The “exodus” is the charter myth of the Israelites. Spread over the four books of exodus, leviticus, numbers and deuteronomy (and therefore being common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam), it tells the story of the enslavement of the Israelites in ancient Egypt, their liberation through the hand of their god, the revelations at biblical mount sinai, and their wanderings in the wilderness up to the borders of Canaan – the land their god had (supposedly) given them.

In terms of silliness, it is hard to rank the biblical stories, however if one tried, the story of exodus would be in the top few. There is some debate about when the Israelites were first termed “Israelites”, but for what follows, it’s just a label and of no real consequence.

For those not familiar with the events of exodus, the following are links to summaries with (much) more detail:

After reading those: golly, where to start with the dissection?

So when is all of the above supposed to have happened? Because there are no originals of the books and there are no known authors, all that can be done to identify dates is to look at the events and descriptions in the texts. Here are some proposed dates:

• Derived from all the begats, the Anglican bishop James Ussher calculated the date of the exodus to be in 1,491 BCE, however that date is highly variable based on which version of the bible is used.
• Based on the claim that the exodus happened 480 years before the building of the temple of solomon (1 kings 6) leads to proposed dates for the exodus such as 1,445 BCE and 1,520 BCE.
• As the conditions in Egypt during the reign of Tutankhamun (sort of) match descriptions in the bible, a date proposed for the exodus has been given as 1,330 BCE.
• Due to the biblical reference of the city of Per‐Ramesses, a date somewhere in the range 1,279 to 1,213 BCE has been proposed (which was when the city was largely constructed).

So there you have it: the seminal story underpinning the major abrahamic religions can’t be dated more accurately than happening within a period of at least 300 years.

But when were the four books written? Dates are highly varied and disputed because of the number of authors (since no scholar really believes the character of moses had anything to do with writing them). The best estimates are that the four books were collated in their final forms somewhere between 550 BCE and 350 BCE, so consider the implications of those dates. The final forms of the books were, at best, completed 600 years after the events and, at worst, over 1,000 years after the events depicted. If an average of 800 years is assumed between the events and the books, then there’s no choice but to admit that’s an awfully long time for fragments of text and verbal accounts to be: forgotten, “remembered”, mistaken, embellished, exaggerated and falsified. Eight hundred years is over thirty generations, so with no established schools, libraries or other institutions, how on Earth can anyone expect to believe that there was a protected lineage under which the exodus events were historically honored – even assuming that they happened?

No matter which dates are taken for the events of exodus, they would have happened during the Egyptian New Kingdom (1550 to 1077 BCE). The New Kingdom covered the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth dynasties, which were ruled by fifteen, eight and ten pharaohs respectively. Apart from the first of those 33 pharaohs, the dates of each of the reigning periods is known quite well – often to the nearest year.

The average of the proposed dates for the exodus is about 1,350 BCE which would have been during the reign of the tenth pharaoh of the New Kingdom – Akhenaten. Of course, averages don’t prove anything, but that pharaoh is very interesting because he was responsible for changing the state religion from the polytheistic Ancient Egyptian religion (involving many gods) to the monotheistic Atenism (a single god), which was centered around the worship of the Aten – an image of the sun disc. Is it just a coincidence that about 800 years after a single deity was established for Egyptians, the men who wrote the bible placed the events involving their (one true) god and the exodus from Egypt at the same time?

Here comes the first major blow to those seeking some sort of truth in the story of the exodus: none of the pharaohs were known to be involved in the events depicted, and no Egyptian records mention the events in any way, shape or form. Certainly there is no record of any pharaoh riding out with his army to follow up to two million departing slaves, and there is no record of an entire army and their pharaoh not returning. There is no record of nine horrible plagues (including of course no mention of the Nile turning to blood) and no mention of the final horrific “plague” during which all the firstborn of Egypt were killed during a single night. There is no mention that some Egyptians were magicians who could turn their staffs into snakes and bring forth a plague such as frogs. There’s not even a mention of millions of Israelites living in Egypt. How can anyone choose to ignore history so completely as to permit a belief in such a story?

