The Shorter Dictionary of Classical Hebrew Revised (2024) is an abridgement of the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew Revised (DCHR) (2018-2028). The Shorter Dictionary is over 825,000 words in length, placing into a single volume 1/6th of the material of the complete DCHR (over 5 million words), and is designed to be a replacement for BDB (the standard 1906 English lexicon of Hebrew). The Shorter Dictionary contains more than 6,420 Hebrew words not in BDB, and refers to many newly published texts, including 540 Dead Sea Scrolls and 4,000 ancient Hebrew inscriptions, making it the most thorough Hebrew dictionary ever produced.
Every Hebrew word in the Shorter Dictionary is followed immediately by an English translation (except for the variant forms of a word and the byforms), so that the Shorter Dictionary can be easily understood by a person with little or no Hebrew.
Further features of the dictionary include:
- Scope-the Shorter Dictionary includes not only Biblical Hebrew but also all Classical Hebrew (pre-200 ce), i .e . Ben Sira, Dead Sea Scrolls, inscriptions.
- Syntagmatic analysis-shows examples of subjects and objects of verbs, those of which a noun is subject or object, etc.
- Occurrence statistics-for each word in the four corpora of Classical Hebrew: Hebrew Bible, Ben Sira, Dead Sea Scrolls, Inscriptions-and for each voice (binyan) of a verb.
- Parallels and oppositions. Shows all words used in parallel or opposition in texts.
- A notation of: 4,285 byforms (words with the same meaning and similar form) identified for the first time; 717 verbal nouns (nouns derived from a verb) with their own articles (not previously shown in Hebrew lexica); 345 denominative verbs (verbs derived from a noun); and the semantic field to which every word belongs (a totally new feature for Hebrew dictionaries).
- An abbreviated version of DCHR's extensive bibliographies is provided in the Shorter Dictionary.
David J.A. Clines (1938-2022) was Professor of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield, and a noted Old Testament scholar. He is the author of 'The Theme of the Pentateuch', 'Job 1-20', 'What Does Eve Do to Help? and Other Readerly Questions to the Old Testament', and 'Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible', among others, as well as editor of 'The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew'.
