of ‘In God We Trust’ on the currency
to the addition of ‘One Nation under God’ into the pledge of Allegiance.
Thus Berger et al. conclude that it is precisely the separation of Church
and State that makes the interlinking of religion-in-general and national
identity possible. They note, however, that this interlinking rests on the
assumption of a certain form of religious life – namely monotheistic,
religious pluralism. ‘Quite deliberately’, they note, ‘this has included
Jews as well as Christians’ – at least in the post-World War II period.9
The resulting religious framework – ‘civil religion’, as Robert Bellah has
termed it – alludes to a shared perception of Judeo-Christian heritage,
taking care to emphasize commonality rather than difference.10 Hence the
expressions I have just cited. They – and the ideas that they represent – are
used not only to rally Americans behind wars and policies, but to increase
support for the political system as such.
If politics and religiosity are inextricably bound together in the history
of the USA, characterized by what Kris Jozajtis has described as a
‘distinctive evangelical tang’, then cinema has long had a role to play in
the perpetuation of this relationship. In his rigorous re-examination of
D.W. Griffith’s epochal The Birth of a Nation, Jozajtis stresses the complex
interaction between nation, economy, politics and religion: forces which
8. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994).
9. Berger, Davie and Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe?, p. 29.
10. Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief (London: Harper & Row, 1970).
shape the film but which are in turn shaped by it. His working definition of
nation, adapted from Philip Schlesinger, is a ‘kind of collective identity…
constituted at a given strategic level of society…[and] serving to construct
an “us” and exclude others’.11 Crucially, it is functionally dependent on
the effective communication of stories, symbols and traditions through
which its individuals imagine themselves as participants in the broader
drama of national life. Hence when, in the First Amendment, religion was
set aside and protected from state intervention in the American context, a
mythology of religious freedom and virtue (one arguably inherited from
New England Puritanism) was born, one which became a defining aspect
of a nation which labelled itself ‘A New Israel’.
For Jozajtis, then, the religious ideals, narratives and symbols visible
throughout the history of Hollywood cinema are therefore not merely
reflective of the autobiographies of the Jewish studio heads who sculpted
the early cinema; the decisive role of the Catholic Church in the adoption
of the Hays Code (as Bazin would have it); or the personal convictions
of such quintessentially ‘American’ filmmakers as Cecil B. DeMille and
Frank Capra, among others. Rather, he stresses that Hollywood’s birth and
development is concomitant with the religious dimension of American
life, and any individual film is reflective of the historical and social
climate (including the place of religion within this) that shapes it. Most
importantly, the ‘secular’ medium of film provided a mainstream space
in which Protestant, Catholic and Jewish belief and image systems could
intermingle under the banner of US nationhood.
There are however, two key thematic concerns that according to
Jozajtis hold a particular significance to this religiously inflected,
cinematic version of the nation. The first of these has to do with notions
of exclusion, the ‘us and them’ mentality which allows a nation to unite
against a common other. The second invokes what Jozajtis refers to as
the ‘Lost Cause’. This is a term that has specific links to the white South
but that refers more widely to a trope of victimhood and oppression
organized along religious lines. It evokes a way of life that is viewed by a
people as sacred or holy but that is subject to the chaos and disorder of an
oppressive order.12 Importantly, the figure of the Lost Cause is often used
to transform a historical oppressor into an underdog, as in The Birth of a
11. Kris Jozajtis, ‘ “The Eyes of All People Are Upon Us”: American Civil
Religion and the Birth of Hollywood’, in Representing Religion in World Cinema:
Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making (ed. S. Brent Plate; New York and
Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), p. 24.
12. Jozajtis, ‘ “The Eyes of All People” ’, pp. 249-50.
Nation, which sees white racist Southerners configured as ‘a conquered

people who view the rubble of what they had conceived as a civilized,
moral way of life’.13
Exodus, Exclusion and Lost Causes
The Exodus story is of course particularly well suited to both the notion
of exclusion and of the Lost Cause, and it has a long history within
American culture of having been adopted by various social and political
movements. Steven J. Ross, for example, describes how, in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, black American slaves venerated Moses even
more than Jesus (not least because while the latter promised a better life in
the hereafter, the former promised freedom in this lifetime).14 Meanwhile
Ingrid Lilly has described how the story has a longstanding history of
revolutionary interpretations: ‘From medieval uprising in the Netherlands,
to William Bradford’s early American pilgrimage speeches, to slave songs
in Antebellum America, to Gustavo Gutierrez’s liberation theology in
Latin America, to Jewish ethics of justice, to Rastafari seeking an end to
British rule’.15
Lilly is damning of Ridley Scott’s failure to live up to the Exodus
story’s ‘liberation potential’, claiming that the film functions as a ‘an
adoring meditation on state power’, one which places the suffering of
the Egyptians on a par with that of the Hebrews, and worships the lavish
lifestyle of its supposed antagonists while underselling the Hebrew
cause. Most depressingly, to Lilly, ‘the biblical theme of the hard heart of
oppressive state power is never dissembled’.16 And yet such ambivalence
is precisely characteristic of the Lost Cause and its tenuous reversal of
the oppressor/oppressed dynamic. And Lilly crucially overlooks the long
history of Exodus serving as a rallying cry not (only) to those groups that
history has cast as authentic minorities, but also to those who it has not.
A case in point is Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 adaptation of Exodus, starring
Charlton Heston as Moses. A remake of DeMille’s 1923 film of the same
name, DeMille’s The Ten Commandments adapted the Exodus story for
13. Jozajtis, ‘ “The Eyes of All People” ’, p. 249.

14. Steven J. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press
2011), p. 282.
15. Ingrid Lilly, ‘Marching on a Hard Heart: Selma Is the Exodus That
Ridley Scott Failed to Deliver’, Huffington Post, 1 September 2015, http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/ingrid-lilly/marching-on-a-hard-heart-selma-is-the-exodus-that-
ridley-scott-failed-to-deliver_b_6437694.html (accessed 1 November 2015).
16. Lilly, ‘Marching on a Hard Heart’.
a Cold War world that saw democracy and religious freedom threatened
by the Soviet Union. To make sure audiences understood his intentions,
the director appeared in the film’s two-minute prologue and explained,
‘The theme of this picture is whether men ought to be ruled by God’s law
or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Ramses.
Are men the property of the state or are they free souls under God? This
same battle continues throughout the world today.’ Made at a time when
Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee
were purging the American film industry of all Communist influence in
what has often been dubbed a ‘witch hunt’, the film clearly portrays white,
right-wing America as the victim of persecution, not least through the
image politics of Heston’s casting as both Moses and the voice of God. An
‘unambiguous hero who repeatedly won cinematic battles between good
and evil’, Heston will for many contemporary readers be unequivocally
associated with right-wing politics, most notably through his support for
the National Rifle Association.17 And yet Heston, too, embodies a certain
victim/oppressor ambiguity, having openly supported the Democrat party
and the civil rights movement (marching in Oklahoma City in 1961)
before embracing a more Reaganite politics and finally being vilified as
the face of American militarism in Michael Moore’s polemical anti-arms
documentary Bowling for Columbine.18
For the left-wing cleric, Giles Fraser, however, the notion of the Lost
Cause is embedded in the very fabric of the Exodus myth. He argues that
any connection to liberation theology can only be made from a Western
perspective. ‘From a Palestinian perspective, one person’s liberation is
another’s slavery… The slaves come out of Egypt and into a land promised
them by God. And for Palestinians, this promise is responsible for their
military subjugation, for walls and settlements.’19 Scott makes a gesture
towards this perspective when Moses, wary of what lies ahead of the Jews
after their crossing of the Red Seas, tells Aaron that the Canaanites will
‘see us as invaders’. Fraser reads perhaps too much into this moment,
and indeed attributes rather more intentional ambiguity to the film than
17. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, p. 272.

18. For a fascinating and very detailed account of Heston’s political persona and
its impact see the chapter on ‘Moses and the Red Tide’, in Ross, Hollywood Left and
Right. For more on The Ten Commandments and its relationship to Communism see
Melanie J. Wright, Religion and Film: An Introduction (London and New York: I.B.
Tauris, 2007).
19. Giles Fraser, ‘Palestinian Christians Find No Cry for Freedom in the Exodus
Story’, The Guardian, 2 January 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/comment-
isfree/belief/2015/jan/02/palestinian-christians-find-no-cry-freedom-exodus-story
(accessed 1 November 2015).
might be convincing – he agrees with Lilly that Scott is unsympathetic

towards the Jews but claims that this is an admirable disruption of biblical
binaries between good Hebrews and bad Egyptians. We will return to the
question of the film’s ambivalence towards the political questions it raises
in due course. But first, let us look more carefully at the political and
film-historical backdrop against which the film was released.
Spectacle and Religion

The critic Paul Coates has argued that ‘[t]rue film epics can only be made
[and properly received by audiences] at a time when a country’s national’s
myths are still believed – or, at best, at a time when a nation feels itself
slipping into decline, which produces a spate of nostalgic evocations
of those myths’.20 So it is that The Ten Commandments was released
at precisely the moment when America’s cultural values – rational
humanism, bourgeois patriarchy, imperialism, entrepreneurialism and
corporate capitalism – were beginning to come under threat from the Civil
Rights, youth, and women’s movements, but were at the same time redou-
bling themselves in the face of the Cold War. Today, we find ourselves at
a similar moment of crisis and consolidation: the Cold War context that
informs DeMille’s The Ten Commandments having become the War on
Terror. And so if, as Jozajtis suggests, historical and social context shapes
the intersection of nation, religion and cinema, then in what follows, I
would like to make a case for understanding Exodus: Gods and Kings
as part of a post-9/11 body of films which both reflect upon and and are
reflective of the political climate in this period.
The ur-text in this group is Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, released
in 2004: in critic Jim Hoberman’s words ‘a movie which aspired to be far
more than a movie by representing and, in a sense, identifying with a
unique instance of divine intervention – and hence proposing itself as a
cinematic event to trump even 9/11’.21 Falling back into Bazin’s binaries,
he describes it as: ‘The antithesis of a film like Robert Bresson’s Diary
of a Country Priest (1951)’, stating that ‘Gibson’s atavistic Christian art
goes for shock [and awe?] rather than sublimity. The filmmaker employs
extreme, even gross, horror movie tropes, a well as blatant digital
effects.’ It is ‘less reverential than razzle-dazzlin’ ’.22 Hoberman’s criticism
20. Quoted in Vivian Sobchack, ‘ “Surge and Splendor”: A Phenomenology of the

