Courses

The Bible is the most influential collection of texts in human history — sacred scripture for over two billion people, the foundation of Western literature, law, and ethics, and a source of comfort, controversy, and transformation for millennia. But what actually is the Bible? What story does it tell? How is it organized? Why does it matter? This course tells the Bible's story from beginning to end for anyone, regardless of background. No prior knowledge assumed. No faith commitment required. Just curiosity.

The Bible has shaped civilizations for three thousand years. For billions of people across history, it has been the most important book they ever read: read carefully, read deeply, read in the original languages it was written in. For billions more, it has been a closed book, a cultural reference, or a family heirloom on a shelf. Cathedra Institute exists because that second group deserves the same access as the first. This course answers four questions: Why have Christians across every tradition taken Scripture so seriously for so long? What are the three languages this library was written in? What does Cathedra Institute give you that a stack of Bibles cannot? And once you understand the tools, where should you go first? DISC 101 is the orientation course for everyone who enters the platform. No Greek or Hebrew required; you'll get your first taste of both. No faith commitment required, only curiosity.

Two billion people alive today consider Jesus of Nazareth the most important person in history. Even the calendar on your phone (the one that says the year is 2026) was built around his birth. And yet many people have only fragmentary impressions of who he was: a gentle teacher, a moral reformer, a miracle worker, a revolutionary, a martyr, or a myth. This course is for anyone who wants to meet him on his own terms. DISC 102 tells the story of Jesus as the four Gospels tell it: not as a flattened harmony, not as a theological abstraction, and not as a debate. The course starts in the dusty political reality of first-century Palestine under Roman occupation, walks through his birth and public ministry, unpacks his distinctive teaching about the Kingdom of God, follows the collision course with the religious authorities, and ends at the empty tomb and the commission that launched a movement now two millennia old. No faith commitment is required, only curiosity and a willingness to look at a man who still divides history.

Billions of people call themselves Christians. They disagree about plenty, but they share a core set of beliefs that has remained largely stable for two thousand years. That core is captured in a few ancient statements the early church wrote down when it needed a way to teach new believers what the faith actually was. DISC 103 walks through that shared ground, covering God as Creator and Trinity, Jesus Christ fully God and fully human, the Holy Spirit and salvation, the church as a living community across two thousand years, and the historic Christian confession about death, judgment, and the new creation. The course is ecumenical by design: it presents the shared confession of historic Christianity without picking sides on the disagreements that divide Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. Where the traditions differ, the course names the differences honestly. No faith commitment is required to take it. Only a willingness to understand a set of ideas that has shaped most of Western civilization.

Every reader of the Bible is already making genre decisions — often without knowing it. Someone who reads Proverbs as a list of divine promises will eventually be disappointed. Someone who reads Revelation as a timeline of the next decade will eventually be embarrassed. Someone who reads Psalm 137 as a moral instruction manual will eventually be horrified. The Bible is a library, not a book, and its sixty-six canonical works were composed across more than a thousand years in at least three languages and at least eight major literary forms. Reading it well begins with recognizing what kind of writing is in front of you. BIBL 210 is the hermeneutics foundation of the Cathedra catalog. It teaches a student to recognize biblical narrative, law, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, parable, epistle, and apocalyptic; to read each one on its own terms; and to ask the right historical and contextual questions before jumping to application. The course assumes no background beyond DISC 100–103 (or equivalent familiarity with the biblical story) and builds the interpretive habits that BIBL 301–307, BINT 301, and every exegetical course downstream will treat as prerequisite. The course is built around short teaching segments paired with close readings of specific passages. Every module ends with a summative quiz that assesses the interpretive moves the module taught — not Bible trivia. A student who completes BIBL 210 will be able to read any passage of the Bible, identify its genre, ask the historical-contextual questions the genre demands, and avoid the most common interpretive fallacies — the competencies BINT 302 will later formalize as exegesis.

