The OSHB Hebrew Lexicon is based in some significant work that has been done in matching the words of the Hebrew Bible to the entries in Brown, Driver, Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. This provides a great amount of in-depth analysis of the individual words. At the same time, we recognize the value of the dictionary approach to accessing word definitions. We are also considering the great popularity of Strong’s Concordance, not only among Bible readers, but also among websites providing online access to the Bible. So we have merged the numbering of James Strong’s Concise Dictionary of the Words in the Hebrew Bible into the references in the Hebrew Bible. These are then augmented by letters distinguishing words where BDB has a finer-grained analysis. These augmented Strong numbers are then aligned with the entries in our lexicon. See the Lexicon App for a demonstration.
The Lexical Index was formed as a hub where all this information comes together. It includes the dictionary form of the word, its part of speech, a short gloss of its meaning, cross-reference information for the other parts of the system, and derivative information, for investigating the etymology of the word. It is also intended to make the lexicon extensible to include other works in the future. As I use the lexicon files in my own applications, I generate groups of related words, from the Lexical Index, as in the illustration, and connect with the specific word of interest at the time. This gives a more well-rounded understanding of the word within the language, as well as its scriptural context. The Lexicon App illustrates this usage of the lexicon.
If you want a more detailed description, you can see the Hebrew Lexicon Documentation. The files of the lexicon are also available at the OSHB Hebrew Lexicon, as well as the XML schema definition for each part of the lexicon. For more information on the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible project in general, see the OSHB home page.