Hollywood Historical Epic’, Representations 29.2 (1990), p. 40.
21. J. Hoberman, Film after Film. Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?
(London and New York: Verso, 2013), p. 29.
22. Hoberman, Film after Film, p. 30.
of the film – that it privileges ‘razzle-dazzle’ (that is, spectacle) over

reverence (spirituality), seems to reiterate Bazin’s earlier condemnation
of the American cinema. Yet this straightforward dismissal of the film
misses the specificity of its appeal to American audiences. With more
pre-sales than any movie in history, The Passion cuts across audience
demographics and religious denominations, its attraction for audiences,
like that of DeMille’s The Ten Commandments arguably being as much
political (albeit perhaps subconsciously) as faith-based. As Hoberman
explains, the film, ‘held as much appeal for evangelical Protestants as
traditional Catholics – and perhaps even more, given that the evangelicals
had little that was comparable to Catholicism’s thousand years of religious
pageantry… To some degree its constituency was the same that George W.
Bush’s key political advisor Karl Rove would address some months later
in the 2004 election.’23 Beyond the evangelicals and the Catholics lie the
significant proportion of the American public who do not align themselves
with a particular denomination but who declare themselves followers
of a kind of ‘golden-rule Christianity’, to borrow Nancy Ammerman’s
term.24 Unlike Europe, where unbelief is a common – and growing –
phenomenon, in America religiosity, however amorphous, is the norm.
Thus The Passion spoke to a wide range of audiences as a concept, even
before they had seen the film. And once in the cinema moreover they
encountered a film that was deeply invested in spectacle and in visceral
effect. As such The Passion was both experiential and – just as impor-
tantly – communal, its visceral visuality demanding that audiences see it
in cinemas, as part of groups, rather than in isolated and often isolating
home viewings.25
In fact it may be precisely its ‘razzle-dazzle’ that lends The Passion its
peculiar religious appeal. Describing the ‘hyperformalism’ of the historical
epic, Vivian Sobchack speaks of the genre as ‘institutionally full of itself,
swollen with its own generative power to mobilize the vast amounts of
labour and money necessary to diddle its technology to an extended and
expanded orgasm of images, sounds and profits’.26 This notion of the
religious epic as an engorged, bloated, grotesque celebration of capitalism
is perhaps what makes Ingrid Lilly so wary of accepting Exodus: Gods and
Kings as an authentic engagement with questions of religion and struggle.

24. Nancy T. Ammerman, ‘Golden Rule Christianity: Lived Religion in the
American Mainstream’, in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice
(ed. David D. Hall; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 196-216.
26. Sobchack, ‘ “Surge and Splendor” ’, p. 25.
Certainly it’s easy to read in Sobchack’s description a parallel with the

lavishness of the Egyptian society that the film portrays. But to paraphrase
Sobchack, within these films religion emerges in popular consciousness
‘as a general and excessive parade of accumulation of detail and event’.27
Thus, she states, in reviews of the (biblical) epic, ‘one generally finds
praise not for its historical accuracy or specificity but for its extravagant
generality and excess – of sets, costumes, stars, and spectacle, of the
money and labour that went into the making of such entertainment’.28
Critical response to Exodus: Gods and Kings has been mixed, but one
point of consensus is that its effects are breathtaking. ‘Well of course the
plagues are a riot’, writes Nick Pinkerton in Sight & Sound, ‘You could
hardly bollocks that up, it’s natural blockbuster stuff, the very reason for
a movie called Exodus: Gods and Kings to exist’.29 Pinkerton’s rather
glib comment belies a serious point, one that is also gestured towards by
Sobchack. For not only are cinema and civil religion longstanding allies,
but Hollywood has served to celebrate and advertise America’s techno-
logical sophistication and the financial ease that lies behind it. ‘We’ve
still got it’, Exodus: Gods and Kings proclaims, a bolster to its domestic
audiences far more than a challenge to international viewers. It is hardly
surprising in this respect that the film’s primary source seems not to be the
Bible but Hollywood itself: from Howard Hawks’s Land of the Pharaohs
through DeMille’s Ten Commandments and Disney’s Prince of Egypt to
Scott’s own Gladiator. The Passion and its variants are far from lacking
in religiosity: it is simply that the quality and object of that religiosity
differ significantly from that of Bresson’s film, for example. Their object
of worship is not a (Christian) God, but America itself, and in particular a
version of America promulgated by Hollywood.
The American Melting-Pot and Exodus: Gods and Kings
The Passion sets the template for the biblical films that follow in its wake,
including Exodus: Gods and Kings: it is experiential and communal; it
offers not escapism, but solace through spectacle; it (re)tells a story that
is part of America’s shared cultural inheritance. But it also is something
of an anomaly, in that it is unique in adapting a New Testament story,
where Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings tell us stories from the Old
Testament. These films thus cast their net still further – appealing not only

29. Nick Pinkerton, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’, Sight & Sound (February 2015),
p. 70.
to a pan-denominational Christian demographic but also to America’s

religious heritage, thus evoking the foundations of civil religion itself.
That is, from its very beginning, immigrant groups into the United
States have used religion as a means for grounding solidarities as they
arrived in a new place. Its religious communities are constituted by those
who gather together (congregate), rather than by geographical territories,
as is the case in Europe.30 And critically, immigrant congregations were not
and are not simply ‘transplants’ of traditional religious institutions from
their countries of origin; they themselves became areas of social change,
moulding the country of which they chose to be part (this narrative of
mutual assimilation is itself mythologized by Warner Brothers’ seminal
film The Jazz Singer). In Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation
of the World, S. Brent Plate draws parallels between the ways in which
religion and film both frame the world, through selection, and create, or
re-create, the world, via myth: a phenomenon that works by ‘organizing
and presenting reality in a way that makes humans not just conceivers but
responders and partakers’.31 In Exodus: Gods and Kings, these two forms
of myth-making coalesce, interpellating the viewer with redoubled force.
Exodus: Gods and Kings tells American audiences a story they know three
times over: it is a Bible story, but it is also the story of how a nation was
formed, and the story of how a great cinematic empire rose out of that
nation.
Consider, for example, New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott’s description
of the film as ‘an epic of national liberation and self-assertion, in which
the Israelites discover a political identity and begin to organize themselves
as a people’.32 Replace ‘Israelites’ with ‘American citizens’ and Exodus:
Gods and Kings becomes the foundational myth of the USA. The film’s
‘melting pot’ production context and aesthetic renders this visually.
Exodus: Gods and Kings’s stars are Welsh, Australian, Italian-American,
British-Jewish, White Baptist: the casting of Christian (Christian!) Bale –
star of The Dark Knight, which has been read as an allegory of Bush-era
politics – responds to a call for ‘macho men’ who would ‘defend Bush’s
America’. It is remarkable too that it is Russell Crowe, best known as
30. S. Warner, ‘Work in Progress Towards a New Paradigm for the Sociological
Study of Religion in the United States’, American Journal of Sociology 98.3 (1993),
pp. 1066-67.
31. S. Brent Plate, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World
(London: Wallflower, 2008), p. 7.
32. A.O. Scott, ‘Moses Is Back, Bearing Tablets and Strange Accents’, New
York Times, 11 December 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/movies/exodus-
gods-and-kings-ridley-scotts-biblical-drama.html?_r=0 (accessed 1 November 2015).
the hero of Scott’s Gladiator, who is cast as Aronofsky’s Noah. These

actors – both of whom have an off-screen reputation for directness to
the point of aggression – are the natural inheritors of Heston’s legacy:
powerful leaders for a perilous world, hyper-masculine heroes who are
directly opposed to the softer more sensitive male images of Marlon
Brando or James Dean in Heston’s case; Leonardo DiCaprio or Orlando
Bloom (whose casting in Kingdom of Heaven was deemed a misfire) in
Crowe and Bale’s. They are heroes who appeal as much to men as they
do to women. Meanwhile the film’s locations – standing in for Egypt and
Israel – are Spain, Morocco and the Canary Islands; its architecture and
costume design combines ancient Egyptian and Romanesque aesthetics,
as well as nineteenth-century Orientalism.33
In this much, Exodus: Gods and Kings echoes certain aspects of
DeMille’s Ten Commandments, which largely cast white actors as Jewish
characters, the ethnically ‘othered’, Russian-born Yul Brynner playing
Pharaoh, and which, on a narrative level, modified or weakened the
Jewish identity of the exodus participants by the inclusion in their ranks
of sympathetic Nubians and even Egyptians. Like DeMille’s film, Scott
also goes some way towards ‘Christianizing’ the Exodus story, repeating
the earlier film’s emphasis on Moses as a Christ-like ‘deliverer’ (in both
films Moses is banished not for killing an Egyptian taskmaster, as in the
Old Testament, but due to suspicions that he may be such a deliverer),
drawing visual parallels between Dathan and Judas, Pharaoh and Pilate,
and incorporating New Testament imagery into sequences portraying
Moses’ exile in the desert.
And yet in other aspects Scott’s film forges significant breaks with
its predecessor, breaks that are revelatory of Exodus: Gods and Kings’s
contemporary social and political concerns. Of particular significance is a
divergence between the endings of the two films, with Exodus: Gods and
Kings’s conclusion sounding a note that on first appearance appears far
more pessimistic than that of The Ten Commandments. The earlier film
closes with Moses posed to resemble the statue of Liberty; he tells the
slaves that ‘we go forth a free nation where every man shall reap what
he has sown’, and exhorts them to ‘Proclaim liberty throughout all the
lands, unto all the inhabitants thereof’: the text drawn from Lev. 25.10 and
engraved on the Liberty Bell. The implication is clear: that the Promised
Land, like the New Israel, will be an ordered but open society, founded
on a creed of capitalism and individualism. Hence, as Melanie Wright
points out, the apparent contradiction between the film’s conservative take
on international politics and the more liberal ideology underpinning the
33. Pinkerton, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’, p. 70.

