Charles Augustus Briggs (1841–1913)

A trio of eminent Old Testament scholars--Francis Brown, R. Driver, and Charles Briggs--spent over twenty years researching, writing, and preparing "The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon." Since it first appeared in the early part of the twentieth century, BDB has been considered the finest and most comprehensive Hebrew lexicon available to the English-speaking student. Based upon the classic work of Wilhelm Gesenius, the "father of modern Hebrew lexicography," BDB gives not only dictionary definitions for each word, but relates each word to its Old Testament usage and categorizes its nuances of meaning. BDB's exhaustive coverage of Old Testament Hebrew words, as well as its unparalleled usage of cognate languages and the wealth of background sources consulted and quoted, render BDB and invaluable resource for all students of the Bible.… (más)

What I like about this lexicon is the comparative information from other Semitic languages. In general it is useful and straightforward.

The groupings of definitions into senses is very well done in my opinion, as far as my knowledge of biblical Hebrew goes. I frequently find that it covers all extant senses of each word quite thoroughly.

It is always really strange, though, to realize that the creator firmly believed that Indo-European and Semitic languages were related. In the linguistics world that is an obvious mistake and one that causes semantic aberrations in many of the definitions. For instance, under the demonstrative pronoun זה (Strongs 2090), the Sanskrit, Latin and Greek pronouns are given for comparison, when there is no etymological relation between these words and the Hebrew words.

In comparison to other Semitic lexica, I like that, unlike Arabic lexica (Hans Wehr, etc.), this lexicon lists words by lexeme and not by root. The grouping of words by root is semantically misleading to the uninitiated (i.e. it leads to etymological fallacy) and makes finding words a challenging exercise for scholars doing comparative work without language-specific training (because they cannot always quickly identify citation forms).… (más)

The classic single-volume lexicon of Biblical Hebrew: Despite the the venerable age of the Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew-English Lexicon (BDB), it is still unsurpassed as the most practical (in a comprehensiveness/affordability sense) for classroom use. Other solutions are either too basic, such as Holladay's Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, or too expensive to for an introductory course such as the two-volume study edition of Brill's Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT).

A potential drawback to the user of this dictionary is that the lexical list by root will cause difficulty for the user unfamiliar with Hebrew grammar. A certain drawback to the work is that considerable discoveries and advances have been made in the area of Comparative Semitic Linguistics since the work's publication, and therefore the etymological lemmata listed under each root may not be entirely accurate anymore, and the scholarly consensus on the pragmatics of certain verb forms may have changed. For serious academic reference on these matters, one should then turn to the HALOT or the new Sheffield 'Dictionary of Classical Hebrew' (in-progress, most recently published volume: 6 'Samekh-Pe').… (más)