Lexica, Part 2
Skim through BDB, and open to pp. 131-132. I am assuming that the reader was working through Genesis 22, and in v. 3 encountered the somewhat unusual word
, which was recognized as coming from the root 
, in fact, given the 
in the middle root letter, was recognized as a 3ms 
converted imperfect of . This entry begins with an obelus (†); this means that every occurrence of the word will be listed. After that, it lists the root as a 3ms perfect Qal form. In some cases, the lexical entry is enclosed in square brackets, as in (p. 130) "[
]": this means that the form adduced is not attested in the Hebrew Bible. (In other words, it is extremely likely that the 3ms Qal perfect of the root 
is , but that form is coincidentally not found.) BDB then notes the word's part of speech ("vb." = verb; cf. the abbreviations on p. xviii), and it offers a general set of meanings: "cleave, break open or through." This is followed by etymological information, in this case from rabbinic Hebrew ("NH" = New [Rabbinic] Hebrew), Aramaic and Ethiopic, which is always enclosed in parentheses. Then, the meanings of the root in various 
are investigated; the root is atypical in that it appears in all of the . The order in which BDB lists the may be seen from this entry.At the beginning of each
, BDB lists the attested forms of the word. (In the case of nouns, this is done once, immediately after the etymological information. The noun is listed in the unbound singular form, and other forms, including constructs, plurals, and forms with suffixes are listed.) Thus, our verb is listed "." This listing reassures the user that the correct word is being looked up in the right place. This is followed by the meaning of the word in the particular , in this case "cleave, cut to pieces, or rend open (oft. more complete or more violent than Qal), sq. acc." The definition part is straightforward. What follows in parentheses is an attempt to distinguish the Piel meaning from the Qal; "sq. acc." refers to the syntactic use of the word, in this case, that the verb is followed by an accusative, namely a direct object with no intervening preposition 
. It is often a good idea to read through the complete entry, at least of the relevant ; in this case, that suggests that "cut" or "cleave," while an adequate translation, does not convey all that in the Piel conveys — namely a sense of violent cutting into pieces. Thus, a careful look at the lexical entry allows for the possibility that the use of this root plays a role in making this text a "text of terror."It is quite likely that the reader of v. 6 would not know the meaning of
. This may be found in BDB under the root 
; this might be guessed because the 
is typical as a preformative, while the 
is a common afformative, leaving the root ; additionally, there is a cross-reference to
on BDB p. 549, under the alphabetical listing of 
. Open to the entry on p. 38. Again, the initial obelus ( † ) means that every occurrence of the word is listed; it is thus clear that it is an unusual word. "n.f." means that it is a feminine noun. In this case, the parentheses enclose bibliographical information; given the age of BDB, these bibliographical references are not typically of great use. The forms and their attestations are then given. In cases like this when a word is infrequent, it is worthwhile looking up the other passages where it is used; in this case, Judges 19:29 is quite useful because it shows that a
is large enough to dismember a human body, and thus is not a small ("Swiss Army") knife, but a large, strong, sharp knife. This too might be difficult to reflect in a translation, but is important information for understanding the tone of the story.A more recent lexicon, completed recently, is The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament: The New Koehler Baumgartner in English (Leiden: Brill). Available in both a five-volume and a two-volume version, it is abbreviated as HALOT. It contains many more, and more recent etymologies than BDB, especially from Semitic languages that are now better understood (e.g. Akkadian) or were not even discovered at the time that BDB was completed (e.g. Ugaritic). Its principles and structure are similar to BDB, although HALOT lists nouns alphabetically rather than by root. It is appropriate to use BDB and HALOT together, though HALOT is more useful for rare words, and words whose meaning have been refined in the last century as a result of new research or discoveries. Another new dictionary project has been begun by David J. A. Clines at Sheffield, and is called The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew; it is now covers a bit more than the first half of the Hebrew alphabet. It contains more syntactic information than the other lexica, and includes material from ancient Hebrew inscriptions and the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, it lacks etymological information. Compare its discussion of
in volume 2, pp. 248-249.It must always be remembered that biblical lexicographers are making decisions based on evidence. Good lexica offer you the same (primary and secondary) evidence, and thus the ability to decide if you want to understand the word similarly. Sometimes, a reader might legitimately decide that a word has a different nuance than the one suggested, or might decide that a word was miscategorized by a lexicon: it might belong with its homonym (BDB lists homonyms consecutively, using Roman numeral to distinguish them [e.g. p. 557 I
"front, in front of" and II "circumcise"]), or an ambiguous form might be parsed differently than BDB suggests (e.g. 
might be a 
rather than 
or vice versa). Although BDB, HALOT and Clines are useful and trustworthy, they must not be confused with modern English dictionaries, which are frequently used by us as authorities for understanding the correct use of a word.