Guidelines for Writing an Exegetical Paper Exegesis is a word
for the systematic process by which a person arrives at a
reasonable and coherent sense of the meaning and message of a
biblical passage. A good exegete has learned what questions to
ask of a text in order to arrive at this sense and how to find
the answers. Because the right kind of questions will vary
depending on the type of literature involved, and finding them
is more of an art than a science, a guide such as this is not
definitive, but only a crude tool. The goal of an exegetical
paper is coherently, succinctly and sensitively to open-up the
meaning of the text in such a way that it reflects the
particularities (e.g. "feel", plain sense, problems,
ambiguities, context, potential theological sensus plenior,
etc.) of that text alone. The reader of the paper should be left
with the impression not that the student has done something new
or different with the text but has understood it well, including
mirroring such things as its aesthetics (or la