It has been proposed that Egyptians didn’t record their defeats, but that’s not relevant here because the events are too major and there are too many of them not to have made it into at least one of their records. Apart from anything else, if the Egyptians had magicians who could turn staffs into snakes, you can bet your bottom dollar that fact would have made it into hieroglyphs at some point. Staffs into snakes? Really? Why are you still believing in anything in the bible if that “fact” made its way into the text? Or is it okay to ignore the ridiculous bits so that you are only left with the “true” and meaningful bits? Why?

There’s also the suggestion that the Egyptians destroyed their records so as not to have such an embarrassment registered against themselves. The problem with these sorts of arguments is that they reverse the burden of proof. Instead of basing history on discovered evidence, they are nothing more than hoped-for guesses designed to defend the indefensible. Anything might be true if you start with the guess that the supporting evidence was destroyed. Really, not a single inscription supporting the stated fact that the Egyptians had magicians? Pull the other one please.

There are also the flow-on effects of the described events. The exodus of a significant part of the workforce and the devastation caused by the various plagues would have had enormous and long-lasting effects on the agriculture and economy of Ancient Egypt. There is no documented evidence of any such flow-on effects.

Not only is the exodus fable based on fictional events, but it is not even original fiction. Legend has it that sargon of Akkad was the first ruler of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia – which was centred around modern-day Iraq. You’re not going to believe this, but apparently sargon’s mother decided to place him in a basket of rushes and set him adrift on the Euphrates river. He was discovered by a drawer of water named akki and was eventually adopted by a goddess named ishtar. The reign of sargon is said to have been from 2,334 to 2,284 BCE, which is about 1,000 years before moses, and the fable was first recorded in Neo-Assyrian literature of the 8th to 7th centuries BCE, which is about 400 years before the biblical books describing exodus were known to have existed. Do you think the men who invented the bible knew of the earlier legend or did they just happen to come up with the same way of saving and elevating the status of a baby? If they had been aware of the earlier account (which seems likely), then what does that say about the bible being the revealed word of the omniscient creator of the universe? Looking grim?

And think about the elevation of moses. Is there any realistic way that the daughter of the pharaoh (no less) would be wandering by herself along the edge of the Nile and then happen to discover the second-most important baby in biblical history just as he was floating past – and within the same short period the baby would have remained alive? Since there’s no realistic way that a baby could be brought up in secret (for decades) in a royal household, it has to be assumed that the pharaoh knew about the child. Wouldn’t the pharaoh have had enough kiddies and other relatives to keep his royal household “pure” with his own lineage?

Not only is there no non-biblical support for the plagues, but they are a ridiculous fiction invented for only one reason – to impress the readers of the time. They are only based on the horrors that were imaginable to the writers of the day: blood, frogs, insects, pestilence, boils, thunder, hail, storms, dead cattle, locusts, darkness and of course dead people. They were the stuff that nightmares were made of … at the time.

Nowadays, “witnesses” would counteract the first nine plagues with: bottled water, boots, insecticide, insecticide, a doctor’s visit, an umbrella, an umbrella, an umbrella, a visit to the supermarket, insecticide, and a torch. Not sure what to say about the modern reader’s response to the murdering of all the firstborn in a society?

Of course the true believers will say that all of those things are exactly what an all-powerful deity would inflict, however that possibility is indistinguishable from men of the day writing fiction that they didn’t have to defend to later generations.

Why didn’t god dictate that foreigners with guns invaded as a plague? Or why didn’t the economy of Egypt collapse because of a trade imbalance as a plague? Why didn’t the people get instantaneous lung cancer as a plague? Those “miracles” surely could have been enacted by an all-powerful deity, but of course the writers of the day had no knowledge of such things.

However the men who wrote the fiction sometimes forgot that they were depicting the omniscient creator of the universe in action. For example, why was it necessary for blood to be smeared on the door of those who were deserving of being saved from the “plague” of having their first-born murdered? Was god not capable of determining who was behind each door? But of course, ritual and superstitious sacrifices were important in those times, so they had to be worked into the myth.