film’s take on slavery (‘God made men. Men made slaves’, says Joshua).
Commandments rejects racism, she writes, ‘since it, like the command
economics of the Soviet Union, is a perversion of the American dream’s
belief in the power of anyone to pursue the “good life” ’. She concludes
that ‘[a]mbiguity therefore blends into consistency’.34
In Exodus: Gods and Kings, on the other hand, a conversation between
Moses and Aaron that takes place on the banks of the Red Sea views the
future of the Jews with a rather more anxious eye. Prevaricating over
whether or not to bring his family with him on the next leg of the journey,
Moses expresses some concern over the reception that the Jews will face
on arrival in the Promised Land. Aaron assures him that the Jews are as
‘big as any tribe’, to which Moses responds ‘we’re as big as any tribe: and
that’s what concerns me’. At present, he tells Aaron, they all have the same
goal, ‘but what happens when we stop running?’ A cut to seagulls picking
over the remains of the Egyptian army and Pharaoh, alone, on the opposite
shore, draws an unsettling visual parallel between the two men and their
nations, as if to underline that no nation’s fate is secure; that the mighty
can – and do – fall. Both Scott’s and DeMille’s films promise resolution
of the conflict between America and its enemies, suggesting that one
culture will triumph, the other be overcome. In Exodus: Gods and Kings,
however, this is no guarantee of lasting peace. Made at the beginning of
the Civil Rights movement, during a period of hope for American politics,
The Ten Commandments is able to celebrate the American melting pot, to
cast the enemy as an external force. Although they occurred subsequent
to the film’s release, the spectre of the 2015 race riots in Baltimore and
massacre in Charleston hover over Exodus: Gods and Kings’ final scenes,
which bespeak a lack of confidence in the extent to which the USA really
can claim to be ‘one nation’.
The conversation between Aaron and Moses is followed by three
more sequences. In the first of these, Moses returns to his wife Zipporah,
bringing the Jews with him to the tiny village where she resides with
his son. In the next, we see Moses bidden by the child God played by
Isaac Andrews to take down the Ten Commandments. ‘A leader may falter.
Stone endures. These laws will lead them in your stead.’ Finally we see
an aged Moses in a wagon, surrounded by a marching horde: the camera
zooms out from the individual to the crowd as the film draws to a close.
How are we to read this ending? On the one hand, as I have suggested,
it implies a certain scepticism towards the American dream and to the
notion of individual agency in particular. In this much, it serves as a
34. Wright, Religion and Film, p. 67.

corrective to the problem that the critic Mark Cousins sees as endemic to
Hollywood cinema:
So much American cinema is spawned from the idea of an individual

winning out against the adversity of a harsh world, that the exhilaration
of the moving image comes to be the natural vehicle for a universalized
struggle for liberty. There’s nothing necessarily either left- or right-wing
about that. But the celebration of freedom, taken to an extreme, becomes
blind libertarianism. It refuses any concept of solidarity or community, or
engagement with other values. It is the liberty of the right.35
Certainly this final displacement of the individual by the group and of

the leader by the law seems to gesture towards an understanding of the
Exodus story structured less around notions of self-determinism than was
DeMille’s and more around nation as community. It is worth noting in
this respect that while DeMille’s film presents membership of the Chosen
People as a voluntary, self-selected identity (according to Wright a post-
Enlightenment, modern Christian position), Scott’s gives it as a birthright:
a genetic inheritance and an obligation rather than a choice.36 Moses first
denies, then – when offered physical proof – is disgusted by, the revelation
that he is Jewish. However his behaviour and appearance throughout the
film’s opening sequences – markedly more masculine than his adopted
brother (sporting a beard and wearing far less make-up), cynical towards
prophesies and charms, practical where Pharaoh is fanciful, and frugal
where Dathan is frivolous – presents him as inherently different from the
Egyptians among whom he was raised. To an extent, then, despite the
mixed casting, Jewishness is configured in Exodus: Gods and Kings as
ethnicity rather than a religion: something that is in the skin and bones
of these characters and is therefore not part of a free-market economy in
the manner that Berger et al. describe contemporary religious affiliation
as being.
But on the other hand, the aesthetics of these sequences potentially
reveal what Mark Cousins has described as the ‘blue artery of right-
wing isolationism running through the [American] culture’, most notably
through their striking resemblance to two classic Westerns directed by
the Republican director John Ford.37 As Moses returns to Zipporah, she
is framed in silhouette in the doorway of her small hut in an almost
35. Mark Cousins, Widescreen: Watching. Real. People. Elsewhere (London:

Wallflower, 2008), p. 213.
36. Wright, Religion and Film, p. 62.
37. Cousins, Widescreen, p. 215.
exact replica of the closing frame of The Searchers (1956). Meanwhile

the zoom from the wagon to the march repeats an exact movement from
Wagon Master (1950). While displaying a superficial libertarianism, the
two films demonstrate on a more profound level a deep-seated fear of the
metropolis and of other cultures, with Wagon Master seeing its Mormon
protagonists flee the violence and chaos of Crystal City for a new frontier-
land Eden, and The Searchers’ Ethan Edwards rescuing his niece Debbie
from the uncivilized, irreligious Comanches who have kidnapped her.
Just such small-town values are promoted throughout Exodus: Gods
and Kings, with Zipporah’s village idyll favourably compared to the
Sodom-like city of Memphis – ruled by an elite detached from ordinary
ideas and intoxicated with power – and the simple appearance of the Jews
contrasted with the ornate, feminized pomp of the Egyptians (Dathan
comes in for particular disapprobation for his extravagant living condi-
tions). Retreat from such debauchery is given as the only correct path
open to the Jews: as Moses tells Ramases, he does not want to rule in his
place, simply the freedom to leave. Thus the film, in its closing scenes,
seems to consolidate its place within a long-standing isolationist tradition.
Its final message, like that of Ford’s films, or indeed those of Frank Capra
or Howard Hawks, is ‘that there’s no place like home. There is no need
for elsewhere: a patriot will find everything he needs in home, family, and
small town American life.’38
Conclusion: A Return to Religion?

In her 1964 essay ‘Piety without Content’ Susan Sontag takes on the
notion of ‘amorphous religiosity’ without faith or observance, coming to
the stern conclusion that one cannot be religious in general any more than
one can speak language in general. For Sontag, to write of ‘spiritual style’
without acknowledging what that spirituality consists of, from whence it
is born, is misguided. She remarks that:
To be religious is always to be in some sense an adherent to a specific

symbolism and a specific historic community, whatever the interpretation
of these symbols and this historic community the believer may adopt. It is
to be involved in specific beliefs and practices, not just to give assent to the
philosophic assertions that a being whom we may call God exists, that life
has meaning. Religion is not equivalent to the theistic proposition.39

39. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin,
2009 [1961]).
In this article I have attempted to situate Exodus: Gods and Kings within
a specific symbolic realm and historical community, to tease out where
this film comes from, and what the implications might be for how we
understand the wider panorama of contemporary cinematic engagement
with the Bible and with religion more broadly. Exodus: Gods and Kings’
conflation of Jewish and Christian religious symbolism, of progressive and
conservative politics, makes for at times confusing viewing. And yet it is
my contention in this article that the divergent themes and images are not
testament to a religiosity without object, nor as Bazin would have it, to a
preference for the stylistic trappings of religion over its substance. Rather,
I believe that in contemporary America religion precisely is equivalent to
the theistic proposition, and ‘amorphosity’ is its defining characteristic.
The differences between political parties and religious creeds are muddied
in service of an overwhelming concern with civil religion: One Nation
under God. And in Exodus: Gods and Kings this concern is played out at
the levels of theme, iconography, and aesthetics.
This is not to claim that the film is wholly celebratory of civil religion.
Quite to the contrary, as its final scenes indicate, this is a complex
work – far more complex than some critics have given it credit for –
which displays a clear ambivalence about the contemporary state of the
nation. But just as Berger, Davie and Fokas show us that the history of
religion in the United States is an upward spiral, one in which nation
building, economic expansion, rapid urbanization and influx of new
people interact positively to promote growth rather than decline in the
religious sector, so Exodus: Gods and Kings closes with a vision of
forward progression. In this much, it is true to its generic provenance.
From Charlton Heston standing on the beach, arm aloft, to Jim Caviezel
rising from the dead: Hollywood’s biblical epics reassure their audiences,
offering visions of communities forged, new beginnings. But beyond
this still, Hollywood cinema is perhaps, as Mark Cousins would have it,
‘inherently worshipful’.40 By dint of its sheer scale, by the very nature
of its medium, it reifies, sanctifies, and makes epic not only the stories it
tells but its very substance. Exodus: Gods and Kings is perhaps part of a
cinematic movement that sees Hollywood returning to religion – but then
again, perhaps it never really left.

