September 21, 2026

Why mythology is not the same thing as “made-up”

If Exodus 12:37 and the later census figures are read as modern demographic statistics, the numbers simply do not work.

The text states that approximately 600,000 Israelite men left Egypt, “besides children.” Read literally, that implies a total population well over two million. When placed against the ecological capacity of the Sinai and the archaeological evidence for the Late Bronze Age, a migration of that magnitude creates substantial difficulties.

This is where the internet usually produces two wonderfully predictable reactions.

• The fundamentalist starts calculating how many litres of water two million people would have needed, then searches for a way to make the numbers work.
• The mocker circles the same numbers in red, declares the Bible disproved, and congratulates himself on having discovered something Christians apparently forgot to notice.

Both reactions share the same assumption: that the Exodus is supposed to function as a modern historical report.

That assumption deserves more scrutiny than the numbers themselves.

The problem is not that the biblical writers were bad at mathematics. The problem is that we are asking an ancient theological narrative to behave like a twenty-first-century demographic database.

And once we stop doing that, a more interesting question emerges: what kind of literature produces a story like this in the first place?

1. No Simple Philological Fix

There have been attempts to make the numbers considerably smaller.

One longstanding proposal interprets the Hebrew term ʾelep̄, traditionally translated “thousand,” as referring in some contexts to a clan, military contingent, or other social unit rather than simply a numerical thousand.

This is a serious scholarly proposal, not something invented by modern apologists. But it remains disputed. The Pentateuchal census traditions use the term within explicit numerical calculations, including the summary figure in Numbers 1:46. Whatever the precise history of the numbers, there is no easy philological switch that turns 600,000 into a few thousand people and makes the problem disappear.

That is worth saying plainly.

The literal demographic reading creates real historical and logistical difficulties. We do not need to rescue it.

But neither do we need to pretend that discovering a problematic number has somehow solved the entire question of what the Exodus is.

2. The Exodus Is Mythology

Calling the Exodus a myth can sound dismissive to modern ears. That is largely because in everyday English the word myth has acquired a meaning roughly equivalent to “something that isn’t true.”

That is not how the category has traditionally functioned in the academic study of religion.

Mythology is not simply a synonym for fiction. It is a way communities construct and transmit stories about origins, gods, human existence, social order, suffering, kingship, land, identity and the relationship between human beings and the divine.

Myth does not necessarily mean that somebody sat down and deliberately invented a story from scratch. Traditional narratives can accumulate over generations. They can preserve memories, reinterpret older traditions, absorb literary motifs, explain institutions, and express theological convictions. Historical memories and mythological storytelling are not mutually exclusive categories.

The important point is that mythology does something different from modern historiography.

It does not primarily ask, “Can we reconstruct the event with the precision of a contemporary investigative report?”

It asks questions such as: Who are we? Where did we come from? Why do we belong here? Who has authority over us? Why do we suffer? What does liberation mean? What kind of god do we worship?

The Exodus is remarkably good at answering those kinds of questions.

3. The Politics of the Narrative

One important dimension of Exodus is its critique of imperial power.

Pharaoh is portrayed as a ruler whose authority reaches into the most intimate parts of human life. He controls labour, determines who may live, and treats an entire population as a resource to be managed.

YHWH challenges that authority.

In this literary world, Pharaoh becomes more than a single Egyptian ruler. He can function as the embodiment of imperial power: the ruler who claims authority over human beings and demands their labour.

The Hebrew vocabulary reinforces the contrast. The root ʿbd can refer to work, service, or servitude depending on context. Israel is forced to serve Pharaoh, but the Exodus ultimately redirects that service toward YHWH.

The point is therefore not simply that Israel escaped from one unpleasant employer.

The narrative asks a much larger question: Who gets to determine whom human beings ultimately serve?

That is theology expressed through story.

And theology expressed through story is precisely where mythology becomes useful as a category.

4. Mythology Happens All the Time

Myths are not merely stories about something that supposedly happened once upon a time.

