Movement of Jah People

The title track reads Jamaica's history through the Book of Exodus directly: Marley cast Rastafari, downtrodden and often persecuted in Jamaica for their beliefs, as Israelites awaiting deliverance, with Africa, and specifically Ethiopia under the reign of Haile Selassie I, as the promised land repatriation would reach. Rastafari theology holds Selassie as a divine figure and reads the Hebrew Bible's exodus narrative as literal history repeating for the African diaspora, a reading scholars trace to Leonard Howell's earliest preaching in the 1930s. Marley had been raised nominally Christian and adopted Rastafari belief and practice after his 1966 marriage to Rita Marley, and by 1977 he carried the movement's theology openly rather than folding it into metaphor, as reggae songwriters before him more often had. Academic treatments of reggae and religion, gathered around the album's fortieth anniversary, describe Exodus as the record that carried Rastafari cosmology to a global pop audience with the theology largely intact rather than smoothed into generic uplift, reassuring Rastafari listeners in Jamaica that their beliefs held even under continued persecution while introducing those same beliefs, for the first time at this scale, to listeners who had never encountered them. The album remains the most cited case study in religion and popular music courses that address twentieth century new religious movements.