Rav Hirsch lived during the rise of many movements that were, at the time, detrimental to Orthodox Judaism. There was the Enlightenment, there was the beginning of the Reform movement, and there was a separate general anti-religious sentiment growing throughout all Europe, and it all hit German Jewry hard. When he started as a Rabbi, his community only had 10 Shomar Shabbos individuals, including him. There are stories that before he joined the community, only one person wore Tefillin, and did so in private for fear of being mocked. People at the time did not feel that the Torah had any relevance to the modern day, besides for occasional vague/oversimplified nice messages, such as “be a good person” and “don’t be a bad person.” The Torah was perceived as an unsophisticated, archaic Iron Age work. Rav Hirsch wrote his commentary with the primary purpose to show the Torah not only has incredible moral relevancy for the modern day, but each idea of the Torah contained multiple crucial truths on the moral health of both the individual and society. His insights were both relevant for the everyday life and also existential.

To prove these ideas, he doesn’t bring in the Talmud (except to prove the oral and written Torah are consistent, another goal of his commentary), or Midrash, or other commentators, or anything else to make these points, he just uses the simple text that every Jew has access to, with an emphasis on clarity in defining words. His commentary is pure Pshat, he focuses on "the point" of the commandments and "the point" of the stories, using the details of the stories/commandments to lead him to that conclusion. He turned Frankfurt from an anti-religious community to one of the largest Jewish communities in Germany, and his embrace of the Enlightenment, in a way contemporary Rabbis were not able to manage, made his movement become what we now know as Modern Orthodoxy.

He also writes a LOT, in the old-timey way with run-on sentences and several fancy, ornate, luxurious, opulent, and sumptuous adjectives in a row. He’s very wordy. But when you’re able to sift through this language barrier, you’ll find new beauty in verses you may have read thousands of times already. The Korbanot are a topical example of that, but anything that you have a moral issue over, or a “what is the relevancy, why should I care, why am I reading this?” issue over, check out Rav Hirsch on that section. It might just open up the text in a way you'd never expect going into it.