The Accordance Edition of the “Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, with an Appendix Containing the Biblical Aramaic, edited principally by Francis Brown, with S. R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs.”
For anyone who has spent serious time working in Accordance, BDB Complete is one of those modules that illustrates why the platform has long been so well suited to biblical-language research. The underlying work, of course, is the classic A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, with an Appendix Containing the Biblical Aramaic, edited principally by Francis Brown, with S. R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs. Commonly abbreviated BDB, it stands in the lexicographical tradition of Wilhelm Gesenius, particularly as that tradition came into English through Edward Robinson. But BDB is much more than a repackaged Gesenius. Brown, Driver, and Briggs carried out substantial additional lexicographical and comparative work of their own, and the result became one of the foundational tools of modern Hebrew Bible study.
The publication history can be a little confusing at first. The lexicon appeared in fascicles beginning in 1891, while the editors’ preface is dated March 1906. For that reason, one encounters both 1906 and 1907 in bibliographic records for the completed work. Accordance itself identifies the base edition for its module as Clarendon Press, 1907, so that is the date I would use when citing the Accordance resource specifically. More generally, it is probably safest to say that the work was completed in 1906 and appeared in complete form in 1906–1907.
What has always made BDB impressive is the sheer density of information packed into each entry. It is organized largely around Hebrew lexical roots, with senses subdivided according to usage, and it draws heavily on comparative Semitic evidence. Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac, Ethiopic, and Assyrian/Babylonian material appears throughout, along with extensive biblical citation. The Biblical Aramaic material is treated in an appendix. In print, all of this makes BDB extraordinarily rich but also notoriously compact and visually demanding. That is precisely where the Accordance edition becomes interesting.
BDB seems to have been part of Accordance from very early in the program’s history. During the development of Accordance 2.0 in late 1995, work was already under way on an abridged BDB, and Accordance 2.0, released in May 1996, introduced the “Tool” architecture that became the home for lexicons, dictionaries, commentaries, and other reference works. In other words, BDB belongs to the first generation of serious Accordance research modules.
For many years, however, the BDB available in Accordance was an abridged version. Accordance later explained that the electronic source text it had inherited omitted two enormous portions of the original work: the Scripture references and the comparative or cognate Semitic material. The abridged module was still useful—far more useful than some older electronic resources bearing the BDB name—but it was not the complete printed lexicon.
That changed around 2008, when Accordance released BDB Complete. An Accordance article from October 2009 refers to the unabridged edition as having been released “last year,” which places its arrival in 2008, even if the precise original release date is difficult to document. The important point is that the complete module finally restored the biblical references and comparative linguistic material that make the printed BDB what it is.
For me, though, the real value of BDB Complete is not simply that Accordance put the missing material back in. It is what Accordance did with that material.
Anyone who has used the printed BDB knows how compressed its typography is. A single entry may contain several levels of meaning, grammatical notes, numerous references, cognate forms, abbreviations, and typographical conventions, all packed together with very little visual breathing room. Accordance’s developers did not simply reproduce that density on a screen. They manually broke the material into subarticles, sections, and paragraphs, creating a much clearer hierarchical structure.
That may sound like a modest improvement until you actually work with the module. In practice, it makes a substantial difference. The print edition often requires the reader to decode the hierarchy visually from typography and indentation; in Accordance, that hierarchy is much easier to follow. The information is still BDB’s, but the electronic presentation makes the logic of an entry far more accessible.
The handling of Scripture references is equally important. In the printed lexicon, they are, naturally, just references on the page. In Accordance, they become live links. You can hover over them, inspect them through Instant Details, or move directly into the biblical text in your library. That transforms the way you use BDB. Instead of constantly moving between a lexicon and a printed Bible, the lexical entry and the passages supporting it become part of the same working environment.
The comparative Semitic material receives similar treatment. Much of it is represented as searchable text in the appropriate scripts rather than merely being reproduced as an image of the printed page. That matters if you actually use BDB for comparative work rather than simply for English glosses. Accordance did have to preserve certain unusual characters or forms as images, and the program later introduced image-scaling support to improve the display of such material. But the overall approach is clearly that of a genuine electronic edition rather than a page facsimile.
The module also continued to improve after its initial release. BDB Complete 4.0, released on July 22, 2014, included substantial proofreading and corrections to page numbers. That is worth noting because it means the current module is not simply the original conversion frozen in time; Accordance continued to refine the electronic text.
The older BDB Abridged also remained available as a separate module and received its own updates. In 2021, Accordance added Strong’s numbers and incorporated the previously separate Biblical Aramaic glossary into the abridged module. That makes the two resources somewhat different in purpose: the abridged edition is convenient and more accessible for quick lookup, while BDB Complete preserves the full scholarly apparatus.
The most important distinction, however, is between revision and digital enhancement. Accordance has not created a new lexicographical revision of BDB. The definitions, etymological proposals, semantic judgments, and comparative conclusions remain those of Brown, Driver, and Briggs, with all the strengths and historical limitations that this entails. BDB Complete should therefore still be read as an early twentieth-century lexicon, not as a modern replacement for more recent Hebrew lexicographical work.
But as an electronic edition of BDB, it is exceptionally well conceived. Accordance has taken an extraordinarily dense print reference work and turned it into a genuinely usable digital research tool. The hierarchical formatting, live biblical references, searchable scripts, structured fields, and later proofreading do not change the scholarship of BDB, but they make that scholarship far easier to navigate and exploit.
There is also something particularly ad fontes about using BDB in this form. The point of returning “to the sources” is not simply to prefer old books because they are old, nor is a lexicon itself the ultimate source for the meaning of a biblical word. Ideally, a lexicon helps send us back to the Hebrew and Aramaic texts, to the passages in which a word actually occurs, and to the linguistic evidence on which lexical judgments have been made. In that respect, the Accordance edition serves BDB unusually well. Its live biblical references and searchable linguistic material make it easier to move beyond an English gloss, examine the evidence cited by Brown, Driver, and Briggs, and then return to the biblical text itself.
At the same time, the complete electronic edition allows us to go ad fontes in another sense: back to BDB as BDB actually was. Rather than relying upon an abridgment that removed much of its biblical and comparative evidence, we can consult the complete historical work and distinguish what Brown, Driver, and Briggs actually argued from what later summaries or electronic derivatives may have preserved. Returning to the sources does not require us to accept every conclusion of an older authority. It allows us to see the evidence and the argument more clearly—and therefore to judge both more responsibly.
That is why I would describe BDB Complete for Accordance not simply as a digitized BDB, but as a carefully engineered electronic edition of the 1906–1907 lexicon. It preserves the historical content while taking advantage of the strengths of the Accordance environment. For anyone who still uses BDB regularly—and especially for anyone who works seriously with Biblical Hebrew—the Accordance version is one of the best ways to experience the lexicon today.
