*This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net.
29 July 2022
BDB is an abbreviation for Brown-Driver-Briggs, refers to the Hebrew and English Lexicon edited by Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. It was built on the Lexicon of Gesenius.
For decades, BDB was the leading dictionary of biblical Hebrew available in English, and still remains an important reference point. It has been followed, among others, by HALOT and DCH. For someone who hasn't yet acquired HALOT and DCH, one great advantage of BDB is that, as it is old, it is available online. You can find it online in several places, including here and here.
For new readers, an intimidating feature of BDB is the denseness of its abbreviations. In PDF form, scrolling back and forth between an entry and the abbreviations is time-consuming, so in order to save time I've worked up an online version of its list of abbreviations here: bdb-abbreviations.
I've found a number of errors in BDB -- I'm speaking of unambiguous things like typographical errors or errors in verse numbers -- and I'm collecting them here: errata-bdb.
The version at BibleHub is very poorly produced, and some of the various online versions floating around aren’t even BDB. I think you'll be safe if your rule of thumb is to only trust a "BDB" version if it a facsimile or if you have checked it against a facsimile.
For a briefly pursued, quickly-abandoned project to make a web-friendly BDB, see bdb-project.
The particular edition I generally use may be cited as follows:
Brown, Francis; Driver, S. R.; and Briggs, Charles A. (1907). A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament with an Appendix Containing the Biblical Aramaic, Based on the Lexicon of William Gesenius, as Translated by Edward Robinson, Late Professor in the Union Theological Seminary, New York.
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