The plagues would have devastated Egypt however no such devastation was recorded by either Egypt or by its neighbors. It’s also quite likely that the neighbors would have taken advantage of a weakened and devastated Egypt, however that didn’t happen. In contrast the pharaohs of the New Kingdom are associated with times of growth – something that wouldn’t have happened if they had recently lost their pharaoh, crops, army, workforce and first-born sons.

Here’s the next major blow to the religious: not a single biblical passage mentions an actual Egyptian person by name and not a single Egyptian writing mentions a biblical person by name. What’s easier to believe: that the most monumental of events involving up to two million people, supernatural events, and the deaths of thousands didn’t happen, or the normal processes in history somehow failed to record them and the people involved?

And what was all the heart-hardening about? Perhaps the pharaoh would have relented much earlier and freed the slaves had not his heart been hardened into resisting their release? We’ll never know, will we? There has never been a satisfactory explanation as to why the pharaoh had to have his heart hardened – except perhaps to prolong an “exciting” story for the masses of the day? And in many ways, the hardening would seem to be against the intended message. Was god worried that people might have acted decently if given the opportunity?

But surprisingly, the most ridiculous event may have been moses throwing up handfuls of soot and having them cover all the lands of Egypt (plague number six). Egypt’s lands encompass about one million square kilometers (about 390,000 square miles), so that’s one hell of a throw moses. However the numbers don’t add up because one handful of soot, if spread out at the rate of one-particle thickness would cover about 250 square meters (300 square yards), which is about the area of a tennis court. It would take about 38 million tennis courts to “cover all the lands of Egypt”. So, if you take the bible literally, did moses really throw up 38 million handfuls of soot, and with perfect throws so that the soot spread out at one-particle thickness and didn’t overlap? Or did he just walk around one million square kilometers and throw the occasional handful here and there to “cover” all the lands?

Some have speculated that the number of people in the exodus party was much less than the millions recorded in the bible. But the bible is very specific about the numbers and even itemizes the numbers tribe by tribe – in more than one place. If the bible is the revealed word of god, how did the precise tallies of the number of people involved in the exodus story get to be so wrong? What else is wrong if those precise numbers are wrong? By how much do the revisionists need to lower the numbers to try and make the fable more realistic?

Then there is the question of geography. Mount sinai plays a prominent part in the story and it is also called mount horeb in many places. It may surprise the reader to learn that no one knows exactly where the biblical mount sinai is! At least ten different locations have been suggested as the location, but for some reason, no one can pin it down. Really, an entire (very important) mountain can’t be attributed!

The Red Sea also plays a prominent part in the exodus story and yet again there’s a problem because no one knows where the supposed parting and crossing of the sea occurred. Are you sensing a theme involving vagueness when it comes to biblical accounts? The main part of the Red Sea is a 2,000 km (1,250 miles) long waterway that averages a width of at least 200 km (125 miles) and a depth of 700 m (770 yards).

At the northern end of the main body of water are the “rabbit ears” – two north-south lengths of water: the Gulf of Suez on the left, which is about 300 km long and between 15 and 40 km wide; and the Gulf of Aqaba on the right, which is about 170 km long and between 15 and 25 km wide. To the north of the town of Suez (the tip of the left rabbit ear) is a series of lakes and waterways that have now been excavated and joined to the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal. The distance from Suez to the Mediterranean is about 150 km. To the north of the town of Aqaba (the tip of the right rabbit ear) is pretty much just desert until the Dead Sea is reached, about 200 km away.

In the above image, Aqaba is not shown, but it is in Jordan just to the east of Eilat (which is in Israel).

The best-guess location of mount sinai is north-east of Aqaba, about 50 km to the right of the right rabbit ear, although some have placed it between the rabbit ears.

Remember that moses was familiar with the geography of the area because he passed through it at least twice: once after murdering the Egyptian guard and fleeing Egypt, and once with his family and donkey as he returned to Egypt after discussing things with the burning bush on mount sinai. On neither of those trips did he feel the need to part any bit of the Red Sea, and why would he since it’s easy enough to head north of the rabbit ears to find a path that didn’t involve getting his feet too wet?

