Strong's, BDB and Gesenius

Proverbs 2 is a father's speech to his son, and it is built like a long conditional sentence: if you do these things, then you will find. In the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) the conditions climb to their peak in verse 4 with two verbs: תְּבַקְשֶׁנָּה (tevaqshennah, you seek her) and תַּחְפְּשֶׂנָּה (tahpesennah, you search for her). The BSB translates the ending as 'it'; the KJV, 'If thou seekest her as silver', keeps the feminine, because the thing sought is wisdom and understanding from verses 2 and 3, which are feminine nouns in Hebrew. The comparisons are כַכָּסֶף (khakkesef, like silver) and וְכַמַּטְמוֹנִים (vekhammatmonim, and like hidden treasures).

Then verse 5 gives the promise. אָז תָּבִין יִרְאַת יְהוָה (az tavin yir'at YHWH, then you will understand the fear of the LORD), and you will find דַּעַת אֱלֹהִים (da'at elohim, the knowledge of God). The search for wisdom ends not in information but in a relationship: the fear of the LORD, which Proverbs 1:7 has already called 'the beginning of knowledge', and the knowledge of God, which Hosea will later say God desires 'rather than burnt offerings' (Hosea 6:6).

This lesson is about lexicons, and the proverb gives the right attitude for using them. A lexicon is a map of where a word has been. It does not hand you wisdom, and Proverbs 2:6 is careful to say where wisdom comes from: 'For the LORD gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding.' But the father also expects his son to dig. The Koine Greek lesson Strong's Numbers and Lexicons explains what a lexicon is, why it gives a range of senses rather than one meaning, and how to read an entry in a set order, starting with the verses rather than the definitions. Read it if you have not. Everything in it applies to Hebrew. This lesson adds what is particular to the Hebrew tools, and the most important difference is the root.

James Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (1890) numbered the Hebrew and Aramaic words of the Old Testament from H1 to H8674, in the alphabetical order of their dictionary forms, and the free tools still use those numbers to link a word in a verse to its dictionary entry and to every other verse where it occurs. Aramaic words, from Daniel and Ezra, are numbered in the same list as the Hebrew ones. As in Greek, the number is a filing label and carries no meaning: H4301, the word for hidden treasure, and H4302, the next number, are neighbours only because their spellings begin alike.

Two refinements of Strong's system appear in the free tools, and you should recognise them. The Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible, a free tagged Hebrew text whose code system Blue Letter Bible also uses, sometimes adds a letter after a Strong's number to separate words that Strong lumped together, so the verb created in Genesis 1:1 is tagged 1254 a. STEP Bible does something similar with what it calls extended Strong's numbers, adding a letter to separate words or senses, so you may see H1540I where another tool shows H1540. When two tools show slightly different numbers for the same word, this is usually why.

Strong's short Hebrew definitions are another matter, and they need more caution than his Greek ones. Strong often began an entry with a guess at the word's origin, and some of those guesses are more imagination than evidence. Look up H3925, the verb Ezra uses in Ezra 7:10 for teaching, and Strong's definition reads in part: 'properly, to goad, i.e. (by implication) to teach (the rod being an Oriental incentive)'. There is a real connection behind it, because a noun from the same root means an oxgoad in Judges 3:31. But the word's use in the Old Testament is learning and teaching, and nothing in the verses suggests that every lesson came with a stick. A preacher who reads that line aloud as the meaning of the word has preached Strong, not Ezra. Use Strong's numbers freely. Read Strong's definitions as a quick first look, and treat his origins with a question mark.

On Blue Letter Bible, the entry for a Hebrew word also gives a TWOT reference, a number from the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament edited by R. Laird Harris, Gleason Archer and Bruce Waltke (1980). TWOT numbers are useful even if you never see the book, because they are arranged by root: the verb יָדַע (yada, to know) is 848, and the noun דַּעַת (da'at, knowledge) in Proverbs 2:5 is 848c, one of the family of words grouped under that root. A shared TWOT number tells you two words belong to one family; a Strong's number never does.

