Read the Hebrew Bible on its own terms

If you have made it through three semesters of biblical Hebrew, you already know something about perseverance. You have memorized paradigms at midnight, wrestled with the Qal passive, and probably wondered — more than once — whether the payoff was worth the labor. I want to speak directly to where you likely are right now: you can read the text with a lexicon in hand, but you are not yet confident reading the text itself. You can parse a wayiqtol, but you are not yet sure what to do with a passage that resists easy analysis. You are competent, and you want to become genuinely skilled. That gap is exactly what this course is designed to close.

What I have built here is not a survey of advanced topics — it is a full exegetical workflow, executed from beginning to end on real Hebrew texts. We start with the grammar, because there is no shortcut: rare verbal stems, archaic morphology, complex verbal sequences in poetry, the nominal and relative clause constructions that intermediate grammars often leave underexplained. We work through these not as abstract paradigms but as problems that arise in actual passages. The goal is that by the end of the advanced grammar unit, you are reading difficult texts with substantially less scaffolding than you required before.

From there, we turn to the text-critical question that so many exegesis courses skip or treat superficially: what text are we actually interpreting? You will learn to navigate the BHS apparatus with genuine competence, to evaluate Dead Sea Scrolls variants as textual witnesses, and to ask what the Septuagint divergences tell us — exegetically, not just historically. We treat textual criticism not as a distraction from interpretation but as its necessary foundation. Then we move into discourse grammar, rhetorical analysis, lexical semantics, historical and canonical context — each layer building toward the final exegetical paper, which is a full scholarly argument, peer-reviewed and presented.

I want to be honest with you about what this course requires: it is demanding. The texts are hard, the methods are rigorous, and the paper asks you to synthesize everything in a single sustained argument. But I also want to be honest about what it offers: the experience of reading a passage of the Hebrew Bible and knowing — with real confidence — what it says, how it is built, what it is doing, and why it matters. That experience is unlike anything else in biblical studies. I have designed every part of this course to get you there. If you are ready to do the work, let's begin.