2 August 2017 To navigate up to the English index: index-topical-hb.
As of 2022, this project sits abandoned. I'm keeping it up because I think the concept is interesting, and worth pursuing if anyone has the time.
I’ve embarked, for fun, on a massive project which I will probably abandon fairly quickly. I’m doing the first few small sections, just to get a feel for it. The idea would be to make a webbed version of Brown-Driver-Briggs, the famous 1906 Hebrew lexicon. As far as I know, it’s the finest dictionary of biblical Hebrew in the public domain, so it really should be online. The typography is complex enough that the Wikisource version of it isn’t getting anywhere. Optical character recognition, I think, isn’t quite ready to handle a text like this.
What would be really neat would be if someone would produce a web version where each of the entries is a different web page, for the convenience of folks linking in. This web version would mostly give Hebrew words in the form of transliterations or spellings out in regular English letters, and a lot of diacritic marks and such would disappear. Abbreviations would be expanded, making the whole thing more readable. Basically, we’d have a paraphrased BDB. Where the work of BDB is outdated or obsolete, an note could be appended to the end giving the newer information. If you could just get a moderately competent person to type it, you could quickly produce a pretty cool resource.
This resource would not be a perfect substitute for BDB, and anyone wanting the original would still be encouraged to download one of the PDF versions of it floating around the web.
Whether I meet that “moderately competent” bar, I’ll leave to others to judge, but I’ll at least start a few entries. Then, if I get tired of it, someone else can do the rest of the entries. As I make progress, you can compare my paraphrase to the original to see what I’m doing. It would, at the very least, blow Strong’s Numbers of out the freakin water.
I’ll index the entries here, by their Hebrew spelling. Below are transliterations. Most of the Hebrew letters are replaced with the English letter or combination of letters which would be obvious. Here’s the Hebrew alphabet used below: ʔ B G D H W Z Ḥ Ṭ Y K L M N S ʕ P Ṣ Q R Š/Ś T.
For a list of abbreviations used in the original BDB, most of which won’t be used here (but some will), see bdb-abbreviations.
ʔB (Ab) — see ʔBH (II).
ʔB (Ib) — see below.
ʔBYB (Abib) -- see above.
ʔBGYL (Abigail) -- see ʔBYGYL
ʔBGTʔ (Abagtha)
ʔBD (Abad)
ʔBH, verb and root [1]