The Old Testament is the longest, strangest, most linguistically varied, and most contested collection of literature in the Christian canon. It was composed across more than a thousand years, in at least two languages (Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic), by authors whose identities are in most cases unrecoverable, and it has come down to modern readers in three partly different forms — a Protestant canon of 39 books, a Catholic canon of 46, an Eastern Orthodox canon slightly larger, and an Ethiopian canon larger still. Reading it well requires more than a summary of its stories. It requires a working mental map of its books, its genres, its historical settings, its textual history, and the scholarly conversations that shape how the field reads each part of it. BIBL 201 is the Old Testament backbone course of the Cathedra catalog. It assumes the student has already completed DISC 100 (the Bible's story) and BIBL 210 (how to read the Bible's genres), and it goes deeper into every section of the Hebrew Bible book by book and division by division. The course covers the Pentateuch, the Historical Books, the Poetic and Wisdom literature, the Major and Minor Prophets, the deuterocanonical books included in Catholic and Orthodox canons, and the major theological threads that run from Genesis through Malachi. For each book or group of books, it addresses authorship and date (including the scholarly debates), historical setting, literary structure, major theological themes, and the book's place in the larger Old Testament story. The goal is that a student who finishes BIBL 201 can pick up any Old Testament book and have a framework for reading it: what kind of literature it is, who wrote it and when (or what the live disputes about authorship are), what historical moment it addresses, how it is structured internally, and what theological threads it picks up and hands on. Every downstream Old Testament course in the Cathedra catalog — BIBL 301 Pentateuch, BIBL 302 Historical Books, BIBL 303 Wisdom Literature, BIBL 304 Prophets, OBST 501 Old Testament Theology, EXEG 502 Old Testament Exegesis, HEBR 501 and HEBR 502 — assumes the foundation BIBL 201 provides.

The deuterocanonical books — Tobit, Judith, Sirach, the Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel — are a body of Second Temple Jewish literature composed between roughly the fourth century BCE and the first century CE, in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. They live in different Christian canons. Catholic Bibles include the full collection. Eastern Orthodox Bibles include all of these and several more (1 and 2 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, 3 and 4 Maccabees). Protestant Bibles include none of them. Over a billion Christians read these books as Scripture. A few hundred million do not. BIBL 250 engages them seriously with every one of these traditions in view. Most resources on this material commit to a single canonical frame. Catholic resources teach the deuterocanon from inside Catholic tradition. Protestant resources often skip it or treat it as historically interesting but theologically off-limits. Cathedra's multi-tradition platform does neither. The course engages these books as literature and, in some traditions, as Scripture, letting readers from every tradition see what the books say, what scholars observe about their date and composition, and what each Christian tradition affirms about them. The course never decides which tradition is right. The course holds three registers deliberately — what the text says, what scholars observe, what the traditions affirm, especially where the subject is exactly where the registers could collapse. Seven modules, nineteen lessons, roughly fourteen hours. Module 1 lays out the terminology (deuterocanonical, anagignoskomena, apocrypha) and a shared canonical map. Module 2 orients readers to the four centuries between Malachi and Matthew, when this literature emerged under Persian, Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Roman rule. Modules 3 through 6 take each book group seriously in turn: wisdom writings (Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon), stories (Tobit, Judith, and the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel), exile literature (Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah), and the Maccabean material. Each book receives a reading that moves through its text, its historical setting, and each tradition's reception on its own terms. Module 7 closes with the New Testament's engagement with this material (including the Hebrews 11:35 reference to 2 Maccabees 7), the canon's historical formation from the Septuagint through the Council of Trent and the Westminster Confession, and a closing lesson that lets readers from four different traditions each name what they can gain from serious engagement. BIBL 250 is the full expansion of the preview Lesson 7.1 gave in BIBL 201 (Old Testament Survey).