Interestingly, to get from Ramesses in Egypt to the promised land in Israel is a journey that involves traveling about 70 km north-east to the Mediterranean (to where Port Said is today) and then a walk of about 260 km along or near the coast before heading the final 50 km to (say) Jerusalem:

(The route in red is how it’s done when you don’t have a deity getting you lost in the desert for 40 years.)

That’s a total of 380 km (about 240 miles), and taking it fairly easily at about 20 km per day would mean a journey of no more than three weeks. The funny thing is that if people walked five abreast on that route and if they were each separated by two meters behind the people in front, the first people would arrive in Jerusalem before the millionth person had left Ramesses.

However, god had other things in mind and didn’t take the obvious route. Instead, he aimed the exodus towards some part of some waterway. One can’t help but wonder why? Surely he could have dispatched the Egyptian army in some suitably horrific way and got the millions (including women, children, elderly and the sick) to the promised land without too much discomfort? Sadly, no.

There’s simply no way that god led them to the main part of the Red Sea for the crossing. It’s at least 200 km wide, so keeping the parting going while millions walked 200 km on the sea bed is ridiculous (even to the most hardened religious folk – surely?). So, it’s somewhere across the rabbit ears they went.

The most common thought is that they went to the north of the left-hand rabbit ear (the Gulf of Suez), and then traveled south-east between the rabbit ears until they came to a point on the right-hand rabbit ear (the Gulf of Aqaba). That point is generally considered to be halfway up the left side of the right rabbit ear, at Nuweiba (although some believe it to be at the base of the right-hand rabbit ear). There is a beach area at Nuweiba which is about 20 kilometres squared in area. That would be 0.15 people per square metre, or each person taking up 6.7 meters square, which is an area little more than 2 meters by 3 meters – which has to include the person’s share of cattle and belongings. So far, so good-ish. If you’ve ever been to a sporting event in a stadium with 50,000 people, then consider that the beach area at Nuweiba had the people from up to 40 of those stadiums. What were those people eating and drinking, and where did they go to the toilet?

Going to the bathroom turned out to be the least of their problems because it was just before the crossing that the heart-hardened pharaoh and his army turned up. (You’re going to need popcorn for the next bit.)

It’s thought that the pharaoh had around 4,000 infantry and 1,000 chariots (if you disagree with those speculative numbers, please take it up with someone else), which would mean that he (whoever that pharaoh was) was outnumbered (by the Israeli fighting folk) by about 200 to 1. A hardened heart meant that numbers were for wusses because the pharaoh decided not to turn around and go home.

Having a quiet word with the forty-stadiums-worth, moses outstretched his arms to facilitate the parting of at least 15 km of water, because it was time for the off. If the average person walks at 5 km/h and follows the person in front by 2 meters, and they walked 20 people abreast, the last row of people would start the crossing close to 60 hours after the first row. As it takes three hours to walk 15 km, the entire group of Israelites took about 63 hours (just over 2.5 days) to cross the 15 km. That’s not factoring in issues caused by unevenness in the sea bed, or having children, sick and the elderly, or climbing out of a sea bed that is at least 750 meters deep. It’s also not factoring in the fact that they had cattle and obviously some luggage. Cows walk at an average of 3.3 km/h, which is two-thirds the speed of humans, so if everyone slowed to cattle-walking speed, it would have taken the entire group closer to 95 hours to cross (about four days). Even if you adjust the above figures based on whatever assumptions you care to make, it’s still going to be a significant length of time for the group to cross. And who can walk for days without rest or sleep? All else being equal and assuming normal resting times, the crossing would have taken closer to an entire week. Remember, the bible is the source of the numbers of people involved.

