The _Dictionary of Classical Hebrew_ (DCH) is a book to die for. But prospective users should realize that it is fundamentally different both in conception and in execution from lexicons like Koehler-Baumgartner's _Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament_ (HALOT) and the antiquated Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (BDB). In fact, DCH does not stand in the grand tradition of BDB and HALOT at all. It descends from the equally grand line of concordances authored by scholars like Solomon Mandelkern, Gerhard Lisowsky, and Abraham Even-Shoshan. DCH is a glorified concordance--and shows just how glorious a concordance can be. _Major Differences between DCH and Traditional Lexicons of the Old Testament (OT)_
(1) HALOT, BDB, and other traditional lexicons are philological works: they attempt to define the vocabulary of a specified literary corpus. They are not dictionaries of a _language_. They do not even restrict themselves to a single language: since a tiny portion of the OT is written in Imperial Aramaic, tiny portions of these lexicons define the tiny sample of Imperial Aramaic words found in the OT--fewer than 800 terms. DCH, on the other hand, is linguistically oriented. It aims to describe the entire Hebrew language, up to and including the era of the Dead Sea scrolls, insofar as we know it from the extant literature and inscriptions. It has no interest in describing a tiny subset of the Imperial Aramaic vocabulary.
Again, since traditional lexicons are corpus-specific, they naturally include entries only for those terms that are found in the OT. DCH, on the other hand, includes all terms found in Classical Hebrew, whether or not they are found in the OT.
(2) In keeping with their philological orientation, the traditional lexicons hew to a strongly diachronic and comparative-linguistic line--they rely heavily on the history of words as a guide to their meaning in the OT. To discover this history, they look not just at Hebrew or Aramaic but at various languages in which the terms in question appear. One of the most entertaining features of an entry in a traditional lexicon is the listing of cognate terms from languages like Arabic, Akkadian, Ugaritic, accompanied by wooden and necessarily misleading English glosses that encourage non-specialists in the bizarre belief that they can handle this material intelligently. (People who know the languages in question well enough to make competent use of the evidence provided by these cognates do not need the wooden English glosses.)
DCH, on the other hand, omits references to languages other than Hebrew, just as many English dictionaries omit etymological discussions--and for the same reason: DCH assumes that the best guide to the meaning of a Hebrew term is the way it is used in Hebrew, not the way it is used in some other language.
HALOT and DCH are broadly contemporaneous--HALOT's first volume is actually more recent (1994) than the first volume of DCH (1993). Both works effectively use the Dead Sea scrolls and other extra-biblical material, and both works' later volumes benefit from the recent revolution in Dead Sea scrolls scholarship. But they use extra-biblical materials in completely different ways, of course: in HALOT, these materials appear only when they can illuminate the meaning of a biblical term, and Hebrew words that are not found in the Bible are not given entries in the lexicon. In DCH, biblical and extra-biblical sources and terms are granted equal weight.
(3) Many users, especially users influenced by modern linguistic theory, expect a lexicon to offer genuine definitions, rather than simply glosses--English terms that are roughly synonymous with the original-language term. In lexicons of New Testament Greek, for example, it has become popular to augment glosses with true definitions. One of the definitions of the Greek word _orphanos_ in the latest edition of _A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature_ (BDAG) is "pert.[aining] to being deprived of parents, _without parents_, orphan": the gloss _orphan_ is preceded here by a genuine definition. Similarly, the _Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains_ offers the definition "an offspring whose parents either are no longer alive or no longer function as parents (as the result of having abandoned their offspring) - `orphan.'" These definitions are not merely long-winded expansions of the gloss `orphan': they make it clear that (in the view of the lexicographers, at any rate) the Greek word _orphanos_ does _not_ mean the same thing as the English word `orphan', which refers not only to children who have lost both parents but also to those who have lost only one.
Neither the traditional Hebrew lexicons nor DCH offer genuine translations. In the case of the traditional lexicons, this is because they are remarkably unsullied, even in their most recent incarnations, by modern linguistic theory: they betray very little suspicion that users might want or benefit from more than simple glosses. The authors of DCH, on the other hand, like good concordance-writers, want above all to provide users with a convenient and orderly presentation of the data that they need in order to make their own decisions regarding the sense(s) of an ancient Hebrew word. Like Mandelkern, Lisowsky, and Even-Shoshan, DCH provides glosses--the merest glosses--as a convenience for the user. DCH does not try to palm these off as definitions: those are the responsibility of the user.
Some users who yearn for genuine definitions may find traditional lexicons more satisfying than DCH, because traditional lexicons, assuming that their glosses _are_ definitions, sometimes offer fuller and more detailed glosses than DCH does. For example, HALOT glosses the Hebrew word _kfr_ as `open village'; DCH offers simply `village.' On the other hand, enterprising users are likely to prefer DCH, which intelligently organizes and displays the contexts in which a word is used--and this typically means _all_ the contexts in which it is used: every single instance in which the word in question is found in Classical Hebrew.