The New Testament is a smaller collection than the Old Testament in raw volume (twenty-seven books rather than thirty-nine), but its scholarly landscape is denser. In roughly a century of composition, a handful of communities scattered across the eastern Roman Empire produced gospels, letters, a theological history, and an apocalypse that became the scripture of a global religion. Reading the collection well requires more than a chapter-by-chapter summary. It requires a working knowledge of the Greco-Roman world that shaped the texts, the Second Temple Jewish setting that provided their vocabulary, the Synoptic Problem and the scholarly hypotheses offered to solve it, the Pauline authorship conversation and its range of faithful responses, the formation of the canon across the first four Christian centuries, and the interpretive conventions appropriate to each of the New Testament's literary genres. BIBL 202 is the New Testament backbone course of the Cathedra catalog. It assumes the student has already completed DISC 100 (the Bible's story), BIBL 210 (how to read the Bible's genres), and BIBL 201 (the Old Testament survey), and it goes deeper into every section of the New Testament book by book and division by division. The course covers the four Gospels (treating the Synoptic Problem directly rather than hiding it), Acts as Luke's second volume, the seven undisputed Pauline letters, the disputed Paulines and the Pastoral Epistles, Hebrews as a homiletical outlier, the General Epistles, and Revelation. For each book or group of books, it addresses authorship and date (including the live scholarly debates), historical setting, literary structure, major theological themes, and the book's place in the larger New Testament story. The goal is that a student who finishes BIBL 202 can pick up any New Testament book and have a framework for reading it: what kind of literature it is, when and by whom it was composed (or what the live authorship conversations are), what historical moment it addresses, how it is structured internally, and what theological threads run through it. Every downstream New Testament course in the Cathedra catalog (BIBL 305, BIBL 306, BIBL 307, NBST 501, EXEG 501, and the Greek language courses GREK 101 through GREK 503) assumes the foundation BIBL 202 provides.

Every reader of the Bible already practices hermeneutics. The question is whether the practice is conscious or not. Hermeneutics is the discipline of interpretation — the study of how texts mean, how context shapes reading, how method protects readers from importing their own assumptions into the text, and how the move from ancient world to contemporary life can be made responsibly. Exegesis asks "what did this passage mean for its original audience?" Eisegesis reads that audience backward from today's concerns. Hermeneutics asks why the difference matters and how to maintain it. The stakes are not academic: Christians have gone to war, split churches, and condemned one another over verses read without regard for genre, context, or the limits of any single interpreter's vantage point. Method is a form of intellectual honesty, and BINT 301 treats it that way. The course takes a specific stance: the grammatical-historical method is the convergence point where contemporary biblical scholarship across Christian traditions actually lives. Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, evangelical, and post-evangelical scholars read one another's exegesis, cite one another's commentary work, and share a common methodological vocabulary. Where traditions diverge is not at the level of method but at the level of presuppositions: what role the church's tradition plays in adjudicating readings, how the Holy Spirit functions in interpretation, and what theological commitments a reader legitimately brings before the text. BINT 301 holds both the convergence and the divergence clearly. Seven modules carry that work: Module 1 places hermeneutics historically, tracing six interpreters from Origen to Barth. Module 2 describes the grammatical-historical method and locates the contemporary convergence. Module 3 unpacks the five context types (literary, historical, cultural, canonical, theological) and shows how each shapes a reading. Module 4 teaches word studies, identifies the major interpretive fallacies, and applies genre-specific principles across the major biblical genres. Module 5 engages typology, allegory, and sensus plenior on their own pre-modern terms before locating them in contemporary scholarship. Module 6 examines presuppositions and the bridging task: how "what it meant" becomes "what it means" without collapsing the distance between ancient world and present reader. Module 7 is the cumulative case study. The case study passage is Philippians 2:5–11, the Christ-hymn. Every method stage the course has taught runs through this passage end to end: text-critical questions, authorial intent and date, the literary context of Paul's letter to Philippi, the historical and cultural world of the first century, the contested word studies (morphe, harpagmos, ekenosen), the Old Testament background in Isaiah's servant and Adam Christology, the canonical weight, the genre question (hymn or creed?), and the theological claims four traditions press from it. The case study is not an exercise in arriving at one correct reading; it is a demonstration that responsible interpretation requires the whole method and that the method's results are both real and open to further theological conversation.