Here’s where it gets weird because while they were taking a week to cross, we are expected to believe that the pharaoh and his army simply waited and watched over two million people walk the 15 km to the other side? No military tactics from a trained army to pick off people simply walking away from them? When was the point that the pharaoh decided to attempt the crossing after the Israelites? He must have waited an awfully long time before ordering his chariots and men to pursue the departing men, women, children, sick and elderly, but just so long that he couldn’t have caught the last of them before they got to the other side. Remember that the Israelites had to be completely clear of the collapsing waters so that moses could relent in his water-parting-activities and allow the “Red Sea” to crash back down and murder thousands of men who had just turned up for work. Are the men representing your particular army brave and honorable? Well, so were the Egyptian fighting men who were doing their king’s bidding – and therefore they were murdered by a “just” god (who must have known why they turned up for work that day). And did moses remain on the starting side of the crossing with his arms outstretched or did he have his arms outstretched during the entire week’s crossing? Was he the last to cross – just ahead of the Egyptian army?

There is a report about a few chariot wheels being discovered at a likely crossing site – thus providing “evidence” of the exodus; but that’s nonsense. One thousand chariots would have left two thousand wheels in the water, so if a few have survived 3,500 years, where are the remains of the other 1,997 wheels and chariot components? And how does anyone extrapolate a few wheels in the water to being proof of the exodus is an inconceivable mystery? How does that person know that the wheels weren’t deposited due to an entirely unrelated event?

There’s also a suggestion that the crossing was somewhere to the north of Suez (the tip of the left rabbit ear) at a place called the “reed sea”. That would get around many of the above issues, but it’s simply speculation based on no evidence, with the aim of mitigating the ridiculous nature of the story. Of course no one really knows where the “reed sea” might be, and let’s be honest, if the “sea” (at best a lake) is named after reeds, there’d have to be a significant number growing … which suggests it wasn’t very deep. Certainly there would be significant doubts about whether the crashing back of the waters of a shallow reed lake would cause the death of every single Egyptian soldier and horse? Some have speculated that the “reed sea” is Lake Timsah, however that rarely gets deeper than one meter. Sorry, the religious can’t have it both ways.

There’s no way of escaping the fact that the bits of the exodus fable to do with the parting of the “Red Sea” are nothing but extreme legendary embellishment designed to impress the readers of the day.

So obviously the traveling of millions of Israelites in the desert for over four decades would leave many traces that could be used as evidence for the story of the exodus? For example, the story tells how all but three of the two million Israelites died in the desert rather than be granted access to the promised land. The burial of that many should have left some sort of trace in an arid environment, e.g. bones, graves, clothing, jewelry, and other burial markers. We have evidence of much older burials than those supposedly happening 3,500 years ago, so there’d have to be at least some remains in the region that could be DNA-matched to modern day Jews? Sadly, not a single remnant has been found.

The group undertook many activities that should have left traces. For example, the bible describes them as a formidable war machine, and such a machine must have had considerable industry to keep them armed with weapons of war. Where are the traces of that industry? Where are the remnants of weapons and shields? They managed to cook (remember the quails?) so where are the remnants of cooking utensils? They all wore clothes and in over forty years they must have changed clothes many times. Where are the remnants of the equipment used to make and mend clothes and shoes? They inhabited the cities belonging to the people they wiped out, so where are the cultural markers left in those towns and cities?

Well, unfortunately there isn’t the tiniest bit of archaeological evidence for even a single part of the exodus fable. And the lack of discovered evidence is not for a lack of looking.

Some of the places described in the exodus story can be identified fairly accurately, for example Ein Qadis and Ezion Geber. Both have been investigated, however they were found to have been established no earlier than 700 to 800 BCE – which means the men who invented the story got it wrong when they set the events of exodus at those locations. There’s also the fact that most of the places visited during the fable did not exist at the same time. The men who wrote the story (about 800 years after the supposed events) didn’t have access to history books or the Google search engine, so they merely compressed time and assumed that the cities and towns all existed in the same fifty-year period encompassing the story. The portrayal of Edom presents a similar problem because, at the time, Edom was not yet a nation. In fact, the region wasn’t even inhabited, and the place the Israelites supposedly stopped at wasn’t built until 800 BCE. Shouldn’t all that be enough to prove the fallibility of the bible, and therefore of it’s supposed author?

