Translation

THE EXODUS, FROM THE BIBLE TO MOVIE

1 Introduction

In the year 1998, the movie producers in Hollywood put the story of the Exodus in the Old Testament in the Bible onto the big screen, which is an animation movie: the Price of Egypt. This soon became a big hit——millions of audience poured into cinemas to see the movie. Some experts said the movie was very successful, while some critics argued that the movie was a failure because it was not loyal to the Bible any longer, so many plots of the original story had been changed. Bao(2008) proposes that The Bible is the primary source of western literature and culture, the Bible has been passed down from generation to generation, influencing not only the physical experiences of the western people, but also their emotional world as well as their habits of thinking and their way of expression. So we can see Bible is so important in western society that it is extremely difficult to make an animation movie based on a Biblical story. The present paper holds that although artistic and historical license has been taken, the film is true to the essence, values and integrity of a story that is a cornerstone of faith for millions of people worldwide. The main plots of the story have been preserved, and the spirits in it are almost the same as it were in the Bible. Moses devoted his whole life to fighting for freedom and finishing the historical task handed to him by God, to liberate the Israelites and save them from the untold miseries and the hellish slavery. So the movie producers made it very successfully to change the story from the Bible to movie. In spite of plots, the language was also changed during the transition from the Bible to movie, and the main purpose of these changes is to meet the taste of modern audience, especially non-Christian audience. So we believe the language change is crucial to the success of the movie.

This thesis will mainly discuss Moses’ image in Exodus, compare the plots and language...