The Hebrew Proficiency Exam for OTST Exegesis Courses

As a prerequisite (see syllabus and the academic Bulletin) for enrollment in an exegesis course, each student must have successfully completed a qualifying Hebrew course or successfully passed the Hebrew Placement Exam. Since it is not uncommon for the successful completion of a Hebrew course or Hebrew Placement Exam to be in the distant past, every exegesis student is tested on basic Hebrew skills at the beginning of an OTST exegesis course. In this way, the student can assess right at the beginning how likely it is that the exegesis course can be successfully completed.

After a 60-minute Hebrew test, the student can immediately view her or his results and decide whether she or he has the ability to pass the exegesis course successfully. After viewing the results, the student can withdraw from the exegesis course if there is no prospect of successfully completing the course. The result of this test is not included in the final grade of the exegesis course but is only used to estimate the probability of successful course completion. If necessary, the teaching professor will provide advice in the event of very poor results.

To prepare for this Hebrew test before the start of the semester, it is advisable to refresh your basic knowledge of Hebrew. The TOHFL-I and TOHFL-II courses are available for this purpose. These courses have been developed in close cooperation with leading institutions (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Evangelical Faculty of Theology Leuven, Protestant Faculty of Theology of the Netherlands, United Bible Society, Andrews University et al). The course is free of charge. All information about the course can be found here.

Also, to prepare well for the exam, make sure

that you use this complete Vocabularly List (containing all down to a frequency of 100) that matches the gloss database of the BibleOL.
that you download the Syntax Defintion Document and learn them. All definitions are to be mastered and assumed in the Placement Exam.

The table below provides access to each part of the exam. Each exam part is hyperlinked (underlined, blue table headers) so that students can begin exam preparations.

Noun Morphology	Pronominal Suffixes attached to Nouns and Particles	Prefixing	Verbal Morphology	Subphrase Analysis (constructs, attribution)	Phrase Function Analysis	Clause Relation Analysis

How to take the Hebrew Exam for OTST Exegesis courses?

You must take the following steps to get access to the Exam:

In BibleOL enroll in the class “AU OTST Exegesis Hebrew Exam”.

The following video shows how you can enroll in classes:

Once you have enrolled, you can see the Final Exam show up under “TEXT AND EXERCISES/Exams”. The following video shows how you can find and take exams on BibleOL:

When you are finished taking your exam you can lookup your exam results instantly. The OT department will inform your instructor within a few days about your official final exam grade.