Communities continually create, reshape and reuse foundational stories to understand the present. In that sense, mythology is something that happens all the time.

The biblical tradition itself demonstrates this.

Later biblical writers repeatedly return to the Exodus and reinterpret it for their own circumstances. The language of liberation becomes a way of speaking about exile and return. The wilderness becomes a framework for understanding dependence on God. Pharaoh becomes a model for oppressive power. The Exodus becomes a template through which later generations interpret their own relationship with YHWH.

The story survives because it keeps doing something.

That is one of the most important things we miss when we reduce the Exodus to the question of whether two million people physically crossed the Sinai.

The ancient Israelites were not necessarily sitting around asking whether Moses had taken the shortest possible route from Egypt to Canaan.

They were asking what it meant to be Israel.

5. And What About History?

None of this requires us to pretend that history is irrelevant.

There is no independent evidence establishing Moses as a historical figure or confirming an Exodus of the scale described in the Pentateuch. The Merneptah Stele, generally dated to the late thirteenth century BCE, does provide evidence that a group identified as Israel existed in Canaan by that period. It does not, however, confirm the biblical Exodus narrative.

Smaller movements of people between Egypt and Canaan certainly belong to the historical world of the ancient Near East. But moving from that general historical background to a specific reconstruction of Moses, the plagues, the wilderness journey and the conquest requires arguments that go well beyond the evidence currently available.

Historical criticism therefore does not have to choose between two extremes:

“Every detail happened exactly as written.”

and

“Someone made the whole thing up.”

The evidence is simply not that convenient.

The biblical tradition may incorporate memories of real experiences, older traditions, theological interpretation and literary development. Exactly how those elements came together is a historical question, and some parts of that question may never be answerable.

6. What Does This Mean for a Reader?

An intellectually honest reader does not need to choose between believing every detail of the Exodus literally and dismissing the story as worthless fiction.

That is a remarkably narrow choice—and conveniently, it is the choice both fundamentalists and superficial mockers often prefer.

There is another possibility.

We can read the Exodus as mythology in the scholarly sense: a foundational tradition through which ancient Israelites interpreted their relationship with God, oppression, liberation, land and identity.

And we do not even have to agree with the theology.

That is an important point.

The Bible does not hand us its values on a silver platter. It does not function as a self-interpreting instruction manual in which every moral conclusion has already been highlighted for us.

Biblical literature contains arguments, stories, laws, poems, contradictions, tensions and competing perspectives. It often leaves the reader with difficult questions rather than neat answers.

That means reading the Bible seriously does not require surrendering our own judgment.

We can ask whether its vision of liberation is convincing. We can question its portrayal of God. We can admire some of its moral insights and reject others. We can find its theology compelling, partially compelling, or entirely unconvincing.

The point of historical-critical scholarship is not to tell us what we are required to believe.

It is to help us understand what we are actually reading.

That is a rather different project from either defending every number at all costs or pointing at the numbers and shouting, “Gotcha!”

Conclusion: Beyond Believing and Disbelieving

The real mistake is not believing or disbelieving the Exodus.

The mistake is assuming that those are the only two ways to read it.

A biblical story does not have to be a modern factual ledger to be historically interesting, culturally powerful or theologically significant. And calling something mythology does not automatically reduce it to “made-up stuff.”

Mythology is one of the ways human communities turn experiences, memories, fears and hopes into stories large enough to carry across generations.

The Exodus may not have happened as the Bible describes it.

That does not make the mythology surrounding it historically irrelevant.

Quite the opposite.

The creation, development and continual reinterpretation of Exodus traditions is itself a historical phenomenon. The story tells us not only what ancient Israelites said about their past, but something about how they understood power, oppression, liberation, God and themselves.

And perhaps that is a more interesting question than whether we can squeeze two million people into the Sinai.

The Bible challenges us to think.

It does not always make that thinking easy. It certainly does not do the thinking for us.

And that may be one of the reasons these ancient stories are still worth arguing with.

Apologetics, Exodus