E x od u s : G od s a nd K ings
a nd t he S ecul a r -R el i g i ous T r ansgr e ssi on
of S a c r ed B ou n dar i e s
David Tollerton
Abstract
2014’s return of the biblical epic was not positively received by all faith
communities. Like Darren Aronofsky’s Noah before it, Exodus: Gods and
Kings provoked religious offence in some quarters, and in so doing became
the latest addition to a line of screen representations of the Bible to have
caused upset among religious conservatives. But the case of censorship
in Egypt, much covered in Western media, also situates it in another, less
visible tradition of films committing ‘civil blasphemy’. The following
discussion will explore some of the key cultural dynamics and theoretical
issues underlying this phenomenon, ultimately suggesting that development
of a sensitivity to civil blasphemy amid study of the Bible’s reception could
inform a variety of contexts.
Bible Films and Offence

Since the very origins of cinema in the late nineteenth century the Bible
has provided popular subject-matter for filmmakers.1 But screen depictions
of the Bible have an in-built potential to cause controversy among devout
viewers. Several factors may be cited, but two are especially prominent.
First, there is the fundamental disconnect between text and moving image
as media forms. Ideas, stories and characters present textually within the
Bible are necessarily supplemented, reduced and altered when transferred
onto the screen. This may be as obvious as omitting or adding elements of
1. See, for example, Adele Reinhartz, Bible and Cinema: An Introduction
(London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 1.
Tollerton Exodus 153
plot, or simply the very act of adding sensory dimensions absent from the
written word. A second conspicuous factor is that Bible films are expensive
endeavours, generally produced under the controlling hand of commercial
studios rather than formal religious authorities. Although the governance
of censorship in Hollywood did, for a period of the mid-twentieth century,
become deeply intertwined with Catholicism, it is generally speaking the
case that clerical institutions have not had oversight of the Bible’s utili-
zation within cinema.2
It should thus be of little surprise that, among cinematic treatments of
the Bible, 2014’s Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings are far from novel
in causing upset among some religious communities. Even the Exodus
narrative itself is not new to this phenomenon. Now relatively obscure,
in 1980 the satirical film Wholly Moses! was, for example, declared
‘blasphemous and sacrilegious’ by Rabbi Abraham Hecht, president of
the Orthodox Rabbinic Alliance of America. Hecht remarked (somewhat
hyperbolically) that ‘this savage mockery of our God, our Bible, including
the Ten Commandments, and our prophet and teacher, Moses, is compa-
rable to events that occurred in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia’.3
But accusations of blasphemy against Bible films have not simply
erupted periodically in some neatly formulaic manner. It is rather the
case that each example has peculiarities related to its particular cultural
location. Consider two well-known examples: Monty Python’s Life of
Brian (1979) and Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ (1988). The
controversies that accompanied the release of these films concerned not
just what the filmmakers did with biblical material, but their emergence
amid broader social discord between Christian conservatives and cultural
opponents. With Life of Brian, a prominent factor in Britain was the
slow-burning confrontation between emergent liberal moralities rooted
in the 1960s and an opposing defence of socially conservative Christian
values – a fight led by The Nationwide Festival of Light and the vocal
campaigning of Mary Whitehouse.4 In the late 1980s, debate surrounding
2. For a short overview of religious censorship in mid-twentieth-century Holly

wood see Andrew Quicke, ‘The Era of Censorship (1930–1967)’, in The Routledge
Companion to Religion and Film (ed. John Lyden; New York: Routledge, 2009),
pp. 32-51.
3. Cited in ‘Wholly Moses Denounced as Insult to Judaism’, Jewish Floridian,
18 July 1980.
4. See Robert Hewison, Monty Python: The Case Against (London: Eyre
Methuen, 1981), pp. 59-95 and David Tollerton, ‘Blasphemy! Free Speech Then and
Now’, in Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and his Times via Monty
Python’s Life of Brian (ed. Joan Taylor; London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 55-67.
the Last Temptation of Christ also involved particular national dynamics.

The controversy surrounding its release became a focal point in America
for the conservative Christian lobbying of the Moral Majority movement,
ultimately foreshadowing the ‘Culture War’ announced by Pat Buchanan
at the Republican National Convention in 1992.5
In this article on Exodus: Gods and Kings I am correspondingly inter-
ested in the particular cultural tensions at play amid some of the contexts
in which it was considered offensive. What boundaries was it deemed
to have crossed? What did it do to provoke the ire of certain viewers?
I will focus particularly on the example of the film’s reception in Egypt
because of the way in which that specific case study draws us into a more
unfamiliar terrain of interfaces between secularity, sacredness, Bible and
nationalism.
Exodus: Gods and Kings and Conservative Religious Opposition
When considering issues of religious offence two notable factors lingered

behind the release of Scott’s film in December 2014. The first, broader
point is that in comparison to the controversies surrounding Life of Brian
and The Last Temptation of Christ, Scott’s film emerged in an altered
landscape as far as issues of artistic expression and blasphemy are
concerned. The period since Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against
novelist Salman Rushdie is a different era, one that has seen significant
attention devoted to the perceived dissonance between Western views
of free expression and Muslim feelings of offence.6 This attention has
only increased over time, with the ‘Rushdie Affair’ eventually followed
by controversy surrounding cartoons published in the Danish Jyllands-
Posten newspaper in 2005, protests against the YouTube video ‘Innocence
of Muslims’ in 2012 and, most recently, shootings at the Paris office
of Charlie Hebdo in revenge for the magazine’s satirical images of
Muhammad.7 Exodus: Gods and Kings did receive some criticism from
Christian conservatives, but notably it was released at a time of heightened
Muslim sensitivity to Western treatments of Koranic prophets and, corre-
spondingly, greater Western interest in Muslim feelings of offence.
5. See Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture
Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 184-89.
6. See, for example, Paul Weller, A Mirror for our Times: ‘The Rushdie Affair’
and the Future of Multiculturalism (London: Continuum, 2009).
7. For a treatment of the Jyllands-Posten cartoon controversy that addresses wider
factors in detail see Jytte Klausen, The Cartoons That Shook the World (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2010).
A more immediate factor to consider is the reception of Noah earlier

in 2014. Aronofsky’s film was criticized by Christian conservatives in
America for its environmental ethos, alteration of biblical plot points and
morally ambiguous depictions of God and Noah.8 It was also banned in
several Muslim countries for a variety of overlapping causes: because of
‘scenes that contradict Islam and the Bible’ (United Arab Emirates), because
‘[a]ny depiction of any prophet is prohibited in Islam’ (Malaysia) and
because the film could provoke public unrest (Indonesia).9 There is indeed
an initial feeling of déjà vu when encountering the reception of Exodus:
Gods and Kings among some confessional commentators. In comparison
to Noah, Scott’s film appears to have drawn less criticism among Christian
conservatives, although vocal exceptions can be found.10 The high-profile
American broadcaster Glenn Beck, for example, concluded his review by
remarking that, because of its characterizations of Moses, divinity and the
plagues, this was ‘[o]ne of the more dangerous movies I’ve seen… As
someone who believes in Moses, someone who believes in God, someone
who believes in the Ten Commandments, someone who believes in
8. See, for example, Sean Hannity et al., ‘Noah Faces Storm of Criticism over
Religious Merits’, The Sean Hannity Show, 27 March 2014, http://video.foxnews.
com/v/3401163917001/noah-faces-storm-of-criticism-over-religious-merits/?#sp=-
show-clips (accessed 24 August 2015); Ken Ham, ‘The Noah Movie Is Disgusting
and Evil – Paganism!’, Answers in Genesis, 28 March 2014, https://answersingenesis.
org/blogs/ken-ham/2014/03/28/the-noah-movie-is-disgusting-and-evil-paganism/
(accessed 24 August 2015); Albert Mohler, ‘Drowning in Distortion – Darren
Aronofsky’s Noah’, 31 March 2014, http://www.albertmohler.com/2014/03/31/
drowning-in-distortion-darren-aronofskys-noah/?utm_source=feedly&utm_reader=-
feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=drowning-in-distortion-darren-aronof-
skys-noah (accessed 14 August 2015).
9. Juma Obeid Al-Leem (Director of Media Content Tracking at the National
Media Council), cited in BBC, ‘Middle East Ban for Hollywood’s Noah Epic’, 13
March 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-26568107 (accessed 24
August 2015); Abdul Hamid (Malaysian Chief Censor), cited in Ben Child, ‘Darren
Aronofsky’s Noah Falls Foul of Censors in Malaysia’, The Guardian, 7 April 2014,
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/07/darren-aronofsky-noah-banned-ma-
laysia-islamic-law (accessed 24 August 2015); Yenni Kwok, ‘Indonesia Ban Noah’,
Time, 25 March 2014, http://time.com/36564/noah-russell-crowe-movie-banned-by-
indonesia/ (accessed 24 August 2015).
10. For a cautiously positive evangelical response to Exodus: Gods and Kings
see Krish Kandiah, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings Review – Biblically Irreverent but
Powerful Cinema’, Christianity Today, 4 December 2014, http://www.christian-
today.com/article/exodus.gods.and.kings.review.biblically.irreverent.but.powerful.
cinema/43927.htm (accessed 24 August 2015).
Exodus, I’m offended, I’m deeply offended.’11 And as with Noah, Scott’s
film faced censorship in parts of the Muslim world. Although reluctant
to provide exact details to the press, the United Arab Emirates’ National
Media Council rejected its release on the grounds that they ‘found that
there are many mistakes not only about Islam but other religions too’.12
The Moroccan Cinematography Center, interpreting the young boy Malak
to be a depiction of the divine, initially banned Exodus: Gods and Kings
before later allowing its release once Fox Studios presented them with a
version featuring ‘the desired change, removing two audio passages that
alluded to the personification of the Divine’.13
Probably the fullest explanation for banning Scott’s film was provided
by the Egyptian culture minister, Gaber Asfour, speaking to the interna-
tional press agency Agence France-Presse. As the largest Arab nation and
geographical setting for most of the film, Egypt’s response to Exodus:
Gods and Kings was widely commented upon in international media.
Reporting on discussions within the country’s censorship committee,
Asfour noted concerns about Scott’s warlike portrayal of Moses and the
reduction of the Red Sea’s miraculous parting to ‘a tidal phenomenon’.14
11. Glenn Beck, speaking on The Blaze radio on 15 December 2014. A recording
of the review is available at Erica Ritz, ‘Beck: New “Exodus” Movie Makes Moses
“Arrogant” Before Turning Him into a Terrorist’, The Blaze, 15 December 2014,
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/12/15/did-exodus-gods-and-kings-turn-moses-
into-a-terrorist-glenn-beck-certainly-thinks-so/ (accessed 24 August 2015).
12. Juma Obeid Al-Leem (Director of Media Content Tracking at the National
Media Council), cited in Manjusha Radhakrishnan, ‘ “Exodus” Will Not Release in
the UAE’, Gulf News, 27 December 2014, http://gulfnews.com/life-style/celebrity/
hollywood/exodus-will-not-release-in-the-uae-1.1432595 (accessed 24 August 2015).
13. The Moroccan Cinematography Center, cited in Paul Schemm, ‘Morocco
Approves “Exodus” Film after Offending Sections Cut’, The Times of Israel, 8
January 2015, http://www.timesofisrael.com/morocco-approves-exodus-film-after-of-
fending-sections-cut/ (accessed 24 August 2015).
14. Gaber Asfour, cited in Agence France-Presse, ‘Egypt Bans “Zionist” Film
Exodus and Cites “Historical Inaccuracies” ’, The Guardian, 26 December 2014,
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/26/egypt-bans-hollywood-exodus-chris-
tian-bale (accessed 24 August 2015). See also Koran 26.63-66. These complaints
reflected two aspects of Exodus: Gods and Kings that its makers consciously highlighted
amid its pre-release publicity. In October 2014 Christian Bale provoked widespread
headlines when describing Moses as ‘one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever
read about in my life’ and Scott described to the press his desire to conceptualize
the Parting of the Red Sea as the outcome of an ancient Mediterranean earthquake.
See Carey Lodge, ‘Christian Bale Says Moses Is “Schizophrenic” and “Barbaric” ’,
Christianity Today, 27 October 2014, http://www.christiantoday.com/article/christian.
Zionism, Pyramids and National Self-Understanding
But with the Egyptian ban on Exodus: Gods and Kings it is notable
that the film additionally appears to have transgressed boundaries quite
distinct from those surrounding Islamic sacrality. To illustrate this point it
is worth momentarily returning to the reception of Aronofsky’s film.
In March 2014 The Al-Ahzar Institute, Egypt’s most authoritative and
influential Sunni body, announced that Noah should be banned on the
basis of visually depicting a prophet. Cinematic portrayal of Noah, they
stated, ‘contradicts the stature of prophets and messengers…and antago-
nises the faithful’.15 Significantly, however, the state Ministry of Culture
did not ultimately ban Aronofsky’s film.16 But as noted above, Egypt’s
civil authorities did ban Exodus: Gods and Kings.
Why this distinction? The very likely cause is that, beyond its perceived
mistreatments of Moses’ character and the miraculous crossing of the Red
Sea, Scott’s film was also deemed to have committed cultural and political
offenses. Culture minister Asfour raised two interconnected complaints:
that Exodus: Gods and Kings suggests ‘Jews built the pyramids’, a view
which ‘totally contradicts proven historical facts’, and that Scott had made
‘a Zionist film’ structured by ‘a Zionist view of history’.17 These two
concerns require a degree of unravelling.
bale.says.moses.is.schizophrenic.and.barbaric/42217.htm (accessed 24 August 2015);

