New in the Reference section: Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon

At Sefaria, we’re always growing our library with texts and tools to make learning, teaching, and researching Torah more accessible. Today we're excited to share the latest addition to our Reference section: the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon — also known as BDB — the most widely used and comprehensive scholarly dictionary for Torah study.

This 20th-century reference tool translates every word of the Bible into English and provides information about its usage throughout the text. It’s long been a go-to resource for academics and many Torah learners, and we’ve received numerous requests to add it to Sefaria in digital form.

For those who rely on the Brown-Driver-Briggs dictionary for their studies, this addition to the library is significant: You can now easily look up words in Tanakh simply by highlighting the word in the text. The corresponding entries, in any of our dictionaries, will show up in the resource panel. This is just the newest text to be added to the many other dictionaries and encyclopedic works in our Reference section — including Jastrow, the Klein Dictionary, Otzar La’azei Rashi, and more.

More than 500,000 people come to Sefaria each month to learn, explore, and connect. Some come to study Daf Yomi, some to read our ancient texts for the very first time, some to share their own Torah, and everything in between. It is our mission to make Torah accessible to all, and we take pride in building a robust library that allows users with diverse needs, interests, and backgrounds to join in the rich Jewish textual tradition. (Curious about how we decide what to add to the library next? Read more about our philosophy.)

With the addition of the Brown-Driver-Briggs to our growing dictionary collection, we’re glad to offer another tool that supports Jewish scholarship.

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