Christian theology is not primarily a collection of beliefs to memorize. It is a disciplined way of thinking about God and about everything else in relation to God, a way of thinking developed over twenty centuries in conversation with Scripture, with tradition, and with every major intellectual movement of the Western and Eastern worlds. A student who wants to understand not just what Christians believe but how Christians think theologically needs to meet the theologians on their own terms: to watch Augustine argue with Pelagius about what sin has done to the human will, to follow Aquinas through his arguments about the simplicity and the attributes of God, to see Calvin's distinction between the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves, and to hear Barth insist that theology must begin with God's self-revelation rather than with human religious experience. THEO 201 is the first systematic theology course in the Cathedra catalog. It assumes the student has completed DISC 103 (which introduced the basic content of Christian belief) and BIBL 210 (which taught how to read the Bible's literary forms), and it goes deeper into three of the foundational loci of Christian theology: the doctrine of God, theological anthropology, and hamartiology. The course covers theological method and the question of authority, the classical doctrine of God and its main modern alternatives, the doctrine of the Trinity as developed at Nicaea and Constantinople, the image of God and the body-soul question, the fall and the doctrine of original sin in its historical articulations, and the social and structural dimensions of sin in modern theological discussion. For each doctrine, the course engages the primary theological sources directly rather than presenting disembodied summaries of them. The student meets Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Barth, and others in excerpted form, follows their actual arguments, and learns to weigh the evidence for different positions. The goal is that a student who finishes THEO 201 can read a theological text, identify its methodological commitments, follow its argument even when they disagree with it, place it within the broader Christian tradition, and understand why different Christians arrive at different theological conclusions without treating the differences as either trivial or catastrophic. Every downstream theology course in the Cathedra catalog (THEO 202, THEO 220, THEO 230, THEO 501 at the graduate level, and the various theological loci courses) assumes the foundation THEO 201 provides. Note on scope: THEO 201 follows a three-topic focus on God, Humanity, and Sin, deferring creation ex nihilo, providence, and the problem of evil to THEO 202 and THEO 210 so that the three central doctrines can be treated with primary-source depth that a broader survey at the same hour count would not allow.

BINT 302 teaches a seven-stage exegetical workflow: text, context, grammar, word study, structure, theology, application. Each stage is a practical discipline with its own methods, questions, and tools. The course does not stop at defining what context means or why word studies matter; it shows you how to do the work in a finite amount of time on a passage you have never studied before. By the end, you will have practiced every stage on a running case study from Romans 5 and will understand why the order of the stages is not arbitrary — each one prepares the ground for the next. The workflow taught here is the same one used by careful readers across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions, because the workflow is a matter of craft, not confession. BINT 301 taught the principles behind responsible biblical interpretation — what the grammatical-historical method is, why context shapes meaning, how words carry semantic ranges that etymology alone cannot capture, and where tradition legitimately enters the reading process. BINT 302 takes those principles and turns them into executable practice. Three areas go substantially deeper here than they did in BINT 301: textual criticism (what to do when manuscripts disagree and an English footnote says "some manuscripts read"), discourse and structural analysis (how to trace the argument flow of a passage and identify patterns like chiasm, inclusio, and repetition), and the exegetical paper (how to write up what you found in a form that makes your reasoning transparent to a reader). Students who completed BINT 301 will recognize the conceptual ground; students who did not will find a brief recap in the first lesson. The course follows a single passage, Romans 5:1-11, through every workflow stage from text establishment to theological reflection. The passage was chosen because it rewards every stage of the method: verse 1 contains one of the most discussed textual variants in the New Testament, the discourse structure is explicit and traceable, and the key words carry theological weight that repays careful investigation. In Module 7, you write a short exegetical paper applying the full workflow to a passage of your choice from a set that includes Psalm 1, Genesis 22:1-19, and Proverbs 1:1-7. The paper is your demonstration that the workflow has become yours, not just a procedure you followed.

Christian theology divides naturally into two halves. The first half asks who God is, what human beings are, and what has gone wrong with the humanity God made. THEO 201 took up that first half across the doctrines of God, humanity, and sin. The second half of Christian theology asks what God has done about the disorder the first half has named, and what God is still going to do. The answer turns on the person and work of Jesus Christ, on the salvation his life and death and resurrection accomplish, and on the consummation toward which the whole creation is moving. THEO 202 takes up that second half across the doctrines of Christology, soteriology, and eschatology. The course assumes the student has completed THEO 201 (which established the methodological framework and the doctrine of God) along with DISC 100-103, BIBL 210, and the BIBL 201 and BIBL 202 surveys. It goes deeper into three foundational loci: the person and work of Christ, the doctrine of salvation, and the doctrine of last things. For each doctrine, the course engages the primary theological sources directly rather than presenting disembodied summaries of them. The student meets Athanasius arguing that God became human so that humans might become divine, watches Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius clash at Ephesus, reads the Chalcedonian Definition of 451 in its own words, follows Anselm in Cur Deus Homo through the satisfaction argument, hears the Reformers articulate penal substitution, and engages modern voices including Gustaf Aulén, Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, N. T. Wright, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and John Stott. Multi-tradition sensitivity is at its sharpest in this course, because Christ, salvation, and last things are where Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions diverge most visibly. The goal is that a student who finishes THEO 202 can read a Christological claim and place it within the Chalcedonian tradition and the live modern debates, can recognize which atonement model is operating in a given theological statement and can articulate the strengths and weaknesses of each, can follow a soteriological argument across the Catholic-Orthodox-Protestant range, and can engage the eschatological debates (millennial positions, the question of hell, the nature of the intermediate state, the new creation) without forcing a single answer where faithful Christians hold several. Together with THEO 201, the course provides the complete undergraduate systematic theology foundation that THEO 501 Systematic Theology I and THEO 502 Systematic Theology II will build on at the graduate level.

