Did the Exodus come from Egyptian myth? What did Gerald Massey argue?

Most historians and biblical scholars say no, though Gerald Massey argued that it did. In Book X of his 1907 book Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World, he reads the Exodus as Egyptian myth turned into history: the dead “coming forth” from Amenta, the world below, retold as a people leaving Egypt. Scholars do debate the story’s history: no direct evidence has been found for an exodus on the scale the Bible describes, and views range from a small historical core to a founding story of identity.

The story the Bible tells: In the Book of Exodus, the people of Israel are slaves in Egypt, under a pharaoh the story does not name. God calls Moses from a burning bush to lead them out. After ten plagues, the last the death of the firstborn, they cross the sea on dry ground, and the waters close over the army behind them. At Mount Sinai God gives the law, including the Ten Commandments, and the people wander forty years in the wilderness. Jews retell the story each year at Passover, and Christians read it as scripture too.
Coming forth by day, in Egypt: Egypt had its own picture of a going out. The Book of the Dead, the spells placed in tombs to guide the dead, had an Egyptian title often translated “coming forth by day”: the hope that the dead could go out into the daylight. Other books, painted in royal tombs, follow the sun through the night until it is born again at dawn.
How Gerald Massey read the Exodus: In Book X, The Exodus from Egypt and the Desert of Amenta, Massey argues that the first exodus was in the sky: the stars, then the sun, rising from below the horizon. Next it was the dead (his manes) coming forth from Amenta, as in the Book of the Dead, which he calls the Ritual; he takes its “Egypt and the desert” for places in that world. Last, in his reading, it was told as Israel’s history. He reads the ten plagues as punishments in the underworld, the Red Sea as its waters, Pharaoh as the serpent Apep who lurks there, and Sinai as the mountain of sunrise. He adds that this is not to call Genesis, Exodus and Joshua intentional forgeries.
What scholars say now: Biblical scholars and Egyptologists do not accept that the Exodus began as a drama of the dead. Its history is debated in its own right. The Bible counts about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides children (Exodus 12:37), but archaeologists have found no direct evidence of a departure on that scale, or of their forty years in the desert, and no Egyptian record of the time mentions it, as Massey also notes. Some scholars think the memory of a smaller group that left Egypt lies behind the story; others read it chiefly as a founding story that gave Israel its identity. Parts of the story do fit Egypt: people from Canaan lived in the Nile Delta at several periods, and the store cities it names, Pithom and Rameses, carry Egyptian names.
In Massey’s words: “The “coming forth to day” with which the Ritual opens is the Egyptian exodus, and the Hebrew exodus is likewise the coming forth to day.” (Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), Book X, p. 638)
In the app: Library › Book X. In the app, Book X gives Massey’s full reading of the Exodus in his own words, with a plain-words note under every part.

Last updated November 2, 2026.

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