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The word exegesis means to draw the meaning out of a given text. It is sometimes contrasted with eisegesis, which means to read one's own interpretation into a given text. In general, exegesis presumes an attempt to view the text objectively, while eisegesis is more subjective.

Although the most known exegeses are from Christian, Jewish and Islamic books, there are analyses on books of other religions.

1 In Christianity

According to some forms of Christianity, there are two different form of exegesis: revealed and rational. The revealed exegesis considers that the authors were inspired by the Holy Ghost and so their words have a divine revelation. The rational exegesis is based on the idea that the authors have their own inspiration, so their works are conceived by their own intelligence.

Among Roman Catholic centres of biblical exegesis are :

• the School of Jerusalem founded around 1873 with Lagrange o.p. with a lot of difficulties leading to modernist crisis , then stopped its activities around New Testament. Such activity will run again after Vatican II
• the Biblical Institute of RomeRome ( Italian and Latin Roma is the capital city of Italy, and of its Lazio region. It is located on the lower Tiber river, near the Mediterranean Sea, at 41°50'N, 12°15'E. The Vatican City State, a sovereign enclave within Rome, is the seat of the Roman in a more canonCanon can mean: A rule adopted by an ecumenical council of the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches. From the Greek kanon for rule or measure. See canon law. A list of books accepted by an ecclesiastic communion as authoritative or divinely inspired.ical way.

Since more than 100 years, exegesis rose from German Universities such as TübingenEberhard Karls University of Tubingen (German Eberhard-Karls-Universitat Tubingen is a state-supported university. It is located on the Neckar river, in Tubingen, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. It was founded in 1477 by Count Eberhard VI (Eberhard in the Bea; in the USA, the Divinity Schools in Chicago, Harvard and Yale got famous. Nowadays, a lot of secular universities such as EPHE (Ecole pratique des hautes Etudes, France) are concerned with exegesis. See higher criticismHigher criticism is a branch of philosophy that attempts to investigate the origin of a text, especially the text of the Bible. Higher criticism in particular focusses on the contributing sources of a document and determine the authorship, date, and place.

One influential book in the field of Protestant Christian exegesis is Methodical Bible Study by Robert A. Traina. It is regarded by many as the standard text describing the inductive approach to interpreting the English language Bible.

Translations of the Hebrew BibleTanakh [] (also spelt Tanach or Tenach is an acronym for the three parts of the Hebrew Bible, based upon the initial Hebrew letters of each part: Torah [] ("The Law"; also: Teaching or Instruction , Chumash [] ("The five", also Pentateuch or The five book, like the SeptuagintaThe Septuagint (LXX is the name commonly given to the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible ( Old Testament) made in the first centuries BC. The Septuagint bible includes additional books beyond those used in today's Jewish Tanakh. The additional books we and VulgateThe Vulgate Bible is an early 5th century translation of the Bible into Latin made by St. Jerome on the orders of Pope Damasus I. It takes its name from the phrase vulgata editio "the edition for the people" (cf. Vulgar Latin), and was written in an every, based on Jewish exegesis, are also objects of exegetic studies.