Graham I. Davies provides his long-awaited commentary on the first ten chapters of the second book of the Torah in this in-depth engagement with Exodus chapters 1-10. Davies brings together all the relevant aids to exegesis - linguistic, textual, philological, archaeological, historical, literary, and theological - to help the reader understand the text at hand. The first ten chapters of Exodus cover the affliction in Egypt and the finding of Moses as well as the plagues of Egypt and Moses' interactions with Pharaoh. Davies plumbs the depths of these well-known texts, bringing out many profound insights into their structure and meaning, and into the history of scholarship. Two results of Davies's research are to place the old hypothesis of an Elohistic source on a much stronger footing and to reaffirm that both it and the J source extended through both Genesis and Exodus.

Postcolonial biblical criticism took shape, largely, by critiquing the book of Exodus. Because of the eventual dispossession of Canaanites in the conquest narratives, so goes the thinking, the Hebrews’ God amounts to little more than a dangerous, destructive, and ethnocentric figure. In Hyphenating Moses Federico Alfredo Roth challenges this consensus by providing an alternative reading of its early narratives (1:1-3:15). Redeploying postcolonial theory and themes, Roth presents a reading of these well-known scenes as orbiting around the topic of identity formation, climaxing in the burning bush episode. In the giving of the name, YHWH promotes the virtue of conceiving identity as a malleable reality to be sought after by all parties caught in the dehumanizing discourse of colonial subjugation.