The Independent, ‘Christian Bale Describes Moses as “Barbaric” and a “Likely
Schizophrenic” ’, 27 October 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/
christian-bale-describes-moses-as-barbaric-and-a-likely-schizophrenic-9821127.html
(accessed 24 August 2015); Sara Vilkomerson, ‘How Ridley Scott Looked to Science
– not miracles – to Part the Red Sea in Exodus: Gods and Kings’, Entertainment
Weekly, 23 October 2014, http://www.ew.com/article/2014/10/23/ridley-scott-red-
sea-exodus (accessed 24 August 2015).
15. Agence France-Presse, ‘Noah Film Should Be Banned Says Egypt’s Top
Islamic Body’, The Telegraph, 6 March 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/10680573/Noah-film-should-be-banned-
says-Egypts-top-Islamic-body.html (accessed 24 August 2015).
16. Cristiana Missori, ‘ “Noah” Film to Be Screened, Says Egypt’s Board of
Censors’, Ansa Mediterranean, 7 April 2014, http://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/
news/sections/politics/2014/04/07/noah-film-to-be-screened-says-egypts-board-of-
censors_014f3103-90d8-4f28-a5e1-d03bd078e011.html (accessed 24 August 2015).
Ansa Mediterranean is part of the Italian Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata press
organization. See also Egyptian Streets, ‘Noah Allowed Screening in Egypt Despite
Al-Azhar Ban’, 3 April 2014, http://egyptianstreets.com/2014/04/03/egypts-top-is-
lamic-authority-bans-noah/ (accessed 24 August 2015).
17. Gaber Asfour, cited in Agence France-Presse, ‘Egypt Bans “Zionist” Film’.
It is relatively easy to discern the grounds for Asfour’s interpretation

that, in defiance of mainstream Egyptology, Exodus: Gods and Kings
suggests that the pyramids were built by the Hebrews. The film opens with
text informing the audience that ‘For 400 years the Hebrews have been
slaves to Egypt. Building its statues, its cities, its glory’, accompanied by
an image of ancient Egyptian monuments mounted with scaffolding. The
right-hand side of this image prominently displays a large pyramid, with
another pyramid more distantly visible to the far-left.
Whether Exodus: Gods and Kings conveys a Zionist ideology is
more debatable. The biblical Exodus narrative itself has rather obvious
resonances with modern Zionism by simple virtue of portraying Israelite
escape from persecution to the Holy Land (unsurprisingly, the Exodus
narrative was indeed much utilized in contexts of early Zionist thought).18
But Scott adds encouragement to the identification of such a parallel by
including clear Holocaust-imagery in his portrayal of Hebrew suffering at
the hands of Ramases. Travelling through Pithom, Moses witnesses the
piling-up and mass-burning of bodies, presenting the viewer with a trope
now familiar from documentary footage of camp liberations and films
such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993).19 By alluding to the
Final Solution in this way, Moses’ liberation of the Hebrews in Exodus:
Gods and Kings may, by extension, be read as a parallel to the 1948
foundation of the State of Israel.
Yet Scott’s message is far from clear-cut. As the drama draws toward its
close he includes a scene in which Moses and Joshua rest on the eastern
banks of the Red Sea, the former reflecting that the Canaanites will ‘see us
as invaders’. Writing in The Guardian newspaper the prominent Anglican
cleric Giles Fraser has also raised doubts about reading Exodus: Gods and
Kings as a film conveying a Zionist message:
18. For a recent treatment of this topic see Arieh Saposnik, ‘The Desert Comes to
Zion: A Narrative Ends its Wandering’, in Exodus in the Jewish Experience: Echoes
and Reverberations (ed. Pamela Barmash and W. David Nelson; Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2015), pp. 213-46.
19. Film scholar Nathan Abrams comments that ‘[p]erhaps in order to make the
story accessible to a modern post-Holocaust audience, Scott liberally peppers the film
with references to the Shoah. The Egyptians are presented as Nazis, hanging innocent
men, women and children in order to flush out Moses who is hiding among them. The
Hebrew slaves are shown concealed in cellars in order to escape an Egyptian Aktion.
Pithom becomes the Warsaw Ghetto and Moses Mordechai Anielewicz.’ Nathan
Abrams, ‘Exodus – Our Verdict’, Jewish Quarterly, 27 December 2014, http://jewish-
quarterly.org/2014/12/exodus-verdict/ (accessed 24 August 2015).
[T]he thing that really puzzled me was why Egypt, along with several other
Arab states, has banned it. If anything, I thought it remarkably unsympathetic
to the Jewish story. The Hebrew God comes across as a petulant psycho-
path, and Moses as a born-again loon. Indeed, when God starts murdering
Egyptian infants, I find myself emotionally on the side of the Egyptians –
which is not how Passover stories are supposed to make you feel.20
For Fraser, the moral ambiguities of Moses and God’s portrayals ultimately
raise doubts about whether the film really does take an unequivocally
triumphalist view of the Hebrews’ liberation.
Despite this, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture’s accusation that Exodus:
Gods and Kings presents a Zionist message is further propelled by the
way it interlinks with the film’s depiction of Hebrews constructing
pyramids (noted above). The problem, from the ministry’s point of view,
is not simply that such a depiction is historically dubious, but that it
has association with the modern State of Israel. Amid peace talks with
Egypt in the late 1970s Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin more
than once made off-hand references to his forefathers having built the
pyramids, a suggestion that at the time caused diplomatic tension.21 It
is a narrative that some Egyptian archaeologists have been at pains to
resist. In 2002, for example, Zahi Hawass, then Chairman of the Supreme
Council of Antiquities, declared that ongoing excavations ‘refute the
allegations reiterated by Jews and some Western countries that the Jews
built the pyramids’.22 Their concern is that a narrative in which Hebrews
constructed the pyramids would amount to a Zionist appropriation of
Egyptian history.
20. Giles Fraser, ‘Palestinian Christians Find No Cry for Freedom in the Exodus
Story’, The Guardian, 2 January 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/comment-
isfree/belief/2015/jan/02/palestinian-christians-find-no-cry-freedom-exodus-story
(accessed 24 August 2015).
21. Regarding an example from 1977 see Avi Shilon, Menachem Begin: A
Life (trans. Danielle Zilderberh and Yoram Sharett; New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2012), pp. 285-86. Begin also briefly refers to this historical view of the
pyramids during speeches which followed the signing of the peace accords in 1979.
See Haaretz, ‘Speeches by Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat at the
White House after the Signing of the Camp David Accords’, 13 May 2002, http://
www.haaretz.com/news/speeches-by-jimmy-carter-menachem-begin-anwar-sadat-at-
the-white-house-after-the-signing-of-the-camp-david-accords-1.45205 (accessed 24
August 2015).
22. Zahi Hawass, cited in Yaniv Salama-Scheer and Jorg Luyken, ‘War of the
Pyramid Theorists’, The Jerusalem Post, 14 January 2007, http://www.jpost.com/
Features/War-of-the-pyramid-theorists (accessed 24 August 2015).
Interwoven with this apprehension is a broader story of how Pharaonic

history has been received in the modern Egyptian state. Beginning partly
as a movement opposed to the imperialist exploitation of antiquities,
‘Pharaonist’ nationalism is a stream of thought in Egypt especially keen
to use the nation’s ancient history for contemporary cultural and political
causes.23 Jacques van der Vliet describes Pharaonism as a movement that
has
developed a discourse of national unity, transcending religious differences,

by pointing at the glorious past of Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs, by
stressing historical continuity and by emphasizing the Egyptianity, the typical
Egyptian character, of both Egyptian Christianity and Egyptian Islam.24
The politician and former member of the Ministry of Culture Milad Hanna
exemplified this outlook in his 1989 book, The Seven Pillars of Egyptian
Identity, proclaiming that ‘[t]he sense of belonging to the Pharaohs is
an inner feeling that fills every Egyptian citizen without exception with
pride’.25 Hanna’s rhetoric should not be viewed uncritically; as Islamic
studies scholar Michael Wood has observed, the movement never had
widespread saturation among the general population, and even among
nationalist politicians and cultural commentators the high-points of
Pharaonism were in the 1920s and 1960s.26 Having said this, it is clear that
Pharaonism’s tradition of political pride in Egypt’s ancient achievements
still had currency in the Ministry of Culture that banned Scott’s film.
When added to what the historian Margaret Malamud has identified
as a long-felt history of Westerners misappropriating ancient Egyptian
culture, the ‘secular’ offensiveness of Exodus: Gods and Kings begins to
come into focus.27 It is a film rendered problematic not only because of its
treatment of figures and stories sacred in Islam, but because it is an affront
to a nationalist understanding of history.
23. On the origins of Pharaonism in relation to Egyptology see Brian R.

