exodus

Exodus comes from Greek exodos, built from ex, meaning out, and hodos, meaning road or way. In Greek the word meant a departure, an exit, or the final part of a play when characters went offstage. It was current in classical literature by the fifth century BCE. The image was concrete: a path leading outward.

In Alexandria in the third to second centuries BCE, Jewish translators used Exodos as the Greek title for the second book of the Torah. That book recounts the departure of the Israelites from Egypt, so the title fit the story exactly. Once attached to scripture, the word gained weight far beyond ordinary movement. It became a name for a historical and sacred departure.

Latin kept the title as Exodus, and medieval Christian learning carried it into Western Europe. English first knew Exodus as the name of the biblical book. From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward, writers extended it to any large-scale departure. A word for one road out became a word for whole populations on the move.

Modern English still carries both the biblical and general senses. An exodus can be the specific Israelite departure from Egypt or any mass leaving from one place to another. The old Greek sense of exit never vanished; it simply grew in scale. That is why the word still sounds both physical and historic.