The biblical scholar Michael Coogan has stated “Correlating the meager textual references with the extensive archaeological discoveries has been controversial, to say the least, and similar problems exist for almost every excavated site whose ancient identification is known. As a result, it is now clear that archaeology cannot ‘prove’ the bible’s historicity.”

Consider the logistics of millions of people in the hot and cold desert for decades. There are estimates that the entire group would need about 1,500 tons of food and 35 million liters (10 million gallons) of water per day. Sorry, manna falling from the sky isn’t going to cut it for forty years, and where did the enormous amount of water come from in the desert? There’s no way that millions of people managed to file past a rock that weeped water to get their daily intake of liquid.

Where did all the timber come from to supply firewood (thousands of tons of the stuff) for cooking and warmth in the cold desert night? Where did the cloth come from to make new clothes for millions of people over the decades? How did they make blankets to avoid freezing at night? How did they make and repair things like tents? So do you believe that god somehow managed to make thousands and thousands of tons of stuff just appear each day? The texts don’t mention that, let alone how that might have happened.

When the group had to camp in a location (for up to a year) how did they manage their waste products? There would have been no way to avoid the diseases associated with the build up of human faeces, such as diarrhea, typhoid, cholera, polio and hepatitis. How did they vary their diet to avoid diseases associated with malnutrition, such as scurvy and rickets?

Why even the need for the censuses? Wouldn’t the omniscient creator of the universe know how many people were in a given area at any time? What’s wrong with god dragging moses up the mountain one more time and giving him a list of tribes and numbers? A census is something that men, not gods, need to do.

The ten commandments are covered elsewhere on this site, however it’s worth noting that there were two or three full sets of commandments and a partial or alternate set detailed during the exodus fable. Why the differences between the sets of commandments? They are the main thing people quote to infer the bible is a book of morals, so why not have consistency? Could it be that different authors at different times wanted differing sets of “morals” to push their own agendas? Thank goodness that the omniscient creator of the universe got moses to write down all the laws and place them in the ark of the covenant so that all future generations of god’s beloved creation could have access to those words and law. Wait; where is that ark that the omniscient creator of the universe left for his creation?

Consider the punishment god enforced whereby the Israelites had to wander in the desert for forty years until all but three had died off: “And the lord’s anger was kindled against Israel, and he made them wander in the wilderness forty years, until all the generation, that had done evil in the sight of the lord, was consumed.” (numbers 32:13).

If you think about it, it makes no sense. Such a large number is going to follow the statistical rules of the normal distribution. In other words, in a large sample, there are going to be some in that generation who lived very short lives and some who lived very long lives – with most living to about the average of 70 (three score and ten) years. Sure, the elderly would have died off in the 40 years, but statistically, there must have been some people in their forties who would have made it through the 40 years of exile. How did god dispatch them and all those younger than 40? So a one-year-old at the time they left Egypt had to be executed 40 years later (at age 41) to stick to god’s plan of allowing only three of the almost two million originals to enter the “promised land”?

Surely there must have been some not-so-“evil” people in the multitude that left Egypt? Why did they have to endure forty years of wandering in the desert alongside the “evil” people? What did they do wrong? Seriously, god killed so many people during this one episode in biblical history that it’s hard to figure out why he didn’t just kill the “evil” people and let the non “evil” people get straight to their reward in the promised land? It’s doubtful that the average reader could conceive of what it would be like to wander in the desert/wilderness for more than 14,610 days.

And poor, poor moses. So a 120-year-old gets to the top of a mountain to see the promised land – which he can’t enter because he struck a rock with his staff, but then (poetically and silently) dies on the summit? Did god kill one more person at the end of the pentateuch just to make a “good” story? With modern medicine and health education, the oldest known person as of 2020 lived to 122. And that’s at the far end of a normal distribution involving over 14 billion people who have known to have lived in the last one hundred years. How likely is it that moses, some 3,400 years ago, with no realistic medical care, lived to the round number of 120? Sounds exactly like another bit of legendary embellishment.

How did the entire fable of “exodus” come about? As is the case for just about every fictional story, there were elements of reality and non-reality that were adapted and embellished.