The history of Christianity is not a single story told from a single perspective. It is a web of stories that stretches from the small Jewish messianic movement that gathered in Jerusalem after the crucifixion to the shattering of Western Christendom in the sixteenth-century Reformation. HIST 201 traces the first sixteen centuries of that web across six modules: the apostolic and sub-apostolic church, the age of the councils, Augustine and the shaping of Western Christianity, monasticism and the Eastern church, the medieval church at its height, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The course assumes the student has completed the Discovery sequence (DISC 100-103) and at least one of the Bible surveys (BIBL 201 or BIBL 202). BIBL 202 Module 7 introduced the formation of the New Testament canon; HIST 201 picks up that thread and weaves it into the broader story of how the early church organized itself, defined its beliefs, and spread across the Roman world. The theological developments treated abstractly in THEO 201 and THEO 202 are here set in their historical context, with the political pressures, the personality clashes, and the institutional dynamics that shaped how the church articulated its faith. The course engages primary sources directly. The student reads excerpts from Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Pliny the Younger, the Nicene Creed, Augustine's Confessions and City of God, the Rule of Benedict, Luther's 95 Theses, Calvin's Institutes, and the Council of Trent. Multi-tradition sensitivity is at its most critical in a church history course: the Great Schism of 1054 looks entirely different from Constantinople than from Rome, and the Reformation looks entirely different from Wittenberg than from the Vatican. HIST 201 presents these events from multiple perspectives, names the genuine grievances on each side, and does not sanitize the difficult history.

HIST 201 ended with a fractured Western Christendom: Luther, Calvin, the Anabaptists, the English Reformation, and the Council of Trent had drawn lines that would define Christianity for centuries. HIST 202 picks up the story at the point where those lines hardened into institutions and follows the Christian movement through four centuries of consolidation, crisis, expansion, and transformation that brought it to its present global shape. The period 1600 to the present contains as much ground as the first sixteen centuries. Protestantism fractured into hundreds of traditions. The Catholic Church reformed itself, defined papal infallibility, and then reformed itself again at Vatican II. The Orthodox Church survived four centuries of Ottoman and Soviet oppression. Christianity crossed the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the equator. The Enlightenment challenged Christianity's intellectual foundations; Schleiermacher, Barth, and others rebuilt them on new ground. Pentecostalism emerged at the start of the twentieth century and became, by demographic measures, the most significant Christian development since the Reformation. And the church faced moral reckonings over slavery, colonialism, Nazism, racism, and sexual abuse. The course assumes the student has completed HIST 201 and at least one of the theology courses (THEO 201 or THEO 202). Primary-source engagement matches HIST 201: the student encounters Spener's Pia Desideria, Edwards's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Schleiermacher's On Religion, Barth's preface to The Epistle to the Romans, Bonhoeffer's writings from prison, the Barmen Declaration, Vatican II documents, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail, and Gutierrez's A Theology of Liberation. Multi-tradition sensitivity is at its most demanding in this period. HIST 202 gives proportional attention to Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant, evangelical, Pentecostal, and Global South developments. The difficult history is presented honestly.

