Index to Brown, Driver and Briggs Hebrew Lexicon

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Ancient Hebrew is not an easy language to master, and so it is often useful to have a BDB Hebrew Lexicon at hand. But that too can be difficult to use (especially if you are relatively new to Hebrew). This Index is the link between the text you are working on, and the detailed knowledge "hidden" in the Lexicon. The trouble is, the Index is so helpful I feel almost guilty using it. (Hebrew shouldn't be easy!) Just one provision, if you are over 45 you will probably want to go out and buy a magnifying glass, the print is extremely small, and can be difficult to see.

Rating:
Summary: soooo helpful for using BDB
Review: This index is so very helpful that it verges on cheating. Anyone who has translated Torah knows how very difficult it can be to strip out the grammatical parts of the word to get to the right root. BDB is useful and interesting, but my havurah still sometimes had difficulty getting to the right entry. I found this Index to BDB at a used book store, and it has really speeded up our translation! It lists each BDB reference in chapter-verse order. You can instantly see which words in the passage you are translating are defined in BDB, including page number and definition number. There are still difficult words that are not indexed (because they are not referred to in BDB), so we still get some practice in figuring out the roots! But the Index to BDB (along with the BDB, of course) is very useful in getting the surface translation so that we can start looking at the meaning of the text.