We’ve already seen how the saving of the baby moses was an event taken from an earlier fable (sargon of Akkad), and how the invention of a single deity probably reflected the move by the ancient Egyptians to monotheism just before the time exodus is supposed to have occurred.

The volcanic explosion at Thera in Greece was only 800 km away from Egypt and occurred around 1,500 BCE. The eruption is one of the largest volcanic events in recorded history and it is estimated that up to 100 cubic kilometers of material was ejected by the event – about four times the volume ejected by Krakatoa in 1883. It’s very likely that such an event made its way into myths and legends. It’s no coincidence that god is described as a pillar of cloud during the day and a pillar of fire at night – just like a volcano. Plate tectonics between Europe and Africa mean that volcanoes were fairly common in the Middle East, so the people would have been well aware of them and their devastating effects. Wherever biblical mount sinai is, it is certainly described as something closely resembling a volcano.

Plate movement does cause tsunamis, so perhaps the description of the Egyptian army being wiped out by the sea was an embellishment of such an event?

There is evidence documenting the movements of small groups of ancient Semitic-speaking peoples into and out of Egypt during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties (about 1,200 to 1,550 BCE), which is the period spanning all suggested dates for the exodus.

All the pieces are there, however the elephant in the room is the question as to how a fable that involves legendary embellishment of reality and mythology ended up in the text that is supposedly the inerrant word of the omniscient creator of the universe? If the entire episode is fictional embellishment, then what else in the bible is fictional? (Spoiler alert: everything.)

And of course there’s no escaping the fairy-tale nature of the story. The events are simply too sequential, ends-driven, and too contrived to resemble reality. At best, it’s the plot of a C-grade 1950s Hollywood fictional movie … (oh, wait).

Consider the episode where the people melted down their earrings and cast a golden calf. It’s pretty obvious that the act is a plot-point designed to elicit retribution from god – which it does because god gets pretty worked up and wants to start killing those involved. Luckily for the idolaters, moses manages to change god’s mind. Think about that. The omniscient creator of the universe – the one that created two trillion galaxies on a weekday – decided upon a plan of retribution and then … gets talked out of it by a mortal? And god was talked out of a course of action more than once. So god got his initial responses wrong? How can that be? Being talked out of a rash course of action is something that (sometimes) happens to men, not gods. That’s simply anthropomorphising the character of god. In fact, god exhibits significant anger throughout the fable, and that’s clearly ridiculous for an entity who is supposed to have created matter and time. It would be like you or I getting angry at a single bacteria that was unlucky enough to grow in the wrong place.

In today’s blockbuster movies, we have huge explosions, strange forces, laser blasts and lightspeed travel all set at the furthest reaches of our imaginations, and exactly the same approach was adopted when iron-age men wrote the bible … except limited to the technology, experiences and imaginations of the time. Biblical mount sinai belched fire, smoke, lightning and rang out with thunder and trumpets, and god appeared as a pillar of cloud and fire – which is the minimum we would aim for if we were writing a screenplay of the exodus story today.

A fairy tale? Well: unicorns; a talking donkey; the saving of one baby who turns out to be the leader; a burning bush; the pharaoh granting moses multiple audiences just because he turns up; a river of blood; magicians with magic staffs; a volcanic mountain making trumpet sounds; the overuse of the number 40; the multitude of military successes without a single loss; the linear and episodic nature of the events, e.g. problems always closely followed by solutions. Of course it was a fairy tale. If it wasn’t for the genocide, you could wrap it all up in a children’s book … (oh, wait).

However there’s also no denying that the exodus fable does contain warmongering and genocide. That’s something that is forgotten or never mentioned by those who choose to base entire cultures upon the legend of exodus.