Parkinson, ‘Tutankhamen on Trial: Egyptian Nationalism and the Court Case for the
Pharaoh’s Artifacts’, JARCE 44 (2008), pp. 1-8.
24. Jacques van der Vliet, ‘The Copts: “Modern Sons of the Pharaohs”?’, Church
History and Religious Culture 89.1-3 (2009), p. 283.
25. Milad Hanna, The Seven Pillars of Egyptian Identity (Cairo: General Egyptian
Book Organization, 1989).
26. See Michael Wood, ‘The Use of the Pharaonic Past in Modern Egyptian Nation-
alism’, JARCE 35 (1998), pp. 179-96.
27. Margaret Malamud, ‘Pyramids in Las Vegas and in Outer Space: Ancient
Egypt in Twentieth-Century American Architecture and Film’, Journal of Popular
Culture 34.1 (2000), pp. 31-47.
Two Traditions of Cinematic Offensiveness

Exodus: Gods and Kings thus belongs to two distinct traditions of films
that have caused offence. The first, exemplified by Life of Brian, The Last
Temptation of Christ and, more recently, Noah, are films which have for
varying reasons caused upset among faith communities. But in affronting
a particular Egyptian understanding of its history it also belongs to a less
high-profile tradition of cinema transgressing the sacred boundaries of
national mythology. To explain this point a few brief examples can be
usefully cited as illustration.
Portraying ancient Persians as tyrannical, corrupt and (in terms of
the film’s internal value-system) sexually deviant, Zack Snyder’s 300
(2006) so antagonised the State of Iran that it complained to UNESCO
that its history was being violated.28 Its government spoke of Hollywood
‘plundering Iran’s historic past and insulting this civilization’.29 As with
the Egyptian Ministry of Culture’s ‘secular’ concerns with Exodus: Gods
and Kings, the issue at stake did not relate to Islamic history, but rather the
denigration of the Iranian people’s specifically pre-Islamic achievements.
Immediately preceding the release of Scott’s film in late 2014, another
widely discussed example of cinematic offence against nationalist
sentiment was The Interview, directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.
Its satirical attack on Kim Jong-un was condemned by the North Korean
National Defence Commission as an attack on ‘the dignity of the supreme
leadership of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea]’.30
The film very consciously appeals to a notion of blasphemy, repeatedly
referring to Kim Jong-un’s status as ‘a god’, only to then depict him as
delusional, childish and petulant.
It should finally be noted that examples of cinematic offence against
national sensibilities and mythologies can also be found closer to home.
In Britain, one clear example relates to Jonathan Mostow’s U-571 (2000).
Erroneously portraying the capture of a Nazi Enigma machine by the
American rather than British navy, the film was condemned by a range
28. See Masoud Golsorkhi, ‘A Racist Gore-Fest’, The Guardian, 19 March

2007, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/mar/19/thereleaseofthebox
(accessed 24 August 2015).
29. Javad Shamaqdari (Deputy Culture Minister), cited in BBC, ‘Iran Condemns
Hollywood War Epic’, 13 March 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/
6446183.stm (accessed 24 August 2015).
30. BBC, ‘North Korea Berates Obama Over the Interview Release’, 27 December
2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-30608179 (accessed 24 August 2015).
of political and media commentators as a disrespectful treatment of

history. Brian Jenkins MP received then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s firm
approval in the House of Commons when describing U-571 as an ‘affront
to the memories of the British sailors’.31 Given the central place of the
Second World War in Britain’s national self-understanding, Mostow’s
film was perceived as a particularly acute denigration of historic heroism.
All of these films in one way or another transgressed boundaries of
acceptable civil discourse. A question that emerges from this is whether
the secular offences for which Exodus: Gods and Kings’ was banned
in Egypt amount to a form of blasphemy. Is it the case that Scott’s film
committed two simultaneous wrongs, appearing blasphemous in the
eyes of both conservative Islamic sensibilities and the secular sacred of
national mythology?
Secular Offence as ‘Blasphemy’?
Deciding whether the historical distortions and perceived Zionist ideology

of Scott’s film amounted (in Egypt) to a form of ‘blasphemy’ depends
on confronting a usually unacknowledged terminological ambiguity.
The meaning of the term ‘blasphemy’ can be a little slippery, with even
the recently founded International Society for Heresy Studies careful to
preface their working definition with a note that it is ‘perpetually open to
amendment and extension’.32
It is useful to distinguish between two modes of thinking about blas-
phemy. The first is to think of it as primarily an offence against God.
Such an understanding of blasphemy is comparatively widespread. In
an influential 2008 letter to The Telegraph newspaper a range of public
figures lobbied (successfully) for the British common law of blasphemy to
be repealed, remarking ‘that the Almighty does not need the “protection”
31. Brian Jenkins, cited in BBC, ‘U-Boat Film an “Affront”, Says Blair’, 7 June
2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/781858.stm (accessed 24 August 2015). See also
UK Parliament, ‘Parliamentary Business’, 7 June 2000, http://www.publications.
parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmhansrd/vo000607/debtext/00607-04.htm (accessed 24
August 2015).
32. International Society for Heresy Studies, ‘ISHS Key Terms’, 2014, http://
heresystudies.org/about/keyterms/ (accessed 24 August 2015). For another recent
attempt to delineate between varying understandings of blasphemy see Austin Dacey,
The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights (London
and New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 18.
of such a law’.33 Writing in her introduction to a recently published

volume on Life of Brian the New Testament scholar Joan Taylor similarly
remarks that ‘[t]he very concept of blasphemy is…totally alien to me’,
reflecting that ‘I honestly do not think God (or what I would call “God”)
gets insulted. God’s quite a bit bigger than that.’34
A second way of thinking about blasphemy is as an offence against
the sacred, or to be more precise, that which people perceive as sacred.
More grounded in sociology than theology, this understanding of the term
resonates with a Durkheimian tradition of viewing religion as ‘beliefs and
practices relative to sacred things’.35 In line with the approach found in
two of the most significant historical surveys of blasphemy as a concept,
Leonard Levy’s Blasphemy (1995) and David Nash’s Blasphemy in the
Christian World (2010), it is this second definition that I favour.36 Framing
blasphemy in relation to sacredness has a number of advantages. First,
understanding blasphemy as primarily an insult to God can end up rapidly
short-circuiting academic discussion if, as the above examples highlight,
you are of the view that God does not require our protection. Taken to
its logical conclusion there is a risk that this becomes something of a
‘get out of jail free card’ whereby community feelings of offence can
be dismissed as illegitimate. Secondly, to actively think of blasphemy in
theological terms of offence against God only works if you are situating
yourself within a faith tradition that makes claims to knowledge of divine
revelation. If you do not situate yourself in this way (which I do not),
trying to engage with what the creator of the cosmos does or does not find
offensive is a difficult endeavour. But the final and most important reason
for privileging a focus on sacredness is that it allows taking the concept
of blasphemy outside the confines of theistic religion. This is because
sacredness concerns not only God, divinely inspired texts and places
where God is worshipped, but also objects, places, myths and ideas core
33. Philip Pullman et al., ‘Repeal the Blasphemy Laws, The Telegraph, 8
January 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/3553469/Letters-to-the-
Telegraph.html (accessed 24 August 2015).
34. Joan Taylor, ed., Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and his
Times via Monty Python’s Life of Brian (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. xxvi.
35. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (trans. Joseph
Ward Swain; London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 129.
36. Leonard W. Levy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from
Moses to Salman Rushdie (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995),
p. 3; David Nash, Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), pp. 1-2.
to a society’s self-understanding. In this sense sacredness, and accusations

of blasphemy along with it, are not the sole preserve of traditionally under-
stood religious communities. The direct relevance of all this for thinking
about Exodus: God and Kings is that this fluidity of the secular-religious
can be discerned amid Egyptian Ministry of Culture’s relationship with
the film.
Civil Religion and ‘Civil Blasphemy’
Exodus: Gods and Kings, I contend, appears to have committed a form

of ‘civil blasphemy’. To my knowledge, the term ‘civil blasphemy’ has
not widely featured in academic writing, but before claiming too much
credit it should be acknowledged that it is in fact a reasonably obvious
extension of the much-discussed idea of ‘civil religion’. Most notably
put forward in the 1960s by the American sociologist Robert Bellah as a
way of thinking about the rituals, monuments and mythology of American
civil life, the notion of civil religion has continued to have traction, seen
in 2014, for example, with Oxford University Press’s publication of Peter
Gardella’s American Civil Religion.37 The precise meaning of the term
has, however, long been disputed, and its application to different national
contexts has inevitably required adjustments.38 In America it has usually
been considered to incorporate some manner of loose theism (related to
‘God’s plan for the nation’), but Niels Reeh has more recently suggested
that ‘because God plays a significant role in American civil religion, it
does not necessarily follow that this has to be so in every case’.39 Focusing
on the example of Denmark, Reeh concludes that Danish civil religion is
more concerned with state mythologization of its own history.
The notion of ‘civil blasphemy’ I put forward here is very simply the
perception that something sacred, something around which civil religion
is oriented, has been violated. One example of this would be the burning
of a flag – and certainly American legal debates about flag burning
are similar in their basic contours to debates about more traditionally
37. Robert N. Bellah, ‘Civil Religion in America’, Daedalus 96.1 (1967), pp.
1-21; Peter Gardella, American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
38. As early as the 1970s scholars were able to reflect on a history of ‘civil
religion’ being understood in multiple ways. See Gail Gehrig, ‘The American Civil
Religion Debate: A Source for Theory Construction’, Journal for the Scientific Study
of Religion 20.1 (1981), p. 52.
39. Niels Reeh, ‘A Shining City on Another Hill: Danish Civil Religion as State
Mythology’, Social Compass 58.2 (2011), p. 244.
understood blasphemy.40 In Britain, the outrage caused by the public