Two great Hebrew lexicons are free on Blue Letter Bible, and both are well over a century old. The first is the work of Wilhelm Gesenius (1786-1842), a German scholar at the University of Halle who did more than any one person to put the study of Hebrew on a scientific footing. His lexicon was translated into English by Samuel Prideaux Tregelles in the middle of the nineteenth century as Gesenius' Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures. Chaldee is an old English name for Aramaic. On Blue Letter Bible the Gesenius entry appears as a picture of the printed page with a link to read the full entry, so on a small screen you may need to zoom. His name also stands on the classic reference grammar of Hebrew, usually cited as Gesenius-Kautzsch-Cowley, whose English edition appeared in 1910.

The second is A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament by Francis Brown, S. R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs, published by the Clarendon Press in Oxford in parts from 1891 and completed in 1906, and known everywhere as BDB. It was based on Gesenius's lexicon as translated by the American scholar Edward Robinson, and for most of the twentieth century it was the standard Hebrew lexicon in English. Blue Letter Bible gives the BDB entry in full text for each Strong's number, under the heading Brown-Driver-Briggs Lexicon. BDB is thorough, careful and full of references. Its entries for a common verb run to pages, sorting the uses by stem and then by sense, with the verses listed under each.

Both lexicons have limits that come from their dates. In 1929 French excavators at Ras Shamra in Syria began to uncover the city of Ugarit and its tablets, written in a language closely related to Hebrew, which threw light on rare Hebrew words and on the poetry of the Psalms. In 1947 the first Dead Sea Scrolls were found. BDB knew neither, and Gesenius died long before both. Comparative study of the Semitic languages has also moved on, and some of BDB's decisions about which root a word belongs to are now doubted. Where BDB calls a word obscure, or proposes an emendation of the text, check a commentary written in the last fifty years before you build anything on it.

The standard modern lexicons are not free. HALOT, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, began as the German work of Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner and was published in English between 1994 and 2000. The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, edited by David J. A. Clines and completed in eight volumes in 2011, covers not only the Bible but the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient inscriptions. You will see both cited in commentaries. One modern project is free: the United Bible Societies' Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, edited by Reinier de Blois, which arranges senses by meaning and is available online, though not yet complete. You can do sound work with BDB and Gesenius, provided you remember their dates and let the verses in the concordance have the last word.

Most Hebrew words are built from a root of three consonants, and a whole family of words can grow from one root. From ידע (y-d-'), the root of knowing, come the verb יָדַע (yada, to know) and the noun דַּעַת (da'at, knowledge). From טמן (t-m-n), to hide, comes מַטְמוֹן (matmon, hidden treasure). Module 4 of this track teaches roots properly. For now, know that the printed BDB is arranged by root, not by the alphabetical order of each word, so to find מַטְמוֹן in the book you look under טמן, and to find דַּעַת you look under ידע. Strong's line on Blue Letter Bible, 'from H3045' for דַּעַת, is pointing you to that root.

Arrangement by root is a strength and a temptation. It is a strength because it shows you a word's family, and families often share a field of meaning. It is a temptation because a student who sees the root can begin to read the root's meaning into every member of the family, whatever the verses say. A root is a fact about a word's history. Its use in sentences is a fact about its meaning. Lesson 5 of this module calls the confusion of the two the root fallacy and gives Hebrew examples. For now, the rule is the same one the Greek track gave: read the verses before you read the etymology.

Hebrew lexicons are also divided by stem. A Hebrew verb can appear in several patterns, called stems, which change its meaning in regular but not always predictable ways: the simple qal, the passive or reflexive niphal, the piel, the causative hiphil and others, which Module 4 explains. A good lexicon sorts a verb's uses stem by stem. On Blue Letter Bible the Outline of Biblical Usage does this in miniature: for the verb in Ezra 7:10 it lists to learn under the qal and to teach under the piel. On STEP Bible, when you tap a verb, the meanings that belong to the stem in your verse are printed in bold.

