This page was written in July 2017.
James Murphy’s commentary on Exodus came out in 1881, and it’s entitled A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Exodus. If you were in a decent library looking for a commentary, the better course generally would be to look for something written in the last few decades. But, on the internet, where you’re looking for stuff unconstrained by copyright law, there’s only a few. I’ve only seen two pre-copyright commentaries so far which would on their face have any claim to embodying reasonably critical scholarship: Murphy’s (1881) commentary and S. R. Driver’s (1918). S. R. Driver was a giant of his field, and much of what he wrote back in the day still holds up pretty well. Murphy’s commentary was part of the International Critical Commentary series, which in general accepted critical scholarship.
But Murphy is an outlier. Unfortunately, he really isn’t critical. His approach to the whole subject is colored by two major mistakes: taking the book of Exodus at face value as a historical record, and trying to harmonize the various discordant chronological claims by the Bible. His work is fundamentally apologetic, from the very first paragraph of the author’s preface. He takes the position not of a historian seeking to analyze an ancient work, but of a preacher determined to defend the soundness of the Bible against skeptics. He winds up reading things into the text of Exodus that just aren’t there.
Take this, from the Introduction, page 11:
[The Israelites] took up their abode in Goshen at a time when the nations still retained some knowledge of the true God, some remembrance of his covenant with man, and some sense of his claim upon their reverence; they marched forth from the land of the sojourning at an epoch when the iniquity of the Amorites was full, when, whatever might be the case with a rare individual or tribe, the nations had corrupted the knowledge of God, disregarded his covenant, and wandered into the devious paths of will-worship.
This doesn’t make sense, historically or in terms of Exodus itself. Apparently, Murphy would have us believe, the world in the seventeenth century respected the one true God of monotheism, but by the fifteenth century had forgotten all about God. There is no historical evidence for this, and you won’t find it in the Bible either. The introduction does not address the documentary hypothesis at all, which makes sense as it wasn’t till 1883 that Wellhausen wrote his Prolegomena. This makes him outdated in a way that even early 20th-century commentaries weren’t.
Once you get into the commentary itself, it is organized by chapters. Before each chapter is a list of Hebrew words of some interest, with definitions and such. These definitions might not be affected by Murphy’s flawed approach, and while there have certainly been advances in Hebrew lexicography since Murphy’s time, the Bible makes up about 80% of the corpus of ancient Hebrew, so there’s a lot of continuity between the lexicography of Murphy’s time and today. Next, Murphy provides an original translation. This is then followed by comments on the passage.
In his commentary on Exodus 1, Murphy makes (without alerting the reader) some leaps of logic. For example, Exodus is pretty clear that the Israelites spent exactly 430 years in Egypt (12:40). But a conflict is introduced by a New Testament passage which takes the 430 years as a stretch of time much longer than just the Exodus, requiring the Exodus to be shorter. After some other math, you could conclude that the Exodus was 210 years long.
Murphy, without explaining that he has virtually discarded the chronology of the Book of Exodus itself, says that “The intervening period of 210 years is summed up in the chapter before us . . .”. The questionable math continues. Murphy takes the Bible’s statement that Joseph died at 110 years old, and takes this as a norm for lifespans of the generation which came down to Egypt. An infant who came down with the family would die at year 110 of the time in Egypt, then, and thus that this marks the point referred to in Exodus 1 when all of Joseph’s generation had died off. Because Moses was said to be eighty at the Exodus, Murphy then narrows down the time of the “new king over Egypt” as beginning between years 110 and 130 in Egypt.
Then, doing a little math with exponents, suppose that the Israelite population grew from 70 in Exodus 1 to the 600,000 of the Exodus in a smooth exponential growth over the 210 years. This would give a population of 8,000 to 20,000 males at the time that the new king arises. This assumes that their population doubles every 16 years, an incredible pace. Murphy gives the figure of fifteen years, approximately correct given all the dubious historical assumptions he’s making.
This means that the king who tries to suppress the growth of the Israelite population is looking at a population of maybe 30,000 people when the midwives are instructed to kill the Israelite children and 50,000 when Moses was born (Murphy’s numbers). Now, this number is far too small to justify the Pharaoh’s statement (1:9), Behold, the Israelite people are more and mightier than we. So, Murphy tells us, Egypt was fragmented at this time, and so when Exodus tells us of a new “king over Egypt,” it’s actually talking about the ruler of some petty principality within Egypt.
Of course, then we’ll have a problem when we move forward in time. If “Egypt” refers to a small political unit unable to handle a population of 30,000 slaves, then why, when the Exodus finally rolls around, does it take divine intervention to help about 2 1/2 million Israelites escape from Pharaoh? According to the Pentateuch, there were 600,000 men fit for military service at the Exodus, which is a number larger than the entire army of the Roman Empire at its peak. Then we have to buy the idea that these people, who could probably have conquered the entire Mediterranean world, were overwhelmed by the mere task of taking over the little land of Canaan.
To attempt to read the Exodus as straight history, and to attempt to read casual statements about chronology in the New Testament about the Exodus as straight history, will lead you to really weird places. And so will Murphy’s commentary.
If you must have a public domain commentary, you would do better to read S. R. Driver’s contribution to the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges, which you can find conveniently online here. His work is still outdated — it still holds to the idea that there really was some kind of Exodus, that Jacob really went down to Egypt, etc., where it is now a matter of general agreement that Genesis and Exodus are basically to be regarded as non-historical in content.
But unlike Murphy, Driver really does think critically, even if some of his opinions have since come to seem naive. Where Murphy not only swallows the idea of 600,000 Israelites but uses them to generate population figures on the assumption of steady exponential growth, Driver recognizes that he is dealing with exaggerated figures.
Read Driver, then. But first, read Wikipedia’s The Exodus, which does a pretty good job of giving you an idea of where modern scholarship is at on the Exodus. Better yet, get yourself to a good university library and find something written in the last two or three decades.