burning of memorial poppies inhabits a similar emotional and sacred
terrain.41 In Egypt, Exodus: Gods and Kings committed civil blasphemy
by transgressing the sacred boundaries of a nationalist mythology. Civil
authorities banned Scott’s film, rather than Aronofsky’s, partly because it
was deemed to have mistreated a Koranic prophet and miraculous event,
but crucially, because it also meddled with national self-understanding.
Conclusion
Bible films have for a long time been associated with accusations of
blasphemy. The necessities of contorting biblical text into moving image
as well as the proximity of sacredness to commercial interest make this
a phenomenon well-placed to continue on into the future. It is difficult
to imagine that Scott’s proposed film about King David will be received
without at least some antagonism within one faith community or another.42
But where Exodus: Gods and Kings is especially noteworthy is its trans-
gression of the sacred in both a traditional sense (by agitating some devout
viewers) and in relation to civil religion. Exploring this film’s reception in
Egypt may be a comparatively narrow example – certainly its commercial
success there would not have been foremost in the minds of its production
companies – but consideration of this case study has value in attuning us
to similar potentials closer to home.
In her 2012 book Biblical Blaspheming Yvonne Sherwood considered
the example of a 2009 exhibition at the Glasgow Museum of Modern
Art in which visitors were invited to write themselves into the Bible by
literally adding to the text. The uproar that followed appeared to transcend
religious–secular boundaries. ‘The perceived crime clearly extended well
beyond an offence against Christians and the sacred text of a particular
religious community’, Sherwood notes, remarking that the artwork was
ultimately seen as ‘an offence against the civil and civic itself’.43 This is
40. See Murray Dry, ‘Flag Burning and the Constitution’, The Supreme Court
Review (1990), pp. 69-103.
41. BBC, ‘Man Guilty of Burning Poppies at Armistice Day Protest’, 7 March
2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12664346 (accessed 24 August
2015).
42. Catherine Shoard, ‘Forget Goliath: Rival King David Movies in the Works’,
The Guardian, 27 October 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/27/
goliath-rival-king-david-movies-in-the-works (accessed 24 August 2015).
43. Yvonne Sherwood, Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular
Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 19-20.
because the Bible was viewed by the exhibition’s detractors as something

central to British self-identity and values. Such alignment of the Bible
and national self-understanding has been continued in subsequent years.
Reflecting on the KJV’s 400th anniversary in 2011 Prime Minister David
Cameron remarked that ‘[t]he Bible has helped to shape the values which
define our country. Indeed, as Margaret Thatcher once said, “we are a
nation whose ideals are founded on the Bible”.’44 Taken to its logical
conclusion, such a viewpoint creates conditions whereby mistreatment of
the Bible may be perceived as inimical to civil wellbeing.
The precise dynamics here differ in their details to the case of Egypt’s
ban of Exodus: Gods and Kings. But we again see a situation where
biblical reception and national mythology overlap. Understanding the
curious case of Exodus: Gods and Kings’s ban in Egypt can help attune
us to the especially fluid potentials of biblical reception in the context of
multiple sacralities.
Both Aronofsky and Scott have in recent times shied away from
straightforwardly declaring themselves atheists, respectively preferring
‘humanist’ and ‘agnostic’ instead, but neither filmmaker set about their
tasks as faith community insiders.45 Their 2014 epics are instead films that
seek to locate biblical stories as artefacts of interest to audiences beyond
the confines of traditional religious adherence. The Bible’s authority in
this context concerns not divine authorship, but rather cultural status.
Given the blurry religious–secular space out of which such films are
now emerging, it makes sense to consider their receptions as capable of
similarly disrupting a division of secular and religious.
44. David Cameron, ‘Prime Minister’s King James Bible Speech’, UK Govern-
ment, 16 December 2011, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-ministers-
king-james-bible-speech (accessed 24 August 2015).
45. See Robbie Collin, ‘Darren Aronofsky Interview: “The Noah Story Is Scary” ’,
The Telegraph, 7 April 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10739539/
Darren-Aronofsky-interview-The-Noah-story-is-scary.html (accessed 24 August 2015)
and Scott Foundas, ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings Director Ridley Scott on Creating his
Vision of Moses’, Variety, 25 November 2014, http://variety.com/2014/film/news/
ridley-scott-exodus-gods-and-kings-christian-bale-1201363668/ (accessed 24 August
2015).
I n d ex of R ef er e nce s
Hebrew Bible/ 3.4-5 12 20.12 45

Old Testament 3.4 22, 25 20.19 29
Genesis 3.6 12, 22, 24, 23 22
1–22 14 31 23.20-22 22, 23, 25
1.27 15 3.7-8 22 23.20 22, 27
5.21-24 15 3.13-14 18 23.21 23
12.2 27 3.14 18 23.22 23
14 68 3.19-20 43 23.23 22, 27
16.7-13 26 3.19 70 24.9-11 31
16.7 26 3.20 81 24.10 31
16.9 26 4–13 22 24.12 19, 31, 34
16.10 26 4 53 31.18 19, 31, 34
16.11 26 4.5 22 32–33 22
16.13 26, 31 4.21-23 43 32.7-14 37
18.22-33 37 4.24-26 42 32.10 71
21 26 5.23 48 32.12 37
21.17-18 26 6.28-30 22 32.16 19, 31, 34
21.17 27 7–8 19 32.26-29 71
21.18 27 7.2-5 43 32.34 22, 27
22.11-18 27 7.22 68 33.2 22, 27
22.11 18 8.7 68 33.9-10 24
22.15 18 8.8-14 69 33.11 24, 27, 31
24.7 18 9.14-16 43 33.20 12, 24, 26,
31.11-13 27 9.15-16 126 29, 31
31.13 27 10.1-2 44 33.21-23 31
32.30 31 11–12 19, 36 34.1 19, 31, 34
48.16 18 11.1 70 34.27-28 19, 31, 34
11.9-10 44
Exodus 12.30 54 Leviticus
1 41 13–14 23 25.10 147
1.11 62 13.21 23
2 41 14 22 Numbers
3 18, 25, 27, 14.4 44 12.5-8 24, 31
31, 66 14.16-18 44 12.5 23
3.1–4.17 18 14.19-20 84 12.8 24, 31
3.1-6 21 14.19 22, 23 14.11-35 37
3.2-4 80 14.20 84 14.12 37
3.2-3 27 14.21 85 14.14 31
3.2 22-25, 27, 14.24 84 14.15 37
31, 32, 35 15.3 55 14.20-35 37
3.4–4.17 22, 24 17 86 20.16 23, 27
3.4-6 27, 31 18.2-3 42 22.22-38 27
168
168 Index of References
Deuteronomy Isaiah 1 Timothy

4.12 31 63.9 27 1.17 31
5.16 45 66.11 45 6.16 31
7.1-2 56
7.6 56 Daniel Hebrews
7.16-24 56 7 92 11.23-29 31
9.10 31 11.27 31
18.16 29 Joel
2.11 56 1 John
Joshua 4.12 31
1–12 55 Habakkuk
24.11-13 56 3 56 Revelation
6 92
Judges New Testament 9 92
2.1 24, 27 Matthew 19 108
6.11-24 25 27.54 71
6.11-12 25 Old Testament
6.13 24 Mark Pseudepigrapha
6.14-16 25 15.39 71 Ezekiel the Tragedian
6.14 25 90–119 12
6.16 25 Luke 90–95 27
6.20 25 23.47 71 96–103 12
6.21 25 101 12
6.22-23 25, 26, 31 John
6.22 26 1.18 31 Midrash
6.23 26 5.37 31 Exodus Rabbah
13 25 6.46 31 2.5 28, 32
13.5 25 8.58 66 3.4 37
13.8-9 25 3.12 37
13.16 25 Acts 6.1-2 37
13.21-22 25 7.20-44 27 16.3 37
13.22 31 7.30 27 42.1 37
7.35 27 43.7 37
2 Samuel 7.38 27 51.4 37
5.17-25 56
Romans Koran
Psalms 1.20 31 26.63-66 156
68.7-18 56
1 Corinthians
Proverbs 11.15 45
8.18 45
8.21 45 Colossians
11.16 45 1.15 31
I n d ex of A ut hor s
Abrams, N. 35, 158 Collins, A.Y. 92

