Exegesis

Exegesis (Greek ἐξήγησις, 'a leading out') is the disciplined interpretation of a text — most classically a scriptural text, but by extension any text serious enough to reward close reading. The word implies a direction: the reader is drawing meaning out of the text, not projecting meaning onto it. Its opposite term, eisegesis, names the fault of reading in what is not there.

The distinction is old and it is not merely academic. A reader who insists that a passage means what they need it to mean, in the face of what it plainly says, has fallen into eisegesis. A reader who patiently reconstructs what the passage would have meant to its original audience — historically, linguistically, contextually — is doing exegesis. Both readers can quote the same words; only one is reading them.

In the Jewish and Christian traditions, exegesis developed into a full technical discipline with its own vocabulary — literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical readings, and so on. In modern literary and legal scholarship the vocabulary differs but the underlying discipline is the same: begin with what the text actually says, in the historical setting in which it says it, and only then ask what it might mean now.

The rule of thumb for anyone quoting a source: before you use a passage to make your point, spend enough time on what the passage was originally saying that you could argue against your own point using the same passage. If you cannot, you are not yet doing exegesis; you are performing eisegesis, and the reader who knows the source will notice.