A Companion to Exegetical Study
About Exegebro
Exegebro is a companion for studying exegesis, with a mindful pedagogical approach. By ‘studying exegesis’ it assumes that users have taken at least one semester of an introduction to the biblical languages, or have studied them on their own for at least 20 hours. By ‘a mindful pedagogical approach’: for students it serves as a guide to practising exegesis step by step; for teachers, as a tool for teaching and for testing students’ exegetical skills.
Exegebro works with any passage of the Greek New Testament or the Hebrew Old Testament. To begin exploring the text, simply type a reference: a single verse, or a range of verses.
The six strata
- LexicalSurface Tap any word for its dictionary form, meaning and pronunciation, and listen to the whole verse read word by word. Flashcards are also available, to help users memorise words with ease.
- MorphologicalSubsoil Work out what form each word takes (its case, tense, person and so on) in a short quiz.
- SyntaxStrata Rebuild the sentence by placing each word where it belongs in the sentence’s tree. A whiteboard is provided in this stage.
- SemanticBedrock Explore what the words mean, and tap a verb to see who does what to whom, drawn as arcs across the sentence. A whiteboard is provided in this stage too.
- TranslationTreasure Put everything you have found into a translation of your own. Users may write freely here; my only suggestion is to stay focused on the practice or the test.
- Hermeneutic BridgeCrossing Users choose three to five questions suited to the passage’s genre. Here, Bro invites users to build their critical-thinking skills.
Practice and Test
Practice is the default: no timer, and nothing is recorded. It is designed for self-study and for teaching.
Test asks for the user's name, times the session, and at the end offers a record of the work to download. That record is a file on your own device. Nothing is sent to a server, and the name is never saved, so several users can take turns on one computer.
The texts and the data
The Greek New Testament is the SBL Greek New Testament; the Hebrew Old Testament is the Westminster Leningrad Codex. The grammar, sentence trees and meanings come from openly licensed scholarly datasets, chiefly Biblica's MACULA project. Every source is credited on the Sources & Licenses page.
When the sources disagree, the tool says so. These datasets were made independently and do not always line up, most often in Hebrew passages where the written text and the traditional reading differ (the ketiv and qere). Where they do not align, the tool shows that part as unavailable rather than guessing. A missing sentence tree is a flagged gap; a wrong one would mislead you without warning.
Three passages you can try for yourself:
- Ruth 3:5 — none of its six words line up, so no tree is drawn at all. The Syntax stage says why, instead of showing an empty frame.
- Ruth 1:8 — the tree is drawn, but one word, יעשה, cannot be placed in it, so it is listed underneath as “Unaligned”.
- Isaiah 9:6 — the same happens to ל/םרבה. Here the written form (ketiv) is what you see, while the audio follows the traditional reading (qere).
Verses this text does not contain
Ask for John 7:53–8:11, the woman caught in adultery, and Exegebro will answer that the verses do not exist. They are missing because the SBL Greek New Testament, the edition this tool reads, does not print them in its text: the earliest surviving manuscripts of John do not have them. The same is true of about fifteen single verses, among them Matthew 17:21 and Acts 8:37.
Weighing manuscripts against one another to decide what the text is, is textual criticism: a discipline of its own, and not part of this tool’s approach. Exegebro works on the text as its edition gives it. When you meet a passage like this one, take it up in a critical edition or a commentary, where the evidence can be laid out properly.
Pronunciation
The audio is computer-generated from phonetic transcriptions of each word. The Greek follows a reconstructed Koine pronunciation. Treat it as a study aid, not as a recording of a native reader. Shadow it with your own voice to get the full benefit.
Design
The Batik Parang pattern behind the workspace, and The Geni, the small flame that keeps you company while you dig, are original designs by Yusup Achmadi.
The opening verse is John 1:1 in the Latin Vulgate: In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Privacy
There are no accounts and no analytics or tracking scripts. A few preferences are kept in your browser's local storage on this device only: your colour theme, the field journal of passages you have dug, whether sound is on, and Geni's state, colour and size. The fonts are served from this site, so your browser does not contact anyone else while you read.