In case any reader thinks that the documented genocide is now a trivial point, imagine that you are the parent of a child in one of the cities being overrun by the Israelites. Just before you are killed, how do you feel about witnessing a sword being pushed through the body of your child – especially since you are being massacred by a race led by a man who had been handed rules such as “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shall not steal” by the omniscient creator of the universe? Pretty unfair? Especially in the case of the cities in Heshbon because that same god had hardened your king’s heart so that he could not avoid the war and subsequent massacre even if he wanted to. And this has nothing to do with allegory, and nothing to do with justification. If you are a believer, then your books tell you that the Israelites marched on people with whom they had no quarrel and simply massacred them. How do you justify believing and supporting the same god who organised that?

If a large group of people were wandering the lands today and systematically killing entire cities and taking virgins as prizes, the world would unite in trying to defeat such monsters. But because it’s in the bible and happened over 3,000 years ago it’s okay, is it? Why? If you find the events in exodus to be seminal to your culture and heritage, perhaps it’s time to rethink things and come up with a fresh start? Why base ceremonies and family get-togethers on the death and blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents who were slaughtered by your ancestors – all organised and encouraged by the god in whom you still believe?

In case you are tempted to wipe the slate clean when your ancestors arrived at the holy land, have you had a careful read of what happens in the book following the four books detailing the exodus? The book of joshua describes how joshua took over from moses and proceeded to empty the promised land so that the Israelites could get on with their lives in “peace”. Here are the highlights:

• “And Joshua said, Hereby ye shall know that the living god is among you, and that he will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites.” (joshua 3:10).
• (Regarding Jericho,) “But all the silver, and gold, and vessels of brass and iron, are consecrated unto the lord: they shall come into the treasury of the lord. So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.” (joshua 6:19-21). Murdering all the children and elderly is a viable strategy to obtain land, is it?
• “And it came to pass, when Israel had made an end of slaying all the inhabitants of Ai in the field, in the wilderness wherein they chased them, and when they were all fallen on the edge of the sword, until they were consumed, that all the Israelites returned unto Ai, and smote it with the edge of the sword. And so it was, that all that fell that day, both of men and women, were twelve thousand, even all the men of Ai. For joshua drew not his hand back, wherewith he stretched out the spear, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai.” (joshua 8:24-26).
• “And the lord discomfited them before Israel, and slew them with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them along the way that goeth up to Bethhoron, and smote them to Azekah, and unto Makkedah. And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Bethhoron, that the lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.” (joshua 10:10-11)
• “And it came to pass, when joshua and the children of Israel had made an end of slaying them with a very great slaughter, till they were consumed, that the rest which remained of them entered into fenced cities.” (joshua 10:20)
• “And that day joshua took Makkedah, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and the king thereof he utterly destroyed, them, and all the souls that were therein; he let none remain: and he did to the king of Makkedah as he did unto the king of Jericho.” (joshua 10:28)

At this point the book of joshua becomes awfully repetitive in detailing the people upon whom the Israelites inflicted genocide. Here’s the summary list of the lands who suffered a fate as described by what happened in Makkedah: Lachish, Gezer, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, Kadeshbarnea, Gaza, Goshen, Gibeon, Hazor, Madon, Shimron, Achshaph, Chinneroth, Dor, Hazor, and also to the Canaanite, Amorite, Hittite, Perizzite, Jebusite and Hivite people in the land of Mizpeh. And remember that at least some of those lands had multiple cities. To summarise: “And all the spoil of these cities, and the cattle, the children of Israel took for a prey unto themselves; but every man they smote with the edge of the sword, until they had destroyed them, neither left they any to breathe.” (joshua 11:14) and “For it was of the lord to harden their hearts, that they should come against Israel in battle, that he might destroy them utterly, and that they might have no favour, but that he might destroy them, as the lord commanded moses.” (joshua 11:20).

If you are dismayed at the actions of such monsters (and at the god who commanded it), then fear not because there is not the slightest piece of evidence that any of the above happened. But wait, you believe the old testament, don’t you? If not, why not? Your jesus stated that he believed it.

There are so many problems with the story of exodus that it is frankly ludicrous for anyone, in this day and age to take any part of it seriously. Yet, the religious will do exactly that because the story is seminal to their faith. Still, the bigger the lie … (as they say). Why base entire cultures on a bloodthirsty lie that should never have been told?