Every theological claim implies an ethical one. If God created humans in the divine image, that says something about how humans should be treated. If Christ died for sinners, that says something about grace, forgiveness, and the limits of judgment. If the Spirit produces love, joy, and peace, that says something about what the Christian life should look like in practice. THEO 210 traces the line from theological conviction to moral action, asking the question that every student of theology eventually faces: now that I know what Christians believe, how should Christians live? The course assumes the student has completed THEO 201 and THEO 202, which established the doctrinal vocabulary. THEO 210 now asks what that vocabulary means for human action. The doctrine of the image of God grounds the ethics of human dignity. The theology of sanctification shapes how Christians think about moral transformation. The course also draws on HIST 201 and HIST 202, which traced how the church's ethical thinking developed over two thousand years. The course covers four areas: foundations (sources of moral knowledge, ethical frameworks), biblical ethics (Torah, prophets, Jesus, Paul), historical development (Augustine through Hauerwas), and contemporary issues (war and peace, economic justice, environmental ethics, bioethics, sexuality and gender). On contested issues, the course presents the range of faithful Christian positions with their best biblical and theological arguments. It does not advocate for one position. The student's own moral reasoning is their responsibility; the course's responsibility is to equip them to reason well.

Beginning Greek I is Cathedra's first language course, built to teach Koine Greek in the only way that actually works: through massive repetition, multimodal engagement, and interleaved practice across every session. The course is not a reading list, a grammar summary, or a vocabulary memorization plan. It is a structured program of exercises — flashcards with spaced retrieval, parsing drills against real New Testament forms, audio recognition using reconstructed Koine pronunciation, and mixed drills that combine all of these — scaffolded by just enough prose to frame what the student is practicing. By the end of the course, the student will recognize and pronounce every letter and diphthong of the Greek alphabet, recognize approximately 250 of the most common New Testament Greek words (covering roughly 80% of the New Testament text), identify the five cases and use them correctly, conjugate the present active, present middle/passive, and imperfect indicative of regular verbs, read and translate simple sentences from the New Testament (particularly the First Letter of John, which uses a limited vocabulary and simple syntax), and parse any form encountered in the course completely and accurately. The course takes roughly 28 hours to complete if the student does every exercise and reviews flashcards as scheduled. The rhythm is steady: 5 to 8 new vocabulary items per lesson, one grammatical concept per module, and daily review sessions that reactivate prior material through the spaced retrieval system. The course presents Koine Greek, the international language of the eastern Roman Empire in the first century — the language in which the entire New Testament was written. Pronunciation follows the reconstructed Koine system (Buth/Kantor school), which recovers the phonology of the first century rather than the sixteenth-century Erasmian convention most seminaries still use.

Beginning Greek II completes the two-semester foundation in Koine Greek. It picks up where GREK 101 stopped — the noun system partially done, the verb system barely started — and finishes both. The third declension, the full set of Greek tenses across all three voices, participles in every form and function, infinitives, the subjunctive and imperative moods, contract verbs, liquid verbs, and the -mi conjugation: all of it is covered here, unit by unit, with exercises at every step. The course closes with a reading capstone in which students work through extended New Testament text and demonstrate that the two-semester foundation is real reading ability, not memorized grammar rules.

Beginning Hebrew I is Cathedra's second language course, and the first to engage the Hebrew Bible in its original language. It is built on the same pedagogical foundation as Beginning Greek I: massive repetition, multimodal engagement, and interleaved practice across every session. Students do not read about Hebrew; they do Hebrew. The course is a structured program of exercises scaffolded by just enough prose to frame what the student is practicing. By the end of the course, the student will recognize and pronounce every consonant and vowel point of pointed biblical Hebrew, recognize approximately 250 of the most common Hebrew Bible vocabulary items, parse any noun for gender, number, and state, parse any verb in the Qal stem for conjugation, person, gender, and number, recognize the three most common derived stems (Niphal, Piel, Hiphil) when they appear in context, read the vav-consecutive as the narrative past form and follow simple biblical narrative, and read and translate passages from Genesis 1 and the book of Ruth. The course takes roughly 28 hours to complete if the student does every exercise and reviews flashcards as scheduled. Pronunciation is modern Israeli (Sephardic-derived), the system with the deepest audio resource base and the system nearly all seminary programs currently use. The Tiberian reconstructed pronunciation is mentioned briefly in Module 1 as an alternative but is not the primary system. Biblical Hebrew differs from Greek in ways that shape the course's structure: the verb system is organized around aspects (completed, incomplete, continuous) expressed through binyanim (verbal stems) that modify a three-consonant root, rather than around tenses. The course uses the Qal stem as the main teaching vehicle and introduces Niphal, Piel, and Hiphil at a recognition level; full mastery of all seven binyanim is the work of HEBR 102.