Proverbs 2:4 shows why this matters. The verb בִּקֵּשׁ (biqqesh, to seek) occurs about 225 times, and in the Open Scriptures count every one of them is in the piel or its passive, the pual; there is no qal at all, so the piel is simply how this verb is used, and no special force should be read into it. The second verb, חָפַשׂ (hafas, to search), occurs twenty-three times across five stems. In the qal and piel it means to search: 'I will search Jerusalem with lamps' (Zephaniah 1:12). But in the hithpael, the stem that often expresses doing something to oneself, the same root means to disguise oneself: 'So Saul disguised himself by putting on different clothes' (1 Samuel 28:8). Nobody would translate Proverbs 2:4 as 'disguise yourself like hidden treasure'. The stem decides, and the lexicon shows you which stem you are in.

Now take the anchor through the tools. Start with מַטְמוֹן (matmon, hidden treasure), H4301. Blue Letter Bible says it occurs five times in the WLC, and its concordance lists them. In Genesis 43:23 Joseph's steward tells the brothers that God gave them the treasure in their sacks, which was their own returned silver. In Isaiah 45:3 God promises Cyrus 'the treasures of darkness and the riches hidden in secret places'. And in Jeremiah 41:8 ten men buy their lives by telling Ishmael, 'we have hidden treasure in the field', and the treasure they name is wheat, barley, oil and honey. That last verse is worth more than a definition. The word means whatever is valuable enough to bury, and in a hungry land that might be grain. The father in Proverbs 2 is not picturing a pirate's chest. He is picturing what a family would dig for because their life depended on it.

Next, דַּעַת (da'at, knowledge), H1847. Blue Letter Bible reports ninety-three occurrences. Its Strong's line points to the root יָדַע (yada, to know), and its TWOT number, 848c, puts it in that family. Read the BDB entry and you will find the uses sorted into kinds of knowing: knowledge of facts, skill, discernment, and, in the phrase in your verse, knowledge of God. Then read the verses. Proverbs 1:7 calls the fear of the LORD 'the beginning of knowledge'. Hosea 4:6 says 'My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge'. In those verses, knowing God is not information held at a distance. It is the right relationship to God that shows in a life, which is exactly where Proverbs 2 is heading.

Third, the verb in verse 5, תָּבִין (tavin, you will understand, discern), from בִּין (bin), H995. This verb is a good warning about tidy categories. Both the qal and the hiphil stems of בִּין can mean to understand, and in a form like this one they look the same on the page, so a tagger has to decide which stem to call it. Both Blue Letter Bible and STEP Bible call it qal here. That is a reasonable judgment, and the meaning is not affected, but it is a judgment. Lesson 3 of this module shows you what to do when two tools judge differently.

Finally, put the lexicon down and read Proverbs 2:6 again. The father has told his son to dig like a man hunting for buried grain, and then he says that the LORD gives wisdom. The tools serve the first half of that teaching. They cannot supply the second. That is not a pious afterthought. It is the structure of the chapter, and it is the right frame for every word study you will ever do.

Choose the two words in your passage that seem to carry the most weight, the words a sermon on the passage would have to explain. For each one, make a word card in your notebook with these lines, in this order.

First, the Hebrew word as printed in your verse, and its pieces, as you separated them last week. Second, its root or dictionary form, its Strong's number, and, if Blue Letter Bible gives one, its TWOT number. Third, for a verb, the stem the tool gives for your verse. Fourth, the number of times it occurs and the name of the text counted, which on these tools will be the WLC. Fifth, three to five other verses from the concordance, written out in the BSB, chosen so that they show the word's range rather than repeating one use. Sixth, the senses the BDB entry or the outline of usage lists, in a few words each, and for a verb only the senses for your stem. Seventh, Strong's line about the word's origin, copied with a question mark after it.

Last, and most important, write one or two sentences saying which sense you judge fits your verse, and why, pointing to something in the verse or its context. That sentence is your evidence. If you cannot write it yet, the card is not finished. Keep both cards; lesson 5 will ask you to cross-examine them, and the capstone will use them.