Aichele, G. 16 Copier, L. 2, 101
Alexander, B. 85 Corliss, R. 21, 35, 38
Ammerman, N.T. 144 Cousins, M. 149-51
Assmann, J. 58 Crossley, J. 67
Aune, D.E. 92
Dacey, A. 162
Babington, B. 103 Dargis, M. 107
Baden, J. 7, 8 Davie, G. 138, 139
Barnes, B. 65 DeMille, C.B. 114
Barr, J. 28 Debnath, N. 52
Barra, E. 124 Dedrick, C. 52
Barthes, R. 121 Denby, D. 14
Bauckham, R. 92 Derrida, J. 134
Baugh, L. 6 Dixon, W.W. 106
Bazin, A. 137 Dry, M. 165
Beale, G.K. 92 Duke, B. 5
Beck, G. 64 Durkheim, E. 163
Bellah, R. 139, 164
Belton, J. 119, 120 Edwards, K. 7, 35, 64
Benton, M. 90 Ehrenkranz, N.J. 82
Berger, P. 138, 139 Eichrodt, W. 24, 27-29
Boling, R.G. 26 Elliott, A.B.R. 78, 116, 122
Bond, P. 10, 58 Evans, P.W. 103
Branaghan, S. 94 Exum, J.C. 40, 41
Britt, B. 60, 66, 73
Brown, A. 55 Fast, H. 73
Buj, O. 94 Feil, K. 102, 104-106
Burnette-Bletsch, R. 2, 3 Fekkes, J. 92
Buskin, R. 13 Fischer, A.A. 22, 23
Fletcher, M. 92
Caine, J. 33, 35 Fokas, E. 138, 139
Canning, C.M. 8, 10 Forshey, G.E. 120
Casanova, J. 139 Foundas, S. 7, 17, 33, 41, 58, 117, 118,
Cassuto, U. 55 166
Castells, M. 123, 134, 135 Fraade, S.D. 24, 31
Chang, J. 51 Fraser, G. 142, 159
Chibnall, S. 94 Fraser, G.M. 113
Child, B. 155 Fraser, P. 6
Childs, B.S. 23, 28, 29, 42
Cieply, M. 65 Gardella, P. 164
Clark, N. 8 Garrett, S.R. 15
Clines, D.J.A. 43, 45, 53 Gehrig, G. 164
Collin, R. 34, 35, 166 Geljon, A.C. 28
170 Index of Authors
Gibbs, J. 94 Kroll, J. 56, 115

Gieschen, C.A. 23-26, 28, 29 Kugel, J.L. 66
Girard, R. 60 Kwok, Y. 155
Golsorkhi, M. 161
GravJes, M. 37 Lambie, R. 123
Graybill, R. 66 Lang, B. 40
Greydanus, S.D. 10, 33, 35, 82, 83, 86 Lang, J.S. 13-15
Griffiths, A. 79 Lee, B. 8
Guggisberg, F. 22 Lennard, D. 65
Gunn, D.M. 42, 68-70 Lev, P. 77
Gunning, T. 76 Levin, S. 66
Levy, L.W. 163
Ham, K. 155 Lilly, I. 7, 141
Hanna, M. 160 Lipton, D. 24, 31
Hannity, S. 155 Lodge, C. 4, 156, 157
Hardy, W.G. 73 Louvish, S. 13
Hartman, A. 154 Lumenick, L. 51
Hayne, D. 13 Luyken, J. 159
Hays, C.B. 66 Lynch, G. 4
Heidt, W.G. 24
Heijne, C.H. von 22-24, 27, 28 Macfie, A.L. 5
Herman, B. 10 Macnab, G. 51
Hewison, R. 153 Malamud, M. 160
Hilbrands, W. 22, 28 Malone, A. 31
Hoberman, J. 143, 144 Mann, T. 73
Hort, G. 50 Marsh, C. 5
Houston, S.M. 16 Marsh, G. 93, 94
Humphreys, C. 82, 86 Martin, J.W. 5
Hurston, Z.N. 73 Martin, K.H. 123
Masters, K. 11, 35
Jancovich, M. 122 Mathewson, D. 92
Jauhiainen, M. 92 Mazzaferri, F.D. 92
Joyce, P. 3 McKeegan, D. 16
Jozajtis, K. 140, 141 Meier, S.A. 26-29
Melvin, D.P. 22
Kandiah, K. 155 Merritt, J. 17, 20, 33, 34, 61
Keane, S. 101-106, 108-10 Merry, S. 51
Kehr, D. 93, 94 Meyers, C. 61
Kermode, M. 4, 11, 52 Missori, C. 157
Kerrigan, F. 94, 95 Moberly, R.W.L. 24, 31
King, G. 104, 105, 125 Mohler, A. 89, 155
King, J. 1, 109 Mohler, R.A., Jr 37
Klausen, J. 154 Morgan, J. 2
Köckert, M. 26, 27, 29 Morrison, J. 121
Kolb, L. 73 Morse, H. 2, 3
Koonse, E. 10, 11 Moss, C. 7, 8
Kotwal, K.N. 5 Moyise, S. 92
Kozloff, S. 13 Myers, F. 58
Kracauer, S. 73
Index of Authors 171
Nash, D. 163 Shari, I. 16

Neale, S. 119, 120 Sheinfeld, S. 32
Nourmand, T. 93, 94 Shepherd, D.J. 76-79, 83-86
Sherwood, Y. 165
Ortiz, G. 5 Shilon, A. 159
Ostwalt, C. 104 Shoard, C. 17, 115, 165
Shohat, E. 12-14
Pardes, I. 114 Shone, T. 137
Parkinson, B.R. 160 Slocum, D.T. 80
Paulien, J. 92 Sobchack, C. 124, 143-45
Pearson, R. 89 Soggin, J.A. 25
Pierce, N. 36 Sontag, S. 101, 150
Pilver, A. 89 Spitznagel, E. 125
Pinkerton, N. 145, 147 Steffens, L. 73
Plate, S.B. 146 Strauven, W. 76
Pollack, S. 66
Propp, W.H.C. 66 Tartaglione, N. 10, 21, 38
Pullman, P. 163 Taylor, J. 2, 163
Tharoor, S. 5
Quicke, A. 153 Thompson, K.M. 122, 129
Tigay, J. 66
Rad, G. von 28 Tollerton, D. 153
Radhakrishan, M. 38, 156 Tunzelmann, A. von 38
Recklis, K. 32 Tuschling, R.M.M. 29
Reeh, N. 164
Reinhartz, A. 2, 12, 152 Untermeyer, L. 73
Renner, K.J. 110 Uricchio, W. 89
Rhodes, G.D. 93
Richards, J. 116, 117 Vander Stichele, C. 2, 101
Rindge, M. 2, 4 Vilkomerson, S. 10, 86, 129, 157
Ritz, E. 156 Vliet, J. van der 160
Rivadulla, E., Jr 94 Vries, Hent, de 115, 132, 133, 135
Roddick, N. 103
Ross, S.J. 141, 142 Walsh, R. 16
Roukema, R. 28 Ward, G. 133
Ruiten, J.T.A.G.M. van 12, 27 Warner, S. 146
Ruiz, J.-P. 92 Watkins, G. 2
Weber, S. 120, 131, 132, 135
Salama-Scheer, Y. 159 Weller, P. 154
Sampson, D. 82 Wheatley, C. 2
Saposnik, A. 158 Williams, J.G. 67
Schemm, P. 10, 21, 38, 156 Williams, R. 105
Scholz, S. 15 Wood, A. 116, 127-29
Schrader, P. 138 Wood, M. 160
Schwartz, R.M. 56 Wood, M.G. 65
Scott, A.O. 5, 51, 146 Wright, M.J. 61, 142, 148, 149
Scott, R. 17, 20, 33, 34, 50
Seed, D. 102 Yacowar, M. 102, 103

(Biblical Reception 4) David Tollerton - A New Hollywood Moses - On The Spectacle and Reception of Exodus - Gods and Kings-Sheffield Phoenix Press (2012 - 9999)

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BIBLICAL RECEPTION 4 (2016)

Bloomsbury T&T Clark

Imprint previously known as T&T Clark

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

First published 2017

© David Tollerton, David Clines, J. Cheryl Exum and contributors, 2017

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-7232-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Series: Biblical Reception, volume 4

Typeset by Forthcoming Publications (www.forthpub.com)

‘Hmmm… But LOVED the Plagues’:

Depicting the Divine:

Exodus: Male Gods and Kings

Interpreting the Entrails:

‘See This Great Sight’:

Once upon an Apocalypse:

Picturing the Plagues and Parting the Waves:

The Birth of a Nation:

Exodus: Gods and Kings

Index of References 167

Matthew A. Collins is Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Second

J. Cheryl Exum is Emeritus Professor at the University of Shefﬁeld

Michelle Fletcher is Associate Lecturer at the University of Kent

Jon Morgan is Lecturer in Biblical Interpretation at the University of

David Shepherd is Assistant Professor in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at

David Tollerton is Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Contemporary Biblical

Samuel Tongue is Tutor and Afﬁliate Research Fellow at the University

Catherine Wheatley is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College

When a range of British press commentators attended an advance screening

The Study of Bible and Film

1. James King (@jameskingmovies), 16 December 2016, ‘[t]he general consensus

2. Laura Copier, Preposterous Revelations: Visions of Apocalypse and Martyrdom

passing the potentials of new computer-generated imagery (CGI), the

6. Burnette-Bletsch, ‘The Bible and its Cinematic Adaptations’, p. 129.

perspective of biblical scholarship, a core challenge, as Matthew Rindge

Exodus: Gods and Kings as Non-Masterpiece

8. Rindge, ‘Teaching the Bible and Film’, p. 142.

So is Exodus: Gods and Kings actually worth bothering with? Questions

as a mode of rethinking concepts of the miraculous, the historical and the

Angles of Approach to Scott’s Film

This volume of Biblical Reception is written by a group of UK and

Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings offers a distinctly innovative

Even before it hit cinema screens in December 2014, director Ridley

* Thanks are due to David Tollerton for a number of thought–provoking post–

Moses, and the presentation of the plagues.1 However, it was Scott’s

1. B. Herman, ‘ “Exodus” Controversies: Christian Bale’s “Barbaric” Moses

Scott’s rather distinctive approach to grappling with the problem of

Depicting the Divine: The Problem of God

[H]ow does one represent a divine ﬁgure who is meant to be devoid of

The voice…is inevitably speciﬁc – it is gendered and accented, and some-

Although the traditional ‘voice of God’ on stage or screen (‘deep, mascu-

God’s cinematic incarnation requires concrete choices involving complexion,

Again, there are rather more traditional cinematic representations of God

15. Lang, The Bible on the Big Screen, pp. 186-93.

The screening of Scripture is an act of translation; like every act of trans-

With that in mind, we turn now to consider Scott’s own proposed

‘God Isn’t a Boy!’ – God or Messenger in Scott’s Exodus?

God or Messenger in Exodus: Gods and Kings?

One of the biggest challenges for me in the ﬁlm is how do I do this

Ramases: You’re listening to Hebrews.

In the next exchange between Moses and Malak (following a series of

Malak